The number of blacks and Hispanics elected to office in American cities has grown dramatically. The media frequently report on their victories in local elections and run features on black and Hispanic mayors. From none in 1960, there are now 27 black and three Hispanic mayors of cities with populations over 50,000 (Joint Center, 1985; National Association of Latino Elected Officials, 1986).

The trend is obvious, its significance disputed. Is it likely to continue, or can we already see signs of reversal? How much power do local black and Hispanic officials have? How was it achieved? And what difference does it make in any case? Can blacks and Hispanics in office strike a better bargain with the investors and financial institutions they depend on for development than previous administrations? In a period of fiscal stringency and reduced federal spending, can they carve out a larger piece of the municipal pie for minority populations? Can minority officeholders make any headway against the growing tide of unemployment and poverty, as help from the federal level is dismantled? Although the growing number of minority officials suggests political integration and racial/ethnic succession, do the limited powers of cities in a federal system and a capitalistic society render that apparent gain more symbolic than real?

Relations between American democracy and religion have always been somewhat equivocal.

On the one hand, moral and ethical principles derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition have been a major source of democratic values. Religion was an important motivating factor in both the colonization of North America and the American Revolution. The Founding Fathers set such high store by religion that they included its free exercise along with free speech and a free press among the liberties specifically protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Organized religion played a key role in such drives to perfect democracy as the abolition of slavery, the enactment of woman's suffrage, and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Perhaps most important, the so-called Protestant ethic provided the moral bedrock on which republican institutions were built.

On the other hand, democratic theorists and much of the general public have been wary of the absolutist social outlook often associated with religion. Practically all religions claim to embody ultimate truths about the nature of the universe and the human condition. At some level, therefore, they can hardly be tolerant of rival beliefs. Religious bodies can avoid social intolerance by acknowledging that human imperfection clouds and corrupts the judgments of all institutions, including the churches, or by limiting their social pronouncement to broad moral directives. In practice, however, individuals or institutions claiming to represent transcendent moral authority are often tempted to attach certainty to their opinions on complex issues in secular politics.

During the past generation, the view has arisen that a liberal polity must remain systematically neutral on the widest possible range of moral and religious questions. During this same period, religious fundamentalism has attained an influence not seen in the United States for more than half a century. It is my thesis that these two developments are intimately related and that, considered together, they have much to teach us about public morality in a liberal society.

Early liberal theorists worked to disentangle civil society from destructive religious quarrels. But they nevertheless assumed that civil society needed morality and that publicly effective morality rested on religion. Juridical liberalism, which focused on the exercise of liberty and the limits of government, presumed a foundation of individual moral restraint. While the civil authority in a liberal society need not directly enforce this moral code in most cases, it should certainly encourage that morality—at the very least, by refraining from utterances and policies that undermine it.

This understanding of the proper relation among politics, morality, and religion dominated the American Founding. It suffused Tocqueville's analysis. In clearly recognizable form, it survived well into the twentieth century. In the past generation, however, this understanding came under attack, and the delicate balance between juridical liberalism and its social preconditions was disrupted. Influential philosophers argued that the essence of liberalism was public neutrality on the widest possible range of moral issues.

Protest Is Not Enough is partly a report on the politics of black and Hispanic mobilization in ten northern California cities and partly an effort to formulate a theory useful for the study of minority mobilization and its significance in cities generally. The cities are San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, Stockton, Berkeley, Richmond, Hayward, Vallejo, and Daly City. We did not expect to generalize the particulars of our ten cities to others, but we did try to cast our concepts and fundamental relationships at a sufficiently general level to encompass a wide variety of cities, and we hoped that the application of our framework to other cities would suggest ways in which it should be extended or altered.

The Theory

We wanted a conception of minority political action and position that linked mobilization to policy, that demonstrated the connection between the passions, interests, and actions of mobilization and the governmental response—if any. It was apparent that blacks and Hispanics achieved a much stronger and more positive response to their interests in some cities than in others. It was apparent also that minority representation in elective offices, the customary way of describing their political position, did not capture the strength of the minority position in the more responsive city governments. The key to the higher levels of responsiveness was not representation but coalition: minority inclusion in a coalition that was able to dominate a city council produced a much more positive governmental response than the election of minority council-members who were not part of the dominant coalition.

In their 1984 book Protest Is Not Enough Browning, Marshall, and Tabb suggest that biracial coalitions are powerful vehicles for achieving minority incorporation in the political life of cities. They argue that black electoral mobilization and subsequent incorporation depend on both the relative size of the black community and white support. Similarly, Hispanic incorporation is a function not only of the percentage of Hispanics in the population but also joint membership with blacks in a liberal coalition (pp. 245–246).

Their optimistic view of biracial and multiracial coalitions contrasts strikingly with the more common pessimism about cross-racial politics. Racial polarization in such major cities as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia (as well as in a number of medium and smaller-sized cities) has fed the belief that the black protests and white backlash of the 1960s have doomed biracial politics.

Protest Is Not Enough focuses on ten small and medium-sized Northern California cities. The largest, San Francisco, is the 16th most populous city in the U.S. But biracial coalition politics has been most advanced in Berkeley, a city of only 103,328 in 1980. Thus the book's argument is vulnerable to the challenge that full-blown biracial politics worked only in a rather small, unusual city and otherwise had a significant impact in cities of only moderate size in the traditionally liberal Bay Area.

Is religion being politicized in Latin America? The question is commonly asked today, but rests only in part on concern with Latin American events themselves. To be sure, religious issues, groups, and people have lately been salient in the politics of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, or Chile—to name only some of the more familiar cases. But the question has deeper roots in a general North American concern with the potential of politicized religion to spur social protest and political change in cases otherwise as distinct as Iran, Poland, Southern Africa, Lebanon, the Philippines, or Latin America itself. Much of this concern is also clearly a refraction of puzzlement here at home with the resurgence of religious issues into national political discourse. These considerations suggest that finding answers to questions about the politicization of religion requires as much attention to the meaning of the questions themselves and to the assumptions built into their posing, as to the search for specific instances of politicized religion in Latin America today.

Questions about the politicization of religion arise from longstanding intellectual traditions which make religion secondary to supposedly more immediate, real, or rational social, economic, or political forces. When religion as an issue or religiously inspired groups do appear in political arenas, they are seen as interlopers, aberrant and likely short-lived phenomena. From this vantage point, religion appears mostly as a survivor from the past, doomed to privatization and ultimate disappearance.

Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall, and David Tabb present some straightforward and convincing theses in their admirable work Protest Is Not Enough. Urban policy responsiveness to minority interests, they argue, depends not so much on the direct impact of protest as on the advent of a dominant liberal coalition in which blacks and Hispanics have some role. Where such coalitions have not succeeded, racial exclusion and policy resistance tend to hold sway. Where blacks or Hispanics have played a leading role in bringing such a coalition to power, or in Browning, Marshall and Tabb's terms where political incorporation has been greatest, then policy results favor minority interests. Political incorporation depends on protest and electoral mobilization among blacks and Hispanics combined with favorable white attitudes toward minority interests. The size of the minority community and its leadership capacity in turn explain minority political mobilization.

By these propositions, New York City should be characterized by substantial black and Hispanic political incorporation and the resulting targeting of policy outputs on minority interests. In the 1980 Census, New York's population was 23.9% black and 19.9% Hispanic; these numbers may have been substantially undercounted. In any case, two-thirds of a decade later New York is clearly a majority minority city. Black political participation dates from Adam Clayton Powell and Benjamin Davis' election to the city council in 1941 and 1943. The first Puerto Rican assemblyman was elected on the Republican and American Labor Party lines in 1938. Subsequently, both groups have had a long and sophisticated history of political participation. From the 1960s onward, a new generation of leadership led both groups to assert their political demands more strongly. The Lindsay administration afforded a national model of how a new liberal coalition could experiment with new forms of political incorporation. Voting in state and national elections would suggest the city is on the liberal end of the urban political spectrum. In short, by Western lights New York should be a model of strong minority incorporation and the consequent targeting of city policies toward minority interests. The problem, however, is that New York City has not incorporated minorities and, depending on what indicators are chosen, has not produced policies that are especially aimed toward minorities.

Participant observation has provided some of our most impressive insights into the contemporary Congress. In particular, two scholars relied upon this method for results that must be regarded as shaping our current paradigm on Congress and its members: David Mayhew, who, six years after serving as an APSA Congressional Fellow, published his essay, Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974), and Richard Fenno, who traveled with representatives and senators in order to assess how members of Congress interact with their constituents and the impact of those interactions upon their performances in Washington in Home Style (1978) and its companion volume on the Senate (1982).

Despite the influence of these works, some ambiguities remained when I began my stint as a Congressional Fellow in the fall of 1984. For one thing, Mayhew and Fenno had reached different conclusions regarding the impact of the need to run for reelection. Mayhew asserted that congressional behavior and congressional outcomes could be explained solely by the goal of getting reelected; on the other hand, Fenno contended that members could establish separate “home styles” and “Washington styles,” as leeway in the latter increased with more successful presentations of self back home. Likewise, whereas Mayhew made no distinction between the strength of the electoral incentive for representatives and senators, Fenno argued that having longer terms than representatives provided much more temptation for senators to do something besides merely run for reelection. A second ambiguity was that most of Mayhew's and Fenno's fieldwork was accomplished in the early to mid 1970s, before the sea-change in American politics best symbolized by Ronald Reagan's election and the dramatic shifts in policy and in political style that ensued (see especially Edsall, 1984; Chubb and Peterson, 1985). While studies suggest that congressional decision-making has changed only slightly in the Reagan years (e.g., Smith, 1985), the altered electoral environment may have produced far-reaching changes in how the electoral connection shapes Congress.

Few subjects arouse emotions like religion and politics. And when combined, few subjects raise more obstacles to balanced and objective scholarly analysis. Many strong and competing biases among both religious and political groups together with a scholar's own ideological and religious views may make it difficult to examine dispassionately the issues raised.

Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority on the right and Norman Lear's People for the American Way on the left pose perplexing problems for American democracy. Each group speaks fervently with immodest assurance that its views of American democracy is correct.

Comments by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and former Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti contrast between these polarized positions. Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard University commencement address charged that humanism “started Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs. … As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed its concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism” (Solzhenitsyn, p. 53). Giamatti, on the other hand, has condemned groups like the Moral Majority by saying they “would sweep before them anyone who holds a different opinion” (The New York Times, September 1, 1981, p. 1).