Religious Language and Southern Politics

Religious Language and Southern Politics
By Charles Wellborn
Professor of Religion Emeritus, Florida State University “We place confidence in the loving God behind all of life and all of history … and we go forward with confidence, because the call of history has come to the right country. May he guide us now.”

Those words could easily have been heard over the last two years from hundreds of pulpits across the country and, perhaps especially, from the pulpits of churches in the so-called Bible Belt, the American South. Actually, the quotation is from the 2003 State of the Union address to Congress by President George W. Bush, as some readers will have recognized. Of course, such religious rhetoric in political settings is not unusual, but Bush has turned his personal faith into a highly public matter, more so perhaps than any modern president, as Deborah Caldwell has pointed out in a recent issue of this journal.

President Bush is not a born Southerner, but he is an adopted Texan, and it is significant that he dates his own deep Christian convictions to his conversion in Midland, Texas, when he was 39 years old. Religiously then, the President can be said to be not only a “born-again” Christian, but a “born-again” Southerner. And in American history the southern Bible Belt has the most conspicuous record across the years of the close connection of religion and politics.

I must record that I am not always comfortable with Bush’s use of religious language. I am suspicious of any politician who claims a divine mandate for his political actions. In the particular instance of the war on Iraq the events of the past few months have certainly generated some doubt that what Mr. Bush did was the result of divine guidance. Almost without historical exception politicians, kings, emperors, and dictators have laid claims to some sort of divine approval for their political adventures. They seem to forget a basic scriptural teaching — the fallibility of earthly men and the assertion that all persons, without exception, are sinners.

To balance off the quotation from the President I would cite one other minor, and somewhat different, example of the use of biblical language in political rhetoric. Let me go back to 1973. In a public speech Governor Reuben Askew of Florida (later to be, briefly, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination) declared, “While I believe in separating church and state, I do not believe in separating church and statesmen. While I believe in separating religious doctrine from public policy, I will never believe in separating the religious conscience from those who make such policy … As Christians, I’m sure that [we] realize that the conscience of the Lord is a good and merciful conscience, one that would lead us to a just and compassionate society, were we to follow it as faithfully as did Christ himself. I think it is the duty of every Christian who holds public office to try to be true to that concept.” I would suggest that Governor Askew’s statement is a reasoned and sensitive one that avoids the peril of identifying one’s political platform with God’s mandate. There is a distinctive and important difference in tone and meaning between that statement and the previous quotation from President Bush.

Any study of Southern political rhetoric could multiply endlessly these types of quotations, as office-seekers — some relatively good, some relatively evil, some sincere, some manipulative — have incorporated biblical concepts, ideals, and authority into their partisan political campaigns. The trail of a particular brand of religious certification for office is pervasive and unmistakable. Even today most Bible Belt candidates will list their church membership among their credentials, and it behooves a candidate to give some evidence of church attendance, especially in the weeks leading up to the election.

I am a Southerner by birth, nurtured in the predominant Southern religious tradition. As long as I can remember (and my memory in this case stretches across seventy years), I have been fascinated by the drama, sometimes epic but more often low-comedy, of Southern politics. As a youngster in deep East Texas, where our radios (no television in those days) exposed us to the flamboyant politics of nearby Louisiana, I remember hearing “Old Uncle Earl” — Earl K. Long, brother and heir apparent of Huey Long — profanely blasting his opponents one moment and quoting scripture the next. As an adult, I heard the passionate keynote address delivered to the l956 Democratic national convention by then Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee. A Methodist lay preacher, Clement drew repeatedly on scriptural images and concluded with the words of a popular gospel song, “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on.” My most striking memory in this area is of the 1938 gubernatorial campaign in Texas. That year a new personality emerged on the Texas political stage. A flour salesman who led a hillbilly band, W. Lee O’Daniel had become a popular radio entertainer, and his daily program, in which he advertised his own brand of “Hillbilly Flour,” was a familiar listening experience for many Texans. “Pappy” O’Daniel sang country songs, introduced his children, Pat and Molly as part of his band, read from the Bible, quoted sentimental poetry (“The Boy Who Never Grew Too Old to Comb His Mother’s Hair”), and sold flour.

In the 1938 governor’s campaign a number of seasoned politicians and office holders were ranged against each other. One Sunday on his radio program O’Daniel mentioned that someone had suggested that he become a candidate for governor. He hadn’t thought about it much himself, he reflected, but he wondered what his listeners thought.

According to O’Daniel, in the next few days more than 30,000 people wrote, urging him to run. So he announced his candidacy. Taking his hillbilly band, his Bible, and his children with him, he stumped the state, collecting money in ice cream cartons to pay the cost of the campaign. Soon, to the surprise and chagrin of veteran political observers and other candidates, his campaign rallies were attracting thousands.

I went with my parents to hear O’Daniel in the City Park in Kilgore, a town of about l5,000 people. We could not get within a hundred yards of the speaker, so large was the crowd. O’Daniel’s platform was concise: the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. He appealed to “old-fashioned biblical common sense,” and his speech was frequently interrupted by hearty “amens” from his listeners. I was reminded of some religious revival services that I had attended. The candidate asked Texas voters to throw out the “professional politicians” and put a “God-fearing, Bible-believing, born-again Christian man” in the governor’s mansion.

The people responded. O’Daniel was elected in the first primary, polling more votes than all his opponents combined. Later he was re-elected to the governorship and then served one term in the United States Senate.

My purpose here is not to evaluate O’Daniel’s political career, which was decidedly a spotty one, but rather to reflect on the nature of the phenomenon.

O’Daniel’s appeals to the Bible and to the virtues of conservative, simplistic religious faith resonated with thousands of voters, including many who were not themselves actively involved in any formal religious organization. A similar pattern of response has repeated itself again and again in Southern political history, though often in less dramatic form. That kind of appeal still has power, but for a variety of social and cultural reasons its effectiveness is eroding and may eventually disappear. Many will applaud that disappearance with unmixed joy. I must confess to somewhat mixed feelings.

I am deeply disturbed by many of the current manifestations of the indiscriminate mingling of religious and political rhetoric. I deplore, for instance, the tactics of some extreme religious conservatives — often designated the “radical religious right” — who move into partisan political struggles with a rhetoric which implies — and sometimes specifically avers — that their particular political policies have some sort of divine mandate. They seek to harness churches and other organized religious groups to their political bandwagons. Their approach suggests that anyone who opposes them is, by definition, ungodly and irreligious.

I distrust on first hearing any politician who seems to be saying that his or her policies have a sacred imprimatur. And in foreign policy I am wary of political leaders in the United States, or anywhere else, who succumb to the temptation to enlist God in their armies or navies, making the Deity a kind of warlord in some armed struggle.

What I am principally concerned with here, however, is not a critique of this type of politico-religious aberration, but a more profound matter. What is the deeper meaning of the intricate mixture of religion and politics in traditional Southern political rhetoric? What is its value, if any, to the structures of community? More importantly, what does the phenomenon indicate about the self-understanding of Southern voters? Professor Eric Voegelin, a distinguished political theorist, has argued persuasively that any political society tends to express itself in symbols which are indicative of its self-understanding, together with its understanding of the self’s relation to transcendent truth and reality.

“Man does not wait for science to have his life explained to him, and when the theorist approaches social reality, he finds the field preempted by what may be called the self-interpretation of society.” f1 To put it another way, a community articulates itself in terms of structures of social and political order which have underlying transcendental meaning. The symbols associated with these earthly orders are, to a significant extent, mirrors of the way in which the “real world” is perceived. This means that a political structure obtains part of its validation or authentication from the fact that order or structure is seen by the people, often in a somewhat inchoate way, as a legitimate and consistent expression of ultimate reality.

The truth of this observation emerges clearly, for instance, in the medieval identification of the king as absolute monarch — God as king of the universe and a sovereign ruler with absolute power. The king on earth was thus God’s anointed one, a mirror image, so to speak, on a human level. The structural and hierarchical development of the Roman Catholic Church, with the Pope as its earthly ruler, reflects this same concept of God. The shift from monarchical political concepts to more democratic ones was historically accompanied by, and interacted with, more populist understandings of the nature of God and man’s relationship to him.

If this analysis of political order is correct, then the traditional characterization of the American South as the Bible Belt takes on new significance and meaning. Whatever else the Bible Belt label may mean, it accurately reflects the fact that the predominant religious traditions in the South have been “populist” movements. The great people’s churches of the South — the Baptists, the Methodists, in some areas the Disciples of Christ, and the Pentecostal groups — all have their roots in a nonurbanized, individualistic atmosphere in which the importance of the individual believer before God is magnified and the ability of the individual to deal directly with God (the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer) is emphasized. The idea that each person makes free decisions in relation to God and religious faith is a major contributing factor to the development of the democratic political order in which individuals make free choices in political governance.

Southern evangelical Protestantism put its emphasis by and large on the redemption of individual souls, not on the salvation of culture. Thus, the social gospel never really found a home in the South. In politics one effect of this religious individualism was to influence people, not toward a radical restructuring of political and social institutions, but toward the demand for pious political leaders who publicly proclaimed their loyalty to the popular conception of biblical faith. If the politician did not himself take his religious commitment seriously, he still had to give public allegiance to it, for the sake of political expedience if nothing else. The sincerity of the political leader is less important than the larger meaning of the phenomenon.

In the last several decades influential studies have been made of what has come to be called the “American civil religion.” Beginning with a seminal article by Robert Bellah in the winter, 1967, issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the civil religion has come in for close scrutiny. In brief, Bellah argues that there is in the country a discernible phenomenon existing alongside of but separate from organized churches and other religious groups. It is not identical with Christianity, Judaism, or any other standard faith group; rather, it incorporates a complex of values, ritual patterns, and commitments that involve insights from the whole religious history of the nation. In it, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, as well as many secularists and humanists, can participate without a sense of general tension with their own faith commitments. One of many examples is the use of nonsectarian formal prayers in presidential inaugurations and the opening of Congressional sessions. It constitutes an important social and political cohesive force, but, like other religious phenomenon, it has features and effects that are both positive and negative.

Many criticisms have been made of Bellah’s original analysis, but his basic thesis has held up remarkably well. For our purposes, it may be helpful to narrow his concept to a subspecies: the Southern civil religion. In the American South the civil religion is, or has been, much more specific and cohesive. It has drawn as has been pointed out, on a dominant tradition that is Protestant, evangelical, individualistic, and Bible-centered. It can be argued that the more unitive coherence the civil religion possesses, the more effective it is in sanctifying and shaping the community’s value patterns. In this sense Southern civil religion has probably had a proportionately greater influence and effect , both positive and negative, on political patterns and actions than has the national one.

The political effects of the Southern civil religion have come under vigorous attack across the years. Much of the criticism is legitimate and well grounded.

Like all religious phenomena, the civil religion is subject to perversion, idolatry, and warping. At its worst, historically, the Southern civil religion has been used cheaply to support institutions like slavery and racial discrimination But it must also be said that the critics, while highlighting the negative aspects, have often ignored any positive side to the issue. They have, as Bellah has remarked about the national scene, taken “as criteria the best in their own religious tradition and as typical the worst in the tradition of the civil religion.”f2 Bellah argues that the civil religion, at its best, does contain genuine apprehensions of universal and transcendent religious reality. These apprehensions arise from and are interpreted in the light of distinctive historical experience.

This kind of appreciation runs counter to much opinion today. It is popular to scorn and ridicule the frequent references to the Bible in Southern politics, for instance. It is easy to dismiss the phenomenon as an indication that religion has only a ceremonial and expedient significance in regard to politics, constituting mere lip service to the deity and solely designed to impress the more naïve voters. But religious rhetoric in political speeches is quite obviously a kind of ritual, and surely the study of ritual and symbol warns us to beware of dismissing something as unimportant because it is “only a ritual.” Which brings us back to the real point. The question is not the motive of the politician: it is an inquiry into the felt necessity of the practice. The cynical response that the politician uses the rhetoric in order to gain votes only deepens the question. The words are effective in many cases because they represent a response to a deep-felt need of the political community. People want from their depths to believe that the political structures in which they participate are somehow “under God” and that the person who holds office is a God-fearing man.

“What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated commitments that are not usually made explicit in the course of everyday life.” f3 What are some of the more important values that the Bible-centered, individualistic Southern civil religion, at its best, has endorsed and celebrated? One such value would seem to be that the politician or statesman is not only responsible to the people who elect him or her but also and ultimately to the God of the Bible and to the objective moral order associated with that God.

Governor Askew’s statement at the beginning of this article clearly sets out that conviction. In American constitutional theory sovereignty is vested in the people, but that theory also contains a notion, consistent with the Bible, that there is a higher sovereignty, as least in popular understanding. The will of the people is not the final criterion. The ultimate standard of judgment is the will of God. And for the great majority of Southerners across the years, the will of God has been identified in one way or another with the teachings of the scriptures.

A second value-shaping emphasis in Southern civil religion is the almost always implicit and often explicit recognition that there is some kind of transcendent goal for the political process. In a practical, hard-nosed way the politician is expected to deal with immediate, pressing problems, but there is also a larger frame of reference which is assumed. Society ought to be a “good society,” and for the Southerner the content of the good society has drawn heavily on a kind of amorphous understanding of the kingdom of God as a model.

One other value manifesting itself in the civil religion needs to be considered, especially because its manifestation has often been so paradoxical. The Bible is generally understood to teach the final sanctity of each individual and that person’s ultimate value in the sight of the Creator. No human being is worthless if God created him or her and if Christ died for that individual — a fundamental declaration of traditional Southern religion. In some contemporary political thought this idea has translated itself into a secular egalitarian theory, asserting that all men are somehow empirically equal. Such an idea has never been a dynamic part of the Southern civil religion. In Southern history, at least two factors mitigated strongly against the development of egalitarianism. First, the functioning class structure of the historic South; which demonstrated its reliance on its European background by its tendency to stress aristocratic birth and breeding over money as a class distinctive, assumed a kind of inborn difference among human beings. Second, the economic and political realities of the institution of slavery seemed to contradict any notion of empirical equality. Nevertheless, the pressure of the religion conviction of ultimate human value was always there, and the Southern attempt to come to grips with the tension was and still is, for some people, an agonizing one.

The use of religious language in political rhetoric is one among several clear manifestations of the functioning of the civil religion. Obviously, situational tensions have often produced deformations in the interpretation of the values of the civil religion, but it is also clear that the pressure of the values has always been there, and that it is partially in the light of this pressure that the shape of the deformations must be understood. To this perspective one may add an analysis of the mixed performance of Southern civil religion which draws on the familiar scholarly model: the priest and the prophet. One can chart a kind of dialectical interaction between the priestly and prophetic strains in virtually every religious phenomenon, and certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. On the one hand, the priestly elements seek to preserve and protect all that is conceived to be worthwhile in the faith and in the society which is infused with that faith. On the other hand, the prophets attack and criticize the status quo as failing to exemplify the ideals of the faith.

The priestly stance is a conservative one by definition. The priests fear change because it endangers what they value. Priests have often made mistakes, and they have always operated, like the rest of us, with mixed motives. They often work to preserve not only what is objectively good in the system but also what is mediocre and even perverse, especially when these elements serve to bolster their own privileged positions. But this is not the whole story. In almost all social and religious systems there are elements worth preserving. Without the work of the priestly forces in religion and society, these things are likely to go down the drain with the garbage.

The Southern civil religion has obviously fulfilled a priestly function. It has worked to preserve something which can roughly be designated as a Southern way of life. No one can quite define what that means, but all of us who experience it know what is being talked about. Some of that way of life has been perverse and destructive, but much of it has positive value. The gradual disappearance of religious language from political rhetoric is only one of many signs that this Southern way of life is changing. The American South is rapidly becoming a carbon copy of every other part of the nation. In that process the entire ethos and moral structure of the region is being altered, producing both positive and negative consequences.

Historically, the priestly elements become static and oppressive, blocking necessary change, unless they are balanced and restrained by the prophets.

While there are always more priests than prophets, the prophetic strain has not been entirely absent from the Southern religious experience. One ironic paradox of Southern history, to use only one example, was the constraint upon Southern slaveowners, in the light of their religious commitments, to allow the Christian gospel to be preached to slaves. For a long time it has been received wisdom that the only effect of that preaching was to placate the blacks, rendering them passive and apathetic with vague promises of “pie in the sky by and by.” A more detailed exposition of the black experience has uncovered new layers to the story. As Richard Wentz has pointed out, “It has recently become a matter of record that the slaves probably received more than they were meant to receive from the evangelical character of the dominant religion… The white man agitated and wrestled with the effects of both law and Gospel in his own life — trying to adjust those effects with the economic and political need to deny them to humans of black skin. But they heard greater depths of the law than the white man intended, and they also heard words like freedom, love, salvation, judgment, mercy.” f4 The gospel story offered the blacks hope, and in many cases that hope was revolutionary. There was a prophetic character to the symbols of the Christian faith that promised more than just a reward in a future life. The visions of a kingdom to come helped to produce more black activists, social unrest, and consequent social change. At the same time that vision of the kingdom made Southerners uneasy of conscience.

In a more contemporary vein one must remember that a prophet like Martin Luther King, Jr., was a product of the Southern religious experience. Of course, it was the black experience, infused with a heavy dose of Boston personalism, King constantly used in his public utterances the time-honored Biblical rhetoric of southern politics. It is ironic that the success of King in the South (a success he was not able to equal in other parts of the nation) was partly due to the fact that the same religious ethos which shaped King likewise informed the development of the blacks to whom he appealed for support and the whites whom he confronted with demands for racial justice. Many Southerners, offended, angered, and frightened by King’s activities, were at the same time emotionally troubled and morally disturbed by his demands. The evidence of the Southerner’s struggle with such sore spots is abundant in his literature, in his tortured interpretations of scripture, in his often flamboyant paternalism, and in his exaggerated responses to the racial demagogues who have so often been a part of Southern politics. Rationalization has often been accomplished, but rarely without pain and never without scar. A prophet like King could not have been so effective had he not been appealing to a people of two minds religiously, people who was often employing in priestly fashion the same religious values which King was using in prophetic style.

If the Southern civil religion, often articulated in politico-religious rhetoric, has functioned in both priestly and prophetic style in the past, what is the prognosis for the future? Here any comments must necessarily be tentative.

The South is changing; of that, there is no doubt. The grip of the Southern civil religion, for good or for bad, is weakening. Many years ago, a thinker like Walter Lippmann foresaw this same phenomenon for the nation as a whole. In a probing volume, The Public Philosophy, he wrote of the erosion of a moral value consensus and the disappearance of a sense of objective, overarching national morality. The process which he analyzed has continued in the nation as a whole and, I think, in the South in particular.

I confess a sense of foreboding when I view the possible and probably further erosion of the Southern civil religion. An old way of life is disappearing. With it go many of the contradictions, inconsistencies, the actual evils which were a part of it. I would not want to call back any of those things. But with the disappearance of that way of life there is also the evident crumbling of a structure of generally acknowledged moral values which has exercised both priestly and prophetic functions in the public arena. Perhaps the time will soon come when Southern politicians will no longer find it politically profitable to appeal to the Bible in support of racial prejudice, class hatred, or economic selfishness. That is all to the good. But it may also happen that the sort of statement quoted from Governor Askew at the beginning of this study will no longer be made. If our analysis of the phenomenon is correct in the assertion that Southern political rhetoric contains religious quotes and references partially as a response to the people’s deep-felt desire for “God-fearing” leaders who have a sense of responsibility to higher moral values and purposes, then will not the disappearance of that rhetoric reflect to some extent the disappearance of that popular desire? Whenever there is drastic modification of a society’s way of life and system of moral values, change almost certainly affects not only that which is undesirable but also that which is worthwhile, not only that which ought to be transitory but also that which sustains healthy community, not only the perversions of hypocrisy but also the traditions of civility. The current modification of the Southern civil religion is not exception to that rule. It is generally agreed that the American president who employed religious language in his public utterances with the highest degree of discernment and understanding was Abraham Lincoln, but it has been pointed out also that Lincoln’s use of Biblical language was effective only because he was speaking to an audience that was biblically literate. Religious language addressed to people who are, as is increasingly true in our secularized society, multicultural, multi-religious and biblically illiterate largely loses its resonance and power.

What kinds of public ritual and symbolism will replace those of the civil religion? What type of public moral value structures, if any, will supercede those of our Biblical, individualistic past? These are provocative questions which are as yet unanswered.

Endnotes
1 Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), ix.
2 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, (Winter, 1967), 14.
3 Ibid., 4.
4 Richard Wentz, “The Saga of the American Soul,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December, 1974), 65.  

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