Biden bids to be a peacemaker in Americans’ religious wars
In our public square, religion has been subsumed by politics. It is increasingly defined more by taking sides in partisan and factional battles than by calling us toward higher aspirations, spiritual hopes and the quest for a beloved community.
Biden has a plan to nudge the nation back toward a more benign and (dare one say it?) constructive engagement with faith. He hopes to encourage greater tolerance and openness across our creedal differences and to embrace the role that churches, synagogues, mosques and the houses of worship of other faith traditions play as solvers of problems and builders of civil society.
He is poised to take a big step on Sunday by signing an executive order returning an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to the White House. This is another instance of what is becoming a through-line in the Biden presidency: restoration combined with transformation.
On the restorationist side, Biden is bringing back an approach to partnerships with faith-based organizations that was pursued by both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
They highlighted the work of compassion and justice undertaken by religious institutions, and they emphasized the long history of productive and (when done right) constitutional partnerships between government and faith-based groups. The very name of the office is a throwback to the Obama years.
But the transformational aspect includes a call for civil society groups, including religious ones, to engage deeply in our ongoing battles against the pandemic, systemic racism and the entrenched problems facing historically disadvantaged communities.
Acknowledging the sharp rise of secular sentiments and religious disengagement, particularly among the young, the new office is set to stress the role of non-religious components of civil society, including intentionally secular groups, in building community and solving problems. And after the Trump administration’s open hostility, the Biden effort will be explicit — as the Obama and Bush efforts were — about outreach to Muslims.
Melissa Rogers, the new director of the faith-based office, is the same person who headed these efforts in Obama’s second term. I should point out to readers who don’t already know that I have been engaged with these issues for more than two decades at the Brookings Institution and have worked with Rogers for much of that period.
She and I wrote a report last fall on how to consider and address questions related to partnerships and the First Amendment’s religious-freedom guarantees. So I know firsthand Rogers’s gift for combining her broadly progressive perspective with genuine openness toward religious conservatives and others whose views differ from hers.
The deputy director of the office, Josh Dickson, was in charge of religious outreach in the Biden campaign and is equally comfortable engaging with those who hold different religious and political perspectives.
All this will matter to Biden’s attempts to promote a more inclusive, less angry and less polarized conversation about faith. The idea is to focus not on culture wars but on the practical work of charity and justice that religious institutions of all stripes undertake — in service to refugees and battered women, the homeless, the sick and the hungry, those left out and left behind. When George W. Bush spoke about “the armies of compassion,” he was describing a real force in American society.
Our public discussion of issues related to religion has gotten ever narrower. The instant religion is mentioned in politics, we typically assume that the debate must be about abortion or LGBTQ rights. It’s as if the Black church, which has challenged consciences throughout our country’s history, didn’t exist; as if the day-to-day work of religiously inspired volunteers and care workers matters not at all.
We should be under no illusions. Changing the way the public side of religion is discussed will not be easy. The words “religious liberty,” which describe something we should all cherish and defend, have been transformed into an ideological slogan used to push back against liberals, especially in battles over LGBTQ rights. This has made liberals increasingly uneasy with, and sometimes hostile to, religion’s political role.
But Biden, the devout churchgoer who won overwhelming support from non-religious voters, just might be the right person to change things. It is, I’d suggest, a blessing that he’s trying.
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