America Needs Religion’s Compass

Imagine your car has broken down on a dimly lighted street in a bad part of town. As you are walking around looking for a phone, a bunch of boisterous youths approaches.

Now, would it make any difference if you knew those kids had just come out of Bible study class?

That parable has come to mind frequently as I have puzzled over the near-paranoia that seems to underlie much of the reaction to the rising political importance of religious believers. Why is there such fear of religion in America today?

That question was a recurrent theme this week at a conference on “Christ and America: Belief and the Public Arena” at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pa.

The answer that emerged from the two principal speakers - Yale University Law School Professor Stephen Carter and the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus - is that the problem lies in a nearcomplete disconnection between religion and the elites of law and journalism.

Carter, who wrote “The Culture of Disbelief” about the marginalization of religion in America (and whose latest book, “Integrity,” has just been released), cited a 1993 Washington Post story characterizing followers of TV evangelists as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

It was a basic misunderstanding.

The Post apologized the next day, noting there was “no factual basis” for the assertion, but Carter suggested that the misunderstanding of religious influence, as reflected in the article, continues.

“The press seems to have a pained fascination,” he said, with the activism of the religious right. He told about a reporter who had called him wondering whether it might be “unconstitutional” for Oliver North’s supporters to pray for his victory in a U.S. Senate race. (Praying may not have worked, but it is constitutional.)

The apparent unreligious nature of journalists has been a baffling and much-debated phenomenon at least since a 1980 survey of 240 top newspaper, magazine and TV journalists showed that 86 percent “seldom or never” attend a church or synagogue. (This, in a nation where 60 percent of citizens go to religious services at least once a month.)

This study supposedly was rebutted by a larger study done at Indiana University which included many journalists who worked at small operations and which showed higher levels of religious involvement.

But even in the Indiana study, journalists were found to be significantly less religious than the public at large, and no one is certain why. My own opinion is that the higher one gets in the journalistic hierarchy, the more cynicism is regarded as a prerequisite rather than an occupational hazard.

Neuhaus, who edits First Things, a “monthly journal of religion and public life,” also took his shots at journalists but then zeroed in on recent Supreme Court decisions that, in his view, have “turned the First Amendment on its head.”

He argued that instead of protecting religion from government interference as the First Amendment was intended to do, the amendment now is being cited to uphold a false premise - that government needs to be protected against religion.

Carter, speaking the next night, elicited laughter as he described the “cramped” reasoning of the court in these decisions. He is glad, he said, that this line of reasoning was not the law of the land during the civil rights era.

That movement was inherently religious, he said, “led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”

Indeed, Carter asserted, every morally significant movement in American history, going back to abolitionism, the rise of labor and women’s suffrage, had “welcomed, or actually been led by,” religious figures.

Democracy, both men said, cannot continue without religion because then there would be, in Carter’s phrase, “no moral horizon” on which citizens can orient themselves.

In other words, there are reasons to be glad that those kids just came out of Bible study.

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