Democratic vice presidential nominee Joseph Lieberman was exhorting a crowd in Muscatine, Iowa, during Vice President Al Gore’s recent campaign trip down the Mississippi. The audience was excited, and someone called out, “God bless you, Joe!”
Lieberman could have gone on talking about Medicare or education, but instead he paused. “God bless you, sir,” he answered. “That’s where it all comes from. Praise the Lord.”
It was a remarkable moment, in large part because Lieberman sounded so much like a Christian conservative, a Pat Robertson or Gary Bauer, rather than a Jewish Democrat.
That combination of who Lieberman is and how he talks has roiled American politics in recent weeks.
The Lieberman phenomenon–his role as not only the first Jew on a major ticket, but one who talks passionately about faith–has prompted a deeply felt debate on the role of religious language in America’s raucous politics. This is in part a constitutional argument, but it is also something deeper, something that gets at our national identity and culture.
The faith-and-politics argument, as it has flared up in the past, usually arrayed itself along certain predictable lines, with conservatives, Christians and Republicans lined up against Democrats and liberals.
Something new is happening in public life, and it is producing some remarkable political moments. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, found itself criticizing a Jew whose selection it had applauded three weeks earlier. Other Jewish groups, meanwhile, jumped to Lieberman’s defense.
The novel situation prompts new questions: Is it different for a Jew or another minority to speak publicly of his faith in America than it is for a Christian to do so? Is there a double standard in the media’s treatment of Lieberman, compared with its excoriation of figures such as Gary Bauer or even George Bush?
When does Lieberman’s religious language become exclusionary, rather than an embrace of diversity? And, basically, when will the public start finding such talk not uplifting but sanctimonious and preachy?
“It is hard for people to talk about their own faith, which is so central to them but is not necessarily shared by others,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. “Finding a way to make those points in a way that doesn’t make other people feel excluded is difficult. Especially if you’re Joe Lieberman, who is still in the process of introducing himself.”
Lieberman does seem to be personally grappling with how much to talk about his faith. In his first few speeches he brought it up regularly, then pulled back. In a couple of recent talks to black clergy he raised it more forcefully than ever, but now he has started emphasizing his tolerance as well as his faith.
In an interview last week, Lieberman offered several reasons why he talks about his religion and seemed to be still thinking it through.
“Mostly I do it as a symbol of America as an opportunity society,” Lieberman said. “I see it as a way to say something about America. And I do have a long-held belief that religion has played an important role in the history of our country.
“A lot of people have an unease about the moral health of the country, the values health of the country, and I do think that faith can be an ally. We have got to be obviously very scrupulous about church-state separation. Part of this, for me, is just having national leaders be comfortable occasionally talking about the role that faith plays in their lives and giving respect to the place of faith in the lives of individual Americans.”
To some, Lieberman has gone beyond that.
In his first appearance with Gore, Lieberman mentioned God several times and departed from his text to quote the Bible. “Maker of all miracles, I thank you for bringing me to this extraordinary moment in my life,” Lieberman added, essentially praying onstage.
At a black church in Detroit last Sunday, Gore told the congregation, “As a people, we need to reaffirm our faith and renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and God’s purpose.”
The next day at an interfaith breakfast in Chicago, Lieberman said the nation’s founders were religious men and noted that the Constitution attributes human rights to the “creator”–statements directly out of the Christian right’s playbook.
The Connecticut senator even footnoted certain policies to the Bible, though partly in jest. He compared Gore’s budget plan to the strategy of Joseph, who stored grain in prosperous times for lean years. He found a basis for the Medicare program in the 5th Commandment, “Honor Thy Father and Mother.”
The first to pounce on such talk were conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, who complained bitterly of a double standard. If a Christian conservative talked this way, they said, he would be vilified.
“Like a lot of conservatives, I have had mixed emotions about it,” Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative and former Republican presidential hopeful, said of Lieberman. “I have been pleased that he has been willing to frame some of his speeches in the context of his Jewish faith. I think that helps make it easier for others in public life to do the same.”
But, he added, “I’ve been irritated that, at least until recently, few of the secular organizations that would normally criticize somebody like myself or Gov. Bush for doing the same thing have spoken up in regard to Sen. Lieberman.”
Now some of those are in fact criticizing Lieberman.
Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, whose mission is to keep an eye out for anti-Semitism, wrote Lieberman a letter last week. “Language such as this risks alienating the American people,” it said. “Appealing along religious lines, or belief in God, is contrary to the American ideal.”
It is striking that some of the most heartfelt complaints about Lieberman are coming from Jews, who are otherwise euphoric about his selection.
Many Jews feel they are the ultimate losers when politicians talk fervently about religion. Jews make up fewer than 3 percent of the population, and to some Lieberman is making it easier for a future politician who wants to put Jesus in the schoolroom.
“The antennae of American Jews go up a little sooner when they hear politicians talking in religious language,” said Pelavin of the Religious Action Center. “So often in the past that has been the kind of language used to exclude religious minorities.”
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, is not Jewish, but he is especially concerned about Lieberman’s recent statement that “the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.”
“He has to be careful. Words mean things,” Lynn said. “That is a Pat Robertson line. It’s a code, and it’s a code invented by the religious right. That kind of things makes people nervous. If you hear Falwell say it one day and Lieberman the next day, you wonder who’s following who here.”
Lieberman’s Judaism plays out in another way too. Some insist that it is a very different matter when religion is embraced by a member of a minority than when a leader of a dominant faith does it.
Throughout world history, when leaders began orating on the virtues of the majority culture or religion, it spelled trouble for Jews. In contrast, there is hardly a danger that Lieberman will impose his religion on anyone else, some argue.
“There is no possibility that the government under Joe Lieberman will be promoting Jewish practice,” said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “It’s not like anyone will be coerced into saying the Shema [a Hebrew prayer] in public school. When you have a country that is 85 or 90 percent Christian, the reaction of minorities is, `He can talk about his God, and people don’t worry.’ “
Some say that, if Gore picked an African-American as his running mate, no one would begrudge him speaking proudly of black culture, but if a Caucasian candidate spoke of his white pride most would be appalled. That’s not a double standard, this thinking goes. It’s a reasonable distinction between a dominant majority and a historically persecuted minority.
Yet Forman and others say it may be unfair to declare it acceptable for some to talk publicly of their religion, but not others.
“Although we may feel less threatened by Lieberman’s statements–we may feel more comfortable than we would hearing the exact same words from a Christian speaker–we have to react the exact same way,” Forman insisted.
Others mention another big difference between Lieberman and, say, Rev. Pat Robertson, who ran for president in 1988 and went on to found the Christian Coalition.
Christian conservatives often tie their religious beliefs to policies they are pushing–such as prayer at school or football games, opposition to abortion, or allowing judges to post the 10 Commandments on their wall. To some, those ideas seem to be an attempt to impose one faith on everyone else, and that is what they find objectionable, not the religious talk itself.
“What is interesting about Lieberman’s talk is that it has been non-substantive,” said Mark Silk (the name as published has been corrected in this text), director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College. “He has not addressed school vouchers, faith-based social services, the Boy Scouts case. All of those substantive issues where religion is really at issue, he has stayed away from.”
Lieberman himself underlined this point. “This doesn’t get very programmatic,” he said in the interview. “In other words, I don’t see a legislative program coming out of this, except in minor ways like the way faith-based institutions are now part of the welfare reform.”
Not everyone buys this however. When Lieberman extols God, they say, that clearly excludes Americans who do not believe in God or who do not adhere to the Judeo-Christian version.
Lieberman sometimes seems aware of the perils of his approach. In an odd twist, he regularly tells this joke on the campaign trail:
A priest overhears a boy saying “I’ll be damned” when the wheels of his wagon fall off. The priest tells him not to use such language, so the next time the wheels fall off, the boy says, “Praise the Lord.” Miraculously, the wheels jump up and reaffix themselves to the wagon.
“I’ll be damned,” says the priest.
Lieberman tells this joke ostensibly to convey how astonished he is at being chosen by Gore. But it sends another message: Joe Lieberman, for all his religion, is a regular guy, and like the priest, he is human under his religious robes.
The entire question, meanwhile, is muddied by the complicated nature of Judaism, which is not only a religion but also a nationality, ethnicity and culture. When Lieberman speaks of how his wife Hadassah’s parents survived the Holocaust, that is a reference to a profoundly Jewish event, but few would consider it a religious reference or inappropriate.
When Lieberman, speaking to a predominantly Jewish group in South Florida, sprinkled his talk with Yiddish phrases, it was more akin to a Hispanic politician using Spanish than a Christian talking of God.
Trinity College’s Silk said that in the end the system is working essentially as it should: To the extent that Lieberman has violated the norms of the political culture, he is being reined in by public criticism.
“There is a point where it sounds like, `If you’re not religious you’re not moral.’ But I think he has backed away from that,” Silk said. “My guess is that Lieberman is going to cool it a little bit.”
