I heard that advice repeatedly while I was growing up, from both my father and my mother. I heard it before my first date, before my first job interview and sometimes when we arrived at the homes of relatives and friends. It’s probably the best advice one can get concerning how to get along in society at large. But it’s damnably hard to follow.

I heard that advice repeatedly while I was growing up, from both my father and my mother. I heard it before my first date, before my first job interview and sometimes when we arrived at the homes of relatives and friends. It’s probably the best advice one can get concerning how to get along in society at large. But it’s damnably hard to follow.

That’s because, in politics and religion, “Perspective is everything.”

That’s been the main mantra of this website since its beginning in April, 1996. It sounds simple, but it is not. It’s more than just the notion that we should “walk a mile” in the shoes of someone we’re trying to understand, or that we should examine our politics from the viewpoint of the other party. It is first an acknowledgement that all questions, particularly political and religious questions, involve nuance the significance of which can only be divined by study, and second, a reminder that however strongly held your convictions in one direction they are opposed by convictions just as strongly held by folks of the opposite persuasion.

In the January, 1998 issue of The Patriot, I said:

“Though it’s sometimes difficult to understand, different folks can and do look at the same set of facts and arrive at completely different conclusions. That’s the essence of politics.” It might be fairly added that it’s also the essence of religion.

I also noted that, “The art of politics is knowing how to adjust and refine your position on any given issue to appeal to the widest possible audience. The hell of politics, for most of us, is that we don’t understand or practice the art of politics, leaving us at the mercy of those who do.”

“Those who do”at the moment are involved in the earliest presidential campaign in our history and each of them are doing their level best to “refine their positions” to “appeal to the widest possible audience.” The winner will be the party best able to do that. In the end, though, the biggest percentage of voters won by each party will consist of their own base of party faithful, folks who see things from only one perspective, that of their particular party.

In America, in most elections, that “particular party” is either democratic or republican. Third parties seldom do well enough to challenge the status quo liberal/conservative balance. Somehow, implausible as the idea sounds, every four years the two parties spread their big tents to include a virtual managerie of groups, causes and issues, many of which are anathema to members of their own parties. Nobody gets everything they want and many get none of what they want, witness the evangelical political community, whose members continue to vote republican, though the party has done nothing whatever to legislate or amend against abortion, gay marriage or the “homosexual agenda.” Dr. Dobson aside, when he (and others) steered the flock into the GOP, he simultaneously triggered their herding instincts and provided them with an outlet for the pent up angst of those who perceive themselves as under attack. Even those who get little, or nothing, from their party platform, once having self identified as republican, or democrat, will do little to resist the freedom to hate their political opposites and to toast the party with many with whom they have little in common. While Dr. Dobson may indeed pull off a third party run by some ambitious and incautious soul, most of his flock will continue to vote with the GOP, despite his recommendations. Politics, I believe, is stronger than religion (a proposition I’ll address in the wake of the primaries, which, I susect, may not produce our next president).

Ambrose Bierce, in his “Devil’s Dictionary,” said that politics is “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” That’s a pretty good definition, and a pretty good perspective from which to approach the general discussion of politics and parties.

Mark Twain, in “The Character of Man,” his autobiography, said:

“Look at the tyranny of party–at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty–a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes–and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves, are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion and freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.”

Both Bierce and Twain have it right. Unless you’re a member of the very elite group of folks who have the ear of republican politicians, or democratic politicians, the only influence you have over your party, and the only interest you share, is your vote … and that influence only becomes manifest in the aftermath of elections insuring that half the country will be dissatisfied with the results.

There was a time in our national history, not that long ago, when both politicians and voters, aware of the divisive power of religion, avoided the subject insofar as possible within the context of political campaigns. It (religion) played a small role in the campaign of Al Smith, in 1928, but that role had more to do with attracting Catholic ethnic voters who’d previously not participated in the process than with the inexplicable doctrine of Catholicism. It should also be noted that at the time of the Smith campaign, the KKK was rampant throughout the country and that Catholics, more so than Blacks or Jews of the time, were the main targets of the organized Klan. JFK, by contrast, ran at a time when the Klan (and a large portion of the electorate) was reverting to their post civil war concentration on the harrassment of our black brethren and Nixon and the GOP were reemphasizing their “southern strategy,” the gist of which had little to do with religion, which is at the core of the campaign currently underway.

In today’s campaign, candidates both left and right do not talk in terms of Franklin’s “public religion,” the traditional vernacular of politics. The “Creator” and the “laws of nature and of Nature’s God” of the Declaration of Independence are not the Creator and laws of the religious right in the GOP, or indeed of the majority of religious Americans, for that God was singularly without denomination and, like today, a significant percentage of Americans were either without religion or indifferent as to the denomination. In fact, by denomination, today’s religious America bears little semblance to the America of the founders.

In the America of 1776, Congregationalists were in the majority, with a little over twenty percent of churchgoers of the day. Next were Presbyterians, at about nineteen percent, Baptists at almost seventeen percent, Episcopalians at a little less than sixteen percent, Methodists at about two and a half percent and Catholics at less than two percent.*

Today’s situation is reflected in a recent Pew Poll showing that eighty two percent of Americans self identify as Christians. Of that group, 52 percent self identified as Protestant  and twenty four percent as Catholic. Only two percent were Mormon.

It’s that “Protestant” appellation that dirties the waters of contemporaneous religious comparison. In 1776 only two percent of Americans were Catholic. Today it’s better than twenty-four percent while Congregationalists hardly exist at less than one percent and Presbyterians fare hardly better at just 2.7 percent. Surprisingly, the number of Baptists has remained relatively the same, falling just a point or two.

It’s different today in terms of political clout, with Baptists and other evangelicals wielding influence way beyond the approximately 22 percent of the population they represent. Catholics, at 24.5 percent outnumber the evangelicals by themselves. With the addition of Methodists/Wesleyans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans and Jews, the most mainstream of religions, that plurality rises to 41.6 percent. One wonders at the relative quietude of the religious majority in the face of the pushy angst of today’s minority Evangelical community and their insistance on the “my way or the highway” approach to both politics and religion.

Now, if any of this, in the eyes of the reader, is construed as an attack on religion, let me disavow that notion. I fully subscribe to the sentiments of Mark Twain, who said in his biography that: “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one’s religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one’s religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life–hence it is a valuable possession to him.”

That said, I also subscribe to another perspective of Twain’s, namely that, “In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

“It’s in the book.” That refrain, or one very much like it, is at the guts of every religious argument. “The Bible says,” “The Koran says,” and “The Torah says,” are often the words chosen to declare moral and pious victory in religious discussions all over the world. Christians, Jews and Muslims devoutly study their particular “good book” with all the zeal only true believers possess, and in so doing acquire or reinforce the bias and misconception peculiar to their particular religion, and know with complete certitude that they are going to heaven while their infidel neighbor is going to burn in hell. And all the while most of them know precious little about the Holy Books themselves.

I know from personal experience, and from personal observation, that America holds many, many lay people who are diligent about reading their Bibles, Torahs and Korans. Indeed, many can quote scripture the way Burton quoted Shakespeare. Likewise, I know from personal experience that when the discussion turns to the Holy Book itself, laymen are far less sure of their facts. Even in the case of preachers, both professionals (seminarians) and lay preachers (way too many for a supposedly educated American congregation), that’s often the case. We are, all of us, Christian, Jew and Muslim, lay people and preachers, doing exactly as Twain described, getting our religion at second hand, from a book about which we know less than we know about brain surgery. It might be time to reexamine the books themselves, and learn a bit more about how they came to be, and at whose hands.

We are living in a time of religious war, not just in this country but around the world. The high rhetoric employed by America in justification of the Iraq war notwithstanding, if Iraqis and other mideastern Muslims believe they are fighting for their religion, it’s a religious war. And here at home, we’re waging a likewise religious war in the current overlong presidential campaign. It’s not just the GOP who are embarrassing themselves by unanimity on the question of intelligent design, demanding equity alongside science in our classrooms. Democrats are pandering even more feverishly in their effort to claim their share of the born again vote. Dennis Kucinich may have seen a UFO, but apparently, for the first time since Jimmy Carter, the democrats have seen Jesus Christ. Nothing like a losing political hand to bring that about and nothing better to illustrate the common law marriage of American religion and American politics. In that sense, we have become a third world nation.

Even in the political depths that surrounded him in the months leading up to his second term campaign, Abe Lincoln said that he relied upon the ultimate wisdom of the people. I’ve subscribed to that notion more than once over the years, but recently I have come to question his idea that “the people” are possessed of a collective wisdom that always leads to the right decision. In fact, I’ve come to suspect that Mencken had it right: “All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence—and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence.”

But perhaps I’m wrong about the people. It does seem that Americans always move at the half step, as though fearful of where the next full step will lead. After all, we’ve come full circle on Iraq, from unreasoning euphoria at the success of our troops to a more or less universal dissatisfaction with the status quo. Change is coming and it’s coming because Americans in their majority want it so. Perhaps the current presidential campaign will inspire, by its universal exposure of religious influence on worldly propositions, a universal rejection of the politics of religion and a return to the politics of good old American pragmatism.

Let the reader beware the notion that I am a great fan of Bierce, Twain or Mencken. Though each of these men are celebrated in American literature, their contemporaneous reputations were not without slur, each of them having been variously described as racists, scoundrels, anti-religion and worse. On the other hand each of them were serious thinkers and each of them, in his own way, enriched American life, philosophy and literature. The words they wrote, and the quotations I’ve used, each speak in a unique way to Lincoln’s notion of the collective wisdom of “the people.”

Allow me to let Mencken have the last word. Though I don’t subscribe to his every word, nevertheless he had a pretty good grasp of religion and politics and their proper relationship to the philosophy of American freedom:

“I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

“I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

“I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty.

“I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

“I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech.

“I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

“I believe in the reality of progress.

“I…But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

Please feel free to add your comments to this article or to discuss it at Faded Glory, our associated political forum.

*On attributions generally: Whenever I use materials not mine I always endeavor to give their owner proper attribution. These particular figures, however, are transcribed from personal notes made on another occasion and were without attribution in my notes. I believe, however, that they are as accurate as any others readily available. Because statistics of this kind tend to vary according to the religious bias of the transcriber, readers may feel free to refine them in accordance with their own sources. For purposes of this article the absolute accuracy of the numbers is not paramount.