If this is true, is politics really separate from religion?
A couple of days ago I wrote a Polinaut item on the Pew poll on religion and politics in America and tried to make a distinction that the term "religious" does not necessarily refer only to evangelical Christians, even though it seemed to be a term that has been hijacked by the political media to mean exactly that.
It's as hard to discuss this issue without being called anti-religion as it is to discuss race in this country without being called a racist. But discuss we must.
The reason Michael Barone (not the Pipedreams guy) makes the big bucks is that he's a better wordsmith than I am, as he demonstrates in saliently referring us today to an article expanding this topic.
Essentially, Walter Russell Mead seems to suggest, what we have now is not a non-religious vs. the religious scenario that the folks who latched onto the poll might suggest, but that we have a religion vs. religion scenario.
Yet the balance of power among the different religious strands shifts over time; in the last generation, this balance has shifted significantly, and with dramatic consequences. The more conservative strains within American Protestantism have gained adherents, and the liberal Protestantism that dominated the country during the middle years of the twentieth century has weakened. This shift has already changed U.S. foreign policy in profound ways.
These changes have yet to be widely understood, however, in part because most students of foreign policy in the United States and abroad are relatively unfamiliar with conservative U.S. Protestantism. That the views of the evangelical Reverend Billy Graham lead to quite different approaches to foreign relations than, say, those popular at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University is not generally appreciated. But subtle theological and cultural differences can and do have important political consequences. Interpreting the impact of religious changes in the United States on U.S. foreign policy therefore requires a closer look into the big revival tent of American Protestantism.
Why focus exclusively on Protestantism? The answer is, in part, that Protestantism has shaped much of the country's identity and remains today the majority faith in the United States (although only just). Moreover, the changes in Catholicism (the second-largest faith and the largest single religious denomination in the country) present a more mixed picture with fewer foreign policy implications. And finally, the remaining religious groups in the United States are significantly less influential when it comes to the country's politics.
I'll have to read his book because -- so far -- it's lightbulb material. And if I'm reading his writing correctly -- and I acknowledge I may not be -- the constant to-and-fro' of liberalism/conservatism does not necessarily start with a shift in political thought; it starts with a shift in religion.
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