On religion in the public sphere

Some disjointed and not all that well-thought out thoughts on the subject:

One.  Blanket statements like "religion has no place in the public debate" are criticisms of the Civil Rights movement, Abolition, the anti-war movements of the 1950s and early 1960s, late 19th Century and early 20th Century Progressivism, Roosevelt's own feelings about the New Deal, the anti-death penalty movement, the prison reform movement, activism and politics in African-American neighborhoods and communities, and even the push for Independence in 1776.

Americans have always been and still are a God-bothering people and a God-bothered people.  Their feelings and thoughts about what makes a just society and how to bring it about are informed by and driven by their feelings and thoughts about what God wants them to do.  This doesn't make us a Christian nation or even a non-secular one.  It just makes us one with a lot of people in it who cannot separate an argument for doing the right thing from an argument about how to get right with the Lord.

They are not going to shut up about it because progressive bloggers don't like it.

Two.  No one should expect you to be persuaded by any argument that is based wholly or partly on their religious beliefs.   The difference between Martin Luther King and someone like Jerry Falwell ought to be too obvious to have to mention, but just as a start, King did not begin and end his arguments with God says what I say and you're going to hell if you don't do what I tell you God says.

Still, the number of atheistic, agnostic, pagan, Buddhist, wiccan, and otherwise non-mainstream religion practicing Progressive bloggers relative to the number of non-blogging Americans who keep the Sabbath by going to church, synagogue, or mosque is very, very, very small, so we should not be surprised that when politicians address their arguments to the public at large they don't tailor them to take into account our vanity and egos.  Especially when we're not even in the room.

Three.  A lot of what gets peddled as Christianity in the public sphere is pure snake-oil.  It's meant to bring the suckers into the tent and get them to open their wallets.  The Media falls for this all the time because most members of the Media don't give a damn and think the suckers should get what they deserve but also because their bosses are trying to sucker the same suckers into watching their news shows and buying their newspapers and magazines.  This doesn't mean that it's all snake-oil.

Four.  A lot of what Right Wing Christian pastors preach is just plain wrong.  Their arguments aren't even close to Christian.  They're based on willful misreadings of the Bible and plain ignorance on the subjects of their own religion and history.  There has been no shortage of conservative Christians writing books and articles about how Jesus wants us all to be rich.  (See also Three above.)

But in a debate between supposed men and women of God purporting to know what Jesus wants and people dismissing the words of Jesus as irrelevant people who want to know what Jesus says aren't going to listen to latter at all.

Five.  Progressives routinely and rightly stand up for and preach respect for the beliefs of religious minorities, but if they do it while sneering and scoffing at the religious beliefs of the majority they aren't fooling anyone.  Making fun of a belief in a white-bearded magician in the sky is implicitly making fun of a belief in Allah, Krishna, and the Great Spirit and believers of all kinds know it.  Dismissing mainstream religious beliefs as mere superstition and bigotry while standing up for the people who believe that rocks have magical healing powers and getting totally whacked out on mushrooms is the path to enlightenment expresses a cognitive dissonance that will strike most intelligent observers as indistinguishable from willfull stupidity or hypocrisy.

Six.  The Media tend to conflate the words "Evangelical" and "Christian" and use both to describe Right Wing Republicans Who Go to Church A Lot and they do it in a way that implies that the Right Wing Republicans Who Go to Church A Lot are representative of all Christians, including Catholics and more traditionally aligned Protestants.  That's their mistake, but we shouldn't make it ours.

Although many if not most Evangelicals attend non-affiliated churches, Evangelicalism isn't a separate form of Christianity like Lutheranism or Presbyterianism.  It's a variation practiced across the board.  And it's not a political monolith.  Although over the last 25 years most have tended to vote Republican, millions and millions of evangelicals have voted Democratic.  Evangelicalism is not inherently conservative.  In fact, it is inherently Progressive, and at one time the Progressive movement in this country was dominated by evangelical Christians, like William Jennings Bryan.

In trying to woo the votes of evangelicals, then, Barack Obama is not chasing Right Wing votes, although he may be trying to win over people who have previously voted Republican because they were under the impression that the Republican Party was the party of Christian values.  And he doesn't need to win over many to turn the tide of the election in any number of Red and Purple precincts and Congressional districts.

Plus, there are signs that, even among conservative evangelicals, younger evangelicals are not as conservative as their parents when it comes to the environment, gay and women's rights, and issues of social justice---in other words, they are nascent Progressives and there's an opportunity to win them over to the Democratic Party not just for this election but for good.

Seven.  Over the last 60 or more years, the Democratic Party's most loyal, active, and consistent constituency has been African-Americans and African-Americans are, generally, sincere and devout Christians---evangelical Christians too, many of them.

Black churches have always been centers of community activism.  Black Democrats do not tend to separate their religious beliefs from their political ones.

Barack Obama came of age politically working for and representing black neighborhoods and communities.  He is sincerely and devoutly religious himself.  It shouldn't be surprising that his rhetoric and his politics are informed by his beliefs, nor should it be surprising or troubling that he continues to address the very people who have always been the core of his political base and that their feelings and concerns mean more to him than the vanities and egos of Progressive bloggers.

On top of that, it is vital that he carry the Hispanic vote in the Southwest and Florida and while Hispanics are, generally, Catholics, evangelical Protestantism has been a growing force within the community.

Eight.  Therefore it ought not to be all that troubling or surprising that Obama has been attending the Forum on Faith and sounding very religious while he's there.

What bugs the hell out of me is that he let himself get photographed hugging John McCain.

Comments

[haelig]

Blanket statements like "religion has no place in the public debate" are criticisms of the Civil Rights movement, Abolition, the anti-war movements of the 1950s and early 1960s, late 19th Century and early 20th Century Progressivism, Roosevelt's own feelings about the New Deal . . . Americans have always been and still are a God-bothering people and a God-bothered people. Their feelings and thoughts about what makes a just society and how to bring it about are informed by and driven by their feelings and thoughts about what God wants them to do. This doesn't make us a Christian nation or even a non-secular one. It just makes us one with a lot of people in it who cannot separate an argument for doing the right thing from an argument about how to get right with the Lord.

I think you're putting up a strawman: The core issue (at least for me) isn't the presence of religion in general politics, but rather the separation of church and state--the role of religion in the legal system and governance of our nation. We can't deny that religion was and is the motivating factor for some of the greatest political movements and social legislation in history. But when the legal transformations were carried out by the government, they were done without any religious pre-conditions--if you were discriminated against because you were black, then you received restitution or the equal treatment you were due because you were a *human being*, not because you were a Christian too. Religion and government intersect when it comes to recognizing the unique worth of every human being and their basic human rights, and if a politician's understanding of that is enhanced by his/her religious beliefs, so be it. But the Bush Administration made their Christian-motivated "compassionate conservatism" into a litmus test for basic government operations--and 8 years later, the Justice Department is a shell of its former self, funding for social services is unaccounted for and badly skewed, and the country is in shambles, all because the applicants were selected on whether they agreed with Roe v. Wade.

What worried me about the Saddleback Forum was that 1) This event was not simply an opportunity for the two candidates to speak to a particular constituency, like the NAACP national meeting. This forum in a conservative evangelical church was the *first nationally televised 'debate'* with the 2 presidential candidates, lending it the near legitimacy of a presidential debate with none of the supposed fairness, policy substance, and neutral objectivity that would allow ALL Americans to evaluate the candidates reasonably. (Although, yes, I know the national presidential debates to this point have been anything but that.) 2) Obama and McCain explicitly professed their Christian faith as not just the animating force that inspired them to help the American people, but also something that would directly dictate their policies--i.e., marriage is between one man and one woman. The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman; but the U.S. Constitution says nothing of the sort, and allows for the gay and lesbian community to claim the legal rights bestowed by marriage.

Yes, I know that religion will be key in reaching certain demographics such as African-Americans and Hispanics. But at the end of the day, the POTUS is governing a richly diverse America with people of widely varying beliefs and creeds, and his/her governance must be based on the objective rule of law, not specific religious creeds. But so far, the rhetoric of both candidates reveals that neither will be better than the Bush Administration on the separation of church and state, and I fear the wisdom of JFK's words will be permanently lost: "I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

[elbrucce]

What bugs the hell out of me is that he let himself get photographed hugging John McCain.

Non-partisan. He'll probably make McCain Secretary of State.

Too bad Constitutional scholar Obama didn't bother to study the First Amendment, though.

[Brian]

"Making fun of a belief in a white-bearded magician in the sky is implicitly making fun of a belief in Allah, Krishna, and the Great Spirit and believers of all kinds know it."

It is, in fact, explicitly making fund of belief in Allah et al., and that is why it is good. Everyone who believes in patent nonsense deserves to be made fun of. End of story. The fact that this includes most people does not make it any less necessary. Religious belief should be legal, safe, and rare.

[rawdawgbuffalo]

Prison and race, the contours of a tragedy

[apostate]

You make some good points, but you aren't acknowledging that there are plenty of terrific arguments on the progressive, non-religious side about keeping politics and religion separate.

Be that as it may - Obama is a sincere and devout Christian? Really?

How do you know?

I am convinced that he is an intellectual. Can intellectuals of his calibre believe in Christianity?

I've never been able to convince myself of Bill Clinton's religiousity either.

It's simply contradictory to be superlatively intelligent and believe in absurdities.

I am pretty sure they do their God-bothering because it's expected of them and they have to, and politicians do a lot of stuff of that nature. Plus, they know the power of community organizing, and churches are perfect community centers.

[Badger3k]

"Four. A lot of what Right Wing Christian pastors preach is just plain wrong. Their arguments aren't even close to Christian. They're based on willful misreadings of the Bible and plain ignorance on the subjects of their own religion and history. There has been no shortage of conservative Christians writing books and articles about how Jesus wants us all to be rich. (See also Three above.)"

Lance, I didn't expect you to bring up the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but there you go. Sad. Over the last 1700-1900 years of history (depending on when you want to say the canon was written) every individual has seen what they wanted to see in the biblical writings. Every one of them says that they are reading it correctly and others are not. If you are going to go into this line of argument, I hope you have more evidence than they do to support your contention, as well as having some measure to gauge how "christian" a person is, and how such a system can be confirmed.

Otherwise, drop it and just say you disagree with them and what they believe.

[actor212]

Amen, Lance. Amen.

It is, in fact, explicitly making fund of belief in Allah et al., and that is why it is good.

Logical? Perhaps. Truthful? Maybe, the jury's still out on that.

But it is idiotic. So, not good.