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Religion and Politics
Although last month s election i and this month s White House I proposals point in just the oppos rection, the commitments of my on Capitol Hill were to such pv as the war on poverty; aid to dis taged schoolchildren; educatu handicapped children; services : elderly; scholarships, loans and study for college students; an: rights for blacks.
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
Having as an eighteen-year-old naval-officer candidate at the University of Mississippi stood in the little, William Faulkner-like town of Pontotoc and heard the late Senator Theodore G. Bilbo give vent to his virulent racism with attacks on  Clare Boothe Luce and those other communists [sic] up north who want to mongrelize the white race,  I trust you will understand why, seventeen years later, I felt myself right where I thought I should be, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial behind Martin Luther King, Jr.
I must add that through all my years in Congress, I took much comfort and derived more inspiration than I am sure my constituents ever knew from the knowledge that Father Hesburgh of Notre Dame shared those commitments.
I recall these several efforts not out of pride although I am proud of them but to remind us all that in a year when one political party and one strain of fundamentalism seem to have asserted a proprietary claim to God and so-called Christian values, many of the liberals I knew in Congress and I were raised in strong religious traditions that informed our choices and our vision of a just and open society.
Let me remind you that the major candidates for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination included a Baptist preacher, the son of a Methodist minister and a graduate of the Yale Divinity School.
There is one other point I should like to make here, and that is that the Nie-buhrian views with which I have expressed sympathy also prepared me for the combat style of American politics. For the Christian faith gives one an appreciation of the tentative nature of the human condition and so arms one for the uncertainties of political life. That perspective also equips one with the patience to work long and hard on one issue and the strength to endure defeat without being devastated.
It must be evident from what I have said that I have never understood the doctrine of separation of church and state to mean that religion has no role in politics. Nor can I agree with the assertion of my friend and former colleague Congressman Henry Hyde, in his speech here last September, that religious values have been driven from the public arena.
The question raised by recent events is not about whether but how religion and politics ought to mix.
Consider how this debate has shifted in the past twenty-five years. I remember how on April 8, 1960, I introduced on this campus a young Massachusetts Senator, then on his way to nomination and election as the first Roman Catholic President of the United States. I remember, too, the intensity, here in Indiana and elsewhere, of anti-Catholic sentiment during that campaign and how John Kennedy was repeatedly pressed not to assert his religious convictions but to deny that he spoke for his church or that his church spoke for him.
In his famous speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association before the election, Kennedy declared:
I do not accept the right of any ecclesiastical official to tell me what I shall do in the sphere of my public responsibility as an elected official....
Whatever issue may come before me as President on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling, or any other subject I will make my decision in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictate.
In the 1984 presidential election, on the other hand, the situation was sharply reversed. Candidates and major public officials, most prominently Geraldine Ferraro, were challenged to explain why their decisions as public officeholders did not always conform to the tenets of their church and to their own religious convictions. Many of you heard the eloquent words of Governor Cuomo on just this question on this campus only three months ago.
Now if I have said yes to the question,  Does religious faith have a place in public life?,  I must at the same time insist that there be limitations on the relationship. I should like, therefore, now to suggest some guidelines that can help us distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate mixtures of religion and politics.
seems to me obvious that ou can and should be a source c ance on basic values, yet I t equally clear that we must be x those who insist when it co: public policy that a principle o ious belief presents only one sol
Here I am in agreement with nor Cuomo that whereas we may joined to accept the teachings faith,
in the application of those te ings the exact way we tran them into political action, the cific laws we propose, the exac gal sanctions we seek there . no one, clear, absolute route tha church says, as a matter of doct we must follow.
In my view, strident insisten there is only one way that a principle of religion or morality written into the laws of the land dangerously close to using the ment of government to impose < ally specific views on others whc share them.
Certainly my respect for the of adherents to minority religic of nonbelievers was among the i that, as a Member of Congress posed legislation to permit or; prayer in public schools. Oppos such prayer has been voiced, by nearly every mainline Pn church in this country as well most of the principal leaders Jewish community. Moreover, distinguished theologian John 1 has noted:  Private prayer is vo and legal now! 
Let me make clear that I am i ing here that religious leaders o should not speak out for or agar cific policies or on single issues. I am asserting that when they do leave behind the authority and th force of their faith and becom dane in the sense of earthly ] actors. Whatever they propose t evaluated through the political ] according to the standards of fe: and judgments about the publi that hold for all citizens of a der
Faith and Political Action
The first guideline concerns the level at which religious convictions are most properly applied in public debate. It
society.
But there is another point make here, one that Joseph ( Bernardin made in his Gannon
at Fordham University last year urged the church to adopt what
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52. Place of Fai
 a consistent ethic of life  rather than focus on just one issue, whether nuclear war or abortion.
In similar vein. Professor Robert Bel-lah of the University of California at Berkeley has observed that Ronald Reagan is highly selective about the areas in which he finds a link between religion and public morality. In Bellah s words:  How can one hold that there is a relationship when it comes to matters of school prayer and abortion but not when it comes to matters of poverty, civil rights, and the prevention of nuclear war? 
In this respect, I remember well that the  right-to-life  advocates who used to visit me in Congress never said a word in support of legislation I was writing to help educate poor children and handicapped children, and to provide services to the elderly or the disabled. I found the silence of my constituents on these issues of human life eloquent and distressing.
Candor constrains me here also to remark that many observers have noted how during the recent campaign, the Catholic Bishops, despite their representation of  a consistent ethic of life,  targeted only one candidate on the national ticket for attack and on only one issue. These observers have reminded us that although there was a sharp divergence between the Bishops  Pastoral Letter on War and Peace and both the record of the Reagan Administration and the planks of the Republican Platform at Dallas, the Bishops voiced no similar criticism of Reagan and Bush.
In like fashion, such observers who range from the Washington Post columnist Haynes Johnson to the Roman Catholic priest and professor at Saint John s University, Paul Surlis note that the Bishops  Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy seems a near frontal attack on the Administration s domestic policies, yet this letter did not appear until after the election.
A Need for Tolerance
My second guideline for relating religion and politics follows from the first but is more a matter of tone than of scope or substance. It is that when we appeal to religious convictions in political life, we should do so in a spirit of
tolerance and humility, and not with self-righteousness.
We must beware of those who claim for themselves a monopoly on morality and truth in any realm, but especially in politics. Groups like the Moral Majority and Christian Voice that call for the defeat of candidates on so-called moral grounds and that rank public officials on  Biblical scorecards  distort the political process. What kind of  morality  assigns a zero to Congressman Paul Simon and former Congressman Robert Dri-nan the first a devoted Lutheran layman and the second a Jesuit priest and a perfect, 100 percent record to another Congressman convicted in the Abscam scandal!
In similar fashion, I remind you that at a prayer breakfast in Dallas during the Republican convention, President Reagan asserted that those who opposed officially organized prayer in public schools were  intolerant of religion.  Mr. Reagan went on to say that  morality s foundation is religion,  as if nonbelievers were by definition immoral.
You will recall, too, the letter sent on behalf of the Reagan campaign by Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada to forty-five thousand Christian ministers in which he attempted to make God a Republican county chairman well, national chairman! by warning the clergymen that  as leaders under God s authority we cannot afford to resign ourselves to idle neutrality.  Jerry Falwell struck the same theme in Dallas when he proclaimed to the Republican delegates assembled that the party s standardbearers were  God s instruments in rebuilding America. 
Instead of such arrogance, I would urge on the part of those who invoke religion in the political process a degree of self-restraint, not to say humility. Religious leaders in particular should remind their followers that other solutions than the ones they propose are possible and appropriate and should be scrupulous in their respect of the right of others to disagree in the public arena. Otherwise, these leaders unfairly constrain debate with innuendos of faithlessness and even heresy.
The fact is each of us brings a particular heritage to bear when he or she enters the political fray, and each of us is obliged to listen intently and respectfully to the arguments of those with differing views. Each of us should be open to persuasion if the reasoning of others
speaks more effectively for the put good.
For we must never forget the m sage that Abraham Lincoln deliverec war-tom nation on the occasion of 1 second inauguration as President:  B< [parties in the Civil War] read the sat bible, and pray to the same God; a each invokes His aid against the othe
Surely it is fundamental in the Jude Christian heritage that all people ai all nations are under the judgment God.
Here I recall how Reinhold Niebu warned us that religious pluralism itsc depends on a sense of our own impe fection. In his words:
Religious diversity ... requires a very high form of religious commitment. It demands that each religion, or each version of a single faith, seek to proclaim its highest insights while yet preserving a humble and contrite recognition of the fact that all actual expressions of religious faith are subject to historical contingency and relativity.
Religious faith therefore ought to be a constant fount of humility.
The price of arrogance, pride, sei righteousness in the expression of rel gious convictions in political li
