BuzzFlash Interviews Gary Hart

Senator Gary Hart Challenges the Unholy Alliance of 'Faith' and Government

BuzzFlash: America is composed of many different faiths. Even within Christianity, there are many different denominations and viewpoints. Sometimes we lose sight of that, because the far right – the Pat Robertson right and the Jerry Falwell right – tend to assert themselves as though they’re speaking for all of Christianity. They’re really speaking for a small segment of Christianity.

Gary Hart: No question. It’s not that they tend to – it’s that they assume to. It’s an assumption that they are the spokespersons for all Christianity, and that’s underwritten in everything they say. There's a man who appears on TV from the Southern Baptist Convention – when you listen to him talk, he positions himself as a spokesperson for all Christianity. This is not true, and I think it’s particularly dangerous for people who are not Christians and who do not quite understand the complexity of, first of all, the Reformation and the split between Protestantism and Catholicism, and then the multiplicity of Protestant denominations. There are lots of variations, by the way, in Catholicism, as well. But among the Protestants, each tends to design his own church. And clearly the people on the right had no authority to speak for other Christians.

On the other hand, part of the blame rests with the so-called mainstream Christian churches that haven’t done a very good job of communicating a different message to the public at large. If you asked a hundred Americans what the Methodist position on the war was, they’d probably guess it was in support.

BuzzFlash: In God and Caesar in America, there is a section called "The Tyranny of the Faithful: The Dangers of Theocracy." Perhaps you can take us back in history a bit. We’ve certainly covered on BuzzFlash the issue of separation of church and state. Our Constitution was in some way the fruit of the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, when people accepted God and the divine, but said religion was something that should exist separate from the state, because the states in Europe were theocracies. In essence, much of early America was a rebellion against theocratic states and monarchies.

Gary Hart: No question. The Founders had in mind, if not from direct experience, certainly the vivid recollection of the history of the intertwining of the church and the state in their ancestral homes in Europe. That kind of theocracy resulted in all kinds of disasters involving the picking of kings, and kings inaugurating popes, and the repression of enlightened thought. That’s why they felt so strongly about all this. And all I warn about here, and I think others have as well, is that you don’t have to slip very far back into that before it begins to happen. I have a couple of passages where I say, here’s what a theocracy is like, and then say, if we’re not there already, we’re very close. The vaguely defined "White House" – probably Karl Rove – calls James Dobson, or makes a conference call to a select group of religious figures to seek approval of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, or policy issues. To submit any judge – for their approval – that’s virtually a theocracy right there – very dangerous.

BuzzFlash: You provide some extremely enlightening analysis of the issue of separation of church and state. You make the point that some of the Founders feared that, if a religion became too identified with the state, the religion itself would ultimately become impure and tainted by the political process. It wasn’t just a question of the state becoming a theocracy, but of the religion itself starting to become corrupted by the machinations of politics.

Gary Hart: It works both ways. The separation was not just to protect the state from the church, but to protect the church from the state. The people who are trying to insert themselves into positions of authority in government, through the Republican Party, ought to be awfully careful, because the same state that takes them in is a state that can turn around and, if it chooses to, by using the same authority, begin seriously to condition their behavior. People with a bit in their teeth, and the arrogance of power, don’t think that way, but they ought to.