Mood:
hungryNow Playing: Obama signs executive order reversing Bush's legacy
Topic: RELIGION IN POLITICS
This week US President Barack Obama decisively and demonstrably turned back the Republican legacy on morality by lifting restrictions on federal funding on embryonic stem cell research. This is a hugely controversial subject in the US, not by the number of supporters for or against the measure, but by the nature and consequences of this presidential fiat. Foremost, one should be clear that the restrictions placed on state funding had very little support from the common people, rightly or wrongly. But the dynamics of law-making is what is turning the heat on.
More than the benefits and the fears of stem cell research is the politics of religion that was on full play in the last eight years, a crucial time that the American scientific community feels has been lost. Coincidentally, this week, according to an American Religious Identification Survey conducted by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the number of people in the US turning apostate is growing alarmingly high. Today, according to that survey, only 75 per cent of Americans call themselves Christian as against 86 per cent in 1990. Americans are not adopting a different religion but they are giving up religion itself, the study found.
Several experts have stated that there is a radical shift towards individualism over the last quarter century. But at the same time, one in three Americans consider themselves evangelical, and the number of people associated with mega-churches has gone up substantially from less than 2,00,000 in 1990 to more than 8-million in the latest survey. But then the same experts also state that the downward spiral in the economy will drive people towards religion.
The other major findings of the study are:
# The percentage of Catholics in the United States has remained steady at about one in four since 1990, while the percentage of other Christians has plummeted from 60 per cent to 50 per cent.
# The percentage of Muslims has doubled since 1990, but remains statistically very small, only 0.3 per cent in the original survey and 0.6 per cent today.
# Mormons have remained steady as a percentage of the population, even as the number of people in the United States has grown. They make up 1.4 per cent of the population.
# The number of Jews in the United States is falling if the category includes only those who define themselves as Jews religiously, but has remained the same if the category includes people who consider themselves ethnically Jewish.
Why this study is significant for the current Administration to take measures like removing the restrictions on embryonic stem cell research is that people have increasingly swayed away from organised religion in that country. One must take note of the fact that President Obama was the first in the history of that nation to have given non-believers a place in the sun, going by his inaugural speech less than two months ago. Also, statistics reveal that white right-wing Christians have not voted in favour of Obama in the last election, in spite of the wide euphoria and hype of a black Democratic leader becoming President for the first time. Barack Obama seems to have seen the writing on the wall.
The argument put forth by many of the analysts is that President Obama does not have much to lose by removing state funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, simply because that vote bank any way will not feel betrayed. But the speed with which Obama has gone about making changes in policy decisions and reverting Bush’s policies regarding major controversial issues, like abortion and now the state funding for stem cell research, make conservatives that much more uncomfortable. But President Obama has quickly learnt that the honeymoon period may not last long for him because of the worsening economic situation in his country, and that such measures have to be taken earlier than later.
After Barack Obama was elected President an interesting study on voting pattern was published which stated something not very obvious. John Green who is an expert in religion and politics at the University of Akron in Ohio conducted the study which revealed that President Obama's share of the vote among white evangelical Protestants was virtually unchanged from that of John Kerry's in 2004. On the contrary Obama had actually lost some ground among white mainline Protestant and white Catholic voters. The fact which will not come as any soother is that Obama had won over the majority of the “modernist” wings of both groups, but not by even the margins than Kerry did.
The conservatives are not against stem cell research itself but against embryonic stem cell research as it will kill embryos, and hence is anti-life. Barack Obama was considered the most extreme pro-abortion member of the US senate. The issue gets a little complicated here as stem cell research itself demands a more mature approach. The embryos produced in vitro for reproductive purposes are now-a-days left frozen in cryopreservation units for future use. Stem cell research on these yet-to-born living babies usually results in the death of the embryo, and that is what Obama’s Republican predecessor George W. Bush took cognizance of. The former president had overtly and covertly been taking up a conservative position which was quite akin to the will of the Church. By signing this executive order on stem cell research, President Obama might as well have conceded that religion is waning in the US.
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Posted by Anil Nair
at 10:44 AM
Updated: Thursday, 12 March 2009 12:31 PM
