JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS
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could also be used by politicians who scarcely knew whereof they
spoke. "Recognition of the Supreme Being," declared President Eisen–
hower in
1955,
"is the first, most basic expression of Americanism.
Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an
American way of life." To Herberg, such pronouncements were as insid–
ious as they were idolatrous, as they were to Reinhold Niebuhr, who
would cite Lincoln on the dangers of identifying God and country.
Is the intermingling of religion and politics such a bad thing? Many
would like to believe that religion elevates politics to a higher standard
of morality and that with religion people will come to take seriously the
duties of citizenship, perhaps aspiring to virtue and goodness, maybe
even to a "compassionate conservatism." In dissident movements at the
margins of society, religion has been a powerful force for good. But at
the center in presidential politics, the record of religion is dubious. Per–
haps the most religious leader to occupy the White House was
Woodrow Wilson, a leader who had no hesitation sending troops into
Mexico and Central America because he assumed he was doing the right
thing, as though Providence inhered in the Presidency.
To allow religion to have an important role in politics is to deny
what America is all about. At the founding of America traditional reli–
gion carried the curse of the Old World. The interplay of religion and
politics may have once characterized the Hebraic faith, and in histori–
cal Catholic and Islamic cultures religion became so inseparable from
politics that lay life was constrained to serve divine authority in
regimes that were essentially theocratic. Western Protestantism had
also once proclaimed the dependence of religion on politics, until John
Locke challenged the "divine right" of kings, thereby ridding the last
vestiges of absolutism and paving the way for liberal, representative
government and modern politics as we know it. In Lockean America,
where government rests not on biblical truth but, as
The Federalist
authors put it, public "opin ion," the role of the state was not to carry
out God's will but simply to protect life and property. In this context,
religion and politics are fundamentally incompatible.
If
there is one
idea, or emotion, centra l to all religions, it is the eternal that has its sta–
tus in the spiritual. But any politician who allows him- or herself to
think beyond the immediate electorate would not be a politician. As
Max Weber suggested in his classic address, "Politics as a Vocation,"
those who seek office in democratic society are as far from genuine reli–
gion as possible, for they are moved by the Christian sins of "pride"
and "vanity," the "self-intoxicating temptation" to be in the spotlight
to the detriment of humility, "the need to thrust one's person as far as
