Completing the Trinity

When John F. Kennedy ran for President in 1960, millions of Americans wondered whether a Catholic President would take orders from the Vatican on matters of public policy. Kennedy consistently responded that his Catholicism would not hinder his abilities as a public servant. Anti-Catholic prejudice was not enough help for Richard Nixon, however; Americans elected Kennedy as the 35th President of the United States.
One would hope that, more than 40 years after Kennedy's victory, Americans would have stopped using religious convictions to assess a person's qualifications for public office. But if Maureen Dowd's recent column in The New York Times ("Tribulation Worketh Patience," Oct. 9) is any indication, the use of unabashed religious bigotry in determining a candidate's qualification for public office is alive and kicking. Worse still, this bigotry is now used as much by the political left as by the political right.
Assessing W. David Hager's qualifications to serve as Surgeon General, Dowd produces a litany of evidence against him showing nothing more than that Hager is a believing Christian. She notes that Hager considers Jesus a liberator of women and that he has written on the positive effects that Bible reading may have in the healing process. While she notes that Hager has said that his belief in the sinfulness of abortion and birth control "does not deter [him] from being a person of science," she later attempts to discredit Hager by repeating his statement that drawing lines between Christian and secular truth is "dangerous."
Hager's statement can be interpreted in manifold ways. Hager might simply mean that his Christian faith informs his quest for truth in all areas of life, his medical practice included. It is quite possible, then, that Hager's sentiments about the danger of severing religious and scientific truth are merely proof that he has read and rejected Nietzsche. Nietzsche, after all, regarded the favoring of truth over falsehood as a product of Judaism and Christianity that was best excised from society. None of the quotes Dowd dredges up to support her attack on Hager indicate that he is incapable of leaving his personal faith aside when assessing, say, the safety of birth control pills. He is able to draw a line between his religious faith as a Christian and his duties as public official.
Dowd's assumption that Hager cannot separate his Christian faith from his duties as Surgeon General betrays a number of common assumptions secular liberalism makes about the role of faith in the life of a believer. Dowd expects something of Hager she would not expect of an atheist--or, more to the point, of a more liberal Christian. Like many critics of conservative Christianity, she faults a conservative Christian for letting his politics be informed by faith even though she would not criticize someone who took a liberal political position because of religious belief. She subscribes to a double standard that categorizes religiously-informed conservatism as the ominous "Religious Right" but does not refer to religiously-informed liberalism as an equally ominous "Religious Left."
The very fact that Dowd feels she can print a column as flagrantly bigoted as this one in The New York Times says a lot about just how seriously our society takes bigotry based on creed. Were Dowd to question Hager's abilities to serve as Surgeon General on the basis of race or sex, readers would be outraged. Yet otherwise culturally-sensitive readers allow Dowd to disqualify Hager as a potential Surgeon General simply because he happens to be an evangelical Christian.
Even in academia, the kind of bias Dowd presents in her column persists. College professors frequently ask students to assess how texts portray race, class, and gender--but rarely creed. Religion is excluded from the academic trinity of race, class, and gender, even though religious faith affects, and is affected by, all three. And this is the case even though, across the last millennium of Western history, discrimination based on creed has been every bit as pervasive as, and possibly more pervasive than, discrimination based on race, class, or gender.
One wonders, in fact, why the catechism of political correctness rejects the conformity and divisiveness caused by religion while accepting the conformity and divisiveness caused by ethnic loyalty. A religious community, after all, at least claims that it draws distinctions between its members and others because its deity requires a distinction between the holy and the unholy, while an ethnic community can offer no equally compelling justification for the distinction it draws between members and non-members.
If Dowd and others on the political left care about religious freedom and demonization of others, they would do well to complete the academic trinity and take seriously their rhetoric about the need to respect religious differences. Bigotry is bigotry--even when the victim happens to be baptized.J.R. Wilheim is a Columbia College senior concentrating in religion and history.