CraigM
1598
Heres the thing, there are a lot of things in modern conservative politics/ evangelical christianity that are elevated to the level of religious belief that lack any basis.
What you are describing is not actual theological arguments, but secular ones dressed up in the language of religion. It emerges with the mutual capture of the GOP and evangelical christianity following from the whole Fawell/ Graham/ Moral Majority rise.
Take the bootstraps comment. That is fundamentally not a christian theological position. It is rather a Randian objectivist one. It also is ironic as it describes an impossible action, and the term originally was meant as such. But loons took over the term and here we are. Anyhow a more theologically sound principle would be found in Luke 3:11
And he would answer and say to them, “The one who has two tunics is to share with the one who has none; and the one who has food is to do likewise.”
However a feedback loop was created where over time the religious belief and practice merged with the political one. And what you see is that a position that not only is not religious in origin, and even runs contra actual religious teachings, began to be absorbed into doctrine and supplant the words of that commie sounding Jesus dude.
Fast forward to today and many christians believe that things like social assistance programs like SNAP are against their religion, and will use religious language and framing to denounce them.
It is a complete overhaul and it is incredibly corrosive to both the political and religious spheres. And this is something the founders were acutely aware of. Its easy to forget from our perch in time, but events like the 30 Years War and English Civil War were very relevant and extremely important in the founding of America. Many of the original settlements were populated by refugees from these wars of religion. For them that was nearly contemporary history. Separation of church and state existed for a damn good reason, as they saw the corrosive effects both had on each other.
This corrosion has made many christians hypocrites of the highest order, has made many of them I would say are no longer christian in action or belief. Their religion has been supplanted. They worship supply side Jesus not that commie liberal sell everything you have and give it to the poor Jesus. And political positions have become rigid and inflexible as they ha be now become elevated to religious belief and practice. No longer is compromise and the common good possible, it is only strict adherence.
Scuzz
1599
It is a comment about how I feel about organized religion as a whole. That you need someone to tell you how to believe. Also, you may be born into an organized religion but you don’t have to stay with it for life. You can leave it , people do every day.
But you actually think any of the big western religions don’t think their direction is the true direction and that they don’t have the duty to impose their beliefs on others? That they care at all about a secular democracy?
I’m not an expert in the history, so I welcome insights from anyone here who knows more than I do, but it seems to me that although there were Enlightenment thinkers with secular tendencies among America’s early elites (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, who coined “the separation of church and state,” I believe), most folks were more like the Puritans. They didn’t come looking for a separation of church and state. They came looking for the freedom to institute the state church they wanted. The First Amendment was meant to constrain the federal government with respect to the states. That’s not to say that there wasn’t then a secularizing evolution of attitudes and the law. But my only point is I don’t think most of the early Americans were looking to expunge religion from the public square the way some advocates over the last, say, century have.
I’ll tell you my approach to this: I don’t think one human life is nearly enough to figure out how we ought to live. That means that if that is truly something we care about, we have to rely on what we learn from those around us and those who raise us, and whoever those people point us to. We can’t live our lives without relying on authorities, we can only use our judgment in figuring out which authorities are worth relying on. If it’s not religion you turn to, it’s going to be something else. Probably something with a much more recent pedigree, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
I did leave my Catholic faith for a long time, and then returned to it partly for these reasons.
100% true. I would argue that in part the utter ignorance of actual Christian theology is part of the problem. And that ignorance isn’t accidental. It was a deliberate approach to religion adopted in part to distance English Protestantism from the Catholics, and in part to support an emerging social order under post-mercantile capitalism that was at odds with much of the actual doctrine of Christianity.
Scuzz
1602
The idea that religion, or at least religious ideals wouldn’t dominate a new America, would have been unthinkable to a colonial American.
I think the founders were inheritors of a legacy of state-imposed religious boundaries usually enforced through state violence, and what they were looking to do was to create a state with no power to impose those boundaries or exact similar penalties. I don’t think they expected that Americans would abandon religion or that the state would ask them to, but I do think they meant to prevent the state’s putting a finger on the scales when it came to practicing religion.
What you call ‘expunging religion from the public square’ they would call ‘preventing the state from forcing participation in a particular variety of worship’. It is quite funny to hear modern Christians opine that it isn’t so bad that a citizen — or a child — has to endure an official prayer she/he doesn’t want to participate in, when so many of the early Americans who made this country would have found it a spectacular imposition on their faith to be forced to do so. Their ancestors let themselves be burned alive rather than sit still for an official prayer of the wrong sort!
Why not simply the lessons of history and the discoveries of science?
Those are perfectly cromulent options that I would also endorse! (I realize what I wrote implied that we we can or should look only to religion, which wasn’t my intent.) In my experience, they can’t tell you much about certain important things, like the meaning of things, or what to value.
Scuzz
1606
I love the word cromulent.
Matt_W
1607
I’m not sure religion is particularly good at this either. Values are think are the product of a host of different influences in an individual’s life, only one of which is religion. The Christian scriptures, for instance, do not use rights language at all, nor do they articulate a doctrine of special respect for human life, nor a consistent sexual moral ethic. The values that are derived from Christian scriptures are imposed on them, and are culturally biased.
Likewise meaning. I guess I supposed you can find meaning in being part of God’s plan? But given how inscrutable that plan is, I never found that source of meaning particularly satisfying. I actually think meaning is easy to come by: the respect of colleagues, the pleasure of watching my children grow into adults, the beauty of the wilderness, the laughter I share with friends, the memories of loved ones who’ve left, etc. Those things are and always have been immensely more immediate and important to me than the unknowable intentions of an undetectable deity.
Good thing Christian scripture isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of the Christian tradition!
Seems to me that if Pelosi can be ex-communicated for choosing to let women decide to have an abortion, the Church should similarly just excommunicate anyone that supports a policy that people should be allowed to choose any religion except Catholicism. I mean if you allow that, then you’re just condemning them to hell.
America is becoming a theocracy.
Catholics don’t believe that all non-Catholics go to hell.
Catholics endorse freedom of religion.
Also, it’s not an obvious distinction, but Nancy Pelosi has not been excommunicated, she’s just being refused communion (in one diocese).
In some ways it has always had this in its DNA, but the Roman Catholics aren’t the ones driving it by far. They at least have a real organization and a structure; their bishops can impose sanctions internally on their members and it is essentially an internal private affair (though I do get the ramifications of the Pelosi case and the arguments around that, for sure).
The real danger is American mainstream Protestantism, which is so integrated with our unexamined cultural assumptions that when people speak with a religious angle or invoke religion from that perspective, it carries enormous weight and is not seen as being specifically religious, but rather seen as being part of some amorphous assumed “rightness” that we “naturally” should adhere to. Far more dangerous than guys in fancy hats waving beringed hands about and pronouncing anathemas.
This is a pretty unsatisfying exchange:
What is it that you’re trying to say here? I read the first bit (replying to me) as saying that Christianity provides the meaning and value, and I read the second bit (replying to Matt) as saying that it is something else (what, exactly?) that provides the meaning and value.
The funny thing is that the reason (as I understand it) that people (ie Protestants) were horrified at the thought of a Kennedy becoming President was that being a Roman Catholic he was going to be told what to do by the Pope.
Roman Catholicism is by no means widely accepted in this virulently evangelical country. Pretty much everyone I meet and know who is Protestant has either mildly to actually strong hostility to the Catholic Church still… it’s just that there’s plenty of meatier culture war targets for them to feast on right now.
I will say that I’ve really kind of given up on “textual” criticism of what a religion supposedly says be what it does. Especially from studying Islam, when it’s clear 95% of Muslim culture and about 90% of theology is evolved historic tradition and not exactly “from the page”; in fact Shia scholarship more or less accepted the idea of the “hidden” meaning of their texts because, it seems, the texts aren’t really complicated enough.
It doesn’t really matter if evangelical Christianity (or Catholicism) are “really” following the text of the Bible, or if the Bible is contradictory, or whatever. The lived experience of a religious community is what that religion is. If evangelical USA Christians don’t read the Bible and believe in prosperity gospel than that is Christianity (for them).
Matt_W
1615
Well that was kind of my point. I mentioned the canon of scripture because it’s generally universal among Christian sects and is somewhat objective. Christians tend to accept its authority as authored by god in some form. There is no other source in any Christian faith, for instance, for the spoken words of Jesus of Nazareth. The Catholic liturgy of the word is entirely based around reading and interpreting scripture, and the liturgy of the Eucharist recites the words of Jesus found only in the scripture. “Tradition” is a more amorphous set of authorities, and–as I pointed out–is almost by definition culturally conditioned. That doesn’t make it less authoritative, but it does make it more subject to cultural biases. And my point was that everyone’s values are conditioned by cultural biases.
I’m having trouble understanding what this conversation is really about anymore but I’d say this does matter when Evangelicals try to claim sole ownership of “true” Christianity, but I concede it probably only really matters to other people calling themselves Christians. Not just for the usual religious doctrine argument reasons, but because they desperately don’t want to always be lumped in with the crazy Evangelicals whenever Christianity comes up.
If 99% of Christians were Evangelical US Christians, than that is what Christianity would be. Just like most Christians today aren’t Nestorian or Chaldean or Arian Christianity, because those versions of Christianity were destroyed or reduced to irrelevance except on a local scale in the past.
I guess my point is that religions are what the majority say it is - there’s no “true” Christianity.
