Religious Divide Cited for US, European Political Differences

(CNSNews.com) - The ideological clash between the United States and certain European countries over the war in Iraq and other foreign policy/cultural matters may have as much to do with a religious divide between those countries as anything else, experts in religion and public policy told CNSNews.com.

While faith-based organizations play a significant role in American politics, the experts said, similar organizations in Europe are far less influential. The political influence of American faith-based groups also appears connected to the importance individual Americans place on religion.

According to recent findings by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, sponsored by the Pew Research Center for the People the Press, 59 percent of Americans identified religion as an important part of their lives. In contrast, 11 percent of the French, 14 percent of Russians and 33 percent of Britons said religion was important to them.

"Europe is decidedly a post-Christian society," said Dr. Richard Lessner, executive director of the Family Research Council's American Renewal Project. "Faith is far less important in the daily lives of Europeans. Their institutions are not rooted in a particular faith point-of-view. They are thoroughly secular societies, with a very different national history from the national history of America."

Robert Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, agreed that religion plays a larger role in American politics than in Europe.

"If you look at the Bush administration, a lot of its initiatives are aimed at religious groups. There's clearly an understanding on the part of the administration that religious groups hold a significant amount of political power in this country, and they want to play to that," said Boston.

The effort to reach out to religious groups is neither a recent trend nor exclusive to the Bush administration, however. Boston said. "I really can't think of a presidential administration in modern history that hasn't had some sort of outreach to religious organizations."

Religious divide includes religious expression

The different levels of religiosity in America and Europe are also reflected in how the average citizens on the two continents feel about religious expression.

"In [Europeans'] minds, the outward expression of religion in the public sphere is almost instantaneously worrisome," said Melissa Rogers, executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion Public Life. In America, on the other hand, "it is viewed as more of a routine, as a basic right, because of one's humanity, to express religion. It doesn't carry any destabilizing connotations."

Rogers pointed to the recent efforts of the French government to ban the wearing of traditional Muslim headscarves at public schools. French President Jacque Chirac appeared to give his support to such a ban by declaring secularism as the bedrock of the French republic and claiming a need "to put limits on the public expression of one's own characteristics."

But Americans generally have an unlimited legal right to express their religion in public, Rogers said, adding that a ban on headscarves would not pass constitutional muster in the U.S.

While public officials in Europe rarely express their faith or belief in God, President George W. Bush identified Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher during the 2000 presidential primary campaign. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, one of the president's closest friends, also told USA Today that Bush privately believes he was called by God to lead the United States through this current period of history.

Boston, from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said that in the months prior to the war, his organization received many inquiries from the foreign press interested in writing about Bush's religiosity.

"They were trying to explain this to their audiences because they didn't understand it," said Boston. "From what I've heard, even something fairly benign like the president ending his speeches in 'God bless America.' That just isn't done in European countries. Even those sort of symbolic uses of religion are seen as rather unusual expressions by Europeans."

Cultural divide

As a result of the larger religious influence in the United States, certain cultural issues like abortion continue to sharply divide the American public, Lessner said, unlike the situation in Europe.

"Because Americans remain a more religious people than Europeans, you see 30 years after Roe v. Wade there is still a profound debate in this country over the sanctity of life and the morality of abortion. That's almost non-existent in Europe," Lessner said.

The issue of homosexuality also prompts little debate in Europe, Boston said. "There has just been an understanding that an adult's sexuality just isn't the business of the state, and the fact that some members of the clergy might not like it really isn't persuasive to people," he added.

But the most profound evidence of a religious divide between the United States and Europe, the experts said, lies in the foreign policies practiced by the U.S. and European nations, especially their handling of terrorism and "rogue states," said Joseph Loconte, a religion fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"The Europeans are having a harder and harder time knowing how to anchor human rights and human dignity in anything solid because they don't believe ultimately in a transcendent moral code," Loconte argued.

Recognizing evil

"On what basis do you defend human dignity?" Loconte asked. "We look at certain situations and say: 'That's simply evil, it offends our moral sensibilities, and we need to confront it, oppose it, resist it and overcome it.' Europeans look at some situations, and I think they're more naive about the tyrannical power of evil regimes - much more naive than Americans are, even though they accuse us or the president of being simple-minded in that way.

"So the ability to see evil clearly, to identify it clearly and to realize that it has to be resisted - that to me is an understanding that is usually grounded in a religious world view," Loconte said, "and is a better foundation for foreign policy than a Machiavellian power struggle, which refuses to make any real distinctions between terrorists and freedom fighters."

Loconte believes that because of its religious heritage, America has a realistic view of human nature, a view that accepts the biblical concept of a fallen, imperfect man. Because of that view of human nature, he added, the United States is more likely to take a realistic approach to foreign policy.

"Most people say that there are these deep cultural differences between Europe and the United States. Well, what's at the heart of culture? At the heart of culture [is] a set of moral and religious convictions. It gets back to views of God, views of the state and views of human nature. And that's where the American experiment is really utterly distinctive, in that our government reflects a certain view of human nature - a sober realism about the limits and the dark side of human nature, which the Europeans don't seem to grasp," Loconte said.

"But I think that's a very useful foreign policy principle, that human nature is deeply selfish and has a great capacity for evil - it also has a great capacity for good and heroism - but an amazing capacity for evil," added Loconte.

The Family Research Council's Lessner agreed that religion was the foundation of American society and the source of the disconnect existing between America and Europe.

"Religion is a matter of the fundamental way you organize your society and your government," he said. "It goes to the issue of what are the basic assumptions on which the two societies organize. And they're profoundly different visions. One is very much informed by religion, and the other is thoroughly secular."

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