Fundamentalist Religion And Politics

If you are looking for an explanation of America’s current, toxic political tribalism, you can find plenty of theories from which to choose. There’s the yawning gap between the rich and the rest, the ability–facilitated by our fragmented media environment–to find “facts” that are congenial to your political preferences, the craven behavior of too many political figures…the list is extensive.

That said, the major element of today’s culture war is religion. Not the specifics of religious belief or theology, but the role fundamentalists and Christian Nationalists believe religion should play in modern society and governance.

I spent six years as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, and experienced first-hand the consistency and ferocity of efforts to ignore America’s Constitutionally-mandated Separation of Church and State. I lost count of the number of panels and discussions devoted to (hopefully patient) explanations of the First Amendment, and why–despite the fact that the exact word “separation” doesn’t appear–the history and clear meaning of the Amendment require recognition of the Founder’s intention to keep religion and government in their proper lanes.

But today’s battles are different from that older, persistent effort to erode operation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses.

The rise of Christian Nationalism is part and parcel of the angry, knee-jerk fundamentalist reaction to cultural change. That reaction is what’s behind the morphing of what used to be a political party into a cult frantically trying to return the country to a time they largely misremember. Just as the racists among them are reacting to demographic changes eroding Whites’ majority status, fundamentalist Christians are reacting to the decrease in public performative religiosity and to what has been termed the “rise of the nones”– to the loss of Christianity’s cultural hegemony.

I rarely make predictions, because I’m not very good at them (mine tend to be based more on hope than evidence). But I feel fairly confident that efforts to turn the U.S. into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy are doomed. The public reaction to court decisions based on religious dogma rather than legal precedent–Hobby Lobby, Dobbs, and the recent Alabama ruling equating embryos with children, among others–is telling.

The argument for injecting religion into the broader culture, rather than honoring the right of individuals to determine their own belief structures, is almost always based on assertions that religiosity equates to morality. An allied charge is that, absent rigorous religious grounding, children will grow up to be selfish and immoral. Neither of these assertions is supported by evidence.

Quite the contrary.

I recently came across a fascinating study suggesting that raising one’s children without religion may be a healthier alternative.

Gone are the days of the unyielding God-fearing mother as the archetype of good parenting, suggests a recent article from the Los Angeles Times. According to multiple reports, research has shown that a secular upbringing may be healthier for children. According to a 2010 Duke University study, kids raised this way display less susceptibility to racism and peer pressure, and are “less vengeful, less nationalistic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and more tolerant, on average, than religious adults.” But the list of benefits doesn’t stop there.

Citing Pew Research, the Times’ Phil Zuckerman notes that there’s been a recent spike in American households who categorize themselves as “Nones” — their religious affiliation being “nothing in particular.” According to Zuckerman, modern nonreligious adults account for 23 percent of Americans. As early as the ’50s, that figure was only four percent. And with godlessness on the rise, researchers have begun analyzing the benefits of nonreligious child rearing more closely.

“Far from being dysfunctional, nihilistic and rudderless without the security and rectitude of religion,” writes Zuckerman, “secular households provide a sound and solid foundation for children, according to Vern Bengston, a USC professor of gerontology and sociology.” Bengston oversees the Longitudinal Study of Generations, the largest study of families and their religious affiliations in America. After noticing an uptick in nonreligious households, Bengston added secularism to the study in 2013. “Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious’ parents in our study,” said Bengston in an interview with Zuckerman. “The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterized by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose.”

Little by little, that dreaded “cosmopolitanism” is undermining the fundamentalist battles that historically triggered wars and currently fuel so much social discord.

Both secularism and the more liberal iterations of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that increasingly characterize today’s culture are signs of social and human progress. Despite the current blowback, I predict they’ll prevail.

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If Only…

There are so many reasons to vote straight Blue this November: to keep a dangerously insane man out of the Oval Office, to remove the “God Squad” from the House and Senate, to protect democracy and Separation of Church and State…and especially,  to send an emphatic message that women will not meekly return to second-class citizenship.

You can undoubtedly come up with other reasons as well. But a bill just filed by the Democrats in the U.S. Senate may be the most important, because its passage would go a very long way to accomplishing several of those goals–and it won’t pass unless Democrats sweep the November election.

Per The Democracy Docket:

Earlier this month, U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.) introduced the Redistricting Reform Act of 2024, legislation that would make a slew of impactful changes to the congressional redistricting process nationwide.

The bill would set spell out comprehensive criteria for congressional redistricting including:

  • Banning partisan gerrymandering by prohibiting drawing maps that favor or disfavor any political party,
  • Ensuring compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
  • Providing an explicit right for private citizens to file legal challenges under this law,
  • Requiring that districts be drawn to represent communities of interest and neighborhoods to the extent possible,
  • Barring people, legislatures and states from asserting legislative privilege over lawsuits brought under the act,
  • Setting clear deadlines for when maps must be enacted and
  • Mandating that redistricting plans are subject to public comment in an open and transparent manner

Gerrymandering is the root of America’s current dysfunctions. When lawmakers can choose their voters rather than the other way around, we end up being ruled by a minority.

Gerrymandering–aka partisan redistricting–does more than skew election results. A lot more. And much of it goes unrecognized. Here in Indiana, for example, where partisan redistricting has carved up metropolitan areas and subordinated them to rural ones, gerrymandering has given us distribution formulas favoring rural areas over cities when divvying up dollars for roads and schools, among other inequities.

Even before the Dobbs decision, The Guardian connected gerrymandering to passage of radical abortion laws.

Georgia’s legislature responded to the state’s closely divided political climate not with thoughtful compromise but by passing one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the United States.

An April poll by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 70% of Georgians support the landmark Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion. The new state ban is opposed by 48% of Georgians and supported by only 43%. So why would the legislature enact such an extreme measure?

For that matter, why would Ohio, Alabama, Missouri and other states establish similar “fetal heartbeat” laws that are far more restrictive than their constituents support?

One important answer is gerrymandering: redistricting voting districts to give the party in power an edge – making it almost impossible for the other side to win a majority of seats, even with a majority of votes. Sophisticated geo-mapping software and voluminous voter data turned this ancient art into a hi-tech science when the US redistricted after the 2010 census.

Partisan redistricting is undemocratic no matter which party is doing it, but give credit where it’s due: the GOP has been far more adept at gerrymandering than the Democrats (probably because Republicans recognize that they are increasingly a minority party and must cheat in order to win). As the Guardian reported, gerrymandering has allowed the GOP to control state legislatures with supermajorities even when voters prefer Democratic candidates by hundreds of thousands of votes.

Gerrymandering nullifies elections and insulates lawmakers from democratic accountability.

Despite lacking any mandate for an extreme agenda in a closely divided nation, Republican lawmakers have pushed through new voting restrictions, anti-labor laws, the emergency manager bill that led to poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, and now, these strict abortion bans. Electorally, there’s little that Democrats can do to stop it.

In Ohio, the article pointed to “zero evidence” that voters held extreme opinions on abortion, and noted that polls showed more voters opposed to that state’s “heartbeat” bill than supportive of it. A University of Chicago study showed that barely half the total vote in Ohio gave Republicans more than 63% of the seats– simply because the maps were “surgically designed” to ensure that few seats would be competitive.

I have frequently posted about the multiple negative consequences of gerrymandering: among other things, it empowers extremists (as “real” elections move to the primaries) and suppresses the vote.

In non-referendum states like Indiana, the only way to get rid of gerrymandering would be via a U.S. Supreme Court decision or a federal law. The Court has repeatedly declined to act, so we need a Democratic win in November big enough to ensure passage of the Redistricting Reform Act.

That would go a long way toward protecting democracy–and women.

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OK–Let’s Talk About Immigration Again

Among the many things that set my hair on fire these days is the national “discussion” of immigration. I put quotation marks around the word discussion because there is virtually nothing about the use of immigration as a wedge issue that resembles a calm, fact-based discussion or debate. As David Brooks once wrote, the only people who have less actual data on their side than the anti-immigration folks are the people who deny climate change.

If anyone harbors doubts about the entirely political approach to what the media routinely calls the “border crisis,” it should have been dispelled when the GOP abruptly walked away from a bipartisan proposal that–after difficult negotiations–had given Republicans pretty much everything they’d been demanding, so they could use the “border crisis” as a campaign issue.

What has gotten lost in this deeply-dishonest politicization of the issue is the importance of immigration to the American economy. A reader recently shared a report from the Economic Policy Institute, listing six reasons that immigration isn’t hurting American workers–and explaining why immigrants are a vital part of America’s workforce.

What are the facts?

Immigrants make up about 14% of the U.S. population; some 43 million people. Together with their children, they are about 27% of us. Approximately 11 million are undocumented, and most do not come via the southern border; individuals who have flown in and overstayed their visas vastly outnumber those who cross the border illegally. 

Immigrants made up 17% of the U.S. workforce in 2014, and two-thirds of those were here legally. Collectively, they were 45% of domestic workers, 36% of manufacturing workers, and 33% of agricultural workers. Those percentages help to explain why state-level efforts to curb immigration have come back to bite them: in Alabama a few years ago, the state passed a draconian law targeting immigrants, and crops rotted in the fields. Farmers couldn’t find native-born residents willing to do the work, despite offering to pay more than minimum wage.

What about those repeated claims that immigrants are a drain on the economy? The data unequivocally shows otherwise. Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars into Social Security for benefits they will never receive. These are people working on faked social security cards; employers deduct the social security payments and send them to the government, but because the numbers aren’t connected to actual accounts, the workers can never access their contributions. The Social Security system has grown increasingly—and dangerously– reliant on that revenue; in 2010, the system’s chief actuary estimated that undocumented immigrants contributed roughly 12 billion dollars to the program.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that approximately half of undocumented workers pay income taxes, and all of them pay sales and property taxes. In 2010, those state and local taxes amounted to approximately 10.6 billion dollars.

By far the most significant impact of immigration, however, has been on innovation and economic growth. The Partnership for a New American Economy issued a research report in 2010: researchers found that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies had been founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

On economic grounds alone, then, we should welcome immigrants. But not only do we threaten undocumented persons, we make it incredibly difficult to come here legally. If there is one fact that everyone admits, it is the need to reform a totally dysfunctional and inhumane immigration system. Based upon logic and the national interest, it’s hard to understand why Congress has been unwilling or unable to do that. Of course, logic and concern for the national interest have been missing from Washington for some time. 

The GOP’s anti-immigrant hysteria is part and parcel of its White Christian Nationalism. Granted, there has always been a nativist streak in America; Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free”– was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

The current eruption of that old bigotry gives new meaning to that old expression about cutting off your nose to spite your face…

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The Cost Of Bureaucracy

Among the opinion writers I read more or less regularly, David Brooks stands out as one of the most annoying. Three times out of five (okay, that’s just a statistical guess), I find him patronizing, preachy and un-self-aware. But then, in those other two columns, he addresses real issues and does so perceptively.

The column that prompted today’s post is one of the latter. In it, Brooks considers what he calls the “growing bureaucratization of America.” His first paragraph sets out his thesis/observation:

Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

As regular readers of this blog know, a couple of years ago I retired from a position as a college professor, a cog in what has to be one of the most prominent examples of the trend Brooks is exploring–a university. I still recall a conversation with a colleague who had preceded me in the trip from “real life” job to the groves of academe. She warned me that what would drive me insane was the utter lack of urgency I would encounter. She was right–if an identified problem was considered really urgent, it might get addressed in a year or two. Universities are very bureaucratic.

Brooks proceeds to provide the requisite overview:

Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

He also acknowledges the pre-eminence of higher education in the bureaucratization of American life. The following paragraph didn’t surprise me:

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.

The rest of the column is devoted to multiple examples of bureaucratic growth and a wide variety of mostly unfortunate and worrisome consequences.

Brooks doesn’t address what is impelling the growth of bureaucracy, or what steps we might take to reverse it. He also doesn’t address what I have long thought to be a glaringly selective response to the phenomenon: Americans are absolutely obsessed with the ways bureaucracy impedes and complicates the work of our various government agencies–but seem not to recognize that the same situation impedes the efficient operation of corporations, large nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.

Sociologists and anthropologists can probably shed light on the reasons for the nation’s increasing bureaucratization. My own hunch–and it’s only a hunch–is that it’s prompted in part by what Brooks calls a desire for “safety first,” a desire to avoid possible dangers. (I also have a sneaking suspicion that it represents a reaction to America’s very litigious society–an effort to avoid the threat of lawsuits by demonstrating the lengths a company or organization has gone to avoid various foreseeable harms.)

Brooks thinks that resentment of the increasingly bureaucratic nature of our society is one of the things motivating MAGA folks. Maybe–although most credible studies attribute pro-Trump MAGA sentiment primarily to racial grievance, not a more generalized impatience with bureaucracy. (MAGA attacks on universities and corporations are focused on that hated DEI, after all, not the number of administrators and managers.)

I tend to think that the growth of bureaucracy is a phase–something that will abate when, and if, civil society sorts itself out and Americans grow up. Think of today’s America as a teenager, needing rules and structure to balance out those raging hormones….

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Our Selective “Anti-Tax” Legislators

In Indiana, Republicans always, always talk about reducing the “tax burden” on Hoosier citizens. They incessantly brag about their solicitude for taxpayers, and Indiana’s status as a “low tax” state.

Well…it turns out that their solicitude is pretty selective; it’s focused on the folks who are most likely to support them, either financially or with their votes. Businesses, corporations, rich folks…Struggling students, not so much.

In fact, not at all.

President Biden’s continuing effort to relieve millions of Americans from a real burden–student loan debt–has already benefitted 35,000 young Hoosiers. A provision of Biden’s American Rescue Plan also amended the Internal Revenue Code so that the discharge of that debt would not be taxable. (As you may or may not know–but your accountant will confirm–if you owe someone money, and that someone “forgives” the debt, the IRS considers the amount forgiven to be income, and you will be taxed on it.) Taxing student loan forgiveness would rather obviously go a long way toward reducing the relief being provided. 

Indiana’s legislators–those solicitous “anti-tax” Republicans–looked at the situation and said “not so fast!”

The Indiana Department of Revenue explains.

The IRS excludes federal direct student loan forgiveness from federal income tax due to an exemption in the Internal Revenue Code. Although the computation of Indiana’s adjusted gross income (AGI) begins with federal AGI, Indiana is a static conformity state, meaning that Indiana’s tax code is linked to the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) as of a specific date. For a provision that impacts federal AGI, the effect on Indiana AGI depends on whether the Indiana General Assembly wholly or partially decouples from the federal provision during the legislative session.

When the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) expanded IRC section 108(f)(5), excluding student loan discharge under certain circumstances from federal gross income, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law decoupling Indiana from that provision in the IRC, and enacted a state provision requiring Hoosier taxpayers to add back the excluded amount to their Indiana AGI.

In 2022, this provision was clarified retroactively to provide that discharges resulting from total and permanent disability, death, or bankruptcy were not required to be added back. That law, IC 6-3-1-3.5(a)(30), still stands; therefore, federal discharge of some student loans between 2021 and 2025 must be added back to Indiana’s adjusted gross income. This includes the one-time student loan forgiveness under the Biden-Harris Administration’s Student Debt Relief Plan, even though the plan was not part of the ARPA.

Nice of them to say that if the loan was discharged because you died, were permanently disabled or bankrupt, they’d let you off the hook.

Indiana thus joins Mississippi, North Carolina and Wisconsin (last I looked, Arkansas was still considering the matter). Students elsewhere in the country are not being penalized.

Things are different for corporations. Indiana is one of only twelve states with corporate tax rates under 5%. That’s in contrast to states like Minnesota (9.8 percent),  Illinois (9.5 percent) and Alaska (9.4 percent). The higher corporate rates in those states evidently made it unnecessary for them to tax students’ debt relief. (I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that corporations can afford lobbyists and students can’t.)

A statement issued by Representative Greg Porter at the time student loan repayments resumed (they’d been paused during the pandemic) elaborated on that point. Porter wrote:

More than 900,000 Hoosiers currently have some form of student loan debt, with the average Hoosier owing about $32,000. With repayments beginning soon, many Hoosiers will face financial stress, a stress the Republican supermajority has done nothing to ease for constituents.

“Indiana is one of the few states that taxes an individual’s student loan forgiveness or an employer paying off the student loan for an employee. Last session, my bill to make loan forgiveness dollars exempt from taxation never received a hearing. This is a shame, because Indiana Republicans never shy away from dispensing tens of millions of dollars in tax credits to large companies seeking move to Indiana but refuse to take action to make conditions better for Hoosiers living and working in our state.

The next time you hear Indiana politicians talk about their concern for us poor, struggling taxpayers, you might ask them just which taxpayers they want to relieve–and which ones are unworthy of their solicitude.

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