The election of 1988 may mark a culmination and turning point in the recent relations of politics and religion. These are no more separable than are politics and morality; but the ties between religion and electoral issues have been very narrowly framed by right-wing Republicans in elections of the Reagan era.
The Moral Majority and its cognate groups argued, with some plausibility, that a secular elite culture had lost touch with the mainstream religious values of our society. A candidate like Michael Dukakis, who was tone deaf to much in our culture beyond its religious aspect, let this oversimplification gain respect with many Americans.
There was an opportunistic aspect to this Republican ploy. But it would not have worked so well if certain Democrats had not accepted a number of its premises--for example, that separation of church and state must entail a separation of politics from religion. Since many Americans have formed their ideas of morality in a religious context, what secularists seemed to be calling for was the exclusion of morality itself from the discourse of the electorate.
The Religious Right could, because of these perceptions, thunder at its opposition as godless, anti-religious, and amoral without looking entirely ridiculous. But that is becoming more difficult in this electoral season.
For one thing, Democrats are not as cooperative in accepting the caricature the Republicans try to foist on them. This is, more than has been widely recognized, the result of having two Southerners at the top of the Democratic ticket. Politicians in the South have never been able to ignore religion--certainly they cannot with electoral impunity defy religion. This is as true of Democrats, whose black constituents have followed preachers to the polls, as of Republicans, whose businessmen attend prayer breakfasts.
Clinton and Gore will not let Republicans try to bar the church doors against them. Clinton, in fact, is never more eloquent than when quoting Isaiah in black churches. Tipper Gore has been part of the Bible-reading circles in Washington.
BUT THE OTHER reason for a change this year is that Republican claims to represent the religious values of the nation have become less convincing. This has happened, oddly, because the Republicans have been in charge of the executive branch for 12 years now.
The conservatives have long claimed that liberals make up a "counterculture" in America, critical of the values that the majority of Americans have held for the longest part of our history. But the conservatives who took over the White House in 1980 have shown that theirs is the real counterculture. We have witnessed a radical disjunction between political power and cultural influence.
It is hard for people who are anti-intellectual to exercise intellectual leadership. The Republicans in power, when they could not use cultural symbols in crudely propagandistic ways, have been negative, distrustful, and censorious. This is not just a matter of looking for "dirty pictures" in the art world, or elevating the flag to the status of an idol, but of treating education itself as an enemy. The "intellectuals" of the Republican world, well-endowed and cushioned against the intellectual marketplace, have clustered with like-minded sorts in think tanks that address matters of economic policy and political tactics.
Where are the conservative artists, philosophers, novelists? The National Endowment for the Humanities promoted a "scholar" who denounced the National Book Awards for giving so many prizes to women, Hispanics, African Americans. Where did Carol Ianonne expect the vital new art to be occurring?
The rise of former outsiders to conscious participation in the culture always frees new energies. It happened when Western vernacular literature challenged New England ideas of gentility in the late 19th century and when an immigrant literature arose in the 20th century. But the distrust of anything new or unpredictable has frozen the right wing into the frightened defense of an unchanging "canon" of works used rather to attack others than to open students' minds. (William Bennett said The Federalist would quiet students' objections to President Bush's invasion of Panama.)
The anti-cultural fears of the right wing are as pronounced in the area of religion as elsewhere. A fundamentalist literalism opposes the new cultural role of women in ministry, in the law, in intellectual life. Carol Ianonne thought that only "politically correct" attitudes could explain awards to female writers.
The Bible is not allowed, by these defenders of it, to engage in the kind of dialogue with the culture that has been its real way of maintaining centrality in the Christian tradition. It was not kept sequestered from Greek thought in the patristic era, from feudal notions of authority in the Middle Ages, from the concept of development in the 19th century. Americans are a religious people, but they do not see their religion as the enemy of American culture, as opposed to intellect, education, art, and philosophy.
WHEN THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT was carping from the outside, its claim that the society excluded them was seriously entertainable. But after they have sat at the center of world power, in all the branches of the American executive department, for more than a decade, their defensiveness begins to look paranoid.
The Republican Party opens its podium to a Pat Robertson, whose use of the Bible is to call the Gulf war a new Tower of Babel raised by the United Nations to challenge God's supremacy. The Right attacks not only Harvard and the National Book Awards. It attacks its own Republican president, calling his New World Order Satan's instrument for the End Time. This is the religious mainstream of America?
The Right is marginalizing itself, and doing it at the center of American life, not on its periphery. Religious nuts wander through the White House. Family planning is turned over to a confused fellow--Archer--who thinks the sale of contraceptives is a bad idea. Pat Buchanan calls AIDS nature's punishment for homosexual sin. This is not the religious tradition that sent Cardinal Charles Borromeo into the plague-ridden neighborhoods of Milan.
The narrow extremism of the Republicans has made it possible for Democrats, who were accused of opposition to the religious mainstream of America, to look more like that mainstream's embodiment in 1992, an amazing change from recent campaigns and perhaps the most interesting development of this year's political culture.
Garry Wills, a Sojourners contributing editor, was adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University in Chicago, and the author of Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (Simon & Schuster, 1992) when this article appeared
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