Below The Beltway

Charles Krauthammer has a column today in which he criticizes the extent to which public displays of piety have become de rigueuer in American politics.

For example, there was that question during the Republican YouTube debate where the candidates believed “every word” of the Bible:

The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

Instead of giving that answer, though, the candidates who responded each “genuflected” as Krauthammer aptly and fell over themselves to answer the question in a way that would satisfy every religious group possible.

Then, there’s Mitt Romney’s absurd contention that “freedom requires religion”:

[T]his is nonsense — as Romney then proceeded to demonstrate in that very same speech. He spoke of the empty cathedrals in Europe. He’s right about that: Postwar Europe has experienced the most precipitous decline in religious belief in the history of the West. Yet Europe is one of the freest precincts on the planet. It is an open, vibrant, tolerant community of more than two dozen disparate nations living in a pan-continental harmony and freedom unseen in all previous European history.

In some times and places, religion promotes freedom. In other times and places, it does precisely the opposite, as is demonstrated in huge swaths of the Muslim world, where religion has been used to impose the worst kind of unfreedom.

Krauthammer isn’t the only one pointing out the extent to which religion has invaded the political sphere, especially on the Republican side. Peggy Noonan makes the same point in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Mike Huckabee is in the lead due, it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his religious beliefs as lived out in his ministry as an ordained Southern Baptist. He flashes “Christian leader” over his picture in commercials; he asserts his faith is “mainstream”; his surrogates speak of Mormonism as “strange” and “definitely a factor.” Mr. Huckabee said this summer that a candidate’s faith is “subject to question,” “part of the game.”

(…)

I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I’m just not sure he’d be pure enough to make it in this party. I’m not sure he’d be considered good enough.

Ironically, this is the same thing that happened to Barry Goldwater. If the vision put forward by Mitt Romeny and Mike Huckabee succeeds and the Republican Party becomes a political arm of Evangelicals and social conservatives, then it will no longer be the Party of Reagan, but will instead become the Party of Pat Robertson.