God is not a Republican…or a Democrat

“Religion is back. The Falling Towers were only the opening thunderclap of the 21st century. Pundits tell us that what secular ideologies – Communism, Nazism – were to the 20th century, religious ones will be to the 21st.”

These were the first words of my first openDemocracy column, published on 4 November 2002. All that has happened in the world since, all the topics that the subsequent thirty columns have addressed – from groupthink to gay marriage, from the Puritan strain in American society to the headscarf ban in French schools – seem like a confirmation and an elaboration of this reality.

The lesson for secular liberals is not just the need to live with it, but to find and make common cause with the religious movements that will support democracy and human rights in the new century – for without these movements, both liberty and the poor will lose out.

It will be a big challenge for some secular social reformers to discover how to work with religious progressives. But there’ll be no adequate progressive movements anywhere in the world without that alliance.

If your attitude is that religion is simply wrong and there is nothing for you in talking with religious people, then you cut yourself off from much of the past and present wisdom of humanity. But worse than that, you lessen your own influence on the future.

The world’s poor are the engines of population growth and most of them have religion. The rich can’t function even in their own countries without bringing in working armies from the global south; in this resurgent “people flow”, religion is returning to the sacred (or is it the scared?) homelands of secularism.

This process raises serious questions for liberals and the left. Will it mean that the tide of traditional patriarchal values, of conservative religiosity, will become irreversible? That the incredible struggle our foremothers and forefathers waged (and more than half–won) for freedom, democracy, feminism, and human rights will be overwhelmed? In the United States, multitudes of people have (as Thomas Frank’s recent book on Kansas investigates) been induced to vote against their own economic self–interest – for example to vote for massive tax–cuts for the rich and against universal health care – partly because the Republicans, the party of big money, has successfully dressed itself in the raiment of religion. Its more vehement ideologues claim God as its own, and by extension stigmatise its opponents as somehow unholy.

In earlier generations, these spokesmen targeted Catholics, Jews, and communists as embodying the work of the devil. Now, they try to make the first two at least allies in newer battles against Islamists and the 1960s (for the 1960s, read a constellation of atheists, agnostics, gays, feminists, socialists, social welfarists, peaceniks and moral relativists).

Their political success owes much to the backlash against the social advances of reformist political eras. When apparently respectable people like Franklin D Roosevelt led the charge for a welfare state – old–age insurance, unemployment benefits, a guaranteed minimum for widows and orphans – a majority of Americans came along. When that apparently good Catholic, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, converted to civil rights, the country (often grudgingly) converted with him.

But the process of establishing a new social settlement is never smooth or uniform. These reform projects entailed spreading to the wider American society attitudes and practices that had been safely restricted to a bohemian “avant–garde”, and in a way that challenged religious understandings of the American way. Just as aristocrats and elites (like FDR and JFK themselves) had always been able privately to indulge sexual libertinism, they had always had their secularists and deists – atheists by another name as far as traditional Christians were concerned. Indeed, it was a secularist vanguard (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson among them) who had founded the republic and deliberately left God out of the constitution. But they mostly followed Benjamin Franklin’s advice not to let the common people know – and historians conveniently forgot.

When, in the 1960s, huge numbers of the younger generation openly embraced the bohemian, aristocratic, “over–educated” values formerly practiced only by their social superiors – Long hair! Free love! Atheism! Uppity Women! New Age! Gay Pride! Appreciation of Other Cultures! – they frightened the rest of the country so badly that the entire liberal project as a whole was derailed in the backlash. When the “infidels” launched their brutal attack on the twin towers, the fear escalated.

Don’t be surprised if huge numbers of these decent, fearful, god–fearing – and Republican–voting – people, feeling themselves beset by enemies, let George Bush remain in the White House beyond November.

To rerail this liberal project in America – to return to building a society of inclusion where everyone has decent health care, education, a fair chance – an inescapable foundation must first be laid; and it is part of the same task that in a myriad ways must be undertaken among the poor populations of the global south and those of their number who become poor immigrants to the north.

This is not to detach people from their religion, but to help shift each religion from its own uglier aspects to its more positive ones. Every religion has teachings that promote compassion and (even better) great examples in past and present of compassionate individuals who made a difference. Many of the latter made alliance with the wiser secularists of their day in joint efforts for human rights and democracy; for example, in ensuring the separation of church and state in America (see Susan Jacoby’s great book Freethinkers: a history of American secularism, 2004).

This column has told stories of religious people who pioneered freedom, democracy, human rights, and compassionate creative solutions.

The purpose has not been to promote religion – I’m an agnostic for God’s sake! – but to bring into the arena of public discussion the fact that there are great religious traditions of prophetic and compassionate championing of the oppressed and the poor. Maybe some religious as well as secular readers of openDemocracy could benefit from being reminded of that.

Instead of dismissing religion, the task of secular champions of liberty in the coming religious century will be to work with, learn from and encourage those religious traditions.

You could start by getting one of those Sojourners car stickers that says: “God is not a Republican… or a Democrat.” Give them a donation. Help them wean their religious friends away from fear, and back to compassion. There is no future for democracy, inclusion and human rights without religious believers sharing the lead and the ranks of those who love liberty and justice.