[Required Reading] "Tyranny of the Christian Right"
I strongly recommend everyone read this post on AlterNet, "Tyranny of the Christian Right". Despite the hot-button title, it is actually quite full of a rational approach to what I feel is becoming a major concern in America. This article has managed to manifest in terms far more thorough as well as elegant than me, my viewpoints (though I do not agree with all parts of the article, but overall I agree with most of it). Here is an excerpt:
America's ragged divides
Those who want to fight Christian nationalism will need a long-term and multifaceted strategy. I see it as having three parts -- electoral reform to give urban areas fair representation in the federal government, grassroots organizing to help people fight Christian nationalism on the ground and a media campaign to raise public awareness about the movement's real agenda.
My ideas are not about reconciliation or healing. It would be good if a leader stepped forward who could recognize the grievances of both sides, broker some sort of truce, and mend America's ragged divides. The anxieties that underlay Christian nationalism's appeal -- fears about social breakdown, marital instability and cultural decline -- are real. They should be acknowledged and, whenever possible, addressed. But as long as the movement aims at the destruction of secular society and the political enforcement of its theology, it has to be battled, not comforted and appeased.
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According to Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy, the combined populations of Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska equal that of New York and Massachusetts, but the former states have a total of nine more votes in the Electoral College (as well as over five times the votes in the Senate). In America, conservatives literally count for more.
Liberals should work to abolish the Electoral College and to even out the composition of the Senate, perhaps by splitting some of the country's larger states.(A campaign for statehood for New York City might be a place to start.) It will be a grueling, Herculean job. With conservatives already indulging in fantasies of victimization at the hands of a maniacal Northeastern elite, it will take a monumental movement to wrest power away from them. Such a movement will come into being only when enough people in the blue states stop internalizing right-wing jeers about how out of touch they are with "real Americans" and start getting angry at being ruled by reactionaries who are out of touch with them.
After all, the heartland has no claim to moral authority. The states whose voters are most obsessed with "moral values" have the highest divorce and teen pregnancy rates. The country's highest murder rates are in the South and the lowest are in New England. The five states with the best-ranked public schools in the country -- Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Wisconsin -- are all progressive redoubts. The five states with the worst -- New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi and Louisiana -- all went for Bush.
The canard that the culture wars are a fight between "elites" versus "regular Americans" belies a profound split between different kinds of ordinary Americans, all feeling threatened by the others' baffling and alien values. Ironically, however, by buying into right-wing elite-baiting, liberals start thinking like out-of-touch elites. Rather than reflecting on what kind of policies would make their own lives better, what kind of country they want to live in, and who they want to represent them -- and then figuring out how to win others to their vision -- progressives flail about for ideas and symbols that they hope will appeal to some imaginary heartland rube. That is condescending.
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I got a chance to read the whole article and… Well… Here is goes: (Sorry it is a bit long.)
I am very annoyed at the fact that people continuously assume they know what “separation of church and state” means. This is not clearly a statement against religion in politics it is an unclear idea and was written to be so. There was not uniform agreement on what the role of religion should be in society and government. It was agreed upon that the new government should not have an official church the way that England had an official church, and that the elected officials should not have to answer to or be ordered around by a religious leader like kings were sometimes subservient to popes. This was the minimal exclusion that should take place, the line that church must not cross according to most people who were involved in creating the Constitution, etc. Other thought that the separation should be greater, that religious ideals and morality had no place inspiring or justifying legislation. They felt that everything that happened in government ought to be justified and inspired by only the secular. This however was not the view of the vast majority (at least not that I have heard), but then again neither did the either side. The founders were split on this idea and the compromise was a ambiguous “separation of church and state.” The wording can be interpreted either way and that is why it was adopted. To say that Evangelicals (or fundamentalist) cannot pass laws, offer classes in public schools or make judicial rulings that are inspired by and further their religious beliefs because of the “separation of church and state” is true only if you interpret that clause in a very strict and wide ranging way. The hard core secularists interpret it that way and so it makes perfect sense to them. The Evangelicals interpret it the other way—that if they are a majority or in the very least are elected that they are free to do as they wish as long as they don’t establish and official church or a supreme religious leader like the Ayatollah. Both are possible interpretations…
This brings me to the issue of interpretation which I think is really at the heart of this whole issue. Interpretation is the forerunner of understanding and knowledge. Anything that is understood and considered knowledge (or fact) has already been interpreted. Sensory input is meaningless without interpretation. Language is meaningless without interpretation. Some things are open to more interpretation (and more varied and wide ranging interpretations) than others, but nothing is limited to one possible interpretation. “The ways are multitudes.” (Where that quote I recall from high school came from I cannot recall.)
The tricky thing about interpretation is that it is circular and as a result anything one believes or believes they know is circular. What you interpret the world (or the phrase “separation of church and state”) to mean (how you understand it and what knowledge and facts come out of it) both determines and is influenced by what you think the world is (or what you want it to be). You interpret the separation clause in a secularist way and that makes you a secularist, but you also made that interpretation (and believe in it so securely) because you already were a secularist to some extent. The same goes for the Evangelicals. The same goes for whatever side you take on the evolution debate. The same goes for just about everything. (What are the exceptions? I don’t know but I don’t want to heavy handedly rule anything out.)
This issue of interpretation and circularity goes even deeper, it penetrate and permeates, it is the only foundation. A person believes in secularism and democracy not because they are true or right or some ideal… They have posited them (or retained them from their heritage) as true, right or as and ideal because they believe in them and are attracted to the world that they make possible. The same is true of the Christian Nationalists. These people are not wrong or perverted, they believe in something different. They are not irrational or insane, they hold different standards for sanity and have a different form of reason. It all comes down to the circularity of interpretation which really is a kind of faith in all cases. Some believe in secularism and other Christian Nationalism.
What scars me about both sides is that they hide or block them selves off from this circularity this faith—the secularists more so than the Christian Nationalists actually. The Christian Nationalists think that God has spoken to them clearly and definitively. This is a faith without doubt, which as far as I am concerned is not faith at all but stubborn self-righteousness. (Faith needs doubt and religion needs doubt and self searching that takes place within a safe space, the space of a sect or church.) The secularists on the other hand seem to ignore the fact that their worldview is based on a faith in science, the material world and abstraction. It is based on faith no less than the Christian Nationalist thought it appears not to be because their faith is at the same time more fashionable (because it is in line with the reason and logic that have been dominant since the start of the Enlightenment) and because it has faith in ways of looking at and abstracting from the material world (as opposed to faith in a non-material God and his revelations). It seems easier to swallow but it is no less based on faith than the other. (In fact its ideas of universal relevance and applicability, morality, equality and progress are derived from that same non-material God and his revelations. This in a sense is a matter of faith itself, faith in the western tradition.)
As for the Electoral College bit: The same sorts of arguments were made by the conservatives when the Democrats had a hold on the Congress during the Regan Era and when Clinton was president. Both republicans and democrats wrote editorials lambasting and calling for the end of the Electoral College that were to run after the Bush-Gore election—depending of course on who won. If the democrats won the republicans were going to bash it. If the republicans won the democrats were going to bash it. Both also had people writing pieces to defend it. We will never get rid of the Electoral College because it is a convenient tool to both win election when you might otherwise not and to use as a scapegoat when they lose. The thing is there in the first place because the founding fathers didn’t really trust the uneducated masses to elect an executive. I am not sure that we are any better educated today…
And as far as New York and the NorthEast: I think New York City should become its own country. I lived there for three years and it is out of touch with the rest of the world, it is as real and in touch as Disney Land.
In the end what the article is advocating is an Enlightenment-Technological-Democratic fundamentalism. I say fundamentalism because it holds its values (freedom, equality, democracy—all of which I like) to be absolute and universal when in fact they are not. They are elements of faith and hope, just like God, the Trinity and Salvation. This sort of fundamentalism is violent towards difference, individuality and tradition… But this gets on to another subject….
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