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On the New Republic's blog, Jonathan Chait has a short post that is overdone but makes a valid point.  He notes that Sharron Angle, the tea-party-backed GOP Arizona senatorial candidate, in an interview with the National Review, credits God (and Mark Levin) for her primary win, saying that "[m]ost everything has a providential side in American history."  She then addresses criticisms of her fervent support of questionable prison rehab programs run by front groups for the Church of Scientology, denying that she is a Scientologist but adding: "What we?re seeing here is a very slippery slope. Whenever religion becomes the focal point ? we saw this during John F. Kennedy?s race and also, to some degree, in Mitt Romney?s race ? whenever this becomes the focus, we Americans should be very, very concerned. We have a First Amendment that guarantees us all the right to worship as we please. We as Americans should, even if we don?t agree, should defend their right to have that right. It shouldn?t come into play in any political arena."  Summarizing her views, Chait writes: "Since the program was essentially created by a religious cult, we can't question her support for it without threatening the church-state divide. Meanwhile, God wanted her to win."

As I said, I think Chait's suggestion of hypocrisy is overdrawn.  But that doesn't mean he doesn't have a point.  In my view, Angle is welcome to credit God for her victory, and I can hardly say she's wrong.  She is also welcome to invoke God, and does: in a speech at the National Press Club, she said she had brought to Washington her Smith & Wesson, God, and her husband, in that order.  When it comes to religion and politics, though, within or beyond the First Amendment, it is not possible to invoke religion as a qualification and then invoke religious freedom as a get-out-of-jail-free card.  For one thing, people don't just question the Scientologists' rehab program because it derives from Scientology: they also doubt its efficacy and even its safety.  For another, if she believes voters have a right to know about her faith, and that she has a right to tell them, then voters must be equally free to question her faith.  They must be free to question whether she is a Scientologist, and even to vote against her on that basis, although I think that charge seems unfair (it is more accurate to say that Scientologists have their own, perhaps valid and certainly constitutionally protected, reasons for supporting politicians of all religious stripes).  And they must be free to question why she supports either that faith or its programs.  For that matter, they are welcome to question whether any Christian in good standing would do so.

I am not encouraging these questions.  I am suggesting, however, that you can't take the sweet without the bitter.  If, I as I believe is true, one is and must be free to invoke religion as a qualification for office and as a vital part of one's background and character, then it must be equally permissible to engage in either sectarian or generalized criticism of a candidate's religious faith, from an internal or an external perspective.  We do religion no favors by excluding it from public discourse; but we do it no favors either by treating it with kid gloves. 

 

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