The Impact of Cafeteria Religion on Political Engagement

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/fixgov/posts/2014/05/08-faith-equality-cafeteria-religion-and-political-engagement-wear

Michael Wear | May 8, 2014 9:01am

America’s religious diversity is important not solely, or even primarily, because of demography, but because of ideas. The politically significant change in America’s religious landscape is not that we are growing more religiously diverse as a people, but more specifically that our religious public square—the parameters and content of our public religious conversations—is more diverse than ever. Today, it seems, everything is spiritual, yet little is sacred. There is little that is unworthy of an opinion, yet even fewer issues are deemed deserving of moral conviction.

It is this diversity of religious understanding that serves as one of many important lenses through which we can view the recent report, Faith in Equality: Economic Justice and the Future of Religious Progressives, written by EJ Dionne, Bill Galston, Korin Davis and Ross Tilchin. This report looks at the potential for a vibrant, impactful religious coalition organized around the political issue of addressing economic inequality. The intellectual and scriptural framework for a progressive religious movement on income inequality has existed for literally millennia. From the prophets of the Old Testament to Pope Francis, the religious mandate to care for the poor and vulnerable has been clear. The report’s introduction takes care to establish how this framework has shaped American politics:

In the late 19th Century, young men and women witnessing on behalf of the Gospel’s call for service to the poor entered the nation’s slums and began work in Settlement Houses. Many of them sparked the rise of the Progressive movement. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” Theodore Roosevelt declared at the 1912 Progressive Party convention. The Lord was presumed to be a Progressive.

Yet, today, for all of the talk about cafeteria religion—the troubling notion of “picking and choosing” what one wants to believe and follow from religious traditions while ignoring the rest—our politics is also afflicted with a cafeteria approach to religious political engagement.

Of course, for political parties this can be a practical matter. The truth is that there is no single religious constituency in this country. Instead, politicians can pick and choose from the plethora of issues important to people of faith and ignore the others, if they are allowed to do so.

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