Public policies and religious arguments for and against them (2 of 2)

Continuing my comments on the discussion between Digby and Sarah Posner from Part 1 yesterday: The parts of their formulations I find problematic are these. Posner: "the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology." Digby: "using the Bible as the basis of any political argument is antithetical to enlightened democracy."

Okay, I'm an Enlightenment nostalgic of sorts. So I would rather that public debates be framed in terms of values and effects that were rooted in the material world and not directly referenced to religious concepts as such. But that's not the world we live in.

If we look at only the post-Second World War period, it's a fact that important parts of what we think of as liberal activism in the United States were based on religious understandings of social values. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a trained philosopher and a Christian minister, and described his program for civil rights in explicitly religious terms. George McGovern was a Methodist minister. Jimmy Carter was and is even now a very religious Baptist (though no longer Southern Baptist) layperson. Cesar Chavez understood his organizing for farmworkers and the poor in Catholic Christian terms. Jerry Brown is a former Jesuit seminarian who studied Zen Buddhism seriously, worked with Mother Teresa in her hospice services in India, and was heavily influenced by the late Christian philosopher Ivan Illich. Some of the key early activists for legalizing abortion in the 1960s were religious people concerned over the deadly realities of back-alley abortions.

Most Christians are not theocrats. Up until they got heavy into the white private school market after desegregation in the South, the Southern Baptists made a big deal of the principle of the separation of church and state, not least because they didn't want Catholic schools getting any public funds. Even the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council adopted the views of the American theologian John Courtney Murray that embraced modern democratic notions of freedom of religion, though the Church would still prefer Catholicism to be officially adopted as state religion.

And anyone with an adult notion of Christianity - and, yes, I'm passing a negative judgment on Christian fundamentalism in saying this - can understand that the Christian Bible doesn't provide a legislative guide book for particular laws. And they, like most other adults, can understand that there is a difference between personal morality and what law allows. A person can consider smoking cigarettes morally wrong but still make practical judgments about public policy based on what is a legitimate health-related public concern and discuss it with other citizens on that basis. Someone can consider abortion morally wrong and chose not to have it for themselves, but still recognize that public policy has to be dicatated by medical realities on the physical survivability of a fetus outside its mother's body, which hasn't changed since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

And the reality of American politics today is that the Republican Party endorses theocratic ideas in practice, though they insist on redefining the English language based on their marketing priorities on a given day and don't like to be called on it. The Democrats have to counter that in ways that disrupt the moral and religious claims of the fundis. The ad trashing Rand Paul over Aqua Buddha as a "heathen idol" didn't seem to work too well. (Although I admit I enjoyed that one!)

The reality of American Christianity today, too, is that most Christians don't want fanatical fundis smearing the Christian brand, either. It's a genuine religious scandal that the most solid block of torture supporters were regular church-going conservative evangelicals. If they believe the general Christian theology that God took human form as a Jewish holy man who was tortured to death by the Romans, then they should worry that the first thing they experience in the next life will be Jesus getting in their face and saying, "What the hell did you think you were doing calling yourself a Christian and supporting torture?" And "hell" in that context would sound a bit more serious than a casual swear word.

Sarah Posner and others are right to call so-called "Christian left" figures like Wallis to account for their lack of support for women's rights on abortion. But both secular Democrats and religious ones needed to disrupt the Christian Right messaging. Including with arguments over the Bible and theology, when appropriate.

Gene Lyons on Facebook recommends this piece by Andrew Sullivan addressing this broad topic: Heightening The Republican Contradictions, Ctd The Lift 06/06/2011. (Standard disclaimer: Sullivan has never to my knowledge fessed up to his disgraceful smearing of domestic critics of the Cheney-Bush Administration's War on Terror and the foreign invasions that went along with it.) It's a decent brief critique of Christian nationalism, though he doesn't use that term. And he has some thought-provoking observations: "The structure of modern America is therefore anti-Christian. Its worship of wealth and fame as the greatest of all things - yes, Palin comes instantly to mind - is the antithesis of Christianity."

Tags: christian left, digby, heather parton, sarah posner, andrew sullivan

Public policies and religious arguments for and against them (1 of 2)

Digby (Hullabaloo) and Sarah Posner (Religion Distpaches) had an interesting exchange about what is sometimes call the "religious left" in these posts:

Digby, Paul Ryan refuses a Bible 06/04/2011

Posner, Paul Ryan's Bible, Jim Wallis', Or None of the Above? 06/06/2011

Digby, A Justified Scold 06/06/2011

And a related post by Digby, False Idols 06/04/2011

The discussion is over Digby's Schadenfreude over Paul Ryan being embarassed at a religion-and-politics conference by a liberal activist trying to give him a Bible with passages in the Gospel of Luke highlighted relating to social concerns. Posner uses it as a taking-off point to remind us that the self-described "religious left" including leaders like Jim Wallis of Soujourners that have tried to offer a political counter to the Christian Right have been pretty disappointing to liberal activists:

As I argued last year, writing about liberal-leaning religious groups countering Glenn Beck's attack on social justice, the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology. As Peter Laarman has noted in these pages, in support of a robust defense of government, liberal and moderate Christian leaders "know in their heart of hearts that only government can take strong and decisive action to end poverty and mass suffering, but they are in some degree of denial about it, in part because. ... They, too, rather fancy the idea of an independent sphere for private faith-based charities - they mostly go along, after all, with the horrendously obfuscatory and constitutionally dubious Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Since the discussion covers both general concepts like applying the Bible and Christian theology to public issues to more concrete experiences in recent years with "common ground" efforts to reduce unplanned pregnancies running aground on the Christian Right's lack of interest and the anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-women's-rights positions of some "Christian left" figures like Jim Wallis, it's hard to say how much I'm agreeing or disagreeing with either of them.

Here is how I framed the issue in a comment to the second of Digby's posts cited above:

Sarah Posner's concluding sentence in that post is, "When you wave a Bible in someone's face, just remember that someone can wave one in yours, too."

I'm not much for literal Bible-waving, myself. But the Christian Right isn't going to stop waving their Bibles figuratively and literally in the faces of Democrats and mainstream Christians. And there has to be pushback in moral and religious terms to disrupt those messages.

What's wrong with liberals agreeing with Wallis on Medicare and disagreeing with him on women's rights? People can make moral, religious and practical arguments on the liberal side of both issues.

Honest religious arguments have their limits, because any honest believer would have a problem claiming that they knew for sure how God would want them to vote on a particular legislative bill or political candidate. But the Christian Right aren't making honest religious arguments when they lie to young women in their fake "pregnancy counseling" clinics about abortion. They're just lying to people who made the mistake of trusting them for honest medical advice. The public policy on how to deal with that kind of fraud may be complicated. But I have no trouble arguing on moral and religious grounds that that's just wrong.

And since the fundis are going to keep making their arguments in the "public square" (as they like to call it), I don't see how either secular liberals or Christians who don't support hate-mongering or torture or lying to pregnant teenagers in the name of Jesus can just avoid trying to counter the religious elements of those arguments. People can make religious arguments for or against a policy like the water torture, aka, waterboarding, without insisting on it as a purely religious policy.

Tags: christian left, digby, heather parton, sarah posner