RELIGIOUS FAITH FINDS ITSELF UNDER SIEGE IN POLITICAL ARENA

Wednesday, amid a flurry of pomp and ceremony, I took the oath to serve a four-year term in the Missouri Senate. The responsibilities that come with that office are awe-inspiring and humbling. We cannot expect government, however, to address much less solve every problem. The following article by Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Bartley is a fine statement of some vitally important truths that we forget at our peril.

As we gather in the year of our lord 1992 to celebrate the most famous holiday of our long-dominant religious faith, the very idea of religious faith finds itself under siege.

The word of God, by decree of nine old men, dare not be heard in the nation's schools. The creche cannot be heard on public property; for the first time since the conversion of Constantine, the state has outlawed the display of Christian symbols. Meanwhile schools distribute condoms, even over the objections of parents. And enlightened opinion cries "freedom of speech" when anyone objects to public subsidies for a display of lustrous photographs of homosexual sadomasochism.

In politics, the religious right, far from taking over the Republic, is being anathematized. Mario Cuomo wins plaudits for eloquence in belaboring Republicans with polo mallets, but Patrick Buchanan is an ogre. It is patently objectionable, even in a gathering of Republican governors, to refer to this as "a Christian nation."

Yet Western Civilization was implanted on these shores by those seeking to practice their version of a Christian faith. And our history has been intertwined with Christianity as with no other faith; those who fought to rid the nation of slavery marched for example to a great hymn concluding "as He died to make men holy let us die to make men free."

Yet this Christian nation has not in the end excluded others. Religious passions, which in other parts of the globe lead to war and murder even today, have here been known but tempered. Our early religious leaders knew firsthand the dangers of persecution, and the Christian strain is not the only one in our history. In particular, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution at the height of the 18th Century Enlightenment, and their predominant values are perhaps best described not as Christian but as Deist.

Yet they recognized and appealed to a Supreme Being. And today, America remains a remarkably God-fearing nation. A study by centers of public opinion in three nations found that 24 percent of Britons and 27 percent of Germans picked this statement as best describing their belief: "I know God exists and I have no doubts about it." In the U.S., 63 percent chose this statement. You'd never guess this from public discourse.

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Now, I understand the wariness about religion in our media and universities populated by the intellectual elite, to which after and for better or worse I belong. I spent my early years in a tiny Minnesota town, an islet of Irish Catholic settlers in a sea of German Lutheran farms. A couple in love had to choose one religion or another, till death might them part. My father, for the sin of Freemasonry, was rejected by both. From there to a Midwestern university town to the metropolis of Chicago to the Sodom of New York, my life has been a flight from provinvial to cosmopolitan.

The mindset that associates religion with the former is one I understand. Today many of the people with whom I identify most closely are not Christians but Jews. I have never been absorbed by contemporary religious issues like abortion (perhaps because the Lutheran catechism I studied four decades ago taught that God does not reveal all his mysteries, and I suspect He is much too wise to let us know precisely when the soul enters the body). From a single-digit age I have understood that religious people can be censorious.

Politically the religious right has been disruptive, as all rising political forces are. Yet we should remember that the first impulse of evangelicals is to live not for this world but the next. Politics was forced upon them by the Supreme Court's judicial pre-emption on abortion and prayer, and in reaction to constant bombardments of the entertainment media.

Detractors of the religious impulse, I've also learned with the passage of time and change of locale, are themselves often intolerant and provincial. If a Michael Medved collects the gaucheries of the silver screen, say, his peers will greet his message with scorn. Legions of journalists prowled Houston seeking displays of zealotry, but I suspect that few if any of them stopped to have a serious conversation with someone who believes in God. It's a shame, for whatever the mutual problems of communication, the seriously religious have something to teach us.

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Looking on society today, indeed, our most serious problems lie in the traditional realm not of state but of church. The problem of crime is manifestly a moral concern. Drug abuse is an issue of character, if not a response to a vacuum in life's meaning. The rise in divorce and illegitimate births is not a good thing; we would be a better society with more intact families. We would be a better society with fewer abortions and more children for adoption. We would have a better society with less casual sex and violence, whether in fiction or fact.

On these matters religion surely has something to teach, despite its own pitfalls and its own charlatans. Regrettably, the most respectable religious denominations have joined in assigning these problems to the state, leaving many of their onetime members little reason to continue. "Fundamentalist" creeds that speak to personal morality are prospering. The great black religious tradition continues strong, almost unnoticed by white elites; with more encouragement it could become an even greater force against the social disorganization of the urban slums.

Christianity has instructed us on moral issues for two millenniums, and Judaism longer still. With or without personal faith, we have been living off this capital; our social pathologies mean it is being rapidly depleted. Rather than denigrating Christianity and religion in general, socially conscious elites ought to be asking what the religious impulse can teach us, and how amid the winds of modernity we might start to replenish the stock of moral guidance it bequeathed us.