Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney's demagogic claims that President Obama is engaged in a "war against religion" are as unsurprising as they are disturbing. Both candidates are resorting to the ideology of another era that we never quite left behind, and they are just a couple of nuances away from calling Obama a godless communist. Both men frequently denounce the president as promoting secularism -- which is a dog whistle heard across a broad swath of the Religious Right and beyond, as embodying a wide range of evils.
As base and bogus as it is, it was not so long ago and not so far away, that Democratic leaders and religious figures, and squadrons of "faith consultants" took up the narrative of the Religious Right, claiming that secularists were driving people of faith out of public life and that the words separation of church and state are not in the Constitution. Those days seem to be over (if not quite forgotten), but I hope we have learned from that experience what can go wrong when we cut loose from the moorings of our history and our most deeply held values.
Meanwhile, the bogus narrative lives on at the highest levels of our public life.
Here are two quick examples of the turn the campaign has taken.
Romney recently wrote in The Washington Examiner that Obama is trying to "impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away."
NewsMax reported on their interview with Santorum:
President Barack Obama uses his faith "as a convenience" when it serves him, while at the same time being the most anti-religion president in history, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum charged in an exclusive Newsmax interview....
"Over the last few weeks, he has done more to assault religion in this country than any president, certainly in recent history, maybe even in history," said Santorum.
This kind of manic strawman Manicheanism has always driven the farther reaches of the religious and political right -- but never extended much beyond Pat Buchanan at the top of American politics. But an indication that Santorum and Romney might be preparing for what we have seen in recent weeks, were the speeches they gave in Texas attacking John F. Kennedy's approach to separation of church and state. Indeed, the attack on separation, the claims that secularists are somehow driving people of faith, and even faith itself out of public life; are underpinnings of the full blown notion, (now expressed in incendiary fashion by Romney and Santorum) that there is a "war against religion" being waged by the Obama administration and president Obama personally.
This narrative is one of the very definitional aspects of the Religious Right. That it is being used by both the leading candidate of the Religious Right and the candidate of the Republican establishment to frame campaign issues is an astonishing development. (Gingrich is doing it too.)
And we have never before seen anything like it.