Uses and Abuses of Religion

My youngest son has a simple formula for comparing and evaluating religions. According to him, whatever their other differences and similarities, religions fall into one of two basic categories: those that encourage adherents to engage with the questions (good), and those that hand believers fixed, inflexible answers (bad).

It’s a handy guide.

Just this week, that distinction came to mind twice. Once, when I read about Governor Pence’s fundraising; evidently, one of his major donors is the owner of Hobby Lobby–the man who went to Court to protect his “right” to impose his religious beliefs on his employees. Our Governor is quite clearly in the camp of those who are sure they have the answers, that they know exactly what God wants (and isn’t it nice that God hates the same people they do!), and who give no evidence of ever having engaged with the questions or wrestled with moral ambiguities.

Fortunately, there is another kind of faith community, and it was on beautiful display last Sunday at an Interfaith Vigil for Nondiscrimination. The Vigil was held at North United Methodist Church, and hosted by the Interfaith Coalition on Nondiscrimination, Freedom Indiana and the Reconciling Ministries Network of Indiana.

When my husband and I entered the sanctuary, I was struck by the size of the audience. My husband estimated attendance at a thousand people, most of whom appeared to be middle-aged or older.

Program participants included Darren Cushman-Wood, Pastor of North Church; Rev. Danyelle Ditmer, pastor of Epworth United Methodist Church; Rev. Linda McCrae, pastor at Central Christian Church; Whittney Murphy, the student body president of Christian Theological Seminary; Rabbi Sandy Sasso, Rabbi Emerita of Congregation Beth-El Zedeck: and Philip Gulley, Pastor of Fairfield Friends Meeting.

If there was a “call to arms,” it would probably be Rabbi Sasso’s declaration that people of faith would not stand by and allow religion and religious language to be hijacked and used as a cover for hatred and discrimination.

If there was a summing up of the sentiments of those in the sanctuary, it would be these words of Phil Gulley’s–a small part of his extraordinary and moving speech. Gulley reminded us of “the America of the open door, its hand extended in friendship.

“It is the land of the kindly neighbor, the generous friend, the liberal heart. It is the America welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. It is the people with nothing to fear but fear itself, the nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. It is the America made wiser by our differences, the America committed to justice, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, who measures its strength in its citizenry, not its weaponry.”

To which we might add (with a nod to my son’s categorization), it is the America in which thoughtful religious citizens are grateful for their constitutional right to explore questions of meaning and transcendence for themselves—an America that understands the importance of extending that same intellectual and moral autonomy to everyone, that rejects the profoundly unAmerican theocratic urge to use religion in the service of their own dominance and privilege.

Both the Governor’s fundraising report and the Interfaith Vigil remind me that, like so much else in life, religion is neither an unalloyed good nor an unremitting evil. It can be used or it can be abused.

My own test is actually simpler than my son’s: if your beliefs make you a better, kinder person, they’re good. If they make you a rigid, judgmental asshole, they aren’t.

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Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts!

Just how depressing have America’s policy debates become? What is the extent to which emotion and ideology have replaced reliance on facts, evidence and data–and what are the consequences of our refusal to confront unpleasant realities?

Permit me to offer just two examples.

In Florida, as you have probably heard, state workers are not permitted to use the phrase “climate change.” As the Guardian wryly noted,

You might have missed it, but Florida has solved climate change. Our state, with 1,300 miles of coastline and a mean elevation of 100 feet, did not, however, limit greenhouse emissions. Instead, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), under Republican governor Rick Scott, forbade employees from using terms like “climate change,” “global warming” or “sea-level rise”. They’re all gone now. You’re welcome, by the way.

It’s pointless to call linguistic distortions of reality like this Orwellian: people tune you out when you use that word and, besides, Big Brother at least had wit. These are just the foot-stamping insistent lies of intellectual toddlers on the grift. It is “nuh-uh” as public policy. This is an elected official saying, “I put a bag over your head, so that means now I’m invisible” and then going out looting.

It isn’t only Florida; Scott Walker’s Wisconsin has a similar rule.

North Carolina went them one better:

In North Carolina, the legislature passed a ruling after the state’s Coastal Resources Commission released an estimate predicting the sea will rise 39 inches along the state’s coast in a century, ABC News reported.

The estimation alarmed developers and seaside residents. If the state was to take action, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, said ABC. North Carolina would need to draw new flood zones, build waste-treatment plants and elevate roads, and several permits of planned development projects would be in jeopardy.

So the state’s legislature promptly addressed the problem–with a bill banning the actual measurement of sea levels; henceforth, sea-level rise “may be predicted based only on historical data.”

It isn’t only climate change. For a number of years, Congress has banned federal research by the CDC on gun violence–a ban it extended in the immediate aftermath of the Charleston church shooting that left 9 people dead.

The ban began with the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which barred the CDC from involvement in any research that could be interpreted as advocating tougher gun laws. Jack Dickey, a Republican Congressman from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who was then a junior member of the House Appropriations Committee, authored a rider to a spending bill that also slashed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget— the precise amount that the organization had dedicated to studying gun violence the year before.

Ever since, CDC studies on guns and public health have been virtually non-existent. Dickey has since expressed regret over sponsoring the measure.

Every single day, 89 Americans die from gun violence, and yet we refuse to support research on the causes, effects and consequences of those deaths.

Representative David Price, vice chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, recently argued that

“Regardless of where we stand in the debate over gun violence, we should all be able to agree that this debate should be informed by objective data and robust scientific research.”

Representative Price is wrong. There is nothing that ideologues and interest groups fear more than “objective data and robust scientific research.” Their most fervent hope is that public policy debates continue to be conducted in the absence of evidence. Their motto is: don’t confuse me with science or fact.

Problem is, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson is fond of noting, science is true whether or not you believe in it. Facts exist whether we accept them or not.

Ignoring reality is ultimately unsustainable.

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Juanita Jean Asks an Impertinent (and Relevant) Question

One of the blogs I read regularly is “Juanita Jean’s, the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.,” where “Juanita” sometimes appears to be an incarnation of the much-missed Molly Ivins.

There’s something about tough Texas women with drawls and rapier wits….

At any rate, Juanita has taken note of the seizure of a national park headquarters building by supporters of Cliven Bundy (you’ll remember Cliven, whose definition of “liberty” included the liberty to graze his cattle on public land without paying for the privilege.) As she quotes from news reports,

Militia members protesting a federal prison sentence for two Oregon ranchers convicted on charges of setting fire to federal land have occupied the headquarters of a national park, the OregonLive reports.

The protesters include Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon, and two of his brothers. Also among them is Ryan Payne, who organized snipers to aim weapons at federal officers during the Bundy Ranch standoff last year.

They told OregonLive that they are accompanied by about 150 others and are hunkered down at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters. The group is described by reporter Les Zaitz as “hard core militia” who adopted the ranchers’ cause as their own.

Her impertinent question/observation?

Now I want you to consider this: Let’s pretend it was Muslims who set federal land a’blaze and that Muslims overtook a federal building. In your wildest dreams imagine Fox News and Ted Cruz having a snarling cat over that.

Actually, it doesn’t take much imagination. As Vox recently headlined its story about the armed takeover, media coverage sure looks different when the demonstrators (terrorists?) are white.

Just one more day in America, where the double standard runs so deep that satire is on its deathbed, and self-awareness is likewise a vanishing commodity…..

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Rights for Me, Not So Much for Thee….

There’s plenty of information available detailing America’s troubling economic inequality; just recently, for example, Salon Magazine ran an article highlighting numbers that showed “America’s busted priorities” and their contribution to that widening gap. They presented the numbers in a variety of ways, but the summary tells the tale:

The following are averages, which are skewed in the case of tax breaks and investment income, as a result of the excessive takings of the .1% and the .01%. Details of the calculations can be found  here.

$8,600 for each of the  Safety Net recipients

$14,600 for each of the  Social Security recipients

$27,333 for each of the  Pension recipients

$54,740 for each of the  Teachers

$200,000 for each of the  Tax Break recipients among the richest 1%

$500,000 for each of the  Investment Income recipients among the richest 1%

The super-rich feel they deserve all the tax breaks and the accumulation of wealth from the productivity of others. This is the true threat of entitlement.

A recent investigative report from the New York Times confirms the suspicion that Salon’s numbers are not the result of inadvertence or accident. The subhead pretty much says it all: “The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income.”

These numbers tell an important story, but they don’t tell the whole story: economic inequality both leads to–and results from–other kinds of inequality. It’s a vicious cycle.

Less affluent neighborhoods are less safe. Schools attended by poorer children have fewer resources and poorer results. Friends and relatives of poor Americans are unlikely to benefit from the networking that the more affluent use to find job opportunities. Access to quality healthcare remains unequal even after Obamacare.

Actually, what is even more troubling than these  persistent inequities has been the hysterical resistance to Obamacare’s very modest effort to extend health care to poorer Americans. A substantial portion of the public has responded to the Affordable Care Act with hostility and a truly unhinged animus. The assault has not focused upon reasoned concerns about aspects of the law; instead, opponents have indignantly rejected the very suggestion that access to healthcare might be a human right, or at the very least, a primary good that government should provide.

It isn’t only efforts to equalize access to healthcare that have met with hostility. Increasingly, we see  substantial support for unequal rights in other areas:

Americans place a higher priority on preserving the religious freedom of Christians than for other faith groups, ranking Muslims as the least deserving of the protections, according to a new survey.

Solid majorities said it was extremely or very important for the U.S. to uphold religious freedom in general. However, the percentages varied dramatically when respondents were asked about specific faith traditions, according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

This reluctance to understand that rights are different from privileges—this inability to understand that no one really has rights if government gets to decide who gets them and who doesn’t—reminded me of Nat Hentoff’s 1992 book “Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee.” If there is one area in which equality is supremely important, it’s equality before the law–and contrary to what too many Americans seem to believe, equality is not a zero-sum game.

There’s a significant “chicken and egg” component to these various manifestations of inequality—which comes first, economic deprivation or reduced social efficacy? We may not be able to answer that question, but surely we can figure out a way to break the cycle.

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That Quaint Thing Called “Ethics”…

A recent article in New America Weekly argues that we Americans need to clean up our understanding of corruption. We tend to think of corruption as the sorts of outright bribery encountered in many other countries, where “doing business” has often required greasing the hands of public servants. If no money has changed hands, Americans tend not to see an ethical problem.

The author of the article—a social anthropologist— argues that we need to expand our definition of corruption to include “rigged systems.”

According to Gallup, the notion that corruption is widespread has gained enormous traction in recent years. With results like this, it’s not hard to see why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have so much appeal. When so many people see the system as rigged and corruption as endemic, citizens are naturally attracted to outsiders, because they themselves feel like outsiders in a game they were set up to lose.

This state of affairs—with so many people self-defining as outsiders in a democratic society—makes it all the more urgent that we redefine corruption. Because unlike communist and many post-communist countries, where few believe(d) in either the system’s version of itself or its ability to deliver on it, the United States has traditionally been a country of believers—where people largely bought into the promise of their system. That is how it should be in democratic society.

The article lists several examples of systemic corruption—from the banking practices that cratered the economy, to the conflicts of interest of military figures who sit on corporate boards while advising the Pentagon on procurement—and the failure of mechanisms to insure accountability.

We need to understand how corruption manifests itself in America in 2015. We need to ground accountability in the ethics of the broader society. Democratic societies run on trust. A civic society can flourish only when the public believes the system is accountable in a real, not performative, way. Without that trust, perception of corruption will only worsen and the ranks of outsiders will swell.

As I have repeatedly noted, a major contributor to this lack of accountability is the current absence of genuine journalism, especially what we used to call “investigative journalism,” and particularly at the local level.

When local media report only on the “what” (new parking meters, new development projects, new public purchases) and ignore the “who” and “how” (dealmaking, cronyism, procedural shortcuts)—when columnists and reporters dismiss legitimate concerns about the “how” as partisan bickering unworthy of investigation—we fail to hold our elected officials accountable, and we feed the growing distrust that acts like sand in government’s gears.

Rigged systems are complicated, and a lot more difficult to combat than bribery and other, more blatant forms of self-dealing. It’s easy to shrug and conclude that “this is just how things get done.” But the integrity of the democratic system is ultimately far more important —and its absence far more consequential—than individual acts of dishonesty.

Quaint as it may sound, ethics matter. And ethical public behavior requires a culture of ethical accountability. “Trust me” doesn’t cut it.

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