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).