In the course of the past three hundred years, the relationship between religion and politics in the United States has been one of frequent shifts in intensity and degree. Sometimes intersecting, sometimes clashing, sometimes operating on parallel tracks, the linkage has been one of the more fascinating aspects of American history and life. In the following conversation, Kenneth D. Wald, professor of political science at the University of Florida, Gainesville, author of a seminal book, Religion and Politics in the United States, discusses this phenomenon. Dr. Wald spoke with U.S. Society & Values editors Michael J. Bandler and William Peters.

Q: The constitutional prohibitions have been interpreted to raise a wall of separation between church and state. Does this preclude the involvement of religion and politics?

Wald: Not at all. The Constitution did clearly establish a secular state or a secular government, but in doing so there was no intent to prevent religion from having an influence in society broadly, and in politics specifically. There were religious ideas that had a strong influence on the Constitution itself, and the nature of the political system that was created. Religious values have been a very powerful influence for a variety of movements, including those to abolish slavery, and to promote civil rights. And religious institutions remain important places where people learn civic norms. So there is no attempt -- and it really would have been impossible -- to rule religion off the political agenda. All the Constitution attempted to do was to say that the state as a government does not take any particular position with regard to religious questions or religious issues.

Q: The Constitution's religious clauses of significance, you write in your book, address "freedom from" versus "freedom of".

Wald: Exactly. The interesting thing about the separation of church and state in the United States is that it really was inspired by two different political movements. The founders of the United States, particularly people like [James] Madison and [Thomas] Jefferson, were very much influenced by the thinking of the French Enlightenment, and they took the position that giving religion state power would produce bad government. The very hostilities the people might have toward other religions would become political hostilities, and the entire system would have trouble surviving.

On the other hand you had the other form; what I call Protestant separationism, which was supported by groups like Methodists and Baptists. They felt that to endow religion with state power would produce bad religion; it would give state sanctions to religions which might be in error, or would limit the religious freedom of other Americans. So there is a kind of two-way street operating in the Constitution -- the sense that religion will do best and government will do best if they flourish independently of one another.

Some people, I think, assume that the Constitution takes a position that is anti-religious, and that's what separation of church and state means. I think quite the contrary. I think that the separation was designed to make religion stronger, provided it focused on an appropriate sphere.

Q: It seems almost as if religion is designed to make the political objective stronger as well.

Wald: Certainly there have been political thinkers who have taken the position that a strong religious sphere is important to the strength of a democratic government. Some people have said that churches are in a sense incubators of civic virtues. It's in churches and congregations that people learn habits of mind and dispositions that may contribute in a positive way to the maintenance of democracy.

Similarly, de Tocqueville argued that you couldn't understand anything about American society unless you first saw that very strong religious base which made a democratic system possible. It taught people to think about means and ends and the importance of taking a long range objective. So there certainly is a stream of thought which says that the founders did intend separation to build a strong religious sector, and that this would be good for the political system as well.

Q: When you refer to what was being taught in the churches, you are basically talking about values?

Wald: Yes. Churches are important to democracies in lots of different ways. On the one hand, churches are institutions where people learn skills and abilities that will enable them to participate effectively in democratic politics. It's been shown, I think very persuasively, that African Americans actually out-participate other Americans, given their level of socioeconomic standing, largely because the churches that they belong to are such powerful schools of political training. In those churches people learn how to give speeches, they learn how to run meetings, they learn how to organize campaigns. They learn a whole host of skills which translate very directly into the political process. So in a sense they are little schools of democratic practice. For many Americans who don't belong to any other organization that gives them these skills, the church is really essential in promoting a broad-based democratic participation.

Similarly, I think you can argue that in their Washington-based representation, churches often provide a voice for people who are otherwise without that voice. The American Catholic Bishops are an example, with their impressive presence in Washington, or the various groups located in the Methodist Building. Theirs are important voices that talk about the needs of the homeless, the needs of people who are defenseless. They simply give a voice to positions that may not be represented by the major interest groups . So I think in ways most intimate in the congregation and much more broadly in terms of a Washington presence, religious congregations do really enhance and bring additional vitality to the government.

Q: This is true, actually, in Jewish circles too. You have a strong representation of Jewish religious groups lobbying in Washington.

Wald: Yes. In fact, you can argue that the extension of the First Amendment, particularly the anti-establishment clause, has really come through minority religious groups that have lobbied for a broader sense of what government should not do to benefit a religion.. Certainly Jewish groups have been at the forefront of almost all of these cases. The late Leo Pfeffer, who represented the American Jewish Committee, was the key litigator. But many of the really critical cases have been argued on behalf of groups like Jehovah's Witnesses, or Seventh Day Adventists, and most recently the Church of Santeria, all of whom have been key actors. Again, I think they expand the rights of all of us by taking these actions.

Q: You earlier referred to the religious roots of the constitution. In your book, you talk about your theory of "inherent depravity" in connection with Puritan theology. As I understood it, this is basically the sense that man is inherently sinful or depraved, and you basically can't trust humankind. The extension of this is that you can't trust any one branch of government; you ought to have checks and balances. Is that correct?

Wald: Yes. One can even call it original sin if one wants. It is a powerful factor that was in the minds of almost everybody at the Constitutional Convention. Jefferson believed we should leave nothing to human virtue that can be provided for by a constitutional mechanism. The sense was that whether you embody government in a single individual like a monarch, or whether you embody it in an elected assembly like a congress, human nature is such that we will abuse the power that we are given, we will try to accumulate as much power as possible, and we will not always be sensitive to the needs of others, particularly those who are less powerful. So the solution to this in the eyes of the founders was not divine kingship which has the same problem, but the creation of a government with so many auxiliary protections for liberty that it becomes very difficult for anybody to abuse power.

The other assumption I find very important in the whole development of American constitutionalism is the idea of the covenant. Most Americans learn this from the Bible; they often learn it from the Mosaic Covenant in which God made certain commitments to the people of Israel if they would follow his laws as provided in the Ten Commandments; or in the covenants with Jesus. In these covenants, God makes an agreement, a contract as it were, with people, providing certain benefits in exchange for certain costs. If God is willing to be limited in this way, it's hard to support an argument for a divine monarch. That kind of thinking is also very important in the Constitution.

Q: Religion as it exists in the United States is not at all monolithic or homogeneous, among the different religions or even within the denominations of particular religions. What happens when these myriad views, credos, interests all converge on the political landscape? How is a cultural war avoided?

Wald: I think that one of the great good fortunes of American life is that we have such a highly diverse and differentiated religious community that in a sense, we are all members of minority religions. The single largest denomination in the United States is Roman Catholicism, and yet that takes in only about twenty five percent of the adult believers, based on most surveys. So in that sense, most of us live in places where there are lots of different religions. I think that has prevented the kind of -- what game theorists would call -- zero-sum situations, which you have in Northern Ireland, or Lebanon, or Bosnia, where you have a majority religion facing a minority religion.

Our diverse religious community, in a sense, has made all of us minority religions at some time or another, and on some issues. So groups often change position based on the issue according to their particular interest. Catholic Americans -- the Catholic Church, for example -- have been very strongly in the pro-life camp that has resisted liberalized abortion. On that issue they have been on very different ground than the American Jewish community, or some other liberal Protestants. Yet on other issues, they have been in the forefront of religious activism because they have a very diverse mandate. So Catholics will change sides; Jews will sometimes work with Evangelicals, sometimes not.

Q: In other words, politics does make strange bedfellows. You have ultra-Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians getting together on more conservative issues, for example.

Wald: Sure. People may think that they have very little in common, but when it comes to issues like school vouchers, or certain other aspects of the process, they find common ground. So in a sense, I think we have been lucky. We have not become like Northern Ireland because every issue isn't simply Catholic versus Protestant with one of the sides foreordained to win. In the American system there is so much difference among religions, so much variety that it's probably preserved some balance, and prevented any one group from becoming dominant.

And the trend in American religion is toward ever more diversity. Since the immigration laws were changed in the sixties, the number of people who are adherents of what are called Eastern or Asian religions has increased significantly. And I think, in a sense, that's the future of American religion: More and more diversity, more and more variation, even within the same denomination.

Southern Baptists, for example, are probably in the process of splitting into two separate denominations. There are two different trends already. American Jews are divided into four or five different traditions or denominations, if you want to use that term. So the pattern, I think, is toward ever greater differentiation. Therefore, I think it's going to make it even less likely that any one faith is going to be dominant.

Q: There's a lot of talk about the success of religious interest groups in lobbying on issues. How are these activities different from those carried on by trade unionists or environmentalists or oil interests and so on?

Wald: I think, broadly speaking, there is a lot of similarity between the way religious interests groups lobby, and how economic interests or labor interests would lobby. There are differences, I think, as well. Religious interest groups, for example, seldom engage in direct campaign contributions in the manner that we associate with political action committees. But in other respects, religious interest groups will do what is called "grass roots" lobbying. They will encourage their members to communicate with public officials. They will host demonstrations and public information campaigns. They will occasionally secure professional lobbyists to represent their point of view. So in some senses they look a lot like some of the secular interest groups.

On the other hand, I think it's important to understand that sometimes the style of lobbying can be very different. Religious interest groups will often argue that they have a prophetic motivation; that is to say they try to bring the insights of their religious tradition to the attention of public officials. In so doing, they deal in a very different currency -- spiritual as opposed to financial. Sometimes this means that they are less likely to win, but they focus on much broader concerns. So sometimes they are very distinctive from the run of the mill.

On occasion, this can take the form of something that I think is very unpalatable. Religious interest groups may take the position that "if you fail to support me on this issue, you are somehow obstructing the will of God." They literally can, on occasion, associate a particular program with a divine mandate. Most religious traditions that I am familiar with would regard that as blasphemy because it, in a sense, connects a religious imperative or a divine mandate with a program of political action, and I would argue that's not what religion does; that's really perverting the goal of religion.

Q: Is that part of the source of the tension over the perceived activities of the radical right; a sense that they are going beyond what is traditionally appropriate in religious expression?

Wald: Well, I think that really comes back to the early eighties, when these groups first began to have a political presence in Washington. The groups that come to mind are the Moral Majority and the Religious Roundtable. These groups were charged in particular with this style of lobbying -- with coming into legislators' offices and saying that God's will is that we pass a certain piece of legislation, a balanced budget amendment, or an anti-abortion amendment, or something of this nature. Basically, in so doing, they were tremendously ineffective because legislators -- and the American public, frankly -- don't like the notion that their sacred tradition is necessarily embodied in a particular political plan.

One of the things that encourages me is that those conservative religious groups have learned some lessons from their failures in the early nineteen eighties. If you compare an organization like Christian Coalition with Moral Majority, which in some ways was its spiritual predecessor, you see a much shrewder and more sensitive approach to religious lobbying. You see a tendency to argue not that this is God's will, but that this is our humble attempt to understand the insights of our tradition as it applies to this issue or policy. And there is much more talking about the religious freedom of students than talking about school prayer.

This is partly a strategic shift. It's clear that Ralph Reed, who runs Christian Coalition, is much shrewder politically than was Jerry Falwell, or many of the people who worked for Moral Majority. In part, though, I think it reflects a learning experience. People have been chastened by some of the feedback they've gotten from their own churches, and some of their own parishioners. They've come to understand that it's important to be modest in linking your policy preferences to your religious views.

There's a prayer that we recite in my congregation on Saturday mornings, for the United States, in which we ask God to give to legislators and public officials the insights of his Torah. It doesn't ask them to convert, it doesn't say that there are particular policies that are consistent with our tradition; others that aren't. It says there are insights in our tradition about what is just, what is fair, what is reasonable, that ought to be factored into the political process. I think that's the level at which most Americans are comfortable with religion in the political process.

Q: In fact, then, the success of this somewhat more sophisticated right is a reaffirmation of how Americans in the middle perceive this entire process?

Wald: Yes, I think that's absolutely right.

Q: I sense that there is a misperception outside the U.S., as to what the outcomes are here, when religious interests attempt to affect national interest politics or policies.

Wald: Yes, I think that's true. When I have lectured overseas, I have seen, really, two massive misperceptions about religion in American politics. One is the assumption that Americans are not religious, and that the Constitutional separation of church and state reflects hostility to religion. I have already indicated that I think that is not the case -- that indeed, many people think it is the absence of a state sanction for religion that has enabled it to be so vigorous. Certainly religion is a more vigorous institution and a more vigorous factor in the United States than it is in almost any society where there has been state support for it. I think there are some interesting free market explanations for this. So that's one misperception that is very powerful. I think it's just belied by the facts.

The other major misperception is that there are some policy areas where religious interest groups totally dominate the process, and there is no example that we hear more often than the American Jewish community and Israel. I think it's interesting that on the one hand, this is probably a policy area where the circumstances, more than any other policy area, do favor interest group impact. This is a policy area which is central to American Jews for a whole series of reasons. Many of them see their identity tied up in important ways with the existence of the State of Israel. It's critical in many cases to the survival and the security of Jews. And it's a policy area where most admit there really isn't any other interest group that's been involved until recently. So you would expect that if there is any policy area where a religious group should be powerful, it would be an area like the Middle East, and a community like the American Jews.

But in point of fact, the evidence suggests that while American Jews have been successful in some important respects, their success is largely because the policies they prefer are interpreted by the president to be in the American national interest. When the American Jews have run up against the Administration, and this is true all the way back to the nineteen fifties, then they've had very little success. For example, they couldn't stop the sale of AWACS planes under the Reagan Administration. They couldn't persuade George Bush to unfreeze loan guarantees to the State of Israel. And I would suspect if Bill Clinton should decide that Israel is not being aggressive enough in pursuing a Middle East peace, the American Jewish community would be able to do very little to prevent him from trying to put more pressure on the State of Israel today. So, if the president is an ally, groups do succeed very well. If the president isn't an ally, then the Jewish community doesn't usually succeed in these things.

Q: Hand in hand with religious tolerance over the years, we've witnessed religious intolerance. On the social and political landscape, is this something that can be deterred or thwarted, and how?

Wald: Well, I think the evidence in America is that on the one hand, speaking at the mass level, there has actually been a growth in religious tolerance. Overt anti-Semitism and overt anti- Catholicism are now clearly phenomena of fringe movements. Americans have shown themselves, for example, much more willing to vote for candidates of minority religious traditions than was ever the case in the past. So in the one sense, I am heartened by the fact that there is less overt religious prejudice; it's less socially acceptable; and affiliation with a minority religion is less of a bar to success.

On the other hand, what worries me is that at the fringes there has been a growth in religiously inspired political violence. We have seen this, for example, in the extreme fringe wing of the anti-abortion movements, with the bombing of abortion clinics and the murder of people who work there. We've also seen it at the fringes in some of the militia movements, primarily in the western states, where the so-called Christian Identity movement has inspired certain murders and assassinations. So in the mainstream the news is good; at the fringe the news is worrisome.

The evidence suggests that the way to counter this sort of violence is, first of all, through aggressive law enforcement which is important -- taking these threats seriously and dealing appropriately with them. The other prong, and what's probably more important, is that communities themselves have to speak up. There was a very heartening case in Billings, Montana, when there was some anti-Semitic vandalism. Members of the committee decided if vandals were targeting houses with menorahs (Jewish holiday candelabra) in the windows during Hanukkah season, everybody in Billings would put menorahs on their window sills. I think when the community makes it clear that it simply doesn't tolerate this kind of behavior, it sends a very powerful message.

Q: Granted that there is nothing new about the linkage between religion and politics in American life, are there any new wrinkles surfacing these days that could have an important impact one way or the other in the years ahead?

Wald: I think there are two really interesting changes that we've seen in the last ten or fifteen years. The first is the political emergence of Evangelical Christians. This is a community that may be as much as twenty five percent of the American public now, which didn't use to have much of an organized political voice. Since 1980, the story has been a much more dramatic, much more assertive political voice for Evangelicals. The results have not always been decorous, and there has certainly been some learning, but by and large, Evangelicals, who used to be politically marginal, have really come into their own.

The other transformation, I think, has been much quieter, but also interesting. It is the changing role of American Catholics. Catholics used to be politically involved, pretty much, only when direct Catholic interests were involved. Questions like public funding for parochial schools, or overt instances of anti-Catholicism used to be the issues that brought Catholics into the political realm.

Now, clearly, Catholics have taken their place on the center stage of American political life, and they've done so in interesting and not always consistent ways. Most of us think of the Catholic church as an opponent of abortion and a driving force of the pro-life movement, but at the same time, the Catholic church has been very active in speaking up on behalf of disadvantaged Americans. In part, this reflects the transition of the American church as it becomes more Hispanic and goes back to its working class roots. In part, I think it represents the impact of the whole series of reforms of Vatican II.

Q: In your book, you argue that ultimately the intertwining of religion and politics in the United States has been both beneficial and detrimental. Could you summarize your views?

Wald: I think any fair-minded person would have to say that religion, on occasion, has ennobled our politics, and caused us to act in the best way we possibly can. The civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties is perhaps the high water mark of religious involvement in a very constructive way in our political system.

On the other hand, any fair-minded person would also say that religion has fueled some of the excesses. It's as if religion sometimes licenses an extra savagery when people mix it with politics. There have been events that many of us would be ashamed about: The bombing of the abortion clinics, the violence among the militia movement, are two recent examples.

To my mind, the connection between religion and politics is good or bad depending on the way people bring their religious values into the political process. I think if they subscribe to the sort of triumphalist notion that they have all the answers, and all we need is to subordinate our political system to our clear religious traditions, then you're going to have problems.

I think our religious traditions are subtle; applying them to the political sphere requires some degree of modesty, some sense that we only dimly perceive the implications of our religious faith in the secular realm. When people approach it with modesty, and tolerance, and understand that when you speak in the public square, you need to speak a public language, then I think that kind of religion and that kind of religious impulse is very constructive.

I've learned a lot from people with whom I disagree politically, when they've explained to me the religious basis of their policy preferences. When people shout at me, when people tell me that their way is the only way, that God has spoken clearly on policy questions, then I don't pay much attention, and I don't think our political life is in any way ennobled. To my mind, it all depends on the attitude with which one finds a link between the religious and the secular.

Q: And the presentation.

Wald: Very much so.