In political terms, Governor Romney's speech about religion and politics was a success. He was able to claim his Mormon faith with conviction and present his beliefs and values in terms that motivate many evangelicals to vote for candidates and participate in politics. While rejecting a religious test on the details of his Christology, he affirmed his allegiance to a political orthodoxy that includes a "common creed of moral convictions" and a rejection of secularism.
Governor Romney is surely right to emphasize that the Constitution opens public office to all faiths, but the fact that he had to make this speech also tells us that politics itself has become something very much like a religious test. We do not seek leaders who will tell us something that is distinctive about their vision for America. We want to know that they share the one we already have. We do not want to hear how they will build coalitions to arrive at working agreements on public problems. We insist on commitments that they will not compromise the short list of positions that have become like matters of faith to us. As a result, our elections, especially the primaries, are driven by polls and polarization. The irony that a candidate would make a speech about religious liberty to reassure an important bloc of voters that he shares their increasingly rigid political convictions seems to have been lost on most of the audience.
We should not blame our politicians for this. Candidates play by the rules we give them. Nevertheless, this confessional politics is very different from the relationship between religion and politics that the authors of our constitution had in mind. The patriots who gathered in Philadelphia were not secularists, but they knew enough about the history of religious warfare to want to keep the line between faith and politics clear. Faith is about commitments worth dying for. Politics allows people with different faiths to live together in a free society.
If we make politics into a kind of faith, we should not expect that it will still provide the opportunities for compromise and reconciliation that a free society requires. The partisanship that has marked our politics in recent years may intensify until disagreement becomes apostasy and innovation becomes heresy. The Founders looked to politics to set limits on that kind of conflict between religious beliefs. The ultimate irony may come when religion has to rescue us from political warfare by reminding us of a higher faith that also knows something about hope and charity.
-- Robin W. Lovin is the Cary Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University.
