For God and Country

By KURT ANDERSEN

Walter Mondale came to Dallas for that most prosaic of political events, a campaign fund-raising dinner, and he had intended to talk about a drab, unemotional subject--the problems facing small businesses. But he tossed away his prepared speech. As he rambled on last Monday night, he found himself turning his campaign talk into a rather passionate tutorial on religion and liberty. "The founding fathers spelled it out in great detail," he said, when it came to writing the First Amendment. "What they spelled out is the separation of church and state." Suddenly the 800 well-to-do Texans erupted with applause, then, still clapping, stood up. The candidate knew he had struck a resounding chord.

"Now why did the framers do that?" continued Mondale. "Because they saw in Europe that every time you let the politicians interfere with religious faith, it was poison and it destroyed its integrity and independence, and that politicians were always posturing and interfering . . ."

Thus the founders of the Republic decided that "religion would be here and was between ourselves and our God, and the politicians would be over there--and we'd never get the two mixed up . . . In America, faith is personal and honest and uncorrupted by political interference." As the crowd leaped up to applaud once again, Mondale added a kind of secular amen: "May it always be that way."

The Democrat's extemporaneous exegesis was unusual, but it did not come out of the blue. Just four days earlier in Dallas at a prayer breakfast, President Reagan had declared that politics and religion were inseparable. He charged that opponents of organized prayer in public schools "are intolerant of religion," that "morality's foundation is religion" and that "without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure." The President got a response at least as enthusiastic as Mondale's. The emotion on both sides reveals a fundamental disagreement in U.S. society over the role that religious beliefs should play in public life.

Religion has become a principal theme of the presidential campaign. Indeed, the prominence and the complexity of religious issues may now be greater than in any previous election. At stake on one level are a set of tough, specific public policy matters with a clear religious dimension: abortion, public school prayer, tax credits for parents of private school students. The debate has also raised more abstract questions: Just how should faith inform public policymaking? Should clergy involve themselves and their congregations directly in politics? To what extent should religious beliefs be thrust into the campaign?

The debate has only just begun. Mondale, seeing the extraordinary reaction his Dallas remarks aroused, decided that the issue should be pursued carefully. "There are few things in American life that are more personal, more emotion-laden," he explained at a press conference Wednesday. "It should only be addressed with great care, and with great clarity." Mondale plans to do just that this Thursday in Washington, elaborating on his vision of American religious pluralism to a convention of B'nai B'rith, the Jewish service organization, and to the National Baptist Convention. Indeed, he and his staff believe that the broad issue might become one of the most important in the election. "This has been building for some time," says Campaign Manager Robert Beckel. "The Republican Convention and Reagan's statements about religion kind of crystallized a lot of thinking. I think it is coming to the surface very quickly."

The relationship between church and state has always been a big issue, of course. The American colonists were often refugees from religious intolerance, come to establish their own homogeneous religious communities. The distinction between civil and ecclesiastical rule was blurry. Yet by 1791, the Enlightenment had taken hold and the American theocratic impulse had cooled: the Constitution's First Amendment mandated that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." What Thomas Jefferson called the "wall of separation between church and state," however, has been understood by most Americans to be broader than the simple, constitutional hands-off requirement. By informal consensus, the separation has been regarded as more of a two-way affair, with undue incursions of organized religion into politics also limited.

During the 1884 presidential campaign, for instance, a Protestant minister's anti-Catholic slur on Democrats ("the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion") caused a backlash that almost surely gave Democrat Grover Cleveland the election. In 1960 religious bias was still strong. To become the first Roman Catholic President, John Kennedy had to persuade many voters that he was not a pawn of the Vatican.

Reagan's 1980 candidacy in some measure benefited from a spiritual surge, a reaction against the secularization of society and the supposed breakdown of morality that was thought to be its consequence. An important element of Reagan's coalition has been the Religious Right, made up of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who joined with New Right political activists on such issues as abortion and school prayer. In recent years, politics has assumed a more religious cast and religion a political tint, partly because of Reagan's masterly use of the presidency's bully pulpit.

The overlap of religious and secular realms has lately become more complex. Last year the country's Roman Catholic bishops entered the debate over arms strategy, effectively endorsing the concept of a nuclear freeze. The Supreme Court last spring heartened the Religious Right, led by Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, when it ruled that a municipal creche in Pawtucket, R.I., was not in violation of the First Amendment. And in his singular campaign for the Democratic nomination, Jesse Jackson, a Baptist minister, skillfully used black churches and religious rhetoric.

The ante was upped this summer. Religion became an offensive weapon. Almost as soon as she was named to the Democratic ticket, Geraldine Ferraro, asked about her Roman Catholicism, replied with a suggestion that the President's aura of piety amounted to political hypocrisy. "The President walks around calling himself a good Christian," she said, "but I don't believe it for one minute, because [his] policies are so terribly unfair." New York Governor Mario Cuomo, a devout Catholic, got into a media debate with New York Archbishop John J. O'Connor over abortion. Then came the Republican Convention in Dallas, where the assertiveness of the Religious Right, and its power in the Republican Party, was shown in full force.

The President's prayer breakfast speech in Dallas added new intensity to the debate. Reagan began with what is essentially a truism: "I believe that faith and religion play a critical role in the political life of our nation and always have." But then he made a series of assertions that were arguable and, to many, objectionable. Because of Supreme Court rulings since 1962, he claimed, "our children are not allowed voluntary prayer." In fact, no judicial fiat prevents any individual schoolchild from praying in voluntary fashion, nor could it. Reagan, however, went further: "Today there are those who are fighting to make sure voluntary prayer is not returned to the classroom . . . those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance . . . Isn't the real truth that they are intolerant of religion?"

Newspaper editorials from the New York Times ("dangerous, divisive mixing of religion and politics") to North Carolina's Raleigh News and Observer ("profoundly insulting" and "self-righteous") denounced the address. For Reagan to declare that opposition to school prayer is an intolerant attack on religion, says Howard Squadron, president emeritus of the American Jewish Congress, "is utter nonsense. Tolerance means allowing religions to go their own way, without Government interfering. To argue otherwise is Alice in Wonderland." The Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., like most mainline Christian denominations and Jewish groups, is against organized school prayer. "We are not intolerant of religion," said Charles Bergstrom, a council officer. "We just don't want the President involved in our prayers." Such opponents fear, quite rightly, that children from a religious minority--a Jew or Muslim, say--would be pressured into joining a Christian class prayer. Nor are the libertarians assuaged by freshly invented "nondenominational" prayers that have been tried by some schools.

Bergstrom and others objected to Reagan's assertion that "morality's foundation is religion." Said the Lutheran leader: "Even Scripture admits the morality of nonbelievers." Forest Montgomery, an official of the moderate National Association of Evangelicals, also faulted the President's closed equation of religion with righteousness. "I sympathize with the nonbelievers on that one. There are some very fine atheists."

The debate over the role of religion in politics is clearest when it involves a specific matter of public policy. The most contentious issue is Government tolerance of, and financing for, abortions. On a personal plane, abortion is a moral and religious decision. Politically, pressure continues for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortions, and the G.O.P. platform went so far as to suggest that opposition to abortion should be required of prospective judges. The debate also involves whether those with deeply held views against abortion should feel compelled to oppose policies and politicians more tolerant of it. "I don't see how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion," said Archbishop O'Connor in June. Governor Cuomo, who opposes a ban on abortion, was angry at the Archbishop's political intrusion. The two men have since come to a consensus on the separation of church and state, even as they agree to disagree about abortion law. "The Catholic Church will not tell people what party, what politician to vote for," says Cuomo. "They will teach us, and should teach us, what they think about abortion." Yet a fundamental, more personal question lingers, unresolved: Cuomo, Ferraro and others argue that their private disapproval of abortion has no necessary bearing on their public, political attitudes.

Questions about the role of religion in politics also occur on a level more abstract than the to-and-fro over particular legislative issues. By allying himself with the Religious Right and its tendency toward a self-righteous zeal, President Reagan can seem, at times, to be appropriating godliness itself for his party and Administration. Last week Columnist Mike Royko joked bitterly about the tendency. "They've managed to convince a large segment of the population that God is a conservative Republican."

For example, Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, Reagan's best friend on Capitol Hill and chairman of his re-election committee, signed a campaign letter sent in July to 80,000 Fundamentalist Christian ministers, encouraging them to register congregants and endorse Reagan. The overtly religious language and pitch have become controversial. "Dear Christian Leader," the letter began. "President Reagan, as you know, has made an unwavering commitment to the traditional values which I know you share. In addition, he has, on several occasions, articulated his own spiritual convictions. As leaders under God's authority, we cannot afford to resign ourselves to idle [political] neutrality . . ." The letter enraged conservative Columnist William Safire. "That political proselytizing is surely so unethical as to be un-American," he wrote last week. Safire also fumed about the "Fundamentalist intolerance" he found at the Dallas convention, and declared that "no President . . .has done more to marshal the political clout of these evangelicals than Ronald Reagan--to his historic discredit." William F. Buckley Jr., however, in a column last week, defended the President. Wrote Buckley: "Reagan is certainly attempting to attract the vote of those who believe they are being unfairly persecuted by the secularists, and why shouldn't he?"

That "persecuted" wing of the Republican Party is ascendant. Falwell's Moral Majority, now almost uniformly pro-Reagan in its politics, claims 6.5 million members (up from 1 million in 1980) and plans to register 2 million new voters this year. The New Right's stark political fervor makes it powerful beyond its numbers alone. "They may not be a majority of the electorate," says Falwell, "but they are major enough to determine who gets elected."

Maybe, maybe not. Governor Charles Robb of Virginia, a moderate conservative, recently urged Mondale to raise the issue of Reagan's affinities for the Religious Right. To make his point, Robb said that Falwell, a constituent, is "the most unpopular person in the state." In addition, there may be strains between the President and his strict Fundamentalist friends. Cal Thomas, vice president of Moral Majority and a syndicated columnist, has expressed a few qualms about Reagan's private life. Thomas wrote last week that the President should spend more time with his family ("He never sees his grandchildren"), give more money to charity ("He gives less than Mondale"), and go to church more often than every few months.

As a great campaign debate looms, the risks are substantial for the two candidates and for the country. Reagan may have misread a national hunger for moral and spiritual uplift as a desire for a specific religious regimen. Mondale could be hurt if he is perceived as insensitive to religious yearnings. In either case, new religious tensions could be stirred.

Like many Americans, Reagan has a religious sense that lacks much formal institutional grounding, but nonetheless seems earnest and powerful. Mondale, the pious and principled son of a Methodist pastor, has a temperamental aversion to wearing his faith on his sleeve--but he apparently feels his faith deeply and knows what he believes. What is at issue, or should be, is neither the sincerity nor the righteousness of the two men's beliefs. Rather, the point is their basic difference in outlook, reflected within the electorate, over the proper role of religion in the political realm. If conducted on that level, the debate need not be ugly, and might even be edifying. "Everybody seems to agree that one cannot ultimately separate religion from politics," says Harvard Divinity School Professor Harvey Cox. "The question is how they are to be related in such a way that civility and respect for minorities are guaranteed and nurtured. I am confident that our society has a large capacity for this kind of discourse."

--By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Hays Gorey/Washington and Christopher Ogden/Dallas, with other bureaus

With reporting by Hays Gorey, Christopher Ogden