Vatican Insider
December 1, 2011
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/the-vatican/detail/articolo/usa-estados-unidos-us-cattolici-catholics-catolicos-10316/
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| American Catholics |
In the aggressive and well-assorted exercise of Washington lobbyists who assail Congress and other palaces of federal U.S. power, the religious component is growing exponentially. A socio-statistical report just published by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, about religiously-oriented lobbying operative on Capitol Hill and at the White House enters into details about a phenomenon that expresses in singular fashion the recent dynamics of the Catholicism of the Stars and Stripes.
Described with the habitual dry competence of the research center that analyzes the connections between religion and public life in the States, the document presents a scenario in full swing. In “Lobbying for the faithful: groups of religious patronage in Washington D.C.” (the title of the Pew Forum's report), what emerges most clamorously is the growth recorded in the sector of “religious lobbying” in recent decades. The number of organizations employed in religiously-motivated lobbying in Washington square alone has quintupled in the last four decades: in 1970 there were less than forty, now there are more than 200. These groups employ at least 1,000 persons in the capital and spend at least 390 million dollars a year on their initiatives aimed at conditioning national politics.
Such growth, laid out according to confessional differences, reproduces in its own way the kaleidoscope of religious belonging that marks life in American society. Roughly a fifth of the lobby of religious inspiration present with offices and staff in Washington D.C. are related to the Catholic Church. An analogous portion is represented by groups linked to evangelical Protestantism. The percentage of the groups connected in various ways to Judaism is listed around 12 percent, while both Islam and the churches of historical Protestantism show 8 percent of the religious lobby in the U.S. But the most crowded section of this galaxy sui generis is that of a “transversal” interreligious stamp. A fourth of the 212 lobbies monitored by the Pew Forum in the 2008-2010 period defend needs connected in various ways with a religious view of reality without representing individual confessions.
The network of groups covered by the report certainly does not exhaust religious lobbies in the United States. The research concentrates only on the groups that have opened offices in the capital and that dialogue with the central federal administration. This includes spontaneous free associations but also offshoots of hospitals, TV networks and think tanks (8 percent). Only 15 percent of the groups officially represent defined religious entities and defend the official interests of individual denominations. The study does not consider the myriad lobbies of religious shading that operate on the level of the individual states and local administrations. But already the evolutionary physiognomy of the sample examined reflects in a visible manner the trajectories traveled by U.S. society and churches over the decades.
The first associations of permanent defense of the public needs of religious communities had already set up shop in Washington by the end of the eighteen hundreds, when churches became involved in the assistance programs for Native Americans. By the Twenties the Catholic Church had taken on a predominant role in religious lobbying, upon input from the episcopate itself. In the Forties, the National Catholic Welfare Conference had the largest staff among religious pressure groups. The postwar period – after the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel – saw a proliferation of Jewish groups, with the opening in Washington of the offices of the Anti-Defamation League and of the American Israel Public Affair Committee. In the Eighties, there arrived even Scientology and the Mormons of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
The changing profile of religious lobbying – besides from that resulting from new entries and by the seasons of greater or lesser protagonism of the various members – is highlighted above all in the variations of the collective agenda. In the first decades of last century, the religious groups mobilized to obtain important civil and social aims – an end to child labor, women's suffrage – or more strictly confessional aims. The Methodists focused their battles against the use of alcohol and drugs. At the end of the Sixties, the Central Committee of the Mennonites opposed the war in Vietnam by opening an office in Washington in 1968.
Currently, there are more than 300 topics addressed by religious lobbies. After the Seventies, in concomitance with the phenomenon's expansion, the panorama fractured and there was a multiplication of groups acting on single themes, such as the committee of activists for Tibetan independence and the Uygur American Association, which defends the Chinese Islamic minority of the Uyguris. But one also detects eloquent oscillations in the most beaten threads of religious lobbying. If the relations with the state and the campaigns for civil rights remain the order of the day, one witnesses an expansion of the lobbying initiatives regard ethically sensitive themes. Even the turnover of waning groups and those making their first appearance on the scene offers suggestive interpretive keys: gone are the groups for the fight against alcohol (which were very strong in the transitional years between the eighteen and nineteen hundreds), and even the Sanctuary Movement has closed its doors, a coalition of 500 Christian congregations that in the Eighties opposed the Reagan administration's policies in Central and South America. Now proliferating are the groups mobilizing on the topic of abortion, including the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, that justifies the depenalization of abortion practices with spiritual-religious arguments. Even the fights over the legalization of homosexual marriage have seen religious lobbyists take the court for (Human Rights Campaign) and against (The National Organization for Marriage, which landed in Washington in 2009 with expenses of nearly 9 million dollars).
The analysts of the Pew Forum frame the escalation of religiously-inspired lobbying within the general increase of public exposure to religious realities that has marked American society in recent decades. Their report did not explore the fundraising mechanisms that expose even “religious” lobbies to maneuvering for non-transparent political operations. Just as it was not their task to note the similarities between the activism of the pressure groups and the processes of “lobbifying” that occur within the ecclesial fabric of many churches, conceived these days as a noisy, ruthless pile of corps and minorities, in continual conflict with one another and the world to make their weight felt and gain visibility.
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