An evangelical Christian writes about the religious right and their embrace of the Bush Administration’s policies, including the policy of torture. A must-read. Here are some snippets:
Evangelicals have come a long way since … 1972. We have moved from cultural obscurity — almost invisibility — to becoming a major force in American society. Jimmy Carter’s run for the presidency launched us into the national consciousness, but evangelicals abandoned Carter by the end of the 1970s, as the nascent religious right forged an alliance with the Republican Party.
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And what has the religious right done with its political influence? Judging by the platform and the policies of the Republican Party — and I’m aware of no way to disentangle the agenda of the Republican Party from the goals of the religious right — the purpose of all this grasping for power looks something like this: an expansion of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the continued prosecution of a war in the Middle East that enraged our longtime allies and would not meet even the barest of just-war criteria, and a rejiggering of Social Security, the effect of which, most observers agree, would be to fray the social-safety net for the poorest among us. Public education is very much imperiled by Republican policies, to the evident satisfaction of the religious right, and it seeks to replace science curricula with theology, thereby transforming students into catechumens.
America’s grossly disproportionate consumption of energy continues unabated, prompting demands for oil exploration in environmentally sensitive areas. The Bush administration has jettisoned U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which called on Americans to make at least a token effort to combat global warming. Corporate interests are treated with the kind of reverence and deference once reserved for the deity.
The Bible contains something like 2,000 references to the poor and the believer’s responsibility for the poor. Sadly, that obligation seems not to have trickled down into public policy. On judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with regard to abortion. At the same time, it approves a corresponding expansion of presidential powers, thereby disrupting the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances.
The torture of human beings, God’s creatures — some guilty of crimes, others not — has been justified by the Bush administration, which also believes that it is perfectly acceptable to conduct surveillance on American citizens without putting itself to the trouble of obtaining a court order. Indeed, the chicanery, the bullying, and the flouting of the rule of law that emanates from the nation’s capital these days make Richard Nixon look like a fraternity prankster.
Where does the religious right stand in all this? Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization’s position on the administration’s use of torture. Surely, I thought, this is one issue that would allow the religious right to demonstrate its independence from the administration, for surely no one who calls himself a child of God or who professes to hear "fetal screams" could possibly countenance the use of torture. Although I didn’t really expect that the religious right would climb out of the Republican Party’s cozy bed over the torture of human beings, I thought perhaps they might poke out a foot and maybe wiggle a toe or two.
I was wrong. Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies.
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For the better part of three decades now, we’ve been treated to the moral sermonizing of William J. Bennett, who wrote The Book of Virtues and served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education and as one of Bill Clinton’s most relentless critics. We now know that Bennett is a compulsive gambler. Ralph Reed, currently a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia — the first step on his road to the White House — has always preached against gambling as part of his "family values" rhetoric. He has also done consulting work for Enron (which engaged in other forms of gambling) and accepted as much as $4.2-million from Indian tribes intent on maintaining a regional monopoly for their casinos. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts," he wrote to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Tony Perkins, a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and head of the Family Research Council, arguably the most influential religious-right organization aside from Focus on the Family, has had ties to white-supremacist organizations in his native Louisiana.
The purpose in ticking off a roll call of rogues associated with the religious right (and the list could have been longer) is not to single individuals out for obloquy and certainly not to suggest the absence of moral failings on the other side of the political spectrum — though I must say that some of this behavior makes Bill Clinton’s adolescent dalliances pale by comparison. The point, rather, is to argue that those who make it their business to demand high standards of moral rectitude from others ought to be able to approach those standards themselves. My evangelical theology tells me that we are, all of us, sinners and flawed individuals. But it also teaches the importance of confession, restitution, and amendment of behavior — whether it be an adulterous tryst, racial intolerance, or prevarication in the service of combating one’s enemies. We have seen nothing of the sort from these putatively Christian power brokers.
"Do not be misled," St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians. "Bad company corrupts good character." Jesus himself asked: "What good would it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?" The coalition with the Republican Party is blasphemy, pure and simple.
It has also led to a denigration of the faith. The early years of the religious right provide a case in point. The pursuit of political power and influence in the 1980s came at a fearsome price. For most of the 20th century, evangelicalism had existed primarily within its own subculture, one that protected individuals from the depredations of the world. It was an insular universe, and the world outside of the subculture, including the political realm, was corrupt and corrupting. Believers beware. Along about 1980, however, evangelicals, newly intoxicated with political power and cultural influence, succumbed to the seductions of the culture. It was during the Reagan years that we began to hear about the so-called prosperity gospel, the notion that God will reward true believers with the emoluments of this world. Evangelicalism was still a subculture in the 1980s, but it was no longer a counterculture. It had lost its edge, its capacity for cultural critique.
A number of people have asked me what the religious right wants. What would America look like if the religious right had its way? I’ve thought long and hard about that question, and the best answer I can come up with is that the religious right hankers for the kind of homogeneous theocracy that the Puritans tried to establish in 17th-century Massachusetts: to impose their vision of a moral order on all of society.
…[But] religion functions best outside the political order, and often as a challenge to the political order. When it identifies too closely with the state, it becomes complacent and ossified, and efforts to coerce piety or to proscribe certain behavior in the interests of moral conformity are unavailing.
Thankfully, the founding fathers recognized that wisdom and codified it into the First Amendment, the best friend that religion has ever had. The First Amendment was a concession to pluralism, and its guarantee of a "free market" of religion has ensured a salubrious religious marketplace unmatched anywhere else in the world.
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For America’s evangelicals, reclaiming the faith would produce a social and political ethic rather different from the one propagated by the religious right. Care for the earth and for God’s creation provides a good place to start, building on the growing evangelical discontent with the rapacious environmental policies of the Republican-religious-right coalition. Once thinking evangelicals challenge religious-right orthodoxy on environmental matters, further challenges are possible. A full-throated, unconditional denunciation of the use of torture, even on political enemies, would certainly follow. Evangelicals opposed to abortion would be well advised to follow some Catholic teaching a bit further on this issue. As early as 1984, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the late archbishop of Chicago, talked about opposition to abortion as part of a "seamless garment" that included other "life issues": care for the poor and feeding the hungry, advocacy for human rights, and unequivocal opposition to capital punishment. Surely the adoption of what Bernardin called a "consistent ethic of life" carries with it greater moral authority than opposition to abortion alone.
As for abortion itself, evangelicals should consider carefully where they invest their energies on this matter. Both sides of the abortion debate acknowledge that making abortion illegal will not stop abortion itself; it will make abortions more dangerous for the life and health of the mother. The other complication is legal and constitutional. Especially at a time when the government’s surveillance activities are already intruding on the privacy and the civil liberties of Americans, we should consider carefully the wisdom of allowing the government to determine a matter properly left to a woman and her conscience.
Good stuff. Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Along those lines, consider Ava Lowrey, who made an anti-war animation entitled "WWJD". You can see the video, which won an honor at Huffington Post, here. It’s a powerful animation that features a soundtrack of a child singing “Jesus loves me, this I know” while one picture after another of a wounded, bloody, or screaming Iraqi child fills the screen.
In response to her animation, Ms. Lowrey, a 15 year old Christian girl, received death threats and vile email, including ones that read:
“It’s people like you who need to fucking die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun."
“Fuck you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the fuck off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.”
“You are a TRAITOR to your country and should be executed for treason. All you do is bitch about the US. If you hate it so much, why don’t you GET THE FUCK OUT.”
“Why don’t you go masterbate [sic] to a pic of Sheehan and fuck off”
“Are you a muslem [sic] terrorist?”
These are the bedfellows of the religious right.