Faith it is

There is near consensus that the only poll prediction that came through in the end was the barely heard one about the religious people swing...

There is near consensus that the only poll prediction that came through in the end was the barely heard one about the religious people swinging it. Exit polls appear to confirm the decisive coming of age of a new block of voters in America: the 8216;8216;values voter8217;8217;. He or she is the person who voted, most of all, for 8216;8216;moral values8217;8217;. He or she is the person who did not really vote for those other issues that occupied vast media acreage in the run-up to November 2: Iraq, terrorism, the economy, healthcare. Conservative evangelicals have been in US politics for decades. But this year, they became a decisive factor. Bush won their vote by a 8216;8216;crushing margin8217;8217;.

In the liberal bastions of America, they8217;re still trying to cut through the heavy gloom. In The New York Times, Garry Wills wrote an Op-ed titled 8216;The Day the Enlightenment Went Out8217;. 8216;8216;Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?8217;8217; asked the Professor of History. Katha Pollit8217;s regular column in The Nation went under the title 8216;Mourn8217;. 8216;8216;Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, 8216;safety8217;8217; through torture, backlash against women and gays8230;a my-way-or-the-highway President8217;8217;.

In Britain, where most major publications had also supported Candidate Kerry and declared it loudly, almost as if they had a vote, they8217;re equally dismayed. 8216;8216;It is foolish to pretend that the world salutes Mr Bush8217;s triumph8217;8217;, wrote The Guardian. Columnist and writer Timothy Garton Ash just could not believe that the energetic voters in the endless queues he had seen in America8212;8216;8216;8216;It8217;s South Africa!8217; was my first thought8217;8217;8212;didn8217;t add up for Kerry. Why turn out for the first time unless you wanted a change8212;he asked, plaintively.

But not everyone8217;s been blaming the voter. Many are trying to catch up with the new phenomenon that is overtaking liberal America. A magazine cover story just before the polls in The New York Times presciently delved into the story of Chuck Ripka, a mortgage banker who, when he is not approving mortgages, or especially when he is, 8216;8216;lays his hands on customers and colleagues, bows his head and prays8217;8217;. Ripka sometimes says to people, 8216;8216;Come on over to the church8212;I mean the bank8217;8217;. It8217;s like the first century AD, said the NYT, when Christianity was not a churchbound institution but an 8216;8216;ecstatic Jewish cult traveling humanity8217;s byways8217;8217;.

The NYT said that Ripka is only holding up one end of a sprawling and vigorous 8216;8216;faith-at-work8217;8217; movement that is now spilling beyond the Bible Belt. Thousands of businesses in America, big and small, are making room for Christianity on the job. The idea is that 8216;8216;Christians have for too long practiced their faith on Sundays and left it behind during the workweek8217;8217;. The word of the church is now filling the 8216;8216;moral vacuum8217;8217; in the secular spaces.

The paper articulated the legal-constitutional questions that such 8216;8216;workplace ministries8217;8217; raise as they try to integrate faith and work. After all, this is a country in which Thomas Jefferson8217;s metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state has been a defining feature of the landscape. The NYT concluded that the freedom of religious expression trumps many other rights in the US. And the workplace itself is very vaguely defined in law.

Dethroned by law

The Washington Post framed the piquant plight of Vijaykumari Markande in village Pinkapar in Chhattisgarh. In 2000, villagers forced her to run for a seat on the village council. They told her they had to elect a woman from the lower castes under the law that reserves one-third of the panchayat seats for them. She became sarpanch. Then, four years later, just as she was growing into the job and discovering her power, the government dismissed her from the panchayat because she had given birth to her third daughter, bowing to pressure from family members and neighbours for a son. Now, she was told, she had violated a regulation imposed in 2001 that laid down that all elected, local council members could have no more than two children.

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Is a policy that focuses on demographic targets, not on women8217;s education and reproductive healthcare measures, unfair to Vijaykumari Markande? Is the two-child law that eight Indian states have enacted for panchayat members discriminatory in a society where women are not free to decide the number of children they have? The Post quoted an NGO8217;s estimate that more than 4,000 elected local council members, men and women, have lost their jobs in these states.