There are those of us of no faith – not a lot of us, or at least not a lot who admit it. We’re not all of us angry atheists railing against religion like Christopher Hitchens with his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Yes, he makes some good points, and that volume is lively and impeccably researched, but being angry all the time makes you tired. People will believe what they will, and you work with it. The idea of getting things done in this world – of making anything better – by poking people in the chest and telling them that they are fools, and dangerous ones at that, is absurd. Insults are not particularly motivating, even if half the high school football coaches in America think otherwise.
And too, we who are of no faith are also not much into arguing this faith business with superb logic and firm grasp of psychology and evolutionary biology, as Richard Dawkins does in his book, The God Delusion. There may indeed be psycho-social reasons, even biological ones, that determined why and how religions and belief without any evidence in the-Guy-in-the-Sky developed, and why people still must have that in their lives, but, as interesting as that is, it makes little difference, operationally, in living day to day. You can understand in wonderful detail just why someone with whom you are dealing persists in their beliefs, but you also understand that they will persist, so your insight is, as they say, of marginal utility.
Most of us in this oddest of minorities, one of choice and not the accident of race or geography or social class, are quiet about it. We’re what’s left over from what was existentialism. God is not an issue – not so much that He’s dead but more as if the whole idea of God and faith in ultimate justice and all the other goodies and punishments seems like cheating, and a sort of self-delusion that we find a bit off-putting. We’d prefer people work out how best to get along here and now – not deferred ultimate justice but the best justice we can work out now to get along. And as for kindness, tolerance and doing the right thing – we prefer to think those through and work out what seems right, not expecting heavenly reward or eternal punishment. Others may find those hypothetical carrots and sticks useful, and they may be useful – but they’re not necessary. Yes, the religious say they are necessary, but we in the odd minority have this idea it is up to all of us, in the here and now, to work out the best way to get along with each other. Maintaining we all must do this or that and certainly not something else “because God said so” has caused no end of problems, as Hitchens notes. That hasn’t worked out so well, and as we’re all in this together, so leaving Him out of it might make sense, when everyone seems to be receiving contradictory inerrant directives.
What it comes down to is taking the position that people can believe what they’d like, and that’s fine, but it’s not that useful in a world where we must say what we think, listen to what others think, account for the emotions involved – pride, fear, anger and all the rest – and work out how we’ll all make it through the crisis of the moment without killing each other. That’s not God’s work. That’s our job. It’s not much fun, but pounding the table and shouting about what you believe God told you is not fun at all for anyone. There is a key principle here, something we of no faith tend to want to say – “Yes, you have deep and firm beliefs, and that’s fine, but let’s attend to the problems at hand, so give it a rest for an hour or two.”
We are the skeptics, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing – but skepticism is not nihilism. It’s just a tool for solving problems.
But we are a nation with a large bloc of evangelicals for whom skepticism is something like the Devil’s Tool. On the other hand, evangelicals can surprise you. Amanda Silverman has a curious news item, What do Evangelicals Want? It’s an eye-opener. She covers a new online poll out from Beliefnet and the questions posed during a panel discussion at George Washington University on Wednesday, January 23, on what matters to this bloc.
It seems that almost a thousand self-proclaimed “evangelical/born-again” voters responded to the poll. Of course fifty-five percent of them said they had a favorable view of Mike Huckabee, but then forty-nine percent said the same of Barack Obama. Aren’t they supposed to be Republicans, as God intended? Obama was right up there with John McCain (fifty-three percent). Mitt Romney got a crappy twenty-five percent and Hillary Clinton was able to beat Mitt at twenty-seven percent, and that’s low.
That was puzzling, and this more so:
On the issues, the poll suggests that traditional hot-button issues for evangelical politics, such as abortion and gay marriage, may be trumped in importance by the economy, cleaning up government, reducing poverty, improving public education and access to healthcare, protecting the environment, ending torture and ending the Iraq war. Only then does ending abortion come onto the radar (even farther down is banning gay marriage). And when asked how to end abortion in America, 69 percent said it should be done “by changing the culture through education and other means,” as opposed to only 26 percent who favored limiting abortion rights.
Maybe someone has been reading the Bible – the parts about taking care of each other and not being mean and nasty. The New Testament is filled with such stuff, and neither the Old nor New Testament mentions the modern Republican Party. The latter association was be inference. Some just don’t make the inference now.
Silverman also reports that she heard Reverend Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who founded the religious social justice group Sojourners, said the media has done “a lot of stereotyping” and has exhibited a “lack of awareness” of the evangelical community. These folks are not what you think.
Silverman suggests maybe the media has been unfair:
When we talk about “evangelical Christians,” it’s usually as shorthand for the sort of folks who make up Huckabee’s base. But as the speakers at today’s panel showed, the evangelical community is broader than that; some of today’s speakers even implied that their ideal candidate was - God forbid! - a Democrat.
But then she points out that Bishop Harry Jackson, the senior pastor at Maryland’s Hope Christian Church, argued in 2004 that African-Americans should vote to reelect George W. Bush. God wanted that. He now is not pushing for any particular Republican candidate, but he did challenge the legitimacy of the church Obama attends. What kind of church can that be? They allow Democrats in.
But that didn’t fly:
Wallis shot back by defending his “friend” of 10 years and what he called his solid Christian values. Wallis denounced attempts to apply a “religious litmus test to politics,” asking evangelicals to look at each candidate’s moral compass. He then went a step further and gave kudos not just to Obama but also to Clinton and John Edwards for their efforts on healthcare and the elimination of poverty.
And Cheryl Sanders, a professor of Christian ethics at Howard University’s School of Divinity said this – “I’m not voting for the person I want to be my pastor. I’m voting for some kind of credible vision or strategy.”
And there was the final Wallis heresy – “God is not a Democrat or a Republican.”
As before, what it comes down to is taking the position that people can believe what they’d like, and that’s fine, but it’s not that useful in a world where we must say what we think, listen to what others think, account for the emotions involved – pride, fear, anger and all the rest – and work out how we’ll all make it through the crisis of the moment without killing each other. These folks are getting there. The economy, cleaning up government, reducing poverty, improving public education and access to healthcare, protecting the environment, ending torture and ending the Iraq war – those are our problems, not God’s. If these people think God is calling them to fix these things, and defer the issue of abortion and gay marriage, fine – welcome aboard. Believe what you will, but let’s get to work.
That’s fine and dandy, but there are other evangelical conservatives, like Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost with this item, arguing that conservatism, in his view, cannot lose a sense of transcendent, revealed, objective truths in its relationship to society. So things are “just so” – one cannot compromise. Skepticism really is nihilism.
Since he is mainly arguing that the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan is one of those misguided nihilists, thinking too much, Sullivan responds, saying he has been trying to figure out how to deal with this most of his adult life:
I don’t think the kind of conservatism I favor denies the existence of objective moral truth. It denies our capacity to access it easily or without layer upon layer of error. My basic concern with Christianism is its conflation of religion and politics but also its erasure of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for humans in the practical here and now. This core distinction between theory and practice, between eternal truth and temporal politics, is, to my mind, the central contribution of conservatism as a political theory - and that is why fundamentalism is, in fact, the nemesis of conservatism, not its complement. The theory-practice distinction enables conservatism to resist both the rationalist problem-solution approach to politics and the absolutist idea that politics is about conforming a messy human world to unaltering divine Truth. It resists both liberal managerialism and fundamentalist Christianism.
And he is a devout God guy:
But it’s not a denial of God, or an abolition of a moral order, let alone a dismissal of tradition as it has shaped us and our society. It is imbued with skepticism - not nihilism. And because Oakeshottian conservatives understand how blindly human beings live - blind as bats - the patterns of behavior and language and politics that we inherit actually become more important, not less. It’s all we know as a society - where we’ve been and how we got here. That’s the foundation for all social change, and sometimes it will mean radicalism and sometimes gradualism and sometimes pragmatism - and every decision is filtered through a prudential judgment that adjusts for the current moment and its perceived needs and intimations.
So unlike the other God guys he has no problem with “the profound shifts in human consciousness over the past century, the lessons of science and evolution, the success of the limited liberal state, and the threat of the fundamentalist psyche - Islamic and Christian - to Western freedom.” He’d like to protect western freedom, in spite of the current currents:
And in conserving that freedom - and in being vigilant against its many enemies, including those who come in the name of God and country - it is, in my view, the most authentic expression of the conservative temperament around.
I don’t expect a Huckabee supporter to find this persuasive, any more than I expect Huckabee himself to have grappled with any of these issues in any depth at all. But I certainly think its place within the American conservative conversation is as valid as any fundamentalist’s.
And he likes Obama, even with his recent religiously-based appeals. Steve Benen here notes it’s the Democrats who have a problem with that:
How far might Obama take this approach? He’s a committed, church-going Christian. But do his appeals point to a Democrat who might be sympathetic to lowering the church-state wall and backing a policy like Bush’s faith-based initiative (a la Joe Lieberman)?
That’s not going to happen. There’s an interview Obama did with BeliefNet suggesting Obama’s view on faith-based programs seems pretty close to Bush’s, but in it Obama says that’s not quite so:
No, I don’t think so, because I am much more concerned with maintaining the line between church and state. And I believe that, for the most part, we can facilitate the excellent work that’s done by faith-based institutions when it comes to substance abuse treatment or prison ministries…. I think much of this work can be done in a way that doesn’t conflict with church and state. I think George Bush is less concerned about that.
My general criteria is that if a congregation or a church or synagogue or a mosque or a temple wants to provide social services and use government funds, then they should be able to structure it in a way that all people are able to access those services and that we’re not seeing government dollars used to proselytize.
That, by the way, is a view based not just on my concern about the state or the apparatus of the state being captured by a particular religious faith, but it’s also because I want the church protected from the state. And I don’t think that we promote the incredible richness of our religious life and our religious institutions when the government starts getting too deeply entangled in their business. That’s part of the reason why you don’t have as rich a set of religious institutions and faith life in Europe. Part of that has to do with the fact that, traditionally, it was an extension of the state. And so there is less experimentation, less vitality, less responsiveness to the yearnings of people. It became a rigid institution that no longer served people’s needs. Religious freedom in this country, I think, is precisely what makes religion so vital.
Benen likes that answer:
The problem with Bush’s faith-based initiative wasn’t that the government would subsidize social-service work from religious groups. The truth is, that’s been going on for years - Catholic Charities, for example, was contracting with the government for taxpayer-financed projects for years, long before Bush came onto the scene.
Rather, the problem with Bush’s approach is that he identified safeguards in the system, and eliminated them. It led to an initiative in which made it easy for religious groups to proselytize with public funds.
Obama’s approach just returns to the model that was in place before Bush took office:
Faith-based groups are eligible to compete for government contracts, as they have been for years, but only while “maintaining” the separation of church and state, and while preventing ministries from proselytizing while performing a state-sponsored public service.
And Obama is not poking people in the chest and telling them that they are fools, and dangerous ones at that:
Indeed, he characterized church-state separation in a way that might appeal more to religious conservatives - arguing that the constitutional principle isn’t hostile towards the faithful, but rather, helps maintain the integrity of religious institutions by leaving them free of government interference.
To be sure, I suspect Hillary Clinton and John Edwards would probably answer the same questions in largely the same way. In this sense, it’s encouraging to know that all three Dems will respect the church-state wall that Bush has been hitting with sledgehammer for seven years.
As before, what it comes down to is taking the position that people can believe what they’d like, and that’s fine, but it’s not that useful in a world where we must say what we think, listen to what others think, account for the emotions involved – pride, fear, anger and all the rest – and work out how we’ll all make it through the crisis of the moment without killing each other. There’s work to do. And there no need to insult or belittle those of faith.
