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Public religious culture post-09/11/01 257

I’m not denigrating anyone’s beliefs. And I don’t pretend to know why
America is so much more infused with religious faith than the rest of
the world. But I do think that we’re in the middle of another religious
Great Awakening, and that while this may bring spiritual comfort to
many, it will also mean a growing polarization within our society.
But mostly, I’m troubled by the way the great intellectual traditions
of Catholic and Protestant churches alike are withering, leaving the
scholarly and religious worlds increasingly antagonistic. I worry partly
because of the time I’ve spent with self-satisfied and unquestioning
mullahs and imams, for the Islamic world is in crisis today in large
part because of a similar drift away from a rich intellectual tradition
and toward the mystical. The heart is a wonderful organ, but so is the
brain. 61
Implicit in much of the debate about the religiosity of the American elec-
torate in 2004 are two notions that are significant to our concerns here.
First is the idea that religion is somehow irreconcilable with the rational
processes of politics, and, second, that the particular religiosity that is
typical of the new emerging segment of the electorate responsible for
Bush’s victory was conservative and, in Kristof’s terms, reactionary and
self-satisfied. I don’t wish to engage in a moral argument here about the
nature of the religious politics that seem to be emerging. Rather, I want to
reflect on some of the claims being made by proponents and critics of this
emerging religious politics in light of the role that media may play. It may
be that neither view is fully descriptive of the situation as people make
political choices in the contexts of their private lives. Each view contem-
plates a normative role for religion in politics, with those who celebrate
the conservative turn on issues like abortion and gay marriage seeing this
as a return to morality, and those who lament the trends concerned about
the emergence of a “theocracy” that will necessarily overwhelm the diver-
sity of opinion contemplated by a constitution that sought to be neutral on
the question of religion.
One conservative voice raised a concern about these trends in the after-
math of the election. Joe Loconte of the Heritage Foundation pointed to
an earlier tradition in American politics where religious leaders like Reinhold
Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jnr, stood above the political fray. Current
religious leadership seems to have lost that distance, he contends:

today, much of the religious right marches in lockstep with the
Republican Party, while the religious left functions like an echo
chamber for the Democrats. Christian conservatives join Republicans
to mobilize against gay marriage, but don’t muster great interest in
families at risk in the inner city. They seem to like the Bush administra-
tion’s economic policies, but offer little criticism of corporate scandals