This Life: Can Religion Save America?
At a Moment When Politics Is Broken, Religion May Be Democracy’s Last Hope
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Every Friday on The Nonlinear Life we talk about life as we live it today. We explore the urgent and emotional issues at the nexus of family, health, work, and meaning. We call it This Life.
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If there’s one thing we all can agree on, it’s that American politics seem broken. To make matters worse, American religion seems broken, too. In recent years, we have been bombarded with stomach-turning tales of religious corruption, sexual abuse of minors, flagrant abuse of power—even violent religious nationalism. One can be excused for thinking that organized religion is hopelessly compromised, and that we should simply burn down all the houses of worship, topple all the power-hungry clerics, and start over.
But as someone who has devoted half my adult life to matters of faith, spirituality, and meaning, I’m not ready to give up. There must be some cause for hope! I found a refreshing dose of hope this week in an unexpected place—a new book by my favorite scholar of religion, Robert Wuthnow.
Born in Kansas in 1946, Wuthnow is the son of a farmer who dropped out of school after eighth grade and a schoolteacher mom. He attended college in Kansas, then earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkely, where he wrote his thesis on the religious undertones of the protests movements of the 1960s. He went on to write three dozen books, many of which hold a treasured place on my shelves, and is now retired from Princeton and living in Virginia within walking distance of four of his seven grandchildren.
Robert Wuthnow, American sociologist
Wuthnow’s new book, Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy, makes the provocative argument that religion is essential for our polarized times precisely because religion itself is so polarized.
He argues that since religion, by its very nature, involves matters of deep complexity and contradiction, it has given us both vital experience discussing matters we disagree about and language to communicate our values and beliefs. Since our current political tribalism has propelled us into separate silos, religion may be the only force strong enough to compel us to interact with one another—and to provide us with the tools to do so.
“An additional benefit to democracy,” Wuthnow says, “is that religious diversity is the vehicle through which people are included in discussions about the kind of society in which we want to live.”
In his book, Wuthnow reminds us that democracy itself owes a deep debt to religious diversity. Democracy developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to decades of wars between Protestants and Catholics as well as among different varieties of Protestantism. “So, to imagine that democracy could somehow be strong without people debating what they hold dear is almost to pose an impossible scenario.”
In the early years of American democracy, the United States was largely Christian, Wuthnow points out, but there was still seething debate among the different interpretations of Christianity. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of separation of church and state was designed in large measure to encourage that debate and not have the state pick a winner. “If one religious constituency makes a strong argument about a policy decision, whether that policy is about abortion or immigration or voting rights, we are fortunate that there are other religious groups ready and willing to contend against those arguments.”
Thomas Jefferson's original Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom
Today, that conflict is even richer in America as our diversity has blossomed. The last century has seen large increases in the number of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and of course atheists. And while it might be tempting to think that only the religious right has a heavy hand in politics, Wuthnow cites the example of President Trump’s decision to hold up a Bible in the summer of 2020 in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protest.
While the lead story in subsequent days was that evangelicals were thrilled with his act, the counter-story was that St. John’s Episcopal Church is a mainline Black church, and the bishop of that diocese, my friend the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, denounced the event on CNN within minutes. As Wuthnow says, “That’s another vivid example of the way which religious groups serve almost as checks and balances — there’s a protest, and there’s a counterprotest. We can certainly be on one side or the other of those huge debates … but we also have to be very thankful we have the kind of diversity that we do have.”
Donald Trump in front of St. John's Church
Wuthnow is not naïve. He begins his book in the New Deal precisely because it was a time when Americans were so fed up with their broken government that they flirted with tyranny; many religious leaders welcomed that trend at the time, he points out. Quoting Wuthnow: “Some said, ‘This is wonderful. Capitalism didn’t work. We need a new world order.’ Others said, ‘No, this is dangerous. This is curtailing our freedoms.’” And they didn’t do that in the abstract, he said. They did that in church basements, in open forums, in dialogue with politicians.
It’s that willingness to confront our differences openly—yet do so in a way that continues to hold us together—that our politics desperately need right now. Politicians can’t do it. The media is too incentivized not to do it. Maybe those of us who care about religion and thus have at least some experience talking with and living alongside those with whom we disagree are the only ones who can lead the way.
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