Public Faith, Pandering, and Blogs

Don't look now, but the count-down to pandering has expired in the Republican Party.

You might have lost it in the news - after all, we just have to have semi-hourly updates on Britney's bald-gate and the latest in the struggle to get Anna Nicole Smith buried (finally, I understand why that poor woman was so screwed up). Both John McCain and Mitt Romney are busy dropping little bombs to stake out their conservative credentials. Specifically, they are simply trying to sew up support among Conservative Christians.

McCain's position is a bit more difficult. He first has to prove to warhawks that he was right and Bush was wrong, but do it in a way that says, "I'll still go balls to the wall to kill." At the same time, he has to reassure religious conservatives that, while he isn't "one of us", he is at least friendly to their political agenda. So he's made the ridiculous statement that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. In doing so he proved that he can drop meaningless codewords in support of conservative activists. It looks like he may have finally mastered sound-bite politics.

Romney, on the other hand, is already getting tons of free promotion just for being a Mormon. Traditional wisdom is that Romney's faith hurts him among religious conservatives. It has to be said that there is a subset of the Christian Right that views Mormonism as a cult and they would sooner vote for Hillary Clinton (or so they say now) than a Mormon. But the constant focus on his faith will do nothing less than constantly play up how closely his issue positions (at least, his positions post-Massachusetts) align with those of the Christian Right. It will also serve to show America how diverse the Religious Right actually is.

This should not, however, be mistaken for true pluralism or a rejection of anything the Religious Right has stood for over the last twenty years. It is truly a form of nationalism in that it sweeps everything up in its demand for ideological purity. Agree with 90% of what they espouse? Not good enough (see John McCain pandering as hard as he can?). This is not about pursuing a thin political agenda - as it is so often misunderstood. It is about pursuing a mostly-false mythical American Christian identity. It is about imposing religiously dogmatic and culturally pervasive hegemony.

So how can a group that is, as I just claimed, somewhat diverse also push for a dogmatic and pervasive hegemony? It's simple. The diversity is skin deep - they don't care if you are a white male or not (though it certainly helps among some groups). This isn't a American Independent Baptists we're talking about, it's an interdenominational and increasingly intergenerational movement that builds on a hegemonic core. The centrality of that core is a literal reading of the Bible, the inerrancy of scripture, and the virtual commandment that "real Christians" want to recast society to save it from itself.

Of course, the goal of any collective social action - whether based in religion or not - is to save society from itself in one manner or another. What sets apart the Christian Right's ideas on how to do so is the particular religious creed to which they are tied. What are, for all intents and purposes, articles of faith are set on the political agenda for no other reason than because they are articles of faith. Why has evolution been opposed by so many of the Christian Right? Because it's an article of faith. They simply believe it's wrong. What about abortion? Same reply. What about global warming (though this is changing somewhat)? Same answer. What about opposition to full equality for women, racial minorities, and gay people? Same answer.

The problem with Christian nationalism isn't that it uses faith as a basis for action - it's that it uses faith and excludes everything else. Their narrow, literal, and selective interpretation of religious texts leads them to call for a more restrictive society that would effectively restrict civil liberties and freedoms that I believe are part and parcel of America's secular society. Chief among these are the tendency to vilify those who dissent and the enforcement of strict gender and sex roles in society at large.

But, to be honest, many of these same problems (if not all) exist on the left, too. Barack Obama has been roundly criticized for using the language of the Christian Right to speak about faith and politics - but the vocabulary for using any competing language is glaringly absent from the modern American lexicon. In short, Obama sounds like he's providing cover for the Christian Right because there is no truly public version of the Christian Left. John Edwards sounds a bit wishy-washy when he talks about alleviating poverty because the language for forcefully attacking that problem has fallen into disrepute. For decades, leading intellectuals of the left have kept it alive by couching it in academic terms - terms that are all too unaccessible for many Americans.

America needs the faithful left to be its voice of conscience, not because other voices cannot or are not articulating that moral authority, but because those voices are too easily dismissed. While I reject the concept of America as a Christian name, I do understand that America speaks the language of the Christian faith - even if it is not done clearly or consistently. It is a shorthand language that cuts through the divisiveness of the surface and forces discussions to a moral level that is all too often missing in contemporary politics.

So I am sending out the call to religious progressives - let us join together to stop the pandering from the left and the right and learn to reason together, to speak heart to heart, and to wrestle with our collective morality in order to face down the problems that have arisen in our society today. I'm calling for a second Progressive Faith Bloggers Conference because it is needed, and I cannot find it within myself to turn away from that need.