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  Davis Merritt  

Dobson can't escape our pluralistic roots

When the nation's founders wrote the "no religious test" clause into the Constitution, they were trying to ensure that the new nation's government could never make specific religious beliefs a requirement to hold office.

It was, as with many other parts of the Constitution, a calculated limit on central authority, but it was also recognition of the importance of free will.

The new nation's citizenry included multiple religious traditions, colonists who fled Europe's monarchies and theocracies in search of a place to practice personal beliefs.

Not much has changed about that pluralism. A giant 2007 survey of 35,000 Americans by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life uncovered broad diversity even among the 92 percent of respondents who said they believe in God and the 74 percent who believe in life after death.

Seventy percent of those affiliated with a religious tradition agreed that many religions can lead to eternal life, and more than two-thirds agreed that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their faith.

This should be comforting to presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom have expressed nuanced, nondogmatic religious philosophies. As much as possible given the glaring spotlight on their every move and word, they would prefer a campaign that allows people to choose between them based on what they would do as president rather than based on what they privately believe. Both have said that religion has a place in public life and both are open about their beliefs, but neither makes it the center of his campaign.

This apparently is not comforting to the minority of Americans who measure all words and deeds by their own religious beliefs. Certainly it can't be comforting to James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said during the Republican primaries that he could not imagine voting for McCain and who last week condemned Obama as theologically confused.

Dobson accused Obama of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible," having a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution" and appealing to the "lowest common denominator of morality."

Judging by the Pew Center survey, most Americans would ask Dobson, "What traditional understanding? Yours? Mine? Obama's? McCain's? John Smith's?"

Dobson apparently was set off, in part, by Obama's pragmatic view that the very nature of democracy requires that "the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.... I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."

The James Dobsons of the world cannot escape the pluralistic roots of American democracy, and their determination to bulldoze past that reality only retards their efforts to persuade the majority of Americans to accept their view of politics and religion.

Religious beliefs are most certainly central to society, but a singular, rigid belief system cannot, by definition, dominate a democracy. Nor should it.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.