Dr. Andrew Murphy - Religion in American Politics

(music playing) Dr. Andrew Murphy: What's always interested me is the connection between our religious values and our political values. The question that has always interested me is how do people put together and make sense of their religious beliefs on the one hand and then how do those religious beliefs, how do they put those religious beliefs together to make some sort of view on society and how society ought to be run. I got very interested in this notion of what we call the Jeremiad. The name is taken, not surprisingly, taken from the Hebrew prophetic tradition, the prophet Jeremiah being the namesake. The prophet Jeremiah would lament that the community had fallen away from God and would give examples of how this had happened and then more importantly perhaps, call the community back to its covenant with God. We fall in a way, God is calling us back, we need to reform and repent as a community, and if we do that, then great things will be in store for us. You get this very strong sense in the early New England context that those colonists, who came to Boston in 1630/1631, were engaged in some kind of covenantal movement that they had entered into some covenant with God and that God was expecting great things from them, expecting fidelity to God's law from them, and often then that becomes a way of explaining why bad things do happen, whether it be crop failures, or indian attacks, or any number of other divisive social problems they're having, often through the voice of important clergy and public figures, traced back to some notion that we must be falling short of God's expectations for us, and that must be why these things are happening to us. The rise of the Christian right during the 1970s and the 1980's really did gain a lot of its power through the crafting of a very powerful narrative, a very powerful Jeremiad, about a nation that had been founded on Christian principles, or Judeo-Christian principles. The argument was that through a number of important social developments, the United States had moved away from this Christian, or Judeo-Christian founding. This was perceived as an abandonment of the nation's religious heritage. It was a very powerful political movement, was in part responsible for the Reagan elections of 1980 and 1984, and really has become a significant voice if not the significant voice in the Republican party, even to this day. Religion really engages issues of what we might call ultimate concern. Is there an afterlife, and if so, what's it going to be like and will what it's going to be like be shaped by how I behave, or not? And in what way? And how do we make sense of the fact that there are so many different answers to these questions. So I think one of the things that makes religion so contentious at times is it's not simply an argument over what do you want for dinner or what did you think of that movie last night? It's the meaning of why we're here, these kinds of questions don't always lend themselves to easy compromise. But I also think that we can overstate the conflictual nature of religion, and if you watch for example the video of King's March on Washington, you'll see not only are there many, many whites in the audience, many many whites wearing clerical collars, and so that was just one example of times where people of all sorts of religions, which may have radically different views on the nature of God or Jesus or whatever. Came together sort of to seek a common purpose to improve people's lives right here and right now. (music playing)