Tuesday, April 26, 2005
How to use government to undermine religion.
In an interesting piece about two schools of conservatism, Andrew Sullivan touches on the increasing entanglement between the government and religion:
For whatever reasons, I think many cultural conservatives are blind to this. My family had a friend a few years back, a local college student who came from a small town on Mountain Time. She was Catholic, but of fundamentalist convictions closer to James Dobson's than most Catholics in this country. She was planning to go to law school, and so one day we got to talking about the Establishment Clause. She rejected the principle of separation of church and state, and rather than argue with her on that score, I tried to suggest that religion is stronger if it is separate from government. Perhaps I didn't explain the idea as well as I'm trying to here, but I utterly failed to register with her. And why not? If you're ruling the world -- and, let's face it, the conservatives are playing the part of the Wehrmacht to the liberals' Polish cavalry lately -- government can be another way to spread your religious views. Or, to put it fairly, if your beliefs lead you to the conviction that there is no position of neutrality on important moral questions, better to be right than wrong.
Fundamentalism is a modern phenomena, a reaction to change rather than an effort to simply preserve what came before. The religious groups that are the most involved in conservative politics today were, only a few decades ago, apolitical. Dan Morgan chronicled this shift in Rising in the West, an account of an "Okie" family from the 1930s to the 1980s. To my recollection, he identified a couple of key factors prompting this shift in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including reaction to the election of Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, and disappointment with his tenure, and the controversy over a tax exemption for Bob Jones University. Whatever the immediate causes, fundamentalism has been a gathering force around the world in recent decades, from Arabia to Alabama.
Seeing fundamentalists enter politics, the rest of us worry that they will succeed in importing their brand of absolutism into government, but the cultural conservatives ought to worry more that their churches and religion will be changed, corrupted. If political rallies look like religious services, then religious services increasingly resemble political rallies. And some of the figures prominent at this intersection of religion and politics suggest the problem to come. In What's the Matter with Kansas, Tom Franks pointedly suggests that some cultural conservatives are political opportunists who identified a niche in the market of American politics and moved to exploit it. (Whether Franks was right in those cases is probably a question reserved to devotees of Kansas politics.) I don't think I've heard it suggested that Ralph Reed is merely an opportunist, but he too has shown us these pitfalls.
We are all so busy worrying about the intrusion of religion into politics, that we're missing the The April 28 issue of The New York Review of Books has a fine account by Helen Epstein about the intersection of AIDS policy with fundamentalist religious politics in this country and Uganda. Epstein convincingly suggests that the increasing involvement of religious conservatives (in both countries) has led to the adoption of less effective AIDS-prevention policy. Left implicit is the thought that competition for $1 billion in abstinence-only programs will have some effect on the religious groups entering that market.
The juxtaposition of modern problems and appeals to tradition is so mundane now that it barely registers. Take the stem-cell debate. Or, in Uganda, "leaders of the Karimojong tribe have called for a ban on miniskirts, though Karimojong people traditionally wear no clothes at all." Fundamentalism is all about the way these traditions find new meaning in changed times.
Surely, an excess of certainty could be overcompensation for doubt about living in a complex and changing world. Why do the fundamentalists care so much what the government does? Because they feel threatened by modernity. Gay marriage illustrates this. We've all heard that traditional marriage is under attack, which can only make you wonder how it can be so threatened. Anything needing government support can't be faring too well on the open market, right? The fundamentalists perhaps perceive this better than the rest of us.
So it is inevitable that politics will corrupt religion. And yet the foibles of Ralph Reeds can look like a story about one man's failings, not the fate of a movement; the movement goes on. One of the salient traits of the new cultural conservative is in its penchant for seeing and portraying political questions in the rubric of individual characters instead of policy issues, Teri Schiavo's drama being only the most recent example. Like termites, the transformation of religious groups will be hard to see until it's far along. But it must be happening.
Compare President George H.W. Bush's praise for "a thousand points of light" as a critical voluntary complement to the welfare state with George W. Bush's channeling of public money into religious social programs.... [T]he new conservatism seems to believe that faith communities cannot do their work adequately without government help. It has less faith in faith than conservatives of doubt do.This seems to me exactly right, and telling. Certainly there are religious groups who abide in their faith and who maintain a distance from civic involvement, at least with the larger society. Think, for example, of the Amish. At least some who advocate for a separation of church and state do so out of a desire to preserve religion from government, rather than vice versa. Politics entails compromise, and a pragmatism that -- on some level -- threatens faith. To say nothing of the money. A big part of what government does is move money around, and this corrupts. So, best to keep politics away from religion, some say. I don't think you need to be Amish to believe this, whether you approach it from a political or religious viewpoint.
For whatever reasons, I think many cultural conservatives are blind to this. My family had a friend a few years back, a local college student who came from a small town on Mountain Time. She was Catholic, but of fundamentalist convictions closer to James Dobson's than most Catholics in this country. She was planning to go to law school, and so one day we got to talking about the Establishment Clause. She rejected the principle of separation of church and state, and rather than argue with her on that score, I tried to suggest that religion is stronger if it is separate from government. Perhaps I didn't explain the idea as well as I'm trying to here, but I utterly failed to register with her. And why not? If you're ruling the world -- and, let's face it, the conservatives are playing the part of the Wehrmacht to the liberals' Polish cavalry lately -- government can be another way to spread your religious views. Or, to put it fairly, if your beliefs lead you to the conviction that there is no position of neutrality on important moral questions, better to be right than wrong.
Fundamentalism is a modern phenomena, a reaction to change rather than an effort to simply preserve what came before. The religious groups that are the most involved in conservative politics today were, only a few decades ago, apolitical. Dan Morgan chronicled this shift in Rising in the West, an account of an "Okie" family from the 1930s to the 1980s. To my recollection, he identified a couple of key factors prompting this shift in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including reaction to the election of Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, and disappointment with his tenure, and the controversy over a tax exemption for Bob Jones University. Whatever the immediate causes, fundamentalism has been a gathering force around the world in recent decades, from Arabia to Alabama.
Seeing fundamentalists enter politics, the rest of us worry that they will succeed in importing their brand of absolutism into government, but the cultural conservatives ought to worry more that their churches and religion will be changed, corrupted. If political rallies look like religious services, then religious services increasingly resemble political rallies. And some of the figures prominent at this intersection of religion and politics suggest the problem to come. In What's the Matter with Kansas, Tom Franks pointedly suggests that some cultural conservatives are political opportunists who identified a niche in the market of American politics and moved to exploit it. (Whether Franks was right in those cases is probably a question reserved to devotees of Kansas politics.) I don't think I've heard it suggested that Ralph Reed is merely an opportunist, but he too has shown us these pitfalls.
We are all so busy worrying about the intrusion of religion into politics, that we're missing the The April 28 issue of The New York Review of Books has a fine account by Helen Epstein about the intersection of AIDS policy with fundamentalist religious politics in this country and Uganda. Epstein convincingly suggests that the increasing involvement of religious conservatives (in both countries) has led to the adoption of less effective AIDS-prevention policy. Left implicit is the thought that competition for $1 billion in abstinence-only programs will have some effect on the religious groups entering that market.
The juxtaposition of modern problems and appeals to tradition is so mundane now that it barely registers. Take the stem-cell debate. Or, in Uganda, "leaders of the Karimojong tribe have called for a ban on miniskirts, though Karimojong people traditionally wear no clothes at all." Fundamentalism is all about the way these traditions find new meaning in changed times.
Surely, an excess of certainty could be overcompensation for doubt about living in a complex and changing world. Why do the fundamentalists care so much what the government does? Because they feel threatened by modernity. Gay marriage illustrates this. We've all heard that traditional marriage is under attack, which can only make you wonder how it can be so threatened. Anything needing government support can't be faring too well on the open market, right? The fundamentalists perhaps perceive this better than the rest of us.
So it is inevitable that politics will corrupt religion. And yet the foibles of Ralph Reeds can look like a story about one man's failings, not the fate of a movement; the movement goes on. One of the salient traits of the new cultural conservative is in its penchant for seeing and portraying political questions in the rubric of individual characters instead of policy issues, Teri Schiavo's drama being only the most recent example. Like termites, the transformation of religious groups will be hard to see until it's far along. But it must be happening.
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