Tag Archives: politics

The Religion of Politics

The most significant difference between science and religion is that the former deals with empirical evidence, while the latter requires faith. (You can’t, after all, demonstrate the existence or nonexistence of God in a laboratory experiment.)

Falsification is the heart of scientific inquiry; no matter how fervently a scientist believes in a particular explanation of natural phenomena, if further experimentation disproves it, she alters that conviction. Religious beliefs by their very nature cannot be falsified.

Ideally, policy decisions, like science, are based on evidence; we try a policy approach, and if it doesn’t work, we try something else. The characterization of states as “laboratories of democracy” rests on that premise–states will try different approaches to similar problems, and others will learn from their successes and failures.

When political ideologies become religions, societies suffer. A recent post at Political Animal, made that point:

When Josh Duggar and countless similar self-righteous conservatives are exposed as cheating molesters, it doesn’t cause conservatives to question whether their belief system might be causing those problems. They just double down. When abstinence education causes more teen pregnancy than responsible sex education, conservatives double down on the slut shaming. When tax cuts on the rich and wage cuts to government workers lead to economic recession, Republicans don’t question their core economic beliefs; they just claim they weren’t allowed to go far enough.

In a way, modern conservatives are similar to the Communists of old. No matter how obvious the ideology’s failure, the response is always that the policies were not enacted in a strong and pure enough manner.

That inability to come to grips with failure and adjust course, and that insistence on doubling down in the face of adverse results, is part of why many consider modern conservatism to be an almost cultic movement. Its adherents long since stopped caring about the evidence or empirical results. It’s all about who can prove truest to the faith, and maximally annoy and rebel against the evil liberal heathens. Policies and results are really beside the point.

Yep.

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Religious Voices Sing Different Tunes

There’s a central insight that gets lost in those fabricated “wars” on Christmas and the purported victimization of “people of (Christian) faith.”

The really consequential religious battles aren’t those that occur between us secular folks and adherents of various religious communities. They aren’t even the conflicts between followers of different religions.

The real dividing line is between people who look to their religion for guidance about the nature of the good, and those who see in dogma a tool for exercising power and/or asserting superiority.

The religious folks I admire strive to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their Lord” (to appropriate a phrase from Jewish liturgy). These are people who aren’t consumed with moral certainty or pumped up with self-righteousness; they’re people looking for wisdom in managing their relationships to each other and the planet, people who understand that there are many paths to a good life, and many good people on paths different from their own.

Then there are those who use religion primarily to advance their own temporal prospects, and the zealots to whom they appeal– angry, insecure people for whom religion is expressed in fundamentalism and intolerance.

Recently, these two incompatible approaches met in Louisiana. I give you Bobby Jindal and the awesome counter to his blatant politicizing of religion. 

A group of religious leaders has scheduled a prayer rally at Southern University to rival Gov. Bobby Jindal‘s religious gathering — officially called The Response — at LSU.

The prayer rally  at Southern University will take place in the Felton G. Clark Center (Mini Dome) on the same day, Jan. 24, as Jindal’s event at the Peter Maravich Assembly Center (PMAC) on LSU’s campus. The Southern gathering is being called the “Prayer Rally for the Soul of Louisiana.”

Organizers of the Southern event have said they will focus on Louisiana’s mass incarceration rate, Medicaid expansion and the state’s failing education system. The list of issues may be a personal critique of Jindal’s tenure as governor. For example, the governor has consistently refused to accept federal dollars to expand the Medicaid program in Louisiana, even as other Republican governors have done so.

Jindal has come under criticism for holding The Response at a public facility on LSU’s campus. Some question whether the event, which is overtly Christian, should be held in a government building. Other criticism has to do with sponsor for The Response — the American Family Association (AFA) — which holds controversial views about homosexuality, Eric Garner’s death and freedom of speech. An initial prayer guide released for The Response linked the rise of same-sex marriage to Hurricane Katrina and other disasters.

If more genuinely religious folks protested the hijacking of religion for political purposes, religion might be more appealing to the growing number of Americans who are throwing the baby of spiritual exploration out with the bathwater of bigotry.

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Maybe an Invasion from Outer Space?

The Washington Post recently ran a column listing the top ten reasons American politics are so broken. None of the listed reasons will surprise anyone who’s been following our increasingly uncivil, toxic political environment, and the whole column is worth a read.

That said, this struck me.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost a common enemy that had once unified the country.

There’s a Bedouin proverb: Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the stranger. From 1939 through 1989, the United States had a rogue’s gallery of heavily armed strangers to unite with in defense of democracy and the homeland. The Cold War began as a bipartisan affair with strong support from both parties. By the 1980s, the parties had clearly split into the hawk party and the dove party, and that split has only deepened. As the parties have purified and moved apart, foreign policy and the proper response to foreign threats has become more divisive.

I’ve often wondered whether the human animal is hard-wired to need an enemy– whether we evolved to inhabit an “us versus them” universe. It seems increasingly likely.

Sociologists argue that “membership” is a meaningless term unless there are also non-members–people we can point to who don’t belong. Many years ago, in a book focused upon the growing assimilation of Jews in the United States, the author–who was very concerned that Jews might die out altogether–posited that anti-Semitism might be necessary to Jewish identity. In other words, without an enemy, there was really no reason to remain in the “tribe.”

That appeal to tribal loyalties, that lack of a more capacious and inclusive definition of “we,” that view of a world divided into “teams” that allows us to experience the world as “us versus them” is what drives everything from religious extremism to Fox News.

All of which does raise an uncomfortable question:  Do Americans–or earthlings–require an existential threat to our existence in order to see each other as fellow Americans, or fellow humans?

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RIP

Andy Jacobs died this weekend. The brand of politics he practiced predeceased him.

I was the Republican candidate who ran against Andy in 1980.  It was a hard-fought campaign, but hard-fought didn’t imply the sort of mud-throwing and character assassination we have become accustomed to. Andy suggested that some of my positions were uninformed; I argued that he was ineffective. When Andy retired from Congress, Bill Hudnut and I were among those invited to “roast” him, and I admitted that during the heat of the campaign I had called him a name…I had called him a Democrat.

Andy didn’t hold grudges against political opponents. His friendship with Bill Hudnut–who actually defeated him before he won back his Congressional office– is legendary. Not too many years after I ran against him, my youngest son served as his Congressional Page.  Andy and I would go on to have an occasional lunch together, and from time to time, he would comment favorably, via email, on columns I’d written.

We probably agreed more than we disagreed. When the Iraq War started, he and I shared the stage at a protest rally on Monument Circle. I seldom saw him after that, and I knew his health was deteriorating.

Indianapolis will miss Andy Jacobs.

The whole country is poorer for the loss of generosity of spirit and the politics of principle he characterized.

RIP.

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