From God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics. (c) 2000 by Stephen L. Carter. Reprinted with permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved. Buy the book from Amazon.com and help support GraceOnline.

The book is inspired by my love of God and love of my country, and my fear that millions of Americans, across the religious and political spectrum, have lost sight of the proper relationship between religion and politics. On one side are those who treat the merest scintilla of religion in our public and political life as an offense against the American idea. On the other are those who believe it to be the responsibility of government to use its power to enforce as law the moral truths of their religion. The tension between these two wrong ideas is ruining our democracy, and threatens to ruin many of our religious traditions as well.

For example: As I sat down to write this introduction, the nation was in the midst of a silly brouhaha over whether or not presidential candidates should tell us about their religious views, which several prospective nominees had recently done. One side worried aloud about the "injection" of religion into politics and cautioned against the development of a Christian litmus test for those seeking the White House. The other insisted that faith was often an important part of character and that character is what politics -- or, at least, governance -- should really be about. Both sides, in good American fashion, subsequently set about impugning the motives, the integrity, and, in the end, the fundamental Americanness of the other. From the way people talked about the issue, one would be excused for thinking that only two possibilities existed: Either we would have a public square so religion-drenched that nobody would ever talk about anything else, or we would have a public square so carefully sterilized of God-talk that people to whom faith was important would be forced to adopt the chilly and (to them) often meaningless language of secular liberalism or to abandon politics altogether.

As so often in these debates that inspire use to nasty flights of polemical fancy, both sides were right. Both sides were also wrong. By trying to understand why each side was right, and why each side was wrong, we can come to a richer vision of the relationship between religion and politics In order to work our way to this richer vision, however, we will have to avoid the usual bias of arguments of this kind -- the bias that begins with the state and asks how religion fits into the politics that are a democracy's life's blood. If we start out thinking about the needs of the state, we have already relegated religion to an inferior position. Many citizens, however, believe that God wants us to put our faith in him and obedience to him ahead of everything else. Any argument that thinks about the state before it thinks about religion can scarcely be persuasive, or even plausible, to citizens for whom their connection to God is of first importance. Instead, we will begin with religion -- with Micah's famous question, What does the Lord require? (Mic. 6:8). Only by looking at politics through the lens of faith, rather than faith through the lens of politics, will we be able to comprehend the nature and resilience (and sensible limits) of the involvement of overtly religious organizations and individuals in our public life.

Many people of deep religious commitment look at the nation today and see a place that is run in ways that make it harder for them to practice their religion.

Comprehending this involvement is of first importance, and not only because talk show hosts find it an exciting subject for gab. It is important because America itself is at risk. The nation, whether ready to acknowledge it or not, faces a crisis of legitimacy. The more that the nation chooses to secularize the principal contact points between government and people -- not only the public schools, but little things, like the names and numbers and symbols, and big things, like taxes and marriage and, ultimately, politics itself -- the more it will persuade many religious people that a culture war has indeed been declared, and not by the Right. Many people of deep religious commitment, especially but not exclusively evangelical Christians, look at the nation today and see a place that is run in ways that make it harder for them to practice their religion, and harder for them to pass it on to their children. One can scarcely be surprised if they therefore feel driven to the fringes of politics . . . or if they fell driven to the point of thinking that the nation is actively at war against them.

Rousseau taught the West that a government at war with its people loses its legitimacy, and he was perhaps talking fact as much as he was theory. If the state is going to interfere with the ability of the religious to build a religious world in which to live, we can hardly expect those religious people not to try to use politics as a way of building a world more to their liking. And for all the common complaints about the efforts of the religious to imposes their views on others, and thus interfere with their freedoms, the point of view of many of the religious is the mirror image, that they are losing their religious freedoms as the majority, or, often, the minority, imposes its views upon them -- views about the nature of moral authority, views about sex, views about procreation, views, in short, about the way the world should be. Much of the screaming about why religion should not be in politics is really an effort to evade the debate the religious are demanding: Why are your views better than ours? At a certain point, if we build too high the walls that are intended to keep religion out of politics, we will face religious people who will storm the barricades and declare the government no longer legitimate, because of its insistence on creating a single set of meanings, a single understanding of life, that everyone must share.

I suspect that I will be storming too.

My mind is not so clouded with the vapors of patriotism that I place my country before my God.

I should make my biases clear. I write not only as a Christian but as one who is far more devoted to the survival of my faith -- and of religion generally -- than to the survival of any state in particular, including the United States of America. I love this nation, with all its weaknesses and occasional horrors, and I cannot imagine living in another one. But my mind is not so clouded with the vapors of patriotism that I place my country before my God. If the country were to force me to a choice -- and, increasingly, this nation tends to do that to many religious people -- I would unhesitatingly, if not without some sadness for my country, choose my God.

It is easy to paint people who put God first as dangerous fanatics, but, from the point of view of the believer, the fanatic is the one so certain that the state is right that he is willing to use law to interfere with religious belief. To take a simple example, I am not sure why it is more "fanatical" for parents to tell their children that the creation story in Genesis is literally true than for the public schools to tell the same children, required by law to attended, that the religion of their parents is literally false. Or why it is more "fanatical" to criticize the culture for not reflecting a particular religious view on, say, the role of women than to criticize a religion for not reflecting the culture's views on the same thing. In short, the danger, if there is one, is mutual.

I hasten to add that one need not be a Christian, or be religious at all, to engage with and, I hope, profit from the stories I will tell. Indeed, as I argue in the book's penultimate chapter, one of the most vital (if often neglected) tasks of the religious voice in America is standing up for the religious freedom of all believers. We must never become a nation that propounds an official religion or suggests that some religions are more American than others. At the same time, one of the official religions we must never propound is the religion of secularism, the suggestion that there is something un-American about trying to live life in a way that puts God first. Quite the contrary: Preserving the ability of the faithful to put God first is precisely the purposed for which freedom of religion must exist.

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