The Public Eye Magazine

The Public Eye, Spring 2008

After the 2000 presidential campaign, I felt a shock of recognition when I read that the George W. Bush Administration planned to use its “faith-based” funding to support organizations to encourage women, especially welfare recipients, to marry. The rationale was that marriage would cure their poverty. Wade Horn, appointed by Bush to be in charge of welfare programs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), had been the titular head of “fatherhood movement.”

The same right-wing populist fears of a collectivist one-world government and new world order that fueled Cold War anticommunism, mobilized opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, and spawned the armed citizens militia movement in the 1990s, have resurfaced as an elaborate conspiracy theory about the alleged impending creation of a North American Union that would merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

One of the most remarkable, and least remarked upon, features of the contemporary discussion of faith in public life is that a defining feature of the religious right worldview has filtered deeply into mainstream and even progressive thought. This defining feature is the idea that somehow God, and/or Christianity, and/or “people of faith” are being driven from “the public square.”