Category Archives: Religion

Religion and Liberalism

Posted on by

I’ve been struggling with an essay by Stanley Fish in the behind-the-firewall New York Times. Fish seems to be arguing that liberalism and religion are incompatible and that liberal society requires the diminution of religion.

Liberalism is in no way incompatible with my religion. However, I’m not going to dismiss Fish’s argument out of hand, even though I think he has several blind spots.

First, I want to repeat the point made by Mark Lilla in his recent New York Times essay, “The Politics of God,” that I blogged about here: Separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible. Lilla provides a long and thoughtful analysis of western civilization going back to the Reformation, and he makes a solid argument that joining religious and political authority, even when done in a reasonably progressive and benevolent way, leads either to totalitarianism or ongoing violent conflict, or both. As Lilla puts it, “Messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics.” Lilla continues,

So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from divine revelation. Yet more is required still. Since the challenge of political theology is enduring, we need to remain aware of its logic and the threat it poses. This means vigilance, but even more it means self-awareness. We must never forget that there was nothing historically inevitable about our Great Separation, that it was and remains an experiment. In Europe, the political ambiguities of one religion, Christianity, happened to set off a political crisis that might have been avoided but wasn’t, triggering the Wars of Religion; the resulting carnage made European thinkers more receptive to Hobbes’s heretical ideas about religious psychology and the political implications he drew from them; and over time those political ideas were liberalized. Even then, it was only after the Second World War that the principles of modern liberal democracy became fully rooted in continental Europe.

As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It’s a miracle.

It’s a miracle we’re maintaining by the skin of our teeth, of course, and several items Lilla lists above are far from settled. But I want to digress one more time, to a wonderful blog series written by John McGowan and posted on Michael Bérubé’s blog in June 2005. It’s called “The Republican Assault on Democracy,” and it’s in three parts — Part I, Part II, Part III. The following extract is taken from all three parts.

My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power. Democracy, in my view, is not worth a damn if it is not partnered with liberalism. Democracy and liberalism are a squabbling pair; they each locate power in a different place–democracy in the people, liberalism in the law–and they aim for different goods: democracy (in its most ideal form) for something like the “general will,” liberalism for a modus vivendi in a world characterized by intractable conflicts among people with different beliefs, goals, ambitions, and values. Neither one trumps the other; both, in my view, are essential ingredients of a legitimate polity. …

… Not only the Republicans, but the American nation as a whole, seem to have lost any sense whatsoever of what liberalism means and what it strives to insure. Even at the best of times, the liberal check upon power is a tenuous bulwark that fights against the odds. There is nothing that underwrites the rule of law except the continued practice of upholding it. The law must be reaffirmed anew each and every time it is enunciated and enforced. And the temptation to circumvent the law, to rewrite it to accommodate one’s current beliefs and practices, is also ever present. To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful–or that one’s own beliefs are, in every sense of that word, “partial.” It is their assurance in their own virtue that renders the Republicans most dangerous, most prone to set the law aside when it gets in the way of doing when they know in their hearts is right. Impatience with the law is endemic–and it is the harbinger of extreme politics of either the right or the left. (It is here, of course, that the leftist will leap. But why should we think leftist self-righteousness any more attractive or less dangerous than the rightist variety?)

I will continue on this line of thought in my next post. Here I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles. Yet its benefits are enormous; it provides, I am convinced, the only possible way humans can live in peace together in a pluralistic world. Given how distasteful liberal expedients are in experience, it is a miracle that they ever get established and maintained. But the benefits of that miracle are multiple–and we, as a nation, will sorely regret it if we trash our liberal edifice out of impatience, frustration, or, even worse, sheer forgetfulness of why that edifice was put in place, how it works, and what it accomplishes. …

… Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference. Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers. And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits. (A social benefit, as opposed to an individual benefit, is a good that can only be produced as the result of the aggregate of many individual actions, not by any individual acting on his or her own. And, ideally, social benefits would accrue to all of the individuals who contribute to its creation, although that is hardly always the case.)

Except for what are generally weak claims for the benefits of diversity (weak not in the sense of being unconvincing, but weak in the sense that no very major social benefit is claimed and some costs are acknowledged), the liberal argument for non-political interference, for privacy and individual autonomy, is primarily negative. Conflict is the result of trying to tell people what to believe and what to do, so we are better off cultivating a talent for resisting our inclinations to insist that others see the world and run their lives the way I do.

But liberalism also provides a positive response to pluralism. It guarantees–through freedoms of speech, the press, and association, and through the institutional mechanisms of election, jury trials, and legislative deliberations–the active engagement of citizens with one another. Liberals should, I believe, promote in every way possible the existence of a vibrant, accessible, and uncensored public sphere (or, to use another term for it, civil society). In short, liberalism proliferates the occasions where citizens of different opinions, backgrounds, creeds etc. mingle with one another, express their views, and argue about specific issues. And, in some but not all cases, these settings have to move to a decision that is then accepted, even when not very satisfying, by all the parties involved. …

… I think we have lost any sense of how our democracy functions–or that it may be much more fragile than we assume. … We are assuming an immunity from civil strife that is hardly guaranteed.

It’s interesting to me that Lilla and McGowan both call liberal democracy a “miracle.” Particularly in a country as large and diverse as ours, we ought to be a roiling mass of warring factions. Ironically, I believe one of the reasons we’ve managed to keep the great experiment going this long is our almost religious devotion to the Constitution.

McGowan wasn’t writing about religion specifically, but I wanted to get his points about liberalism in front of you before wading into the Stanley Fish essay. Fish begins by citing the crusading atheists, i.e. Richard Dawkins.

The authors of these tracts are characterized by professor Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University as “the soccer hooligans of reasoned discourse.” He asks (rhetorically), “Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than thirty seconds without referring to religious peoples as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the public good, crypto-Nazis, conjure men, irrationalists … authoritarian despots and so forth?”

In a similar vein, Tom Krattenmaker, who studies religion in public life, wonders why, given their celebration of open-mindedness and critical thinking, secularists “so frequently leave their critical thinking at the door” when it “comes to matters of religion?” Why are they closed-minded on this one subject?

An answer to these questions can be found, I think, in another publishing phenomenon: the growing number of books and articles dedicated to the rehabilitation of liberalism both as a political vision and as a self-identification of which one needn’t be ashamed.

I object to the equation of liberalism with atheism, intolerant or otherwise. A liberal may be religious, or not, but so may be a conservative. But let’s go on —

An answer to these questions can be found, I think, in another publishing phenomenon: the growing number of books and articles dedicated to the rehabilitation of liberalism both as a political vision and as a self-identification of which one needn’t be ashamed.

A recent example is Paul Starr’s “Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism” (2007). Starr, a professor of sociology at Princeton, claims that what unites liberals are political principles rather than agreement “on the ultimate grounds on which these principles rest.” This is the familiar (and suspect) claim that liberalism is not a substantive ideology but a political device that allows many ideologies to flourish and compete in the marketplace of ideas. Liberalism, says Starr, “is only a framework – that is, it provides a space for free development.” Where there are deep “divisions over the meaning of the good life,” he continues, the “neutrality” of the liberal state “furthers mutual forbearance.”

But right there, in the invocation of “free development” and “mutual forbearance,” Starr gives the lie to liberal neutrality. Free development (the right of individuals to frame and follow their own life plans) and mutual forbearance (a live-and-let-live attitude toward the beliefs of others as long as they do you no harm) are not values everyone endorses.

Remember what McGowan said — “Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference. Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers. And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits.”

Fish is, in effect, arguing that democratic society must honor anti-democratic views, even if those views threaten civil peace and promote tyranny, because to do otherwise violates the principles of tolerance that liberalism claims to value. However, I argue that it is perfectly consistent for a liberal to be intolerant of intolerance and to stand against anything that threatens civil liberty.

And I’ve also argued in the past that being liberal doesn’t mean being a patsy.

Anyway, finally we get to the meat of Fish’s essay:

And neither are the other values Starr identifies as distinctively liberal — individualism, egalitarianism, self-realization, free expression, modernity, innovation. These values, as many have pointed out, are part and parcel of an ideology, one that rejects a form of government organized around a single compelling principle or faith and insists instead on a form of government that is, in legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s words, “independent of any particular conception of the good life.” Individual citizens are free to have their own conception of what the good life is, but the state, liberal orthodoxy insists, should neither endorse nor condemn any one of them (unless of course its adherents would seek to impose their vision on others).

It follows then that the liberal state can not espouse a particular religion or require its citizens to profess it. Instead, the liberal state is committed to tolerating all religions while allying itself with none. Indeed, Starr declares, “the logic of liberalism” is “exemplified” by religious toleration. For if the idea is to facilitate the flourishing of many points of view while forestalling “internecine… conflicts”  between them, religion, the most volatile and divisive of issues, must be removed from the give and take of political debate and confined to the private realm of the spirit, where it can be tolerated because it has been quarantined.

Thus the toleration of religion goes hand in hand with – is the same thing as – the diminishing of its role in the society. It is a quid pro quo. What the state gets by “excluding religion from any binding social consensus” (Starr) is a religion made safe for democracy. What religion gets is the state’s protection. The result, Starr concludes approvingly, is “a political order that does not threaten to extinguish any of the various theological doctrines” it contains.

That’s right. The liberal order does not extinguish religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the religions that display the same respect for the public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces. A religion that accepts the partitioning of the secular and the sacred and puts at its center the private transaction between the individual and his God fits the liberal bill perfectly. John Locke and his followers, of whom Starr is one, would bar civic authorities from imposing religious beliefs and would also bar religious establishments from meddling in the civic sphere. Everyone stays in place; no one gets out of line.

What Fish doesn’t address is Lilla’s contention that the kind of democratic republic we have enjoyed since the Constitution took effect in 1789 is not possible without separation of church and state. Without strict limits on the power of sectarian religion, liberal democracy cannot survive. Either religious strife will pull it apart, or else a dominant religious faction will take over and render government more authoritarian and intolerant of diversity. And that includes religious diversity.

Fish continues,

But what of religions that will not stay in place, but claim the right, and indeed the duty, to order and control the affairs of the world so that the tenets of the true faith are reflected in every aspect of civic life? Liberalism’s answer is unequivocal. Such religions are the home of “extremists … fascists … enemies of the public good … authoritarian despots and so forth.”

Lilla’s essay makes a good argument that the name-callers are correct. And I would like to point out to Stanley Fish that, were the U.S. given over to “religions that will not stay in place, but claim the right, and indeed the duty, to order and control the affairs of the world so that the tenets of the true faith are reflected in every aspect of civic life,” those people inevitably will turn around and oppress religious minorities. Liberalism may be “intolerant” of some religion, but so is theocracy.

Closed-mindedness with respect to religions that do not honor the line between the secular and the sacred is not a defect of liberalism; it is its very definition. …

… At first glance, this makes perfect sense. After all, why should we tolerate the unreasonable? But the sense it makes depends on “reasonable” having been defined as congruent with the liberal values of pluralism and moderation, and “unreasonable” having been defined as any viewpoint that refuses to respect and tolerate its competitors, but seeks to defeat them. In liberal thought, “reasonable” is a partisan, not a normative notion. It means “reasonable” from our perspective.

I’d say “reasonable” means “reasonably unlikely to destroy the fabric of society.” For a democratic republic, toleration of religious totalitarianism amounts to a suicide pact.

In saying this, I am not criticizing liberalism, just explaining what it is. It is a form of political organization that is militantly secular and incapable, by definition, of seeing the strong claim of religion — the claim to be in possession of a truth all should acknowledge — as anything but an expression of unreasonableness and irrationality.

Yet many liberals are deeply religious. Fish lazily equates “liberal” and “secular” with “non-religious” and “atheist,” but these are not synonymous. “Religious” and “secular” are not necessarily opposites. I call myself a “religious secularist,” for example, because I believe a religion-neutral society is one that allows a free and healthy personal exploration of religion, without coercion, intimidation, or forced indoctrination. On the other hand, when religionists are given governmental power, generally the first thing they do is squelch other religion.

Berlinerblau and Krattenmaker hold out the hope that secularists and strong religionists might come to an accommodation if they would listen to each other rather than just condemn each other. That hope is illusory, for each is defined by what it sees as the other’s errors.

I’m glad Fish used the word religionist here. The plain truth is that religionism is incompatible with democracy and with civil society that does not permit religious majorities to oppress and discriminate against religious minorities. Complain all you want, but if you want to live in a true democracy, religious neutrality is a necessary condition. Allowing any religious faction to use government “to order and control the affairs of the world so that the tenets of the true faith are reflected in every aspect of civic life” would mean the end of religious freedom for the rest of us.

However, I’m troubled by Fish’s claim that “The liberal order does not extinguish religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the religions that display the same respect for the public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces.” What do we do about religions that simply don’t respect the liberal social compact? That consider it their duty to take over government and rule all of us according to their religious beliefs? What should be the liberal response?

For reasons I’ve ranted about in the past I am as offended as Stanley Fish by the Dawkin-Hitchens school of broad-gauge shotgun, “demonize ’em all” criticism of religion. A big part of my argument with Stanley Fish is that he equates this school of criticism with “liberalism,” and I say it is just the opposite. Remember what John McGowan wrote —

I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles.

Can we say, liberalism appreciates the wisdom of doubt?

Right now great vistas of argument are opening up in front of me, so I’m going to stop here and save much of what’s rattling around in my head for future posts.

By the Book

Posted on by

Mustafa Akyol writes for the Turkish Daily News:

When Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda bomb innocents, or when some fringe imam in a radical mosque preaches hatred toward non-Muslims, these greenhorn “Islam experts” find some passages in the Koran, which apparently justify such extremists. No wonder that these extremists themselves refer to similar passages in the Koran or other Islamic sources. The situation is very similar to the strange agreement between the anti-Semites and the Jewish terrorists on the wrong notion that Judaism justifies carnage.

One common problem in all such misreading of the scriptures is the “sloganization” of certain verses or passages. This is done by taking a part of the holy text out of its textual and historical context, and turning into a slogan that will justify a mundane political agenda. For example, some Islamic revolutionaries, especially the ones who are inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, used to find a political message in this verse: “Those who do wrong will come to know by what a great reverse they will be overturned!” (26:227) But in fact the verse speaks about the punishment that God will hand down to unbelievers on judgment day.

The crucial mistake here is to overlook Islam’s scholarly tradition called “tafseer,” which is the study of the meaning of the Koran. Tafseer has a basic rule: A single verse or passage can’t be understood in itself; it has to be evaluated according to the other parts of the Koran, the general goals and principles of the holy text, and the way it was implemented by the prophet. Yet most radicals — whether they be Islamist or anti-Islamist — don’t have the time to waste with tafseer. They rather copy-paste the divine words to make powerful slogans.

In other words, according to Mustafa Akyol, Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran for permission to act out their hatred.

Akyol wrote that years ago he saw a book that claimed Jews oppressed Muslims because that’s what the Jewish religion taught.

If the Israelis were breaking the bones of a Palestinian youngster — a globally notorious scene from the ‘80s — then the caption would include a verse with something like “Thou shall break their bones.” The book’s argument was blunt and simple: The Israelis were torturing a nation because that was what their religion ordered them to do.

The more I learned about the Old Testament and the politics of the Middle East, the more I realized that what the book presented was not analysis but anti-Semitic propaganda.

Of course, we’ve all seen propaganda like that, although the new version cherry picks verses from the Koran to prove that Islam teaches its followers to be terrorists.

But then there’s Mathew 10:34 — “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” — which is one of the Christian Right’s favorite verses. They may not know the Beatitudes from chickens, but the holy rollers can all quote that one verse. It’s an all-purpose justification for war against anyone outside the tribe. Conversely, I’ve seen anti-Christians quote it to show that Christianity is a religion of Evil.

When I was researching the history of fundamentalism for the Wisdom of Doubt series, I was struck by the fact that notions about absolute biblical inerrancy and literal interpretation of the Bible didn’t become popular until a few years after Darwin published Origin of Species. One suspects the “faithful” didn’t reject Darwin because it violated Scripture, but rather retrofitted interpretation of Scripture to justify their rejection of Darwin.

There seems to be a pattern here.

How insane is it that, three centuries after the Age of Reason, religious wars are raging around the planet? I understand why many non-religious people think scriptures promote ignorance and that the world would be better off without religion. I’m not sure religion is the cause of this ugliness as much as it is the excuse for it, however. If people didn’t have religion to justify their darker impulses, they’d come up with something else. As it is, for much of the world’s “faithful” religion has devolved into more of a tribal loyalty than anything resembling a spiritual quest.

On the other hand, one can argue that holy books have become enablers of sociopathy.

The Abrahamic religions in particular insist that their scriptures be respected as works of divine revelation and wisdom. So, mankind has lumbered into the 21st century still dragging a hodgepodge of mostly Iron Age literature vested with enormous, even supernatural, power and authority. And people use this literature to justify wholesale atrocity and to provide moral cover for psychopaths. Various demagogues who are considered “religious leaders” actually encourage this.

I’d say there’s a problem here that needs addressing.

This reminds me of a Zen story. Once upon a time a scholar gained great renown for his erudite interpretation of the sutras. People traveled great distances to hear his lectures and read his books. And then one day he had an awakening experience and realized enlightenment. After this, he burned all of his books and never lectured again.

May all beings realize Wisdom, hopefully before they destroy the planet.

Faith Based Larceny

Posted on by

Frederick Clarkson at Talk to Action tells us about George Bush’s nominee for surgeon general:

Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing Movement is a rightwing “renewal group” affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic churches of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing neoconservatism and the religious right.

Holsinger was elected to the highest court in the Methodist Church a time when the IRD-affiliated church “renewal” groups had launched efforts to use church judicial systems to enforce their notions of orthodoxy, particularly on matters related to homosexuality.

Now, an investigation [by] Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money, only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief.

Meanwhile, Weaver and McGaughy report Holsinger did not disclose to his fellow church justices that he he was party to significant litigation against the church in the state courts — and thereby surface any potential conflicts of interest. The litigation cost the United Methodist Church (UMC) millions of dollars in legal fees to recover its assets. The article also raises questions about how those assets (that were not given away) were managed while under the control of Dr. Holsinger and his associates, some of whom apparently also had conflicts of interest.

You might remember that the last surgeon general, Richard H. Carmona, told Congress that the White House kept him on a leash and would not allow him to speak or issue reports on stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. I guess the Bushies recognized that Holsinger is a man who won’t let integrity get in the way of his job. And what was that about people needing religion to be moral?

Messianic Hitchens

Posted on by

Christopher Hitchens critiques the Mark Lilla essay I blogged about yesterday, and makes a botch of it.

Hitchens’s single biggest howler in this piece is here —

Lilla’s most brilliant point concerns the awful pitfalls of what he does not call “liberation theology.” Leaving this stupid and oxymoronic term to one side, and calling it by its true name of “liberal theology” instead, he reminds us that the eager reformist Jews and Protestants of 19th-century Germany mutated into the cheerleaders of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich, which they identified—as had Max Weber—with history incarnate.

— where he confuses 19th century “liberal theology” with 20th century “liberation theology,” which were two entirely separate movements. And the word “liberal” in “liberal theology” didn’t mean “leftist” as we might use it now (and as Hitchens uses it, perhaps not having noticed the word liberal to refer to leftist/progressive politics didn’t come into vogue until the 1930s), but rather “free thinking,” an ideal of the Enlightenment. This alone is a big honking clue that Hitchens doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Hitchens writes, “In the first place, it is not correct to say that modernism relied on a conviction about the steady disappearance of religious belief,” as if Lilla had argued that modernism relied on a conviction about the steady disappearance of religious belief. But that is not what Lilla argued. He did not say that religious belief had to “disappear,” but that genuinely democratic government requires that religion be separated from politics. There’s a huge difference between thinking of religion as a matter of private conscience out of reach of government, and saying that it must be eliminated entirely.

Hitchens’s argument is based on the conceit that religion — all religion, mind you — is totalitarian, and all totalitarianism (including totalitarian states in which religion is persecuted) is religion. As I argued here, the real enemy of democracy and modernism is fanaticism. Fanaticism can be religious, and it can be nonreligious. Hitchens himself is a fine example of a nonreligious — nay, anti-religious — fanatic.

The Lilla essay highlighted our species’ doggedly persistent tendency to think ahead to a pre-ordained, perfect future. This tendency can be found in most religions — the Second Coming is a prime example. But it can also be found in non-religious ideologies — replacing bourgeois society with a workers’ paradise, or secular democracy spreading to all the nations of the world. A major point I took from Lilla’s essay is that this sort of utopian thinking can cloud understanding and cause nations to make some very bad decisions. For example, the belief that there is a pre-ordained arc of history that will lead all nations to democracy could lead to misreading of current events. And when utopianism gets mixed up with nationalism, events can get ugly.

Thinking about a better future is not necessarily fanatical. It’s common to hope that, some day, human society will evolve into something more peaceful and compassionate than it is now. Nor does it worry me if some people associate this future benevolent society with religious belief, such as the Second Coming of Christ, as long as the belief is held with humility, as something beyond ordinary understanding that will happen in its own way and in its own time.

But when people are so all-fired determined to make their perfect future come to pass that they are willing to violently overturn the current social order, or oppress and/or eliminate those they think stand in the way, then we’re looking at the kind of fanatical messianism that creates brutal and oppressive totalitarian regimes. I agree with Christopher Hitchens that this is an outcome to be avoided. I disagree, however, that all religion and only religion inevitably leads to this outcome.

Hitchens’s conceit is that religion causes utopian fanaticism, and that if religion were only eliminated the world would be a better place. But I say utopian fanaticism can exist without religion, and that much religion is neither utopian nor messianic. Even if all religion, and all belief in God or gods, disappeared tomorrow (which would be Hitchens’s utopian fantasy, I believe), utopian thinking would still be with us.

Rather than assume religion causes utopian fanaticism, I think it’s more accurate to say that utopian thinking breeds a certain kind of religious thinking, in which a person-God is believed to be leading his believers collectively to a glorious future. And that is, certainly, a common viewpoint of many religions. But not all religions promote that point of view. My religion doesn’t even recognize linear time except as a relative construct, for pity’s sake; past, present, and future are all One. But even in the God-centered religions, people do interpret apocalyptic prophecies as metaphors for individual, rather than global, transcendence. Or, as I was taught, the challenge of the “end times” is one of personal preparation — be “right with God” every moment, because you never know when the End is coming.

And in the modern age it is just as likely for people to think that if only their ideological principles would be put into practice, a perfect society would be born. Think of libertarians and their absolute faith in free markets to solve just about all humanity’s problems.

Many of us use the word “messianic” to describe extreme utopian faiths, whether religious or political. And you can use the word religion to refer to non-religious matters, also. If I say Alice followed her diet religously I would mean that she followed her diet conscientiously, not that she was dieting because God told her to.

Hitchens may be confused by the common practice of using of the word religion as a synonym for faith. I argued here and here why religion and faith are not synonymous. I refuse to call myself a “person of faith” even though I am religious, and I think all religious people should do likewise. When you define the totality of religion as nothing but “faith,” and when faith in anything becomes indistinguishable from “religion,” then the word religion itself has lost any useful purpose and ought to be retired.

But religion is a great many things other than faith, and faith can be about a great many things other than religion. And when we’re clear about that, then it becomes obvious why Christopher Hitchens is a blathering fool.

Messianic Politics

Posted on by

Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, has a long and fascinating essay in the current New York Times magazine called “The Politics of God.” The essay is adapted from Lilla’s book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, to be published next month. In brief, Lilla looks at the relationship between politics and religion in broad historical context, and presents three essential points:

1. Separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible.
2. This separation came about in the West (17th century and after) as a result of a unique crisis within Christian civilization.
3. There is little reason to expect other societies, such as Muslim ones, to follow the same path.

Very briefly — this is a long essay, as I’ve said — it was Thomas Hobbes who showed Europe the way out of the bloody religious wars touched off by the Reformation.

In his great treatise “Leviathan” (1651), Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do — he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence.

In the next few paragraphs Lilla elaborates on what Hobbes wrote, then concludes:

Hobbes was neither a liberal nor a democrat. He thought that consolidating power in the hands of one man was the only way to relieve citizens of their mutual fears. But over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.

The ideals of our Enlightenment founders were built on Locke, and to them separation of church and state was a cornerstone of good civil society. Much of Europe, however, took a slightly different road. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 19th-century Europeans decided that politics and religion would not have to be separated if religion could be adapted to fit modernity.

It would have to be rationally reformed, of course: the Bible would have to be interpreted in light of recent historical findings, belief in miracles abandoned, the clergy educated along modern lines and doctrine adapted to a softer age. But once these reforms were in place, enlightened politics and enlightened religion would join hands.

This worked for a time, but eventually — especially after World War I — strong elements of messianic nationalism crept into this more “enlightened” religion. In Germany especially, messianic nationalism after World War I had some nasty results.

All of which served to confirm Hobbes’s iron law: Messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics. The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason.

There are a lot of undercurrents in this essay about fear and redemption. We humans can’t stop thinking that history has some pre-ordained arc toward utopian perfection, and beliefs about an impossibly perfect destiny fuel fanaticism and war. Even the political heirs of Hobbes have fallen into this delusion.

A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore.

In other words, we in the West tend to think that the historical-political arc that took us to democratic liberalism is somehow natural and pre-ordained for all human societies, and it is only a matter of time before all other peoples wise up and step into the light with us. But Lilla says this is not likely to happen in any foreseeable future. Our liberal-democratic order, tenuously maintained in a small part of the industrialized world, is an exception; a fluke of European history. We must not expect mass conversion to our way of thinking about separation of church and state.

This essay ignores the religious fanatics and messianic nationalists in our own midst who are determined to send America backward to the Dark Ages. It may be that Lilla discusses them in his upcoming book. But it is striking to me how easily some can go from declaring that liberty is “God’s gift” to deciding God has called us to spread that gift throughout the world by force of arms.

Think of it; for the sake of a ideal of democratic government made possible by separating religion from government, an American government led by a messianic Christian president engages in war to enforce that ideal in Muslim nations that don’t want it. If there is a hell, all the demons in it must be laughing their butts off.

Update: In today’s Washington Post, Peter Baker what happens when messianic presidents attack.

Over Rove

Posted on by

David Frum writes in today’s New York Times:

AS a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question.

The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?

The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it?

It occurs to me that one could say something similar about the DLC. They’re still answering the question “How can Democrats win elections after Reagan and the VRWC moved the nation so far Right?” And the question they ignored was “How do we correct the nation’s political culture and move the nation back to the center?” But this is a post about Rove and his lasting impact on the Republican party.

Frum goes on to say that Rove’s polarizing tactics united the GOP base, but it also united the Democratic Party base.

Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. …

…Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.

The “new motherlode” was Latino voters, of course. Rove also tried to make inroads into the African-American vote by wooing some black evangelical ministers, but that attempt was flooded out by Katrina.

Seems to me that in attempting to “mine” Latino votes, Rove stepped on a land mine planted by Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who had the brilliant idea to win white voters away from the Democrats by exploiting racism — the Southern strategy. As explained by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips in 1970, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” Reagan tapped into the same vein with his stories about welfare queens. Rove must not have noticed that the cornerstone of his base is bigotry.

Josh Marshall has a good analysis of Frum’s column. Right now I want to look at just one part of GOP base, the Christian right.

A number of Karl Rove retrospectives online today give Rove credit for cobbling together a coalition of small government conservatives and religious conservatives, but I say not all that credit is deserved. As noted here, right-wing religion and right-wing politics have been fellow travelers in America since at least the 1930s. Richard Hofstadter wrote in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage Books, 1962, p. 131):

Their heightened sense of isolation and impotence helped to bring many of the dwindling but still numerically significant fundamentalists into the ranks of a fanatical right-wing opposition to the New Deal. The fundamentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of the flag. Since the 1930’s, fundamentalism has been a significant component in the extreme right in American politics, whose cast of thought often shows strong fundamentalist filiations.

Ronald Reagan is likewise given credit for bringing evangelical Christians into the conservative camp. But I think it’s more correct that many evangelicals were already there, in particular the Premillenialists. Reagan simply signaled to them that the GOP was now ready to champion their views. Gary Wills wrote in 1988,

The other sign of the End, the Antichrist, took visible shape for these Christians in the Communist empire — which is why they were so excited when Ronald Reagan referred to that as the “Evil Empire” and “the focus of all evil in the world.” A leader who would recognize that was, for them, another sign. Detail after detail could be put together. Gorbachev’s forehead birthmark became “the mark of the Beast” from Revelation (13:17). Ezekial 38 and 39 suggested that the last war would begin with an invasion from the north; Falwell sought etymological linkages between Russian and biblical names. The invaders would come for “spoil,” and all you had to do was take off that word’s first two letters to get the reason for Soviet invasion of the Middle East. [Gary Wills, reprinted in Under God: Religion and American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1990) p. 150]

But the links between the U.S.S.R. and Satan were already well established in many Christian’s heads. I well remember that illustrations in my Sunday School literature of the 1950s often portrayed Nikita Khrushchev or other Soviet leaders standing with the Devil, while Jesus hovered protectively over the United States. And this was a Lutheran Sunday School. I can’t imagine what the kids were being taught at the Assembly of God church down the street.

In other words, the connection between Satan and Communism was old news when Reagan came along. All he did was let right-wing Christians know that he “got” it.

I want to go back to Gary Wills and the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. “Poppy” Bush.

Bush was paying court to evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker in that same period, hoping for an endorsement from them while they were still in their glory days of running Heritage USA, the patriotic theme park. Reagan had won evangelicals away from Jimmy Carter, one of their own, in 1980, capturing the electorally important South. That region stayed with him in 1984, though he had not pushed very hard for causes like prayer in school. Now the evangelicals, feeling powerful, were ready to make harder demands — even, in 1988, to run one of their own. It was time for Reagan’s party to deliver. [Wills, ibid., p. 79]

Poppy actually went further to court the religious Right than Reagan did. Bush publicly declared that Jesus was his “personal savior,” which is not something one normally hears from a High Church WASP like #41. Reagan, Wills said, had deftly side-stepped personal confessions of faith, but Bush needed to go the extra mile, so to speak, to win them over. Further, running mate Dan Quayle was a disciple of a Dispensationalist named Robert Thieme, which may have been a factor in his being chosen for the ticket. Wills wrote (op cit., p. 80) that Bush “had finally got religion by the balls.” Perhaps, but the evangelical vote didn’t seem much of a factor when Poppy lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. Poppy really wasn’t one of them.

Now let’s pick up what Lou Dubose writes in Salon about Karl Rove:

In Texas, we saw this modern iteration of the Republican Party come together in the summer or 1994, as Bush kicked off his first successful run for public office. (He had lost a congressional race in West Texas in 1978, in which Rove was only marginally involved.) Social conservatives had already joined together with economic conservatives when Ronald Reagan got into bed with the Rev. Jerry Falwell. But it was Rove who consecrated the union. A nominal Christian and Episcopalian, Rove had little regard for the evangelical extremists who have become essential to the success of the modern Republican Party, even cracking the occasional joke about his own lack of faith.

Then the Christian right showed up at the Republicans’ state convention in Fort Worth, in 1994, with enough delegates to seize control of the party. The dominant Christian faction tossed George H.W. Bush’s handpicked state chairman and longtime friend, Fred Meyer, out of office and replaced him with a charismatic Catholic lawyer from Dallas. It banned liquor from convention hotels and replaced hospitality-room bars with “ice cream sundae bars,” where chefs prepared designer confections. It summoned delegates to Grand Old Prayer Sessions, required Christian fealty oaths of candidates for party leadership, and made opposition to abortion the brand by which Texas Republicans would be defined.

This political great awakening was not unique to Texas. But it occurred in a context in which a brilliant, Pygmalion political consultant saw in George W. Bush a malleable idol who could be fashioned into a governor and ultimately a president. And Bush was a candidate whose genuine evangelical faith was an asset rather than a liability. After initially fighting the dominant evangelical delegation at the state convention — proposing Texas Rep. Joe Barton as a compromise candidate for state party chairman — Rove joined them.

By all accounts not religious himself, Rove masterfully exploited religion as a campaign resource. To cement the relationship, right-wing Christians were given places of honor both in the campaigns and in the Bush Administration. But neither Rove nor Bush seem to have given enough thought to the long-term consequences of turning the Republican Party — never mind the government — over to fanatics and absolutists.

First, says Dubose, “the larger public — and even the Republican Party, if the candidacy of Rudy Giuliani means anything — has grown weary of the Christian right.” Remember, the “Christian right” represents a minority of Christians. The large majority of Christians do not believe in the Rapture and are not keen on starting Armageddon anytime soon. I’ve heard much anecdotal evidence recently that even many Southern, socially conservative Christians are tired of politicians who ceaselessly harp on guns, God, gays, and abortion, but have little to say about kitchen-table issues — jobs, pensions, health care, gas prices. Not to mention Iraq.

Second, you can’t very well maintain a governing coalition with people who won’t compromise and who do not even tolerate, much less respect, opposing opinions. (Disagreement with them is not just disagreement; it is Evil.) As I wrote here, Rove’s biggest blind spot is his failure to see that campaigning is not governing. Making promises and smearing opponents only takes an office holder so far. At some point he needs to follow up on promises and see to it that his policies are working. Rove and Bush seem to have plenty of the vision thing; what they don’t have is the accomplishment thing.

And third, now that the Christian right owns the Republican Party, it remains to be seen if the GOP can nominate someone moderate enough to win the general election.

Deb Reichmann of the Associated Press reported recently that President Bush still has majority support of only three demographic groups:

The only subgroups where a majority of people give Bush the nod are Republicans (67 percent), conservatives (53 percent) and white evangelicals who attend religious services at least once a week (56 percent).

These are the same three subsets of voters who support Bush on Iraq.

White evangelicals as an entire bloc – regardless of how often they report going to church – have been a reliable support group for Bush since he first set foot in the Oval Office. But even their overall approval of the president declined to 44 percent last month from 57 percent in May – a decline driven partly by bad news from the battlefield in Iraq and conservatives’ opposition to Bush’s ideas on immigration.

Of course, there are plenty of people who have soured on Bush but who are still inclined to vote for Republicans. But in a close election, can a GOP candidate afford to distance himself from the Christian right base? I doubt it. But can a presidential candidate packaged to appeal to the Christian right win a general election? I doubt it. What’s a Republican party to do?

And might I point out that the GOP didn’t have this problem back in Dwight Eisenhower’s day. But that was a long time ago.

The War on Science

Posted on by

In Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis, who explains why science in Muslim countries is stuck in the past. For example, “A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.” And this is remarkable considering that, centuries ago, the Middle East was light years ahead of Europe in science.

What’s so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During Europe’s Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?

Note also that Copernicus used the mathematical work of Iranian astronomers to construct his theory of the solar system.

What happened, in brief, was the European “scientific revolution.” Beginning in the 16th century, Europeans went through a shift in consciousness about how to understand and study the natural world. As a result, religion and science were separated into two entirely separate spheres of knowledge. Plus, as Edis says, this separation, with its promise of infinite new inventions and technologies, became complete just in time to plug into emerging capitalism. But in Muslim countries the critical separation of science from religion never occurred. Thus, scientific inquiry in the Middle East never matured into true science as it did in Europe.

And now, there’s Islamic creationism.

In many Muslim countries, you don’t have much creationism, but only because evolution does not appear in their textbooks in the first place. In countries that have had some exposure to conventional science education, such as Turkey, then you also have more of a public creationist reaction. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen creationism appearing in Turkey’s official science textbooks that are taught in high schools. Turkey has also witnessed a very strong popular movement for creationism that has spread to the whole Islamic world.

But before we feel pity for Middle Eastern scientists, let us consider what we’re dealing with here in the U.S. Namely, wingnuts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Ace of Spades. Never mind that the Ace’s, um, interpretation of the article bears no resemblance whatsoever to what the article says. Wingnuts generally have reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to that of spinach. Just take a look at this conclusion —

Hey, Christian conservatives? You want to win your creationism cases? Start bringing in Muslim creationists. And watch your liberal opponents suddenly finding it much more plausible that God — or, rather, Allah — created the earth, the animals, and humans directly.

Somewhere in there is a clue to why one cannot have a sensible conversation with an American right winger.

To his credit, the Ace is not a creationist himself. However, he dismisses global climate change as a “cult.” I’d say we’d best not point fingers at the Muslim world for being hostile to science. And we shouldn’t be too proud about logic or literacy, either.

See also: Sadly, No.

Update: Why some say we liberals should support righties in their fight to save the liberal values of the Enlightenment. No, serously.

Program Notes

Posted on by

Markos Moulitsas will be on Meet the Press today, with the DLC’s own Harold Ford. Could be fun. I’ll be in a zendo most of the morning and will miss it, but feel free to comment.

See also this op ed by Susan Gardner and Markos in yesterday’s Washington Post.

In religion news, David Neiwert reports that Rep. Bill Sali has recanted and says he didn’t mean to say that there shouldn’t be Muslims serving in Congress. David also posts more evidence that the Founding Fathers explicitly intended to include Islam in the protections of religious liberty.

Fundies are, apparently, still hollering about a Hindu prayer in Congress, because Hindus are (on the surface, anyway) polytheists. Hindu scholars might argue that Hindus were really the first monotheists, since all gods and beings are manifestations of Brahman, the One, but never mind. Once again, I give you Thomas Jefferson:

“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Now, is that so hard?

See also: Digby on the unrelenting creepiness of what fundies call “Christian love.” Logan Murphy at Crooks and Liars for more on the megachurch that canceled a memorial service for a veteran of the Gulf War when they found out the deceased was gay. Max Blumenthal on fundie proselytizing in the military.