220) Religion in politics, stupidly.

Religion in politics, stupidly

Oct 19th 2010, 20:07 by D.L. | PHILADELPHIA

THOSE dueling Jack Conway-Rand Paul ads continue to generate online heat. First, Mr Conway uses stories of Mr Paul engaged in college pranks to accuse him of being anti-Christian, then Mr Paul replies by publicly confessing his love for Jesus Christ. Unemployment’s stuck above 9%, we’ve been at war for nearly a decade, the federal government is running enormous deficits, and this is what Kentucky’s Senate candidates are debating? You don’t need to have especially high expectations for democratic government to find the whole spectacle pretty repulsive.

At the same time, though, I think that some of Mr Conway’s liberal critics, such as theNew Republic’s Jonathan Chait, are wrong to assert that "an atheist, which is what I’m pretty sure Paul is, ought to be able to run for office without having his belief system publicly interrogated." And why is that, exactly? I realise that atheists face a particularly high hurdle in running for office in the United States, with a higher percentage of Americans declaring themselves willing to vote for a black (94%), Jewish (92%), female (88%), Hispanic (87%), Mormon (72%), or gay (55%) candidate than for a non-believer (45%). But that doesn’t mean that an atheist’s beliefs should be any more off-limits to public scrutiny than a religious candidate’s.

Some atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, believe that religious education is a form of child abuse. It should be considered perfectly appropriate to ask an atheist candidate whether he agrees with this blatantly intolerant position. Various religious groups, meanwhile, encourage their members to believe things that might clash with the requirements of holding high office. Mormons teach that the head of their church is a prophet of God and his mouthpiece on earth. A large portion of evangelical Protestants affirm biblical inerrancy and reject science as a method for determining the truth about the natural world. Many Pentecostals believe that God is directing world history toward an apocalyptic cataclysm in the Middle East.

All of this is supposed to be off-limits to public scrutiny? Why? Because we want our leaders to conceal their most deeply held and potentially dangerous views? Or is it that we fear that our nominally religious politicians will be forced to admit that their garish displays of public religiosity are a pious sham—a put-on designed to appeal to simple-minded voters who care more about cultural signaling than evaluating the details of competing public policy proposals?

The problem with the dueling Conway-Paul ads isn’t that they raise questions about religion. It’s that they raise those questions stupidly.