The Messianic Style In American Politics

I've done submitted a new YDN column on the fusion of the Christian right and the Republican party, and the semantical games that are used to mask the awfulness of that phenomenon. The piece is about 250 words too long, so when it does come out it will be fairly substantially attenuated. I thought I'd provide my loyal readers with the piece in full, so here goes. The difficulty in writing in this genre, i.e. criticism of the politicization of religion or influence of religion in politics, is towing the line between sufficiently sharply attacking the perniciousness of politically activist fundamentalism and keeping one's rhetoric from getting overheated. I think I did a reasonable job, though you can be the judge. I'm very partial to the last line, though a lot of people won't be:

In his YDN column of October 27, Mike Slater, parroting Senator Joseph Lieberman, wrote that “[t]he First Amendment guarantees all Americans the freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” As a matter both of jurisprudence and of intuitively reasonable interpretation of the establishment clause, this is utter nonsense. Freedom of religion of course encompasses freedom not to believe, and the First Amendment could not any more clearly enunciate a prohibition against the endorsement of a particular faith by the institutions of the state. Yet it seems to have escaped the notice of legislators and commentators in both parties that the state sponsorship of all religions simultaneously is just as fatally incompatible as the state sponsorship of one religion with the values of liberal, secular democracy according to which the Constitution was written and the United States founded.

I used the word “values” advisedly to denote the principles according to which the Founders created the separation of church and state, because it is apparently the issue of “values” itself, and not any particular set of values, that was the decisive factor in George W. Bush’s re-election. To sketch the situation rather roughly: Republicans have values, and Democrats do not, or so the punditariat has informed us. But it cannot be true that Democrats believe in nothing; they avow beliefs in the right of women to have legal abortions, the right of gay couples to attain some sort of dignified status in civil law, the responsibility of the government to advance potentially life-saving research on embryonic stem cells, and indeed, Democrats may just believe in a variety of other things as well.

However reprehensible these beliefs may appear to some people, are they not values? Perhaps, in fact, they aren’t, if the word “values” has somehow come to be synonymous not with “guiding moral principles,” but instead with axioms of religious belief that are inaccessible to reason and by their very nature immune to analysis. What follows from such a redefinition of “values” is strikingly simple: To have moral values is equivalent to being religious, therefore any political party whose religiosity is insufficient is necessarily immoral.

It’s worth noting that the pan-theocratic ecumenicism Slater (and Lieberman) defend is exactly the wrong way to understand the Republicans’ equation of moral values with religious faith. Their religious base will not be satisfied by the profession of any faith at all, so long as it is genuine; one must pay homage to the True Faith. The imperatives to legislate homosexuality out of civic life, to confer citizenship on amalgamated cells in petri dishes, to micro-manage the permissible content on radio and television, to assert the validity of “creation science” in public schools, to regulate against pre-marital sex and also to deny contraception to those who engage in it, etc., are not the values of the benign, undifferentiated faith that every national office-seeker must affirm regardless of his or her politics. They are the specific tenets of an ultra-politicized fundamentalist Christianity, whose adherents are unreservedly certain that their social agenda is God’s plan for the United States, and that the recent success of the Republican party is evidence of His will in action.

There is nothing at all surprising, therefore, about the wave of triumphalism among the religious right and the forms in which it has been expressed. Charles Colson, an erstwhile Watergate felon turned born-again advisor to the Bush campaign, said of Bush’s re-election that it represented God “giving us a chance to repent and to restore some moral sanity to American life.” The president of Bob Jones University, in a clear invocation of religious humility, reported that “God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.” James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, and the de facto domestic agenda-setter for the Bush White House, has already virtually destroyed the bid of the pro-choice moderate Republican Arlen Specter to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and made it clear that any Republican dissension from the religious right’s platform on social policy will be a career-destroying move.

How, exactly, is one supposed to argue with those who think that their political positions bear the mark of divine ordination, and for whom, consequently, things like self-criticism, rational persuasion, or the need to ground one’s beliefs in observed evidence, are the vain tools of the Devil and of liberals that can only serve to lead people into waywardness and heterodoxy? The Democrats are likely to avoid sustained engagement with these forces for fear of being God-baited in future elections. The Republicans, meanwhile, are in a position in which it is impossible even to try to argue with the religious right.

Though all Republicans are by no means fellow-travelers of the Christian Coalition, and there remain, especially in states where the Democrats are competitive, a fair number of Republicans who are moderate on social issues, the number of prominent Republicans who will stand up to the religious right is small and shrinking. The large majority of elected Republicans either believe, in full or in part, in the Family Research Council’s vision of social transformation, or else are both too ambitious and cowardly to resist taking the party line. More importantly, perhaps, the Republican president is a member of his own religious base. His rejection of empiricism has both served as a tool for crafting policy—there is no other way to understand what went wrong in Iraq, for example—and as a badge of honor, a signifier that he has “values,” whereas things like evidence and rational justification are only for the likes of those who never had any morals in the first place.

There is a deeper conflict of values underlying the various disputes on issues of bioethics and sexual/marital relationships. The beliefs in individual autonomy, natural rights, and the inherent worth of the scientific method, i.e. the Enlightenment values at the core of our nation’s founding documents, have always coexisted uneasily with a subcultural stratum of religious fundamentalism. Those of us who cling to the former set of values—and who recognize that the classical liberal principles of governance are and have always been genuine values—are in for a grim four years, if not longer. What’s new about the contemporary iteration of fundamentalism is its interest in and inextricability from politics. This year, the Constitution itself came under attack by those who would amend it to include their own private interpretation of Leviticus. And faced with a changing social landscape and the eventual inevitability of gay civil equality, a number of voters sufficient to determine the outcome of the election decided to reinstall George W. Bush in the White House. His victory was a down payment on their messianic deliverance.