First, in the movement Marcia Pally describes, evangelicalism is no longer synonymous with white evangelicals. Conservative black churches have long held a pro-life, pro-marriage ethic in balance with energetic social activism. Immigrant churches, the fastest-growing segment of Christianity, tend to be conservative theologically while progressive on issues like poverty and immigration. The increasingly influential Hispanic community naturally aligns with this movement. As Samuel Rodriguez puts it: “Where Billy Graham meets Dr. King, that’s where you will see the Hispanic Christian community emerge.”

Second, this movement represents a dynamically different process of connecting faith and social engagement. Instead of a checklist of correct stands on selected issues, many evangelicals seek a consistent ethical framework rooted in core beliefs. Conservative blogger Eric Teetsel comments, “Rather than valuing other issues alongside life, Millennial emphasis on life explains their interest in other social issues. Caring for the poor is born from a foundational valuation of life.” Indeed, while young evangelicals remain solidly against abortion, two-thirds (63 percent) agree that poverty, disease and torture are also pro-life issues.

Third, evangelicalism is revising its strategies of social influence. New evangelicals tend to hold progressive opinions on some issues and promote (private-sector) social justice initiatives while maintaining a conservative political identity and voting GOP. Their activism deemphasizes top-down political strategies in favor of incarnational engagement on the local level. This makes the political and cultural influence of evangelicals less centralized, less coordinated, and more unpredictable. Whether it is ultimately more effective remains to be seen.

While a significant change is undeniably underway, it should not be overestimated or overgeneralized. New evangelicals are not on a journey toward becoming liberals; they are not likely to swell the ranks of Democratic voters; they have not abandoned abortion as a core issue. As sociologist John Schmalzbauer cautions: “While dreaming of what evangelicals might become, we must take a hard look at who they are.” What is clear is that “who they are” can no longer be captured by old labels and simple polarizations.

Yet where there was once the appearance of a monovocal evangelicalism there is now robust polyphony—what theologian Scot McKnight calls “the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the twentieth century, a new kind of Christian social conscience.” This deserves our attention because most politics does not happen at elections but in between, when policy is negotiated and implemented. Current shifts in evangelical activism have re-routed the flow of evangelical money, time, and energy, and are changing the demands on the US political system. This essay investigating the shift is based on seven years of field research in evangelical books, articles, newsletters, sermons, and blogs, and on interviews with evangelicals, ages 19 to 74, across geographic and demographic groups—from students in Illinois to retired firemen from Mississippi, from former bikers to professors and political consultants (see The New Evangelicals: Expanding The Vision Of The Common Good).

For the purposes of this essay, American evangelicalism is an approach to Protestantism across denominations, its central features including: the search for a renewal of faith toward an “inner” personal relationship with Jesus; the mission to bring others to this sort of personal relationship; the cross as a symbol of not only salvation but also of service to others; individual acceptance of Jesus’ gift of redemption; individualist Bible reading by ordinary men and women; and the priesthood of all believers independent of ecclesiastical or state authorities. It was a progressive movement from the colonial era to World War One. Its emphasis on individual conscience made it anti-elitist, anti-authoritarian, economically populist, and socially activist on behalf of the common man. Twice in the twentieth century, evangelicals turned to the right, the second time in the late 1970s, when they became a central pillar in the modern conservative movement.

But recent trends point to another political transformation within this community—to those evangelicals who have left the right, moving toward an anti-militarist, anti-consumerist focus on poverty relief, environmental protection, and immigration reform, and on coalition-building and more issue-by-issue policy assessment (more Democrat on environment, for instance, and more Republican on abortion). While the religious right remains robust, in 2005 Christianity Today lambasted evangelicals for conflating the gospel with American or Republican policy, writing, “George W. Bush is not Lord… The American flag is not the Cross. The Pledge of Allegiance is not the Creed. ‘God Bless America’ is not Doxology.” In 2006, the Evangelical Environmental Network/Call to Action, launched its “What would Jesus drive?” campaign for greater fuel efficiency. In 2007, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) issued its “Evangelical Declaration against Torture.” Since 2009, the NAE has repeatedly protested against Republican budget cuts for the needy, for instance writing, “this is the wrong place to cut.”

These “new evangelicals,” as Richard Cizik, head of The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, calls them, are neither small in number nor elite. By 2004, devout Christians whose activism differs from that of the religious right came to 24 percent of the US population. Subtract Catholics, and we find that 19 percent or so of devout Protestants do not identify as religious right.

Devout Christians whose activism differs from that of the religious right (% of US population). Source: Assessing a More Prominent ‘Religious Left.’ Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life (June 5, 2008).

Four factors were decisive in this shift. The first is generational, with idealistic younger evangelicals rejecting the in-group-ism and Prosperity Gospel politics of their parents. They are, as then-AP religion writer Eric Gorski found, “even more anti-abortion than their elders” on ethical grounds, “but also keenly interested in the environment and poverty.” Second are cultural changes since the 1960s. Attitudinal shifts—about the environment, global connectedness, and poverty—have proceeded not at the radical fringe but in Middle America, and priorities there, including among evangelicals, have shifted. Third is ethics amid a group that takes ethics seriously. The militarism and torture of the Bush years and the consumerism and in-group-ism of the last forty years prodded many evangelicals to self-examination. In their book, Unchristian, evangelicals David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons title their chapters Hypocritical, Sheltered, Too Political, Judgmental, and Antihomosexual, giving some idea of the self-critique underway. A fourth reason is the de-professionalization of service work. As growing numbers of ordinary Christians began to live and serve among the poor, their priorities moved toward economic justice and environmental protection.

One key feature of “new evangelicals” is their embrace of church-state separation in order to ensure fair government and religious freedom for all, including Muslims. As the Evangelical Manifesto (2008) declares: “Let it be known unequivocally that we are committed to religious liberty for people of all faiths… We are firmly opposed to the imposition of theocracy on our pluralistic society.” This document was signed by over 70 evangelical leaders, including the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson, and Mark Bailey, president of the Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas.

A second key feature is self-identification as a critic of government when they believe government to be unjust. This is the “prophetic role” of the church—not to be government but to “speak truth to power.” And it requires party independence. In 2006, Frank Page, then president of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, warned, “I have cautioned our denomination to be very careful not to be seen as in lock step with any political party.” The 2008 Manifesto, too, called on evangelicals to distance themselves from party politics, lest “Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another.”

A third feature is self-identification as civil society actors (neither state actors nor “bubble communities”) who advocate for their positions through public education, lobbying, coalition-building, and negotiation. Indeed, “new evangelicals” are often engaged more than other citizens in the economic, social, and charitable spheres of American life through the programs they develop. These are run largely by volunteers who also raise much of the programs’ funds. As one Midwestern pastor explained, “If healing the brokenhearted, setting the captives free, and ministering to the poor was Jesus’ job description, then we believe it is ours as well (Interview with the author, May 1, 2009; September 25, 2010).

These programs are not only giving alms, but are also seeking to restructure opportunity—in education, health care and clean air and water. Evangelicals do this first within the church. An example would be the over 200,000 Christians who contribute to a pool that covers members’ medical bills, handling over $12 million in medical expenses a year. Reaching outside the church, evangelicals alter their business practices toward economic justice. An example would be the Pasco, Washington fruit farmer who puts 50-75 percent of her profits into development projects in the US and abroad. For her employees she built a residential community and set up ESL, GED, and computer courses, parenting training, youth programs, counseling services, preschool and elementary school, and a college scholarship program.

“New evangelicals” also use their own monies to redistribute resources in less developed regions. Examples include the educational, substance abuse, homeless, environmental protection, and micro-credit programs that are run not only by large organizations like World Vision, whose micro-credit program supports over 440,000 projects in forty-six developing countries, but by volunteers in local churches. One church in my study spends $1.5 million a year on economic justice and aid programs. Another runs an impressive free health clinic locally and raised $66,000 to build a training center in a Zambian village, plus $100,000 for yet another project.

In their overseas endeavors, these evangelicals are developing a nuanced critique of the “Bibles for bacon” school of evangelizing, where participation in religious activities was a condition of aid. This is unacceptable not least because when Jesus served, he did not ask people “to sign on the bottom line,” according to John Ashmen, head of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (Interview with the author, December 22, 2010). One head of a church overseas mission said, “We tend to everyone—Muslim, Jewish.” If people want to know why his church is digging a well or building a school, he’ll tell them. Perhaps something about his faith will interest them. If not, “I’ve dug thirty foot water wells with guys who didn’t believe what I do, and I love those guys. If God wants to use me to change their belief, that’s fine. If not, then heck, we dug a well” (Interview with the author, May 1, 2009).

“New evangelicals” also oppose anti-gay discrimination in housing, education, and non-religious employment. They note that while some consider homosexuality a sin, a matter between man and God, democracies do not punish people for sins, which after all vary across faiths. Moreover, the state does not rescind civil rights for the commission of other sins, such as heterosexual adultery—why should it then for homosexuality? They note also that judging the sins of others is unchristian.  A joint evangelical-Catholic Washington Post OpEd protesting Uganda’s draconian anti-gay legislation declared, “any effort to persecute people for their sexual orientation or gender identity offends intrinsic human dignity and violates Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.… The entire Judeo-Christian worldview is built on this unshakable foundation.”

While 74 percent of white evangelicals oppose gay marriage, opposition to gay civil unions is decreasing: at 57 percent in 2009 and dropping; and less than a majority—41 percent—of evangelicals who attend church less than once a week oppose. In 2011, evangelical Belmont University amended its anti-discrimination policy to include homosexuals, and recognized its first gay student organization. That same month, the student newspaper at Westmont College ran an open letter signed by 131 gay and gay-friendly alumni in support of gay students. Alumni at the influential Wheaton College have a Facebook page in support of gay students.

While 60 percent of white evangelicals opposed abortion in 2012, 34 percent believed it should be legal in all or most cases. Noting that 73 percent of US abortions are economically motivated, “new evangelicals” aim to provide accessible, realistic alternatives, including medical, financial, and emotional support during pregnancy along with day care and job training post-partum, where needed. Especially effective programs include pairing a pregnant woman with a local family to serve as her “family” and help out as needed, for instance, driving the child to day care when the new mother’s car has a flat tire so that she can get to work and not lose her job. Midwestern megachurch pastor Greg Boyd explained, “A person could vote for a candidate who is not ‘pro life’ but who will help the economy and the poor. Yet this may be the best way to curb the abortion rate” (Interview with the author, May 4, 2009). “New evangelicals” note that there is no reason why they should not join with others, including feminists, in developing these programs. “I am decidedly pro-life,” southern megachurch pastor Joel Hunter says. “But by working together instead of arguing, both sides can get what they want.”

Though GOP policies are often at odds with “new evangelical” activism, the “new evangelical” vote remains largely Republican in part because of reluctance to back a party that supports legal abortion. In greater part, however, it is a vote for small government. This is a preference that evangelicals came to through doctrine and history, beginning with the Protestant and evangelical emphasis on self-responsible striving for moral uplift. While this originally meant striving toward the divine, striving became a muscle well-exercised and applied to many arenas of life, including the political and economic. Striving was further underscored for dissenting (evangelical) Protestants, who became determinedly self-reliant in order to survive the oppression and marginalization by Europe’s states and state churches. These qualities—a preference for individual and community self-responsibility on one hand, and the dissenter’s suspicion of authorities on the other—interacted synergistically with the rough nature of American settlement, where one could not rely on authorities or the state because there was little of either.

Because of evangelicalism’s formative influence on American culture, these elements remain broadly influential even today. The American political imaginary is one of voluntary associationism and suspicion of central government. In spite of the Great Recession, support for a governmental safety net is down 18 points since 2007. For evangelicals, this is even more the case. If they are generally wary of the state, Obama’s use of government programs to address recent economic crises further inflamed their mistrust. To be sure, the 2008 election saw an uptick in evangelicals supporting the Democratic Party: two evangelical ministers—Joel Hunter and Tony Campolo—helped write the 2008 Democrat party platform; Leah Daughtry, an evangelical minister, served as CEO of the 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee; and evangelical PACs like the Matthew 25 Network were set up to support Obama. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the influential Houston pastor, gave his support to Obama, though he had given the benediction at both of Bush’s presidential inaugurations and presided at the wedding of Bush’s daughter in May, 2008. Wilfredo De Jesús, pastor at New Life Covenant church in Chicago and staunch opponent of abortion and gay marriage, supported a Democrat, Obama, for the first time in his life. But while these gestures of support translated into an increase in evangelicals voting Democrat—a third of white evangelicals under 40; 26 percent of older white evangelicals; 36 percent of the less observant—a mass turn to the Democrats is at present unlikely owing to small-government-ism and opposition to abortion. What raises more serious questions, however, is the 65 percent of evangelicals ages 18-30 who favor more governmental aid to the needy, including Obamacare. These questions may endure, with implications for the political future, as coming-of-age politics has life-long effects.

White evangelicals, because of their small-government-ism, are often seen as un-modern and unequipped to deal with today’s economic and geo-political complexities. It is an ironic view, as their extensive social service work has made many of them sophisticated in their understanding of economic, environmental, medical, and migration issues, including the relations among poverty, soil erosion, rapes of girls out alone searching for potable water, AIDS, and migration. It is also worth noting that evangelicals do not call only for smaller government, but for a more robust civil society; not only for an absence (of central government), but also for our energetic presence.

Many scholars who initially saw in Obama the possibility of a reinvigorated prophetic civil religion have since been disappointed. Now, on the eve of the election and as the waters recede across New Jersey and New York City, we have a moment to reflect on the rhetoric and symbolism that Obama has employed during this disaster.

What, if anything, is new about the rhetoric and symbolism he is employing, and how should we understand the relationship between this rhetoric and his governing style? What does it suggest about the arc of American civil religion, about shifting and multiple visions of national solidarity, and about the election and the political climate to follow?

This page was updated on 11/7/2012—ed.

Our respondents are:

Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Robert N. Bellah, an American sociologist and educator, who for 30 years served as professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

Marie A. Eisenstein, Associate Professor of Political Science, Indiana University Northwest

John R. Hall, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis

Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies, Duke University

Laura R. Olson, Professor of Political Science, Clemson University

Jenna Reinbold, Assistant Professor of Religion, Colgate University

Rhys H. Williams, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago

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Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Sandy, in all her indiscriminate, non-partisan fury, ripped the facade off two large problems that had received little to no attention in the Presidential debates—poverty and climate change. In the storm’s grim aftermath, President Obama spoke movingly of America’s unity in the face of adversity. “We leave nobody behind,” he said the next day. “We make sure that we respond as a nation and remind ourselves that whenever an American is in need, all of us stand together to make sure that we’re providing the help that’s necessary.” But the reality is that the suffering occasioned by Sandy, though no doubt experienced at all levels, has been unequally distributed. As David Rohde observed in Manhattan the night of the storm, “Those with a car could flee. Those with wealth could move into a hotel. Those with steady jobs could decline to come into work. But the city’s cooks, doormen, maintenance men, taxi drivers and maids left their loved ones at home.” Gestures of bi-partisanship and horizontal solidarity, though perhaps refreshing, should not be allowed to occlude the plight of those left behind in poverty.

Sandy has also made it seem like bad taste to scoff at climate change, as Governor Romney did in his convention speech. Though it may be too early to tell precisely what role climate change played in this particular case, increasingly severe hurricane activity is part of what the scientific models suggest we should expect on our warming planet. Obama’s comment on October 30th is telling: “Sadly, we are getting more experience with these kinds of big impact storms along the East Coast.” Apart from such oblique remarks, and despite pressure from environmental groups, Obama has been mostly silent about the climate of late, but perhaps the images of flooding and devastation will help to change the political climate around climate change, which, like so much else, will most acutely affect the poor.

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Robert N. Bellah, an American sociologist and educator, who for 30 years served as professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley

Let me quote from an article I published in Commonweal on March 14th, 2008, entitled “Yes He Can: The Case for Obama”:

Hearing Obama give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was one of the most electrifying experiences of my political life. Who is this person? I thought. How is it possible for anyone today to formulate the very best of the American tradition in such eloquent terms? (Needless to say, with a sense of the centrality of rhetoric to the Western political tradition from Aristotle and Cicero to Lincoln and Martin Luther King, I have never appreciated the derogatory use of the word.  I believe that speaking well and thinking well usually go together and vice versa as George W. Bush, who can do neither, so vividly illustrates.

Nothing since has changed my mind.  I have been as strongly for Obama as I was from the beginning. “Civil religion” is a contested term. I have long tried to avoid it and it cannot be found in Habits of the Heart. Yet it won’t go away. It is still in play in the United States, and, I learned to my amazement, in China today, to which I made two trips in the fall of 2011 to discuss the idea of civil religion in China among other things. When I reread my original essay of 1967, “Civil Religion in America,” which has become iconic in more circles than I realized, I find I can’t disagree with it. It is not the worship of the state or an effort to “integrate” Americans in loyalty to the U.S. It is a deeply critical call for judgment on this nation, similar to what Durkheim was doing in his defense of Dreyfus. Obama still represents that kind of civil religion, critical but hopeful.

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology, the University of New Hampshire

President Obama’s speeches anticipating and responding to Hurricane Sandy are a reminder of the enduring cultural and political significance of America’s civil religion. A recurring emphasis in his statements was Americans’ deeply felt obligation that we have to look out for one another in tough times. This, he reiterated, is the spirit demanded and unceasingly demonstrated in tough times, the spirit that animates Americans’ resilience and their ability to bounce back and do what is necessary “until our work is done.” The virtue of neighbor helping neighbor is a civil religious or sacred belief in the U.S., and it is not merely belief—but belief backed up with practice, as underscored by news accounts of neighbor helping neighbor in devastated neighborhoods. This is what Americans do: whether urban, suburban, or rural, they help their neighbor in need and this is how community solidarity is built, maintained, and regenerated.

Importantly, too, exemplifying that civil religion is equipped to build solidarity across and amidst differences, Obama emphasized that “pulling together” means that “we set aside whatever issues we may have otherwise to make sure that we respond appropriately and with swiftness.” He demonstrated this ethic himself with his energetic 24/7 availability to the governors and state and local officials in need of federal help, an ethos captured in images of Obama embracing his arch-critic Republican Governor Christie as they absorbed New Jersey’s losses. Solidarity, of course, as Durkheim elaborated, entails the sacrificing of the interests and appetites of the self in order to serve a larger communal good. The criticisms of Obama-coziness leveled at Governor Christie by fellow-Republicans underscore the high partisanship of our national politics, and the fact that while the rhetoric of unity can inspire and move us, it is frequently impeded by deliberate barriers to its realization.

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Marie A. Eisenstein, Associate Professor of Political Science, Indiana University Northwest

The most potent rhetoric and symbolism employed by President Obama during the disaster that was and is Hurricane Sandy occurred at a campaign event on November 1st, 2012, in Green Bay, WI. President Obama said that when disaster strikes, Americans put aside their differences; “There are no Democrats or Republicans during a storm, there are just fellow Americans.” This rhetoric reminded me of (Senate candidate) Obama’s 2004 DNC speech where he said, “[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” This rhetoric—a rhetoric that emphasized our commonalities and not our differences—is what inspired so many to vote for President Obama in 2008.

While the disaster and tragedy that is Hurricane Sandy gave President Obama an opportunity to highlight his positives—his ability to communicate an American ethos of solidarity, compassion and heroism—it is, quite honestly, too little, too late. The promise of candidate Obama in 2004 and 2008 did not materialize during the tenure of President Obama.

President Obama is capable of soaring rhetoric—rhetoric that once inspired us. But we are also a practical people; we want words to be matched by actions. And many Americans do not believe that President Obama has governed as if there is no separate liberal and conservative America. That is the disappointment.

During this crisis, an example of the American ethos is present in the behavior of Governor Chris Christie. To the dismay of his Republican party, Governor Christie embraced President Obama; in the heat of a tight election, Governor Christie put solidarity with his state and his citizens above all else. That is the American ethos in action. That is what we have not seen from President Obama.

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John R. Hall, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis

Among the punditocracy, Megastorm Sandy has been called Barack Obama’s October Surprise. Nate Silver, on the other hand, used his November 5th New York Times FiveThirtyEight column to suggest that President Obama’s trending polls toward reelection were “overdetermined,” meaning that multiple factors could reasonably account for Obama’s increasingly favorable position. Both points of view strike me as true.

As Silver points out, a variety of recent developments weighed in Obama’s favor. However, Sandy precipitated a turn toward the affirmation of a collective fate and responsibility—a central theme in America’s “civil religion.” President Obama’s words in this vein became increasingly clear over the course of the storm. “When we go through tough times like this we all pull together,” he said on Monday, October 29th. In the midst of the storm, his rhetoric was purely that of civil religion. And by Thursday, he was introducing his stump speech in Wisconsin with themes of bipartisanship laced with the language of awe, humility, and mourning: “we rise and fall as one nation,” he affirmed.

Obama’s rhetoric was not so strikingly different from that used by all presidents during times of challenge to the nation. What was striking was the contrast to the petty meanness, the bickering, posturing, and unrelenting partisanship that had characterized the election before Sandy arrived. We were reminded that we are a national community. Under ordinary circumstances, such expressions of civility would have merely been expected. During this election, they amounted to something like shock therapy for politics.

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Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies, Duke University

Hurricane Sandy gave President Obama an unprecedented opportunity to mobilize and unify the nation in the face of natural disaster. Obama’s preemptive planning and genuine resolve for an efficient post-disaster recovery shows he can both lead and care at the same time. The wellbeing of the country took priority over partisan politics. Given the president’s electoral blues, Sandy came his way like a mulligan in golf.

It is as if Brutus, of Shakespearean fame, whispered in Obama’s ear:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3)

Not only did Obama get a chance to demonstrate his ability to take charge during a crisis, but governor Chris Christie’s endorsement of his leadership was also an unasked gift. Perhaps by tomorrow evening we will know if hurricane Sandy helped Obama to row out of the political shallows.

Indeed, Obama has shown that he genuinely cares for his country. In New Jersey he told folks: “we are here for you, and we will not forget.” George W. Bush said, “we will not forget the events of 9/11”—but then happily went on to wage war in far off countries by forgetting the home front. Obama, in turn, is making promises to flood victims: “we will follow up to make sure that you get all the help that you need until you’ve rebuilt.” These are words of a man confident about a second term in order to supervise the rebuilding effort.

Using military assets for rescue and cleanup in New Jersey and elsewhere is a potent symbol of American civil religion on display during the Obama presidency. Obama wants to turn swords into ploughshares. Determined to end the overseas wars, he solemnly redeploys national assets in the service of nation building at home. Health care, financial legislation in order to regulate Wall Street, promote education and a smart approach to national security—rather than a blundering military machine—appears to be his incomplete work-in-process agenda for national reconciliation, prosperity and fiscal discipline.

Rejecting Republican cynicism, Obama has consistently placed his confidence in the American people. Bipartisanship should be a top priority if he gets another four years. But if faced with Republican obstruction, he should listen to the lyricist of the rhythm and blues (R&B) song and we should tell Obama, not Sally or Sandy: “Ride, Obama, ride…” Hope he listens to us, this time round.

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Laura R. Olson, Professor of Political Science, Clemson University

As Hurricane Sandy approached the East Coast, poll after poll showed President Obama widening the gap with Mitt Romney after his disastrous first debate performance. Obama knew the odds of his reelection were increasing (statistically speaking) with every passing day. And weather reports indicated that the storm likely would have its greatest impact on states that already were safely in Obama’s column. What better strategic opportunity for Obama to tweak the national campaign narrative—and even more significantly, the post-election climate—than by stepping into the symbolic presidential role of comforter-in-chief? In this role, crisis transcends political division. People come together across the proverbial aisle. There is, as a younger, more idealistic Obama said in his landmark keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America.”

Obama knows the inside-the-beltway realities of a second term as president would require him to transcend Washington’s vicious partisanship and bring his actions into line with his trademark rhetoric. He began signaling such an approach in word and deed even before landfall. Invoking vaguely civil religious tones in his November 3 weekly address, he proclaimed:

We’re Americans. When times are tough, we’re tougher. We put others first. We go that extra mile. We open our hearts and our homes to one another, as one American family. We recover, we rebuild, we come back stronger—and together we will do that once more.

Then he met with and hugged people devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Much to the ire of his fellow partisans, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie played a supporting role (as “the warm-hearted Republican who sees the light”) in this drama to perfection.

From the start, Obama genuinely seems to have believed in his personal capacity to unite people of widely divergent political orientations. If reelected, he will need to be far more proactive in pushing for cooperation with Congress. Summoning the better angels of our nature after a superstorm will hardly quiet all of Obama’s partisan foes. But when one of your more vocal critics cannot stop singing your praises, it is a starting point.

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Jenna Reinbold, Assistant Professor of Religion, Colgate University

This election has been a trying time for those of us who long for a vision of American solidarity from the candidates—either of them. (After all, Republicans like solidarity, too.) Although the Romney campaign continues to groan under the burden of its infamous “47 percent” delineation, the Obama campaign has been striking in its own way for its failure to recapture the widespread appeal of the 2008 “hope” and “change” motifs. Surely this is tied in part to the words themselves; “change” is a particularly risky word on which to hang a bid for a second term, as Obama conceded to a Wisconsin audience last week:

You may be frustrated at the pace of change. But you know what I believe. You know where I stand. […] I know what change looks like, because I fought for it. You have, too. And after all we’ve been through together, we sure as heck can’t give up now.

Obama’s assessment is perhaps refreshing in its honesty, but there’s no denying the fact that it smacks much more of sober drudgery than it does of heady transcendence.

As is almost always the case with a disaster, Hurricane Sandy jarred us for a short time from our partisanship. As it figuratively and then literally hovered above Americans of all political persuasions, it furnished the candidates with a chance to spur the national solidarity that so readily congeals in the face of clear, newsworthy adversity. By almost all accounts, Obama wildly outpaced Romney in this endeavor, furnishing us with a reminder of our president’s remarkable—and remarkably underutilized—capacity for rhetorical effervescence.

As Sandy dissipated late last week, however, Obama quickly returned to the business of framing the Republican Party as the biggest disaster of them all—a disaster avertable only by the crucial though admittedly rather tedious cultivation of “a middle-class agenda that rewards hard work and responsibility.”

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Rhys H. Williams, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago

Disasters—whether natural, human-made, or some combination—are civil religious moments.  People are distressed, appalled, fascinated, scared, angry, uncertain. They see themselves in the victims, they feel relief they are not among them, they seek explanations for why this happened and how it might be avoided in the future. If it cannot be avoided, then they want to know it has some meaning.

American Presidents—as the “face” of the nation (our “brand” as it were)—have some responsibility for stepping up and addressing those concerns, and to look like they are themselves searching for answers and working to prevent future event. Thus, not surprisingly, the immediate aftermath of an event produces a type of patriotic and civil religious response among many people. Whether it was the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, or the recent devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy last month, we are pulled together momentarily in our concern, and any President has the opportunity (and responsibility) to respond as a reassuring civil religious “priest.” Presidents typically appear immediately on all media, with speeches that assure the nation that this will not permanently damage our society or way of life, that reassert our national resolve to deal with the disaster, and that make the claim that the event actually reveals the basic strength of our national character. They usually end by evoking civil religious blessings on us and our relationship to the Divine. There is usually a “rally around the President” effect and approval ratings typically go way up in the immediate aftermath. We see these things dramatically after 9/11, from President George W. Bush’s approval ratings, to his rhetoric of resilience and re-building, to the ubiquitous flourishing of posters, bumper stickers, billboards and the like that proclaimed “Proud to be an American,” “God Bless America,” “Never forget,” or “United We Stand.” Of course, the President must successfully do these rites of civil religious healing—President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is an instructive counter-example.

Thus, President Obama’s response to Hurricane Sandy—including the noted change of rhetoric, body language, and setting (walking devastated beaches) was perfectly attuned to the cultural needs of the moment. Of course it had political benefit—the President is supposed to do, in the minds of many, exactly what he was doing. It is a structural advantage that a challenger can’t possibly grasp equally. Was it a return to 2008, as many claim? Yes, in many ways, particularly given the sense of crisis that pervaded the nation four years ago. Was it politically calculated?  Perhaps so. But if we think of “politics” not as a dirty word but as the “authoritative allocation of values” in the broader sense, it should be so. That’s what many Americans look for in a leader.

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The idea that people of faith should not be permitted in the public square to influence public policy is antithetical to the First Amendment, which says the free exercise of religion – James Madison called people of faith, and by the way, no faith, and different faith, the ability to come in the public square with diverse opinions, motivated by a variety of different ideas and passions, the perfect remedy. Why? Because everybody is allowed in.

And on This Week, Santorum affirmed an earlier statement about his reaction to President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on his religion:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

In light of Santorum’s recent comments, we asked a small handful of scholars about the status of these and related claims regarding religion in American political life. Just how “naked” is the American public square? What is the appropriate place of religion in the public sphere?

This page was updated on 3/8/2012—ed.

Our respondents are:

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

John H. Evans, Professor of Sociology and and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

Philip S. Gorski, Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Research, Yale University

R. Marie Griffith, Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics and Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

Cristina Lafont, Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University

Nancy Levene, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University

Nadia Marzouki, Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute

Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies, Duke University

Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

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Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

Rick Santorum seems to want to have his cake and eat it too, by privileging his religious views at the expense of other views in the public square. It is neither true nor practically possible in the United States to prevent religious views from coming into the public square to influence public policy. There is no prior censorship or “policing” of views in the public square, to permit non-religious and exclude religious views. What is not and should never be permitted is to protect any views from contestation because some of us believe them to be “religious.” If any views are to influence public policy, they must do so by being persuasive to all citizens, regardless of religious belief or lack of it. The logic and process of reasoning in the public square should be accessible to all citizens and not only to religious believers on their internal terms. Calling views religious emphasizes their inaccessibility to non-believers, thereby insulating them from critical evaluation. The rhetoric of disenfranchised religion seeks to perpetuate an establishment of one religion under the guise of saving it from unfair exclusion. The way forward for all Americans is to acknowledge and regulate the connectedness of religion and politics in order to ensure effective disestablishment of any religion by the state. The pretense of unfair exclusion of religion from politics is the Trojan horse of the establishment of religion.

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

Each passing week of the Republican primary season brings an amplification in rhetorical appeal to the highly, or should I say severely, conservative base dominated by white evangelical voters. When insurance-mandated contraception coverage for employees in Catholic colleges and hospitals can get co-opted as an issue of religious liberty (notwithstanding the brutal irony that since the 1970s the vast majority of American Catholics use contraception and believe that one can be a good Catholic without adhering to the Vatican’s opposition to contraception), we should be on high alert for other instances in which democratic ideals are strategically hijacked for partisan gain. Rick Santorum’s recent comments about religion in public life and how he was sickened by JFK’s call for the separation of religion and politics can be seen in this vein. In the current political landscape portraying Democrats as anti-religion, Santorum struck a blow against President Obama (whom earlier in the week he accused of a “phony theology”), the Democrats, and their iconic figure JFK. The same comments also quite efficiently struck against his immediate rival, Mitt Romney, whose minority religious views as a Mormon continue to be a source of concern for many evangelicals. Not coincidentally, Romney has dealt with the looming shadow of his religious identity by emulating the tack used by JFK; namely, asserting the differentiation of church and state as legitimate separate spheres.

Claims regarding religion in American political life always have to be understood in context. JFK had to say what he said in 1960 if he were to have any legitimacy among highly skeptical and indeed prejudiced Protestants who were long accustomed to thinking of Catholicism as  anti-democratic and anti-American, and who feared that JFK would enact policies only if they had Rome’s imprimatur.  It was strategic of JFK and indeed a bold move.  It anticipated a key doctrinal shift subsequently made by Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) when they eloquently elaborated principles of religious freedom, individual conscience, and the rightful differentiation of church and state.

Differentiation, theoretically, produces integration, not exclusion. The differentiation of church and state does not mean that religious individuals or institutional voices have no place in politics or the public sphere. Quite the contrary. They have the same democratic right as secular individuals and organizations to articulate views about the issues at hand.  The democratic procedural expectation, however, is that they do not merit exemptions or opportunities denied to the non-religious. The public square can never be naked; it is inevitably clothed in the religious and religio-cultural strands woven into any given societal context and this shapes who speaks, what is said, and what makes sense. The challenge is to make room for and listen to the Other and to refrain from accusing others a priori of phony religious theologies or secular ideologies.

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John L. Esposito, University Professor and Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

Statements like, “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up” and “What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” reveal the extent to which Rick Santorum plays to the religious right. He remains an ideologue and demagogue whose outbursts and rhetoric play on and appeal to the prejudices, fears, and emotions of people, like his propensity for Islamophobia.

Santorum seems to have missed American history classes in school and to have been asleep for the past few decades of American politics. While America has an institutional separation of church and state, it most certainly has not witnessed a separation of religion and politics or public policy. We have had ordained ministers such as Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson run for president, had robust debates in Congress and society over birth control, abortion, school prayer, and stem cell research, in which religious actors and organizations have been influential participants. The Christian Right and similar groups have played active roles in these issues as well as other religious issues in electoral campaigns and have weighed in on appointments to the Supreme Court.

Santorum’s strategy, while attractive to many voters in Iowa and South Carolina, will backfire nationally among moderate Republicans, Independents, and Democrats.

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John H. Evans, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

Rick Santorum recently said that then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s statement on the separation of church and state made him want to throw up because he claimed that Kennedy wanted no influence by religious people in public life. This is typical campaign hyperbole aimed at motivating the religious right through allegiance to one of its founding myths—that religious conservatives are increasingly and literally barred as religious citizens from participating in the public sphere. I could deconstruct this and find a much more subtle and limited truth-claim in Santorum’s statement, but I think that what is most interesting is that Santorum felt he could repudiate his fellow Catholic’s statement about church and state.

Kennedy made this statement to assuage the anxiety of conservative Protestants in voting for a Catholic president. The Pope, it was claimed at the time, would pull the strings of Kennedy the marionette. Now, fifty years later, not only does Santorum not need to claim that he is independent of the Pope, but by rejecting Kennedy’s statement he actually scores points with conservative Protestants. This not only represents the decline of anti-Catholicism, but the declining importance of background theological conceptions to conservative Protestants.  As long as Santorum takes the substantive policy positions they agree with, conservative Protestants apparently do not care that he takes inspiration from the Catholic Magisterium and not directly from the Bible as they do. Perhaps if Romney had been consistent on conservative social issues they would not oppose his underlying Mormonism. So, I’ll take this kerfuffle as evidence of limited progress towards religious tolerance in the U.S. If the religious right has indeed learned to get beyond their deeper theological differences, in my more utopian moments I wonder if they could use this experience to become more tolerant of additional religious traditions underlying people’s policy stances, such as Obama’s mainline Protestantism or Islam.

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Philip S. Gorski, Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Research, Yale University

Rick Santorum has a point. People of faith should be allowed into the public square, and they should not have to check their faith at the gate. Those liberal secularists who claim that “America was founded on the separation of church and state” and that religious people must adopt a (purportedly) “neutral” language of “public reason” in the political realm have a poor understanding of the First Amendment and an illiberal understanding of political speech. Legal and intellectual historians such as Noah Feldman, Philip Hamburger, and Steven Green have convincingly shown that the doctrine of “total separation” is an invention of the 20th century, not the legacy of the framers. And philosophers and theologians such as William Connolly, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Jürgen Habermas have persuasively argued that discursive restraints on religious speech cannot be defended on liberal grounds.

But Santorum is also running through an open door. The doctrine of total separation may still have some purchase within the judiciary, and some diehard defenders within the academy, but it is a minority view within the broader society. This is an extraordinary development. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy gave his speech on faith and politics, leading universities such as my own still had Jewish quotas, and American Catholics were still viewed as a fifth column. A half century on, the Supreme Court is dominated by Catholic conservatives and Jewish liberals, and a Mormon and a Catholic are the leading candidates for the Republican nomination. These days, it is people of no faith who are most likely to be locked out of the public square.

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R. Marie Griffith, Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics and Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

Rick Santorum’s blatant distortion of John F. Kennedy’s historic speech reveals the paranoid underside of far-right Christianity in the U.S. People of faith play major roles in all arenas of public life, including policy making; just because they do not share Santorum’s particular brand of theology doesn’t erase them from view. What Santorum wants is a theocracy in which Catholic dogma is the rule of the land—something, incidentally, that the vast majority of U.S. Catholics do not want. What an irony that Santorum singled out the nation’s first Catholic President as his scapegoat. Among other grave dangers, Santorum now risks rekindling the latent anti-Catholicism of the American religious and secular left—a move that would do his Church and its people far more harm than good.

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Cristina Lafont, Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University

Rick Santorum is certainly right when he claims that “the idea that people of faith should not be permitted to make their case in the public square in order to influence public policy is antithetical to the First Amendment.” He appeals to the “free exercise of religion” clause, but simply on “freedom of speech” grounds it seems that the case is closed. This indicates that what is at issue in this debate is not whether citizens of faith are permitted to make their case in the public square but rather what it takes for citizens to legitimately make their case in order to influence public policy. The issue is not that citizens of faith should exclude their religious convictions from public debate, but that appealing to religious convictions alone is insufficient to justify the imposition of coercive policies on secular citizens and citizens of different faiths who have an equal right to be co-legislators but do not share those convictions. Thus, citizens of faith who participate in political advocacy in the public square can appeal to religious reasons in support of the policies they favor, provided that they are prepared and able to show that these policies are compatible with treating all citizens as free and equal and thus can be reasonably accepted by everyone. Citizens of a constitutional democracy cannot make their case in favor of coercive policies on the basis of their religious convictions alone, since they are constitutionally bound to only support those policies that can be shown to be compatible with the constitutional principles of freedom and equality (i.e. with the equal protection of the fundamental rights of all citizens). Thus, citizens of faith who participate in the public square in order to influence public policy must ultimately rest their case on the basic democratic values that they share with secular citizens and citizens of different faiths.

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Nancy Levene, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University

“I have often wondered that men who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance, and honest dealing with all men, should quarrel so fiercely and display the bitterest hatred towards one another day by day, so that these latter characteristics make known a man’s creed more readily than the former… In seeking the causes of this unhappy state of affairs, I am quite certain that it stems from a widespread popular attitude of mind which looks on the ministries of the Church as dignities, its offices as posts of emolument and its pastors as eminent personages. For as soon as the Church’s true function began to be thus distorted, every worthless fellow felt an intense desire to enter holy orders, and eagerness to spread abroad God’s religion degenerated into base avarice and ambition. The very temple became a theater where, instead of Church teachers, orators held forth, none of them actuated by desire to instruct the people, but keen to attract admiration, to criticize their adversaries before the public, and to preach only such novel and striking doctrine as might gain the applause of the crowd… Surely, if they possessed but a spark of the divine light, they would not indulge in such arrogant ravings, but would study to worship God more wisely and to surpass their fellows in love, as they now do in hate.” —Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

“[F]or he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself; he who loves God in faith reflects upon God.” —Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

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Nadia Marzouki, Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute

“Everybody is allowed in,” says Rick Santorum…so long as, one might add, their views and conducts do not disturb me. Rick Santorum has been one of the most vocal supporters of the anti-Sharia campaign and claims that: “Sharia is incompatible with our jurisprudence and our constitution.” He participates in the movement launched by pundits and activists  such as Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, and Brigitte Gabriel to recast the past distinction between good and bad Islam into an even more incendiary distinction between  Sharia as a political-legal system and “spiritual Islam.” There is something sadly ironical to Santorum’s call for the inclusion of religions in the public sphere, when he so clearly advocates for a complete invisibilization and neutralization of Islam.

Moreover, although Santorum poses as the defender of those who want to make communitarian arguments against the so-called hegemony of secular-liberal individualism, he actually reinforces the very worldview that he claims to combat. First, his statement is based on the assumption that there is an obvious distinction between the full and rich realm of faith, and the deserted field of non-faith/secularism. In a very Platonistic perspective, he imagines the possibility of a naked public square that is waiting to be covered and filled with faith-based values, even though such a “naked” space has never existed outside of the embattled fantasies of secular and religious extremists.  Second, this understanding of the relation between faith and the public square reaffirms a typically neoliberal vision of the public sphere as a free market of ideas, where  any individual can and should fight for her inner convictions. By suggesting that the improvement of American politics entirely rests on the rights of (some) individuals to express their faith, Santorum skillfully eludes the more pressing issue of the structural inequalities that keep so many out of the public square.

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Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies, Duke University

I do not like Rick Santorum’s politics. Nor do I understand the moral credo underlying his views on reproductive rights. I leave it to the public to reward or punish him for his views at the polls. Yet, his provocative and hyperbolic comments challenge prevailing orthodoxies of Euro-American political philosophy: the inability to have an honest debate about the place of religion in the public sphere. The words of an eleventh century thinker, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, resonate. “An intelligent adversary,” Ghazali said, “is preferable to a naive friend.”

Most thinkers inadvertently or intentionally become statist in their preferences when it comes to discussing the place of religion in the public square. How? By adopting a definition of religion that serves the paramount interests of the nation-state. That view relegates performed religion to the private or communal spheres. In reality this is just a case of smoke and mirrors. This is going to happen more frequently as strong evaluations, to cite Charles Taylor’s felicitous phrase, are pursued by a variety of publics. The nation-state and its defenders might want to get their act together without suffocating debate by retreating various artifices at its command.

A variety of publics are no longer satisfied with generic “store-brand” versions of political and social morality. A public sphere that does not entertain the substantive value commitments of citizens is like driving in bad weather where the smoke has turned into unbearable smog. Accidents are bound to happen.

Is it not transparent that our public sphere is replete with theological doctrines and faith claims laundered as the secular? That kind of dissimulation has indeed perverted secular political and cultural discourses. Often, for opportunistic reasons, politicians pretend to be secular when their proclamations are deeply religious. Newt Gingrich is exhibit number one of this fraudulence. When he claims that Sharia is the enemy of the constitution, what he really wants to say is that he hates Islam and Muslims. At least Santorum had the courage to say what he believes. Then, at least, we can substantially engage him for his beliefs, ideas and values.

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Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

It bears reminding, given the sensitivity of Rick Santorum’s gag reflex, that nothing in the Constitution (or even in Mitt Romney’s recent speeches) can be construed as limiting the presence or the voice of people of faith in the public square. Despite his claims on Meet the Press, no one—least of all Mitt Romney—has said that “people of faith should not be permitted in the public square.” Santorum’s strident critique of political secularism thus rests upon a series of deliberate misreadings, straw men, and manufactured affects. On our last time around the Ferris wheel of the Republican primary process, when he was having an even harder time courting a skeptical electorate, Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech affirmed the importance of religion in public and private life while assuring voters, like Kennedy before him, that specific doctrines and Church authorities would not be the basis of his public policies. In his analysis of Romney’s speech in a column for the Philadelphia Enquirer in 2007, Santorum favorably compared Romney’s position to Kennedy’s, though he faulted Romney for not having adequately addressed the specificity of his Mormonism. What has changed in the intervening years? Alleging that his opponents want to keep people of faith out of the political process may be an effective way for Santorum to marshal the indignation of conservative Christians, but it is not an honest one. While religion will undoubtedly remain a visible and divisive part of the American political process, someone should remind the candidate that vomit, however, has no place on the public square.

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John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

For presidential candidate Rick Santorum, the university is the enemy of Christian America. Arguing that professors “teach radical secular ideology,” Santorum claims that “62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it.” Opposing President Obama’s efforts to expand access to higher education, he criticizes the “indoctrination that occurs in American universities.”

To this date, nobody has been able to locate Santorum’s statistic. While LifeWay’s Ed Stetzer reports that 70 percent of regular attenders drop out of church (35 percent subsequently return), he notes there is no statistical difference between college students and other young adults.

Sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker suggest that Santorum has it exactly backwards. In an essay commissioned by the Social Science Research Council, they report that “young adults who never enrolled in college are presently the least religious young Americans.”

This was not always the case. In the past, researchers found that college eroded religious participation. At the tail end of that era, Rick Santorum went to Penn State.

Much has changed in American higher education. Since 1990 Campus Crusade has tripled in size, while Hillels and Chabads have proliferated across the land.

At Santorum’s alma mater, the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center welcomes three dozen religious groups, including the Latter Day Saint Student Association and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Though American faculty remain less pious than the general public, people of faith are a growing presence in higher education. While born-again Christians make up one-fifth of the professoriate, two-thirds of elite natural and social scientists describe themselves as spiritual. At Princeton University’s James Madison Program, political scientist Robert P. George presides over a “Catholic renaissance.”

Far from a naked public square, the campus has become a bustling religious marketplace. Santorum should quit channeling God and Man at Yale and go back to school. He might like what he sees.

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According to Jean Daniel, the French commentator and founder of Novel Observateur, in his “Islamism’s New Clothes” article in the December 22, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books, the answer is: very badly. In his view, the recent elections in Tunisia amount to a “counter-revolution.” It would appear from what he says that the elections could only count as a revolution if they had followed the script of a French model of 1905 laïcité –the most religiously “unfriendly” form of secularism of any West European democracy. Such a model, in a more extreme form, was imposed by the state in the authoritarian secularism under Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali, who ruled Tunisia without free elections from Independence in 1956 until the Arab Spring.

Having witnessed, and written about, over fifteen efforts at democratic transitions and having visited Tunisia three times since the start of the Arab Spring, I would argue the opposite: A much more appropriate description of the political situation in Tunisia is to call it the Arab Spring’s first completed democratic transition.

Fifteen years ago my colleague Juan Linz and I, in our book  Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe, spelled out four necessary requirements for a successful democratic transition. First, sufficient agreement has to be reached about political procedures to produce an elected government. Second, a government has to come to power as the direct result of a free and popular vote. Third, this government de facto has to have the authority to generate new policies. Fourth, the executive, legislative, and judicial power generated by the new democracy must not have to share power with other bodies de jure (e.g. the military, or a religious power). Tunisia is within days of actually meeting all four of these requirements. Egypt has not met even one.

How has this been achieved in Tunisia? There is a deep back-story involved here which is only now being publicly documented and which I will spell out in much greater detail in an April 2012 article in the Journal of Democracy. However, the essence of the story is the gradual construction of a democratic and relatively consensual opposition, involving both secularists and a religiously-based, Muslim party, Ennahda, a construction that began eight years before the fall of Ben Ali. A strikingly similar process of political rapprochement and commitment to non-violence and democracy began in Chile in the 1980s, involving the secular Socialist Party and the religiously-based Christian Democratic Party, roughly eight years before they defeated Pinochet in an election and formed a successful ruling coalition.

In June 2003, representatives of four of the five largest political parties with the greatest number of seats in Tunisia’s current Constituent Assembly, met in France to launch a “Call from Tunis” (Appel de Tunis). The participants agreed that any future, elected government would be “founded on the sovereignty of the people as the sole source of legitimacy” and be “religiously neutral.”  In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in their draft program of 2007 had asserted that sharia should be the main source of law (and it is probable that sharia will remain so in Egypt’s future constitution). Another principle agreed on in the “Call from Tunis” concerned gender equality. One of the accomplishments of Bourguiba was the creation of the Arab world’s most egalitarian family code which, among many other things, granted the right of women to initiate a divorce, to receive compulsory child support, and to have access to family planning, including abortion. In 2008, these four political parties from Tunisia met again, and re-affirmed and even deepened their commitment to the principles of the “Call from Tunis.”

Within days after Ben Ali was overthrown, the interim government created a new organization to put in order the procedures for a rapid presidential election. Protests against the exclusion of all but technical, legal advisors from the organization led to a new body representing all the political parties and civil society, the “High Commission for the Fulfillment of Revolutionary Goals, Political Reform, and Democratic Transition,” generally called after its chairman, Ben Achour.  This Commission is one of the most successful and consensual organizations in the history of crafting a democratic transition. Nothing remotely like it has yet been created in Egypt, where the military, via the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF), until very recently has structured all significant political dialogue via over 150 unilaterally issued communiqués.

In November of this year, I talked at length with Ben Achour, with members of the political parties in the Commission, and with leaders of civil society organizations, as well as with two of the expert (but non-voting) legal advisors to Ben Achour’s staff. I was also given the key documents the commission had voted upon. Here are the main decisions:

1.  Though many changes were considered to be important for improving Tunisia, it was agreed to concentrate only on decisions that were indispensible for creating a democratic government to make these changes.
2.  It was decided that the first election to be held would be to create a Constituent Assembly, whose task would be to produce a new Constitution.
3.  It was agreed that the Constituent Assembly would appoint a Government, which would thus be based on the legitimacy of elections and also be responsible to the Constituent Assembly.
4.  It was agreed that the electoral system would be one of proportional representation, with every other name on the ballot being a woman. By all accounts the first party to accept this gender parity provision was the Muslim-inspired Ennahda.
5. To ensure that all the contesting parties have confidence in the fairness of the electoral results it was decided to create Tunisia’s first ever independent electoral commission, and to invite many international electoral observers and give them extensive monitoring prerogatives.  In sharp contrast, in Egypt, SCAF initially unilaterally denied the entry of international observers, on the grounds that their presence in the country would amount to a violation of Egypt’s sovereignty.  Eventually, SCAF allowed into the country some election “followers,” whose number and prerogatives were substantially less than in Tunisia.
6. On the issue of what to do with Ben Ali’s official political party, the Assembly decided to ban the party and some of its most important leaders from being candidates in the first election. However, in order not to exclude a large group of citizens from participating in the first free elections, the Assembly declared that former Ben Ali party members and/or supporters were free to form new parties.

On April 11, 2011, approximately 155 members of the Ben Achour Commission voted on this package of measures to create a democratic transition. The vote count was the following: two walk outs, two abstentions and 150 in favor of the package. The negotiations and vote together intensified feelings of solidarity.

Democracy is always only “government pro tem” and always has some dangers that must be guarded against by democratic rules, a non-majoritarian constitution that protects minority rights, a vigilant judiciary, and a free press.

Tunisia’s new democracy, building upon the consensually agreed April 11 decisions, and the electors’ voting decisions, has a reasonable number of credible constraints in place.

A crucial democratic constraint is that Ennahda, with only 40% of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, has had to form a coalition with two secular parties in order to get the necessary 50% plus 1 majority to form a government.  If Ennahda were to ever succumb to pressures from Islamist militants in its base, it would probably be in the interest of the two secular parties in the coalition to withdraw from the ruling coalition.  Ennahda, in the de facto parliamentary setting created by the April 11 laws, could even lose its control of the Constituent Assembly.

Another major constraint is that there is agreement among virtually all the opposition and the government party leaders I talked to—including Ahmed Nejib El Chebbi, the leader of the most important secular party, the Progressive Democratic Party, which polled less well than predicted—that the elections were in fact free and fair. Crucially, Chebbi went on to say he was certain that free and fair elections would actually be held again in twelve to eighteen months, after the Constituent Assembly has completed its work.  When I asked Chebbi why he did so poorly in the Constituent Assembly elections he said he made a mistake of following the advice of his US-based election consultants, who urged him to concentrate on television ads. He told me that in the next election he will spend more time and effort on grass roots organization.  He predicts that, given the problems of the world economy, and the great pressure on Ennahda to deliver on their economic promises, a broader coalition of opposition parties will have a serious chance to form a government after the next round of elections.

Chebbi, and indeed virtually all the party leaders I talked to, such as the incoming Prime Minister of Tunisia, Ennahda’s Hamadi Jebali, and Ennahda’s outgoing party president, Rachid Ghannouchi, now see elections as “the only game in town” for acquiring political power. This political incentive-based assumption, in itself, is one of the things Linz and I argued long ago is necessary for a democracy. The vast majority of political party leaders I talked to praised the work of the Independent Electoral Commission and the role of international election observers and want, and expect, them to play an important role in the next elections.

Tunisia is not Algeria in 1992, nor France in 1905. Nor is Tunisia in the throes of a counter-revolution. To say, as Daniel does, that “the prospect of a Western-style democracy and complete freedom of religion now seems nothing but a fleeting memory” in Tunisia, is to get it wrong. Tunisia may not be putting in place the French-style, 1905 form of hard, secular democracy that Daniel seems implicitly to prefer, but Tunisia is undergoing a democratic transition, one in which secular party leaders and religiously-based leaders in Ennahda are crafting new and promising forms of democratic contestation.

What role did religious discourse—both civil and uncivil—play in the public conversations leading up to the elections, and what light does this shed on the ways that religion is currently shaping contemporary political culture in the U.S.?

Our respondents are:

Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology

Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

J. Kameron Carter, Associate Professor in Theology and Black Church Studies, Duke Divinity School

Ernesto Cortes, Jr., Co-Director, Industrial Areas Foundation

John L. Jackson, Jr., Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Connecticut College; Senior Advisor, SSRC; Editor-at-Large, The Immanent Frame

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun Magazine; Chair, Network of Spiritual Progressives

Ebrahim Moosa, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University

John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

Jeffrey Stout, Professor of Religion, Princeton University

Emilie M. Townes, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology, Yale Divinity School

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 Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology

When the Swiss voted to ban construction of minarets in November 2009, many Americans congratulated ourselves on our comparative tolerance of all things “religious.” But just one year later, controversies surrounding the building of mosques and Islamic centers in the U.S.—not to mention a ballot measure in Oklahoma prohibiting Shari’ah—make it harder to maintain that smugness, and, in this respect at least, American patriots in tricorne hats are beginning to sound a little, well, European. Hold the freedom fries.

It might be objected that this shared antipathy arises, like a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus,” out of quite different sources: in Europe, as José Casanova and others have noted, Islam is often taken to offend secularism, whereas many Americans conceive of the U.S. as a Christian nation and oppose Islam on religious grounds. Yet, that distinction isn’t always so clear in practice. In announcing the alleged failure of multiculturalism in Germany last month, Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here.” And in the U.S., objections to Islam are often framed in terms of “secular” norms—like autonomy and human rights—that Muslims are presumed not to endorse. That opponents of Islam’s presence in the liberal public sphere appeal alternately to the Christian and to the secular should remind us that behind these apparently opposed adjectives lie tangled genealogies.

Like other people whose company I enjoy, I am greatly troubled by the rising tide of hostility and violence within ostensibly democratic states, including my own. But calls for “civility” also worry me, and I am suspicious of what often passes for common ground. Might it be that the real alternative to the exclusionary rhetoric of both Christian nationalism and secularist liberalism is not tolerance or even religious pluralism, as conventionally understood, but something like what William Connolly calls “agonistic respect,” vigorously pursued across multiple intersecting social and political cleavages?

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Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

The day after I walked through a Tea Party in Atlanta, I woke to read multiple commentaries on the Stewart/Colbert rally. These pieces asserted variously that we need more and less and “better” “faith” in politics, taking from Saturday’s collective public satire a series of warnings about religiosity that coexist awkwardly with those warnings uttered by the armed gentlemen in Little Five Points.

Opinions on religio-political formations have poured out furiously since Tuesday’s elections. While some attend to rhetorical constructions of “religion,” many others—more invested in political transformation—obsess over the degree to which Democrats have failed to close the God gap, or over the possibility of a Lakoffian reformulation of key terms or tropes. What interests me, however, is how the enthusiasms and passions of “religion” take shape. It is simple to say that the ressentiment of wave voters or the Tea Party’s élan constitute some formation of “religion” and help thereby to explain certain modes of rationality that elude left-progressives, or to show how certain citizens supposedly vote against their material interests.

But consider Jim DeMint and Rand Paul. Each has avowed God’s role in every human affair. When one reads DeMint claiming, “The fight starts today,” or recalls Rand supporters stomping a liberal neck, one is tempted by associations of rage, religion, and Republican majorities. These are not wholly wrong. But Paul’s opponent Jack Conway unknowingly revealed another dimension of this discourse when he was censured for suggesting that Paul belonged to a college secret society that mocked Christ in favor of “Aqua Buddha.” Conway’s wrongdoing—according to Kentuckians, Mike Huckabee, and others—was in “injecting” religion into the campaign. How odd that in the midst of the fighting words and vitalities of such campaigns there should emerge a quasi-liberal protestation that “religion” is “special” and should be neither attacked nor abused.

This thing called “religion,” this discrete presence that moves here and there, is what improbably remains opaque to us the more we invoke it in public life. It makes possible the relation between—perhaps the interdependence of—the combustible religiosities that compel and the juridical or procedural dispositions that locate religion outside the political. Maybe it is this collusion or collision of formulations that is the real kindle to what Hume called “the common blaze.”

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J. Kameron Carter, Associate Professor in Theology and Black Church Studies, Duke Divinity School

This past Tuesday’s midterm was one of the most contentious election periods in recent memory, and religious discourse was central to its contentiousness. Indeed, I predict—would that I am wrong!—that religious discourse will continue to be a focal point of contention in 2012 and beyond.

Understanding this requires connecting Tuesday’s elections to the 2008 presidential election, for it was then that religious discourse started to do the work it now does in politics.

The 2008 election cycle was a drama of political theology wherein religious discourse, particularly a certain vision of what Christianity is and ought to be, was mobilized to define the Americanness (or the lack thereof) of the candidates.

We saw this with how Obama’s relationship with his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was cast. Through Wright, Obama’s Christianity was questioned. Also, some interpreted his religious identity through his Muslim name (Barack Hussein Obama) in such a way as to say that he was not really a Christian at all. Either way, religion was used to judge Obama’s Americanness, his fitness for office, and the direction in which he would take the country if elected.

Alternatively, there was John McCain, who brought Sarah Palin—now the face of the Tea Party movement—onto his presidential ticket to shore up his own religious weakness with the Republican base. Against Obama, many saw her as authentically Christian, meaning also more authentically American.

In the background of all of this was a subtle transformation of racial anxiety over a black person being in the White House into religious anxiety that equated “authentic Christianity” with “authentic Americanness.” Religion thus became the new site of racism in a so-called “post-racial” world.

The contentiousness of the just-completed election is a continuation of this political drama of religion. But what this drama really points to is a profound crisis within the social and theological imagination of contemporary Christianity itself, and that’s what ultimately must be addressed.

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Ernesto Cortes, Jr., Co-Director, Industrial Areas Foundation

Religious discourse and religion may have been significant in the election, but in my opinion they were not clearly evident in responding to what the electorate has been going through. What was evident was fear and other pre-political responses like frustration and anxiety. People are frustrated with politicians of both parties and anxious about fundamental issues like whether they will be able to live and stay in their homes. There are not enough political institutions, organizing institutions, that can effectively deal with these changes and the losses that people have suffered.

The volatility and flaying amongst the electorate is an expression of fear and anxiety. The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the group that I work with, has been trying to address these questions and challenges through our organizing. We have been able to get people to go to polls and such, but it has been a difficult time and context in which to do so. We were successful in some areas, but not in all.

During times of trouble, it is critical to understand that people ask hard questions. They can get anxious. They become more thoughtful and reflective about their life conditions. And amongst the most worrisome effects of people suffering anxiety and fear is the regeneration and resurgence of nativism. That makes me very, very nervous. People who are discouraged and not powerful become frightened of those in power. We see this in Arizona and Texas and the rise of nativism against immigrants there. When times get tough, it’s not at all surprising that nativism enjoys a resurgence.

I am shocked and angered by how disconnected the political elites of both parties have been from the difficulties people have been experiencing for a long time now. These elites did not recognize how deep the crisis is for people. There is a shock amongst political elites that the suffering of people is so deep and has been going on for so long. It tells me how disconnected these elites are from how difficult it is for people to pay their bills, to get food on the table, to stay in their homes. What is painful to me is that these elites—again of both parties—are only now coming to understand that. The IAF has been working hard for a long time now to engage folks about civic life, to teach people about why and how structural and cultural changes are taking place.  Clearly we have all got to do a lot more organizing!

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John L. Jackson, Jr., Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Was this week’s Republican and Tea Party victory a referendum on Black America? I was in London this past weekend when someone, anticipating the political pummeling to come, asked me this very question.

I was participating in an ambitiously interdisciplinary conference at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, an event that brought scholars together from all around the world to discuss African Jews/Judaism.

The conference  also attracted many non-academics, and one such person, a black Brit, wanted to discuss America’s midterm elections over lunch. He’d been following this election season fairly closely, and he asked me if I interpreted the soon-to-be Republican landslide as an affront to black America.

Surely, I must feel that way, he thought, because even he did, and he was way over there, all the way across the Atlantic.

He took the racism of the Tea Party as self-evident, and he could recount several media-covered instances of Tea Party members expressing their anger in race-tinged language.

The 2010 election isn’t just about Obama, he said. It is about you, about whether you belong in America. It is also about the Constitution, whether the original intention of its framers (to disqualify non-whites from full citizenship) can be successfully reinstated. They want to take that country back from you, he proclaimed. And he wouldn’t countenance any alternative interpretation of things.

He eventually admitted that he also felt implicated in America’s midterm election. This was about redrawing the racial lines between “us” and “them” all over the world. And what’s happening in America, he assured me, has European counterparts. The Tea Party might be an American phenomenon, he said, but its motivations and seductions can be seen in political movements all over the planet.

I asked him if the anti-establishment rhetoric of the Tea Party might be better viewed as a response to the albatross of economic woes that the Obama administration hasn’t been able to remove from around its political neck: my version of, “it’s the economy, stupid.” Or maybe it was just that the Dems couldn’t package their successes convincingly enough for the electorate: my version of, “it’s Fox News, stupid.”

He dismissed my retorts with a wave of the hand. Americans aren’t that stupid, he said. They know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

We’ve all heard arguments about the Tea Party’s ostensible racism. And we’ve certainly listened to Tea Partiers defend themselves against these accusations.

It is easy to dismiss such racial accusations as mere hyperbole and irrational paranoia. But that only makes them uncannily similar in kind (though not in content) to the histrionic rhetorical engines that have fueled the Tea Party’s effective campaigning this election season.

This election might not be a referendum on America’s commitment to racial inclusion, but talk of “taking back America” does raise a number of potentially troubling questions.

And is it really that difficult to see why invocations of “original intent” might make some Americans (and at least one Brit) more than a little antsy?

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David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Connecticut College; Senior Advisor, SSRC; Editor-at-Large, The Immanent Frame

After the election, Obama appeared chastened and far from emboldened. He acknowledged defeat but also admitted that he had been tone deaf “to the people.” There is surely genuine human suffering behind the anger and the acrimony that stoked the fervor of the Tea Party and the like. And yet it’s deflating, at best, to realize that what has attuned Obama to listen to the pain and suffering of those who are trying to endure through economic and personal duress are voices that insist that he is “not American,” that he is “a Muslim,” that he is “a socialist.”

These lies have been kept alive by “messengers from the people,” like Rand Paul, with his triumphalist cry of “taking our country back,”  John Boehner, in his claims about his lifelong pursuit of “the American dream,” and Glenn Beck’s insistence that the enmity he continues to stoke is “all about love.” These folks trade in the language of American exceptionalism and have subsequently legitimated an array of xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants, toward the soon-to-be non-white majority, toward the queer community, and toward Muslims.

For all of its talk about community organizing and supporting faith-based initiatives, it seems clear that the Obama administration remains tin-eared not only to progressives but also to religious folks who speak truth to power with love. Recalibrating the tone of public discourse toward civility will require Obama to understand that he cannot persist in prioritizing corporate welfare at the expense of everyday people. Many Americans clearly wanted and needed to express their anger and frustration. Paul, Beck, and company were ready to exploit those desires and needs. We are in the midst of a battle over political power but, most assuredly, also over the meaning and language of the prophetic, social justice, freedom, and love. Let us hope that this will be a fair fight, and that the prophetic call from the left and from religious communities can find their way back into the fray.

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Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun Magazine; Chair, Network of Spiritual Progressives

God is the Force in the universe that makes for the possibility of transforming “that which is” to “that which ought to be.” Idolatry is being “realistic,” that is, accepting the current configuration of power and wealth and shaping policies and worldviews to accommodate that which is.

Religions sometimes abandon God and become servants of the powerful to the extent that they decide to become “realistic” rather than to proclaim what could and should be. And one way that they do this is to bow to the notion that economics is more important than spiritual consciousness, or that economics can exist apart from God.

The notion that “the economy” determined the outcome of the election is a truism once one understands what is involved in “the economy.” Actually, the economy refers to all that we do in our daily lives to sustain ourselves and each other as part of a web of interwoven parts that include the earth, the nations of the planet, the sun, corporations, farmers, industries, and the lives of individuals, both in our capacities as producers and consumers, the worldviews both secular and religious that sustain our activities, the families that provide us with the emotional sustenance to keep connected to the rest of the world,  and all the other factors that shape the impact of how we organize our individual and collective lives. In this sense, of course, it is always the economy that is determinative.

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Ebrahim Moosa, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University

American civil religion took a massive shellacking all summer in a momentum that reached into the fall as politicians on both sides of the aisle demonized Islam and Muslims. Boosted by the midterm elections, the right wing has become even more audacious in its Islamophobia. The unrepentant Tea Party hosanna singer Sarah Palin was called out when she retweeted conservative pundit Ann Coulter’s message that described President Barack Obama as a Taliban Muslim illegally elected President USA. The fact that more Americans now believe that President Obama is a closet Muslim than when he was elected as president is an index of hyper-Islamophobia. So the silly season is not really over since the plague is far from over without a remedy in sight. This does not augur well for American civil society nor for political life.

Throughout the electoral campaign Muslim Americans and Islam were dehumanized in rhetoric ranging from Islam being the enemy, opposition to the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan and mosques elsewhere in the country, Qur’an-burning publicity stunts, to conspiracies that Sharia law will displace the US constitution. Here is the bad news: Decent politicians frequently swallowed the Islamophobia pill in different doses. Claims by Sharron Angle that Sharia law will govern US cities infected Senate leader Harry Reid’s campaign and he too voiced opposition to the building of the Manhattan mosque to cite only one example.

But something more pernicious has been unleashed in this electoral campaign that exceeds previous levels. Anything said about Islam and Muslims, the more bizarre and disgusting the better, has become believable.  When it comes to Islam, our civil discourses fish in the sewers.  The main culprits are not only Fox and Rush Limbaugh but also left leaning comedians like Bill Maher who are equally culpable. Maher added to the dehumanization of Muslims when he copied Juan Williams’ paranoia by claiming that he was spooked by babies named Muhammad in Britain. And, when the prosecutors in the trial of the Canadian-born Guantanamo inmate Omar Khadr can offer testimony of a Danish psychologist that Muslim inbreeding “may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool” and this passes without a murmur then surely we are swimming in the sewers of dehumanization.

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John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

 The 2010 triumph of the Tea Party Republicans presents some interesting paradoxes. On the one hand, many of the victors tilt to the right on abortion, gay marriage, and church/state issues. Despite the defeat of Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party freshmen class will include dozens of social conservatives.

On the other hand, the election night rhetoric focused almost exclusively on the evils of big government. Ohio Republican John Boehner’s victory speech never mentioned the social issues. When praising “the values that have made America,” he spoke of economic freedom, individual liberty, and personal responsibility. Boehner’s rhetoric matched the campaign literature that flooded our Ozarks mailbox. Though we live in an “Evangelical Epicenter,” all but one mailing emphasized economics.

Slowly but surely, the culture wars are being redefined. In The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future, Arthur Brooks notes that “this is not a fight over guns, abortion, religion, and gays.”  Heralding a “new culture war,” Brooks makes a case for the morality of capitalism and free enterprise. The book carries endorsements from William Bennett and Marvin Olasky, stalwarts of the religious right. Last week he visited the campus of Wheaton College.  Before an audience of young evangelicals, Brooks had a respectful debate with Jim Wallis. The topic: “Does Capitalism Have a Soul?”

Meanwhile, the works of atheist Ayn Rand are for sale in Christian bookstores. In The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion Versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, Robert Nelson describes free market economics and environmentalism as secular religions. Though the Kentucky campaign included a silly diversion over Rand Paul and “Aqua Buddha,” the real religious issue comes down to this: Will Christian conservatives bow to the “goddess of the market”?

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Jeffrey Stout, Professor of Religion, Princeton University

This election wasn’t about religion. It was about liberty.

Barack Obama used to say that democracy flourishes only when citizens exert pressure from the bottom up. He might have added that the new economic elite endangers the liberty of everyone else. One group dominates others if it is in a position to use its power arbitrarily over them. Liberty is security against domination.

But Obama selected an economic team closely connected to the economic elite.  He knew that Lincoln’s ideal of liberty—as security from domination—wouldn’t fit with his behavior. So, when the economic crisis came, he was unable to explain to the people what was going on.

The Tea Party, like Organizing for Obama, is a top-down organizational structure masquerading as grassroots democracy. Its message is that liberty is security from governmental interference. This is the kind of liberty that slaveholders fought for during the Civil War. For the corporate bosses, the fewer laws the better. “Don’t tread on me, even if I am treading on you. But I’ll take that bailout, thank you.”

A president who used to be a law professor could have explained that true liberty can be achieved only in a society with laws that protect the people from domination. But he didn’t. The argument over liberty was never joined.

The corporate bosses will continue to dominate until there are citizens’ organizations that can generate enough counter-power to change the playing field. The reason that Obama used to spend a lot of time in church basements is that ordinary citizens often gather in such places. If he still cares about bottom-up change, he will need an organized citizenry to whom he can say:  “Make me do it!”

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Emilie M. Townes, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology, Yale Divinity School

Much to my surprise, Yale Divinity School became bandied about in the Delaware senatorial contest between Chris Coons and Christine O’Donnell. O’Donnell, who trailed Coons throughout the contest was known for her outspoken views. And then there was the witchcraft thing. Coons, an alumnus of the Divinity School (Master of Arts, 1992), gave an interview for our “Notes from the Quad,” where he notes that he believes in “values-based leadership and helping form and sustain a positive community.”

I watched with a certain amount of horror and amusement as conservative commentator Jeffrey Lord used the interview to paint Coons and the YDS as a hotbed of loony ideas. Lord’s extremely idiosyncratic look at five courses from the spring 2010 term suggests that these were representative of all of our courses. Frankly, when one looks at the syllabi for these courses, there’s not much there that would justify Lord’s depiction of them as borderline seditious and certainly suspect. But then, words like “multicultural” and “diversity” do appear in the syllabi and books in these classes (and many others). In the end, I hardly recognized the school as conservative bloggers picked up the story and it went viral.

It seems that attempts to help folks understand the width and breadth of the Christian tradition is a dangerous idea, and photoshopped depictions of liberal Christianity become the polemical tools that would keep us from welcoming the big tent reality of the Christian faith. The smear on YDS and Coons did not work. He won the contest handily, but I am left sobered, once again, by the ways in which religious beliefs and views become expedient when it comes to politics and how the depth and thoughtfulness with which most people try to practice their faith gets lost in a torrent of stereotypes and caricatures.

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