Rhetoric Race and Religion
by Ira Chernus
Religion Dispatches
When the Obama administration declared that employees of Catholic institutions must have contraception covered in their health plans (before the president’s deft backtracking compromise), one group of religious Americans stood firmly opposed to Obama’s original position.
No, it wasn’t Catholics. Despite the bishops’ howls of protest, poll after poll showed Catholics supporting the administration’s new rule. The opposition came from white evangelical Protestants, who stood against Obama by a whopping margin of 56 to 38.
Protestants take a stronger stand than Catholics against birth control? Curious, to say the least.
Rachel Maddow explains it by suggesting that birth control isn’t really the issue here. It’s just another convenient excuse—like controversies over Planned Parenthood and the morning-after pill—for conservatives to tar Obama as the commander-in-chief of a “war on religion.” “The right has picked a fight on this issue,” says Maddow, “because religiosity is a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats in an election year.”
Okay, Rachel. But what makes religiosity convenient? If it’s all about politics, “convenient” means effective in moving voters from one column to the other.
So beneath all the fine points of the debate about contraception and health insurance, this latest brouhaha raises a much bigger question that urgently needs public discussion but rarely gets enough: In a nation supposedly built on a wall of separation between religion and politics, why are so many voters so often moved by appeals to religion?
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