Religious politics

Speaking to Your Enemy

Matt Taibbi’s polemical piece on the self-anointed prophet of tea part evangelism, Michele Bachmann, is worth a read, but suffers for its tone. If half of the facts he’s dredged up about Bachmann are true — multiple, abortive attempts to turn the machinery of state into a proselytizing organization, for example — then the thing speaks for itself, and requires none of Taibbi’s invective to prove just how dangerous representative Bachmann truly is. He makes one exceptionally useful point, though, that deserves its own separate treatment:

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies. [. . . .]

All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us.

The first paragraph feels like a conclusion; the second is. Views like Bachmann’s are objectively unreasonable. But we live in a country where more than a few of us reject inferential reasoning, and substitute belief, to define the boundaries of their reality. As hard as it is to admit, we can’t win battles like this by disputing first premises. Matt’s right; we’ll lose, and come off worse in the process. We need to understand these beliefs, and be able to articulate not why they’re bad, but why they’re not appropriate to govern a diverse nation.

We may not even be able to win that. It’s been painfully clear for a while now that, for the religious right, faith trumps constitutionalism. But we can try.

Can Legislators Properly Consider God in the Decisionmaking Process?

I’ll preview the conclusion: if it’s outcome determinative… no.

Disgraced former Senator Rick Santorum grabbed headlines yesterday by saying he was “frankly appalled” by President Kennedy’s “radical” statements during the 1960 campaign, which amounted to the following, now sadly somewhat controversial but succinct statement of a basic, foundational principle: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

Jack Kennedy is now one of America’s favorite former presidents. Nevertheless, says Santorum, for JFK’s sins, “Jefferson is spinning in his grave.”

We’re seeing how Catholic politicians, following the first Catholic president, have followed his lead, and have divorced faith not just from the public square, but from their own decision-making process.

It’s a hallmark of the tea party’s de facto religion – ancestor worship of the founding generation — that its adherents in fact have no idea what the Founders believed, or what they fought for. Santorum demonstrates and compounds that ignorance on the pages of other papers, in a long screed ably taken down elsewhere, but to that let us add some. Jefferson was a deist, openly hostile to organized religion (and especially Catholicism) as it was practiced in his time, whose approach to the Bible was precisely River Tam’s [YouTube]: to tear out the pages that don’t make sense, resulting in a slimmer, simply moral document. It’s for this sin that the Santorums of Texas eliminated Jefferson from the curriculum.

Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was very real, very present in the early Republic, and defined how he saw his position: as a temporal officer, with responsibilities exclusively to the office, and no higher power. Hence, for example, Jefferson’s remarkable decision to forgo a thanksgiving prayer, for fear of converting the early Presidency into some American pontifex maximus. That understanding should control today.

We elect legislators to serve the people, the office, and the Constitution. Not God. In discharging that role, legislators must exercise moral judgment, a task that will often require reference to religious morality. That’s fine, and moreover, unavoidable. But legislators should not be in the business of making legislative decisions exclusively to appease their favored interpretation of their favored deity. Where the law of the land and the principles of the Constitution point in one direction, and God, as interpreted by man, points in another, the former should always control, as a function of the oath of office, and the basic principles of democracy.

We expect that God will guide our magistrates, our courts, and our nation. But how vain to imagine he needs our help to do so?

Glenn Beck’s Christmas Paean to the Constitution

WordPress won’t let me embed the video, and thank God; I’d rather not profane our pages, anyways. But please don’t miss this video of his, describing, four days before Christmas, the “birth of the Constitution.”

The timing and phrasing of it all suggests a not-so-subtle dog whistle to devotees of obscure quasi-historian Cleon Skousen, Beck’s epistemological inspiration, who holds the Constitution out to be a divinely inspired document enshrining Christianity (specifically, Mormonism) as the backbone of an America deliberately designed by God as the vehicle of the world’s cap-s-Salvation. It’s… creepy stuff. Naturally, in Beck and Skousen’s America, the separation of church and state becomes a necessary casualty of America’s eschatological role. And history goes out the window, too. Take Beck’s assertion that, for Thomas Jefferson, one of the prime functions of government is the “adoration” of God. Let’s go to the text:

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?

Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Jefferson — who refused to offer a Thanksgiving prayer rather than risk setting a precedent that the state should take as a prime function the adoration of God — drew a clear line between the religious beliefs of the people, and the religious activities of its government. One could spend a lifetime policing these little infractions, committed by amateur historians like Beck and his peers, either too poorly read to notice such vital distinctions or too dominated by their agenda to care, and still come up short. I feel compelled to note this one only as an example of how brazen our opposition has become in selecting, and blowing out of context, vital elements of our shared history. This is a religious Nation, but we must carefully protect the stoic nature of our  State, as a bulwark for the protection of both men of conscience, and men of faith.

Theologies of Governance

Conservative websites justly criticize Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) for the bold assertion that fiscal conservatism requires “social conservatism,” by which he means a dedication to God, by regulating society to conform to and mirror his subjective idea of what religious righteousness requires.

Setting to one side the arrogant assumption that Jim DeMint, and the Republican Party, are exclusive conduits to the Almighty (no-one comes to the Kingdom, but through the GOP?), DeMint’s theory seems to satisfy neither his theology, nor the strictures of common sense, nor align with the actual meaning of American exceptionalism. 

His theological hook is some neo-gnostic notion that a large government displaces God, by focusing the people on “Caesar,” rather than God. But when government forces the people to God, this is itself an exercise of Caesar’s will, and an accentuation of the “size” of government, both of which DeMint should view as inimical to true faith. Coerced religiosity is no religiosity at all; it’s a tenet of both Christianity and constitutionalism that government intrusion corrupts faith. Properly viewed, “social” conservatism is the enemy of, God, small governance, and any fair understanding of America’s unique place in the world. Theocracy creates the illusion of piety, but this ought not be enough for a religious man, as DeMint purports to be.

Politically, one wonders whether (and when) pronouncements like these will cause tea party groups to finally sour on the Republican Party. If tea party “patriots” actually cared for small government values — and to be clear, I don’t think they do — we would never have come to this pass. But as we get deeper into Republican “governance,” such as it is, we can expect the cognitive dissonance to become increasingly difficult to reconcile.

Our Sharia

Although the protections afforded Jews and Christians by Islamic law were, in many ways, ahead of their time, this grace, such as it was, had its limits. According to the Pact of Umar, which defined the relationship between the Peoples of the Book,

[Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians] shall not build, in our cities or in their neighborhood, new monasteries, Churches, convents, or monks’ cells, nor shall we repair, by day or by night, such of them as fall in ruins or are situated in the quarters of the Muslims.

This strict limit was not absolute, in practice. But how interesting that the very groups that oppose Sharia law as a looming threat to the American way of life would now duplicate it, to repress Muslims.

Facts on the Ground

There’s a large police presence in downtown Manhattan today — but comparatively fewer protesters. Most of them, too, are marching in support of Cordoba House. It’s actually quite refreshing.

Someone put up sheets to note, and presumably discuss, reasons to support or oppose the center. Who doesn’t want a swimming pool? I talked to one person who was incredulous that this could be a reason to support the center, but in a way, it goes to the heart of the issue. Downtown (TriBeCha?) needs community services; the Cordoba House will provide them. The inoffensive faith of the builders really shouldn’t matter.

This seems to pretty accurately sum up the state of public discourse, miserable as it is. (But hats off to the serviceman writing on the bottom right, in support of the rights for which he fought.)

This guy is the only anti-Islamic protester I could find in the area. Notice he’s also the only person with press coverage.

“One Nation Under God”: Co-opting the Fringe Narrative

For as long as I’ve been politically conscious, the line, “One Nation Under God,” a new adornment to our currency and a belated addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, has been pushed by the Christian right as proof that, in opposition to both the constitutional text and any fair reading of American history, we are a “Christian nation.”

President Obama today:

We are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.

This is successful messaging: a national symbol restored to national purpose.

The Meaning of Defeat in the “Ground Zero Mosque” Issue

Although concern over the “Ground Zero Mosque” never made much sense, the lategame opposition appears to have collapsed into the truly absurd. Sarah Palin, and a few other Republicans, see the Cordoba House – a community center open to all, built with the explicit intention of bridging interfaith divides  — as the moral equivalent of burning Korans. It’s worth mentioning this brings all of them in line with the would-be book burner himself. Donald Trump thinks it would be significantly less offensive if moved only three blocks north. We’ve never gotten an adequate answer to how far the “mosque exclusion zone” should extend around the sites of national tragedies… tragedies that affected American Muslims too… but Trump’s chosen line of demarcation ought to prove that this debate is no longer about “offense,” if it ever even was. It’s about putting American Muslims in their place, on the periphery of American society. If the site were to move, no matter how far, we would ratify this sickening turn of events.

In the hands of our demagogues, the “mosque” issue has become the wedge by which the thin veneer of interfaith respect can be peeled back, and the hopes of the hateful energized for an important election season. We now owe it to ourselves to ensure that coexistence is forced upon us, not for the benefit of downtown Muslims (although that’s nice too), but to prove to the world, and ourselves, that we are not ruled by our baser elements. I remain convinced that, once the building is actually built, this will fade away in a matter of days. Whether or not that result obtains, we no longer risk validating hate. We must insist on a peaceful future. Nine years ago, and every day since, some of our countrymen died for something. Let them have died for that.

Update: Peacekeepers are already getting hurt over this absurd nonissue.

Update:  “Ground Zero” is now all of Manhattan west of Broadway and south of Park Place. There are about six halal carts in that vicinity.

Rights and Discretion

Obama’s remarks on the “Ground Zero Mosque” lack, for once, his usual clarity. He’s come down quite strongly on the point that Muslims have a right to build where they choose, but less so on whether they should use that right. The distinction is one between the right to an act, and the discretion which one should employ in its exercise. (RedState actually hits on this, but Erickson’s bullet-pointed, talk-show style writing deprives the point of its eloquence, while his confusion about the scope of the rights discussed deprives it of its meaning.) For my part, to be clear, Muslims have the right to build where they want, and the reasonable exercise of discretion does not suggest otherwise.

There is no principled argument that a religion does not have the right to build a place of worship wheresoever it pleases, unless barred by a law of general application. It’s rare that the phrase “un-American” can be appropriately used, but those who suggest otherwise are precisely that. Thankfully, they’re few, but vocal.

The discretionary argument is harder to make, and I’m not sure if our side has been able to make it in a satisfying manner, yet. Surely it’s true that ordinary Muslims can’t be tarred with the crimes of a violent minority, just as Fred Phelps doesn’t speak for Christianity. But the anti-”mosque” group doesn’t have to make that argument to make their case. To sustain the charge that building the “mosque” is insensitive, they only have to prove that a non-trivial amount of society will draw the connection, whether or not it’s erroneous to do so. How do you answer that?

As stated, I don’t think we have yet. I’ll take three shots at it.

First, societal decisions can’t be held hostage to a misguided minority. Rules of polite society don’t, or shouldn’t, vest a heckler’s veto in the first party to make a plausible case for “offense.” This is a principle to which conservatives normally subscribe, but I guess “political correctness” is okay, so long as it confers rather than restricts a right to take a shot at unpopular minorities.

Second, leadership is found in defeating, not succumbing to, our baser instincts. This is a teachable moment that carries no small importance to our relationship with the East, if not diplomatically, then culturally. Clashes of civilizations become self-fulfilling prophecies, left untended. I keep going back to Foreign Affairs‘ brilliant verse review of Huntington’s book:

Politicians prone to pick what’s overripe or rotten
May resurrect a culture that is gone but not forgotten,
Building on the current state of cultural confusion
To craft a cult of closure or a culture of exclusion.
We publish at our peril and we magnify the dangers
By lending credibility to cultural estrangers. [. . . .]
History’s indispensable to shape our understanding,
But it needs to be there at the takeoff, not the landing.
To find our voice and tools of choice in shaping human futures,
We need to nurse that vision not with scalpels, but with sutures.
Huntington as scientist may well deduce his stances,
But Huntington as moralist might just reduce our chances.

Finally — and this is a point friend-of-the-site Mike makes — if we agree that discretion requires Imam Rauf, and Financial District Muslims, not to exercise their right to religious freedom, the requisite discretion swallows the right. Religious freedom doesn’t exist for the easy cases. It exists for the hard ones. That’s tough, but also the way the system was designed. Being an American is hard. It’s supposed to be hard to be the good guy. This country was built for men of moral courage, by men of moral courage.

“No Special Rights for Special Classes”?

A curious new conservative organization, “Stop the Islamization of America” (SIOA), demonstrates one of the more clever anti-equality tropes we regularly see from the far-right. Move past the classy, blood-spattered logo, and look to the mission statement:

SIOA is a human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights; no special rights for special classes.

The first clause should be understood to omit a qualifier — “for Christians” — but the second seems baffling. Who, in their view, is receiving “special rights” that they ought not? Presumably Muslims? We see this with gay rights, too, where moves towards marriage, and employee non-discrimination, are read to confer “special” rights, that further stratify society, rather than erase inequalities. Why?

This follows because the far-right operates under a distinct theory about what “rights” we are due. American history, in general, reveals a progression of rights, such that the original compact, conferring set rights on set groups only, was flawed in its application, but perfect in its stated goal of conferring all rights that were due. To vindicate that vision over time, as society changes, we must continue to confer new rights as they are adjudged to flow from identical principles.

Naturally, the right doesn’t see it that way. Under the alternate view, rights aren’t iterations of larger principles, but entitlements that exist in isolation, and admit of no abstraction. Any expansion of rights from the way they existed at the founding, then, is a gift of “special” rights — not “special” as in, as distinct from the rest of the population, but “special” as in “new,” and therefore non-deserved. Putting gays on an equal plane with the rest of the population is definitionally “special,” because only recently have we begun to view sexuality as something immutable, and blameless, even if it just equalizes those groups who should be equal. Characterizing that grant as “special” leverages its novelty to suggest its illegitimacy.

Applying this principle to Muslims is strange, though. At the founding, Muslims did acquire the “special” right to religious freedom, contemporaneously with disfavored Protestant sects, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, etcetera. To view it otherwise, you have to completely disregard the clear statements of numerous founding fathers, and especially Thomas Jefferson. I guess that’s not new, though.