Random Blogging – Page 22

Defining Our Terms

A recent headline asked the wrong question. The TIMES headline read “America’s Becoming Less Religious. Is Politics to Blame?”

The correct question is: has politics become religion?

The article begins with statistics. It quotes results from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, showing that the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, “as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.”

The article proceeds to examine the possible causes of that decline.

Economic prosperity and functional governance (both wonderful things) can weaken our felt need for religious resources. For example, much of what religious institutions historically provided America’s citizens—education; counseling; support for the needy; marriage options; entertainment; and explanations for how the world works—are increasingly provided by the state and the market. Church participation has become more optional, just one more activity middle-class families do in the suburbs—or not.

Another factor is simply the inevitable consequence of living in an increasingly cosmopolitan, multiracial democracy where liberal values of tolerance are celebrated. Diverse neighborhoods, schools, and civic institutions force us to confront the reality that there are wonderful people out there who don’t share our religious beliefs. Our children will be friends with one another, maybe even spouses. Rising generations find the divisive dogma of many religious groups increasingly strange, if not offensive.

There is another explanation that the article explores: politics.

For the past few decades, sociologists and political scientists have demonstrated across multiple studies that as Christianity has become increasingly aligned with right-wing conservatism and the Republican Party, Americans who might have otherwise identified as Christians on surveys are now identifying as “nothing in particular” or “none.” The conclusion many seem to be drawing is “If this is what it means to be religious, count me out.”

We see quite a bit of that reaction on this site. And as the article notes, that reaction is mirrored by political conservatives, who have become increasingly likely to identify with religion because they see it identifying them as Trump supporters–actually (although the article doesn’t explicitly acknowledge it) as White Nationalists. White Americans identifying as “White Evangelical,” see the label itself as meaning “pro-Trump MAGA conservative.”

The article assumes that “This is another way that politics has driven secularization”– that the association between right-wing politics and religion driving young progressives away from religion is also secularizing religious folks. It compares the former phenomenon to the resurgence of Russian Orthodoxy in Putin’s Russia, where the number of Russians who identify with Russian Orthodoxy has grown, but the growth doesn’t reflect a rise in religious practices like church attendance and prayer. Instead, it reflects a rise in nationalistic fervor, ethnocentrism, and a fondness for the old Soviet Union and Stalin.

And that brings me back to my long-ago interpretation of Soviet Communism, which I saw not as an economic theory–at least, not primarily–but as a religion, a belief system.

The linked article is interesting, and as far as it goes, informative and factual. But it doesn’t grapple with what I see as the most important question, namely what is religion? I’d define it as a belief system based in faith rather than on demonstrable fact– a belief system that elevates certain values and behaviors on the basis of convictions that are simply not subject to empirical confirmation.

How is a belief that White Christians are superior beings entitled to pre-eminence in American life any less “religious” than a belief in the existence of heaven or hell?

You can undoubtedly come up with numerous examples of what we usually call “ideological” beliefs. What the studies cited in the linked article really demonstrate is that–at least in today’s contentious culture– “religion” and “ideology” have become virtually indistinguishable. And that’s a problem, because what we have come to call “culture war” is really a debate about whose belief system should be imposed on everyone else.

Political scientists tell us that laws are legitimate when they are agreed to by majorities of citizens holding very different world-views: for example, Americans of virtually all beliefs agree that murder, robbery and rape are wrong, and should be punished. (Although we still debate the definitions of even those terms.)

Americans aren’t really getting “less religious,” but they are admittedly getting less traditionally religious. Political ideologies have morphed into a different kind of religion. One is grounded in respect for pluralism and equal liberty of conscience. The other is intent upon protecting what they believe to be their god-given superior social status.

Compromise seems unlikely.

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Age And Skill

I am so sick of the focus on Joe Biden’s age. In the interests of transparency, I will admit to being two years older than the President. I do forget names and dates more frequently than I used to (although I never had much of a memory), but then, like Biden, I have a lot more material to remember and a lot more experience to draw on than younger folks do.

Some people are senile at 50. Some never are. My grandmother, who died just two months before her 100th birthday, was mentally coherent to the end. My husband is 91 and still sharp (so is Willy Nelson, who’s also 91 and still performing). Donald Trump, who is a mere four years younger than Biden, seems to have been born with dementia. (Trump has always been incoherent, so his followers evidently haven’t noticed the extent to which he is visibly continuing to decline.)

The people trying to defeat Biden by claiming he is age-impaired are people who have no persuasive argument with his performance and are desperate to find something–anything–they think will work. The Democrats who are publicly panicking over the issue–or worse, insisting he should allow someone else to run– are providing them aid and comfort. The truth is, Joe Biden has been a great President. (My middle son says Biden is the first person he’s voted for who has exceeded his expectations.)

I thought about the issue of performance when I viewed a powerful ad run by a candidate for U.S. Senate in North Dakota, of all places, sent to me by a (formerly Republican) friend who pointed out that the picture painted by this particular candidate is applicable everywhere, not just in the state of North Dakota. I am going to shorten this post in an effort to encourage you to click through and watch it, because it is a powerful indictment of the “wolves” who have hollowed out America’s middle class and who are attacking Biden because, under Trump, they will be able to continue preying on America.

Joe Biden has done more than any President since FDR to combat the wolves and shore up the middle class, to grow America “from the middle out,” as he likes to say. If the linked video speaks to you, you are a Biden voter! (If, on the other hand, you are throwing your lot in with the wolves, you are clearly a MAGA person…)

Let me be clear (as if I haven’t been!). Given the choice Americans will in all probability face at the ballot box, I will vote for Joe Biden. I would vote for him even if he was in a coma. The only genuine issue with his age isn’t senility–he is clearly in possession of his faculties, and his superior performance as President has been enhanced by the depth of his knowledge and experience and the connections he’s developed over the years that have allowed him to surround himself with highly competent people. The only downside of his age is an actuarially increased possibility of death sometime during the next four years– and a Kamala Harris Presidency would still be infinitely preferable to the disaster–for America, for democracy, for world peace–that Trump represents.

Watch the video.

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What The Good Guys Are Doing

Sometimes I feel like a motorist driving past a spectacular wreck. It’s hard not to rubberneck. And these days, government sure looks like that wreck–here in Indiana, where a gerrymandered legislature focuses on everything but the common good, and in Congress, where the wheels have come off the legislative vehicle, and the entire enterprise looks more like one of those old Keystone Kop movies than a genuine effort to govern.

It really is important to remind ourselves that–while we are craning our necks to look at the destruction–other cars are moving properly down the highway. While the local and national members of government’s lunatic caucuses are attacking democratic institutions and neglecting pressing problems, a wide variety of “good guys” are devoting their time and resources to solving those problems.

Recent headlines have reported the extension of broadband Internet access to millions of people, the eradication or control of several diseases around the globe, multiple acts of charity and philanthropy, and scientific progress on a variety of threats to the environment. You can probably point to many more nuggets of good news.

What triggered this post was a story I came across detailing the work being done by Matt Damon, the movie star, to address the threats posed by lack of access to potable water.

Evidently, when Matt was young, he took multiple trips around the world with his mother, and witnessed what life was like for communities living with the global water crisis. Then, while filming a movie in Sub-Saharan Africa, he spent time with families in a Zambian village who lacked access to water and toilets. Those experiences “inspired a commitment to helping solve the global water crisis. In 2006 he founded H20 Africa Foundation to raise awareness about safe water initiatives on the continent.”

While his foundation brought water to families in need in Africa, the A-list actor realized he needed more expertise to solve the world’s water and sanitation crisis. Fortunately for him, a partner who could help Matt do more, faster, was a meeting away.

In 2008, during an annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, Matt met Gary White, an engineer from Kansas City who had gained an international reputation as a water and sanitation expert. Realizing the global impact they could have together, Matt and Gary’s organizations came together to create Water.org in 2009.

In their book, The Worth of Water, Gary and Matt invite us to become a part of this effort—to match hope with resources, to empower families and communities, and to end the global water crisis for good.

My visit to Water.org prompted a google search for other efforts focused on water–especially efforts to clean Earth’s increasingly polluted oceans. There are, it turns out, several: The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization developing and scaling technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. (The organization uses what it calls a “dual strategy”– intercepting plastic in rivers to cut the inflow of pollution, and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean and won’t go away by itself.) The Ocean Conservancy is studying the effects of climate change on the oceans of the world, and working to ensure that the oceans get the government funding and attention they require. The Ocean Rescue Alliance is conserving reefs through restoration, research, eco-Tourism, & education.

There are several others, and that’s just efforts directed toward the planet’s oceans. Scientists are working on a wide variety of technologies intended to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change; multiple non-profit organizations are addressing daunting social ills. In short, there are a lot of very good people doing very good things and ignoring the wreckage that is America’s current, overwhelming political dysfunction.

There are, of course, reasons that this blog focuses on that dysfunction rather than on what the “good guys’ are doing. The most obvious is that–as a former professor of public policy–governance and policy are my areas of interest.

That said, it is also the case that government remains the pre-eminent mechanism through which people and communities can act; a non-functioning government negates or hobbles the efforts of those good guys. The lunatic caucus in the U.S. House threatens everything from citizens’ civil liberties to world peace; the chokehold of the GOP supermajority in the Indiana Statehouse prevents urban Hoosiers from exercising local control and undermines public schools in rural areas, among many other travesties.

I will continue to focus on the wreckage that is America’s current political environment, but every so often, I do want to recognize that there are a lot of “good guys” out there, and that many of them are making a real difference.

If only we had a government that was helping, rather than hindering….

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The Cruelty Really Is The Point

There are things I understand, and things I never will.

Take crime. I can understand the motives for many criminal acts– you see something you want and can’t afford, so you steal it; you are so furious with someone that you beat or even kill them. These are wrong actions, and certainly not excusable–but most of us can see and at least partially understand the human weaknesses involved.

On the other hand, there are anti-social behaviors that defy understanding. Vandalism, for example–the act of simply trashing something–has always confounded me. Another is hurting people who lack the ability to fight back, just because you can.

And that brings us to today’s GOP.

What triggered this post was a headline in the Washington Post, “Republican governors in 15 states reject summer food money for kids.”

Republican governors in 15 states are rejecting a new federally funded program to give food assistance to hungry children during the summer months, denying benefits to 8 million children across the country.

The program is expected to serve 21 million youngsters starting around June, providing $2.5 billion in relief across the country.

The governors have given varying reasons for refusing to take part, from the price tag to the fact that the final details of the plan have yet to be worked out. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said she saw no need to add money to a program that helps food-insecure youths “when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) said bluntly, “I don’t believe in welfare.”

Activists with nonprofit organizations in the states rejecting the funds say the impact will be devastating –it will add pressure on private food banks that are already overwhelmed.

In 2022, food insecurity rates increased sharply, with 17.3 percent of households with children lacking enough food, up from 12.5 percent in 2021, according to the USDA.

In Oklahoma, for example, pandemic food relief money has been helping more than 350,000 children in need for the past four summers. Now that money has dried up with no statewide replacement on the way, and nonprofit assistance groups are scrambling to fill the gap.

What do these Republican Governors stand to gain by refusing to take advantage of an existing program and rejecting funds that have already been appropriated? What blow against obesity (!) or “welfare” is achieved by refusing to feed hungry children?

As the article points out, a number of these states have also refused to extend Medicaid to their poor citizens. Wouldn’t want to let those “undesirables” access medical care!

And although the article didn’t mention it, there’s considerable overlap between the Red states that don’t want to feed hungry children and Republicans’ ugly use of trans children as a political wedge issue. As Indiana Senate candidate Marc Carmichael points out, as acceptance of gay citizens has diminished their usefulness as a wedge issue, Republican extremists like Jim Banks have turned to attacks on trans children. As Carmichael says, it’s despicable to pick on children who are vulnerable and powerless. It is particularly cruel to focus such attacks on children who are already struggling with their identities.

And there’s so much more…

What about the cruelty of denying appropriate medical care to pregnant women? Abortion bans, according to GOP culture warriors like Banks, are needed to “save” innocent babies. That concern about babies rather obviously doesn’t translate into feeding hungry children. It also didn’t keep the Trump administration from tearing immigrant children from their families–without even documenting where they were being sent so that they could find each other again. It obviously doesn’t prompt Republicans to protect the lives and health of those children’s mothers.

Nope–once those babies emerge from the womb, they’re on their own.

There are plenty of other examples– Adam Serwer’s recent best-seller, “The Cruelty is the Point” spells them out, as does a recent essay from the Telegraph. After listing a number of Republican positions that seem deliberately intended to hurt people who lack the means to resist, the author considers what the GOP offers in return:

The ability to be openly intolerant of others. Starting with immigrants and extending to minorities, the poor, and any non-fundamentalist Christian, the list of people Republicans are encouraging others to revile keeps growing. Employing a word that they refuse to define for fear of sounding silly, Republican candidates rail against “woke” as though it stood for Satan’s agenda, when all it means is being aware of injustice. What is more intellectually cruel than wanting your followers to be intolerant, unaware and ignorant?

Republicans used to debate the best way to help people who needed that help. Today’s GOP doesn’t want to help anyone but gun owners and the party’s donors. Certainly not hungry children.

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They Really ARE Crazy

Between the Indiana legislature and the lunatic caucus in Congress, I’m increasingly reluctant to read the news these days. I scan the headlines and I force myself to read the articles I really need to see, but the process gets more difficult every day.

The Indiana legislature is ignoring most of the actual work they are elected to do, in favor of protecting gun manufacturers (they’re on the way to passing a measure that would void Gary’s lawsuit against those companies) and ignoring child safety (they deep-sixed measures that would have required parents to store weapons safely); they’re doubling down on their war against Indianapolis (they’re halfway to revoking a measure passed just last year that allowed the Ciity-County Council to tax our downtown, because the Council had the nerve to actually do so, and it’s in the process of substituting the “wisdom” of our legislative overlords for the desires of the 70 percent of Indianapolis residents who voted for public transit.)

And just for good measure, the legislature has reminded citizens that the prejudices and ignorance of the self-satisfied super-majority are more important than whatever Hoosier voters might prefer: among other things, it refused to extend Indiana’s shortest-in-the-nation voting day, and refused to approve a non-binding ballot measure asking voters if we might want the ability to mount initiatives–a right voters in other states enjoy. Don’t want anything disturbing their gerrymandered power!

And then there’s Congress, which is in thrall to the most ignorant and dangerous fringe of the ignorant and dangerous cult that used to be a political party.

The House looks increasingly likely to reject a hard-won bipartisan immigration agreement negotiated in the Senate– even before they know what is in it, and even though it reportedly gives the GOP measures they have long claimed to want–because Republicans want to run for re-election on the issue. Desperately needed aid to Ukraine is contingent on passage of that agreement.

American politicians used to take pride in the fact that partisanship stopped at the water’s edge–that foreign policy was approached in a nation over party manner. If Russia wins its war of aggression against Ukraine, the balance of power in the world will shift, and not in our favor–and Republicans don’t care.

With Ukraine in the balance, with the world dangerously close to widening war in the Middle East, what are Indiana’s GOP Congressmen doing? Well, Jim Banks has moved forcefully into the breach–he’s demanding that the City of Carmel terminate its sister city relationship with Xiangyang, China. Showing his foreign policy chops!!

Banks has long been a member of what the New York Times calls the “wrecking ball” Congress, echoing the nutty conspiracy theories and endorsing the White Christian Nationalism of the fringe of the fringe. And that lunatic fringe just gets crazier by the day.

If you think calling the Right crazy is unfair, allow me to share one news item making the rounds: Taylor Swift is an operative of the deep state.

As Philip Bump writes,

There are lots of manifestations of this, including multiple presentations on the right’s preferred cable news channel. The iteration that attracted perhaps the most attention, though, came from former presidential candidate and Donald Trump cheerleader Vivek Ramaswamy (speaking of people who suddenly emerged in the public consciousness to polarizing effect).

In a social media post, a prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist linked Swift to … let’s see here … ah yes, George Soros. In response, Ramaswamy offered a prediction.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” he wrote. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”

The implication (again: forgive my telling you something obvious) is that the Chiefs are being ushered to the Super Bowl … somehow … to secure Swift’s endorsement for President Biden….

How would this work? Did the Baltimore Ravens take a dive? Did someone pay them? Are they just that committed to Democratic politics that they all agreed to lose? Did the Buffalo Bills before them? And the Miami Dolphins before the Bills? Or does the government have some Havana-Syndrome-esque device that it trains on opponents, causing field goals to go wide right? What’s the mechanism, exactly?

There will be a lot of important things decided by November’s ballots, including the future of reproductive rights and American democracy. It appears we will also decide between sanity and lunacy–between reality and a world in which terminating a sister city relationship is the conduct of foreign policy and Taylor Swift is an election psyop.

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