The europeanization of American politics?

Is the political debate in the United States taking on the character of post-revolutionary politics in 19th- and 20th-century Europe with the two major parties polarizing along religious lines? Joseph Bottum considers this possibility and is most uncomfortable with it:

I wrote, as though it were perfectly self-evident, “We cannot—we should not—have a party so strongly identified with opposition to religious believers.” And a Europeanized friend emailed to call me on my over-easy assumption: “Why shouldn’t we have one party that is friendly to religion and one unfriendly? That is the pattern in most developed countries, and surely, as the Republican party increasingly takes on the attributes of a European-style Christian Democratic party, it is logical that their opponents take the other position.”

The attribution of cause here is a little one-sided, as though the poor liberals were forced into their un- and anti-religious positions entirely by the conservatives’ donning of the religious mantle. Even the good Democrat Amy Sullivan blames some of this on the way the Democratic party has behaved. Still, my friend’s general point is a good one: The First World pattern has been a Social Democratic party versus a Christian Democratic party, an anti-religious party versus a religious party, and if politics in the United States is starting to match that pattern, why is this surprising or undesirable?

My first answer was that the idea makes my skin crawl—which is just another way of saying I had been assuming that American exceptionalism lets us sidestep this whole wars-of-religion, Westphalia, philosophes, French Revolution, last-king-strangled-with-the-guts-of-the-last-priest European thing.

In a way, I still think that my original assumption is the answer. A developed argument about American exceptionalism and the nature of the American Founding would take us a long way toward understanding why we don’t want religion to be pushed from the shared mainstream over to one side’s shore.

Although I am to some extent sympathetic with Bottum's skin-crawling reaction, I doubt that his protest will win out at the end of the day. As for American exceptionalism, it is certainly true that the settlements that would form the United States at the end of the 18th century were largely spared the political turbulence that plagued the old continent between 1789 and 1815, with the partial exception of the last three years of this period. The American colonies were in many cases founded by devout Christians seeking the freedom to follow their ultimate beliefs.

That said, during the so-called founding era between 1776 and 1800, the political élites were largely nominal Christians at best, imbued with Enlightenment ideals and holding to a vague deism. Thomas Jefferson was the paradigmatic figure of this period. However, at the turn of the new century a series of religious revivals swept through the new republic, significantly altering the face of its public life. After this point evangelical protestantism dominated the expanding nation up until the cultural changes following the Great War.

What makes the United States exceptional, then, is not so much the bundle of ideals said to constitute the American enterprise; it is rather the historic vacillation between the dominance of christian and secular forces, with one in the ascendancy at one time and the other temporarily supplanting it. This is in contrast to Europe where the long range trend has been in one direction: secularization. Is the US finally conforming to this European pattern?

Having been born and brought up in the US, my own sense is that the larger trend, at least at present, is towards a more overt public presence of the traditionally religious. Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate to label himself openly as a "born-again Christian" back in 1976. Prior to that time, explicit claims to a particular confessional identity were all but unknown amongst national political leaders. Since that time, such claims appear almost to be the rule rather than the exception. That such claims find a home more naturally within the Republican than the Democratic Party goes some way in explaining the former's dominance in recent years.

That said, the Republican Party is far from being a European-style christian democratic party, especially considering the presence within its fold of libertarians and free-marketeers. President Bush's "compassionate conservatism" marks, at least in part, a departure from this anti-government support base. But this hardly guarantees the GOP's transformation into a christian democratic party. If anything, Bush, with the best of intentions, has engaged in dangerous overreach, overestimating the power of government in general and the US government in particular, much as Lyndon Johnson did four decades ago.

This suggests to me that, after Bush's departure in 2009, the libertarians may once again find themselves in the ascendancy within their party, as Americans react against the "big-government" conservatism of the younger Bush. This could give the Democrats a window of opportunity, if they are willing to abandon their stance on abortion and reach out to the followers of traditional Christianity and Judaism. If they are not, then the Republicans will likely remain dominant, with frustrated evangelicals and Catholics having no choice but to remain within a party where their influence is less than what it once was but more than in the opposing party. Of course, this may be a blessing in disguise as it could force Christians to grapple with the larger issue of formulating a coherent political philosophy rather than settling for a piecemeal gut response to issues such as abortion, marriage and the like.

What about Canada? That's for a future post.