Religion and Politics

Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the Catholic bishops of the United States last spring, articulated a challenge to contemporary liberalism, saying, "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted.... To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." The pope was not advocating a union of church and state. He was, instead, insisting that religion makes claims upon a believer's entire life-public views as well as private feelings-and that arguments to the contrary are evidence of a kind of intellectual sloth or a superficial faith.

For some time now, there has been a great deal of discussion over whether younger white evangelicals differed from older white evangelicals in their political attitudes and priorities. Now comes a fascinating and important pre-election survey suggesting that younger evangelicals are indeed somewhat more inclined to vote for Obama and to hold more moderate views on gay marriage -- though they are still, on the whole, pro-McCain. The survey, conducted for PBS's Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, found that overall, McCain led Obama by 71 percent to 23 percent among white evangelicals. McCain's lead was even larger, 73 percent to 22 percent, among white evangelicals over 30 years old. But among those under 30, McCain led by only 62 percent to 30 percent.

As the Roman Catholic Church observes its annual "respect life" Sunday in this heated presidential election season, the unusually pitched competition for Catholic voters is setting off a round of skirmishes over how to apply the church's teachings not only on abortion but also on the war in Iraq, immigration and racism. In a departure from previous elections, Democrats and liberal Catholic groups are waging a fight within the church, arguing that the Democratic Party better reflects the full spectrum of church teachings. The escalating efforts by more-liberal Catholics are provoking a vigorous backlash from some bishops and the right. In response, a coalition of liberal lay Catholics is pushing back, criticizing the bishop's message for neglecting other aspects of "life" talked about in Catholic social teachings, like concern for the poor.

Catholic voters considering how to cast their presidential ballots should judge candidates by their passion for building a safer and more humane world, especially for the poor and the weak, retired Washington, D.C., Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and others told an audience at Loyola University this week. And while the Catholic church believes a candidate's stand on abortion is gravely important -- Archbishop Alfred Hughes has called it "foundational" -- it also urges its members to examine candidates' positions on other serious issues such as torture, war and contempt for the poor, McCarrick said. With more than 60 million members, Catholics are the largest religious voting bloc in the country. But political scientists have long known there is no monolithic "Catholic vote." The church by long practice does not recommend a candidate.

The every-four-year national skirmish among Catholics over abortion politics is as predictable as a politician's smile. But this year a few "game changers," in the phrase of the season, have altered the conversation within the Catholic community and for the wider culture. For the first time since the abortion issue began to dominate the Catholic political discussion 35 years ago, groups have organized and high-profile Catholics have gone public to insist that Catholic teaching does not prohibit a vote for a pro-choice politician. Much to the contrary, in fact, groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United note that the teaching explicitly prohibits bishops from endorsing or opposing specific candidates, from instructing Catholics on how to vote or from arguing that Catholics need consider only one issue in determining how to vote.

While a strong majority of Americans support religion's role in public life, a solid majority also expresses opposition to churches coming out in favor of particular political candidates. Indeed, an August 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that two-thirds (66%) of the public opposes churches and other houses of worship speaking out in favor of one candidate over another. The high level of opposition to such endorsements is consistent with Pew polling conducted in recent years.

Whatever happened to the death penalty as a moral priority for Catholics in the US presidential election? Why don't they challenge their candidates on the issue? It's not as if the Church is ambiguous any more. There goes the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Renato Martino, in Rome today, looking to the day in which the death penalty is "definitively eliminated" from the earth. He was speaking at a conference in Rome organised by the Catholic community of Sant'Egidio, which has spearheaded the international campaign to abolish the death penalty. Cardinal Martino left American Catholics no wiggle room in his description of the death penalty as "contrary to the great Christian values which sustain the universal rights of man." It may not be as absolutely definitive as abortion and euthanasia, but the Church's opposition to capital punishment (except when faced with the breakdown of civil order) remains one of the core elements of its pro-life teaching.

The troubled economy, soaring healthcare costs, the Iraq war - these may be the issues we're hearing the most about in this election year. But anyone who's decided that this means the culture wars are over could not be more wrong. Abortion and gay marriage, for example, still pack a terrible punch as issues. And even though Americans might prefer these questions were out of the way, it's wishful political thinking to imagine that the demands of religion, morality, and culture can be dismissed just with a comment about being beyond a candidate's pay grade. What lies behind the insistence on injecting morality into politics - and what lies behind the resistance to it - is a battle between two basic concepts of democracy itself: between democracy as process and democracy as purpose.

Church leaders urged members of Congress and the Bush administration to keep the human and ethical dimensions of the economic crisis in mind as they craft a financial bailout package for Wall Street. "This crisis involves far more than just economic or technical matters, but has enormous human impact and clear ethical dimensions which should be at the center of debate and decisions on how to move forward," said Bishop William F. Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y. Bishop Murphy, who chairs the U.S. bishops' Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, also stressed responsibility, accountability, awareness of the advantages and limitations of the market, subsidiarity, solidarity and the common good in the search for just and effective responses to the economic crisis.

The once reliably Democratic Catholic voting bloc is no longer reliable and not so Democratic. Still, Ohio has more than 2 million Catholics. And the Catholic vote has particular clout in western Ohio, including the Dayton area and 13 rural counties north and east of the city. That area alone accounts for nearly 500,000 Catholics in 221 parishes, more than any other part of the state except Cleveland, says the Catholic Conference of Ohio. About one out of four voters is Catholic; the percentage on Election Day might be higher, as Catholics are generally more faithful about going to the polls than other voters.