And Now the Bishops Meet

Beginning with this open letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops on 10 October, I have blogged repeatedly about the opening to violence that hateful campaign rhetoric—especially at rallies of Sarah Palin—has now created in our society (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/open-letter-to-us-catholic-bishops-on.html). I have repeatedly called on the U.S. Catholic bishops as a body to address and condemn such rhetorical violence, and to remind people of good will that rhetorical violence fuels actual violence.

The bishops have remained silent. Since they are now meeting in Baltimore, I renew my appeal to them.

Today, Tim Shipman reports in the London Telegraph that the Secret Service has now released information that they “warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks” (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/sarahpalin/3405336/Sarah-Palin-blamed-by-the-US-Secret-Service-for-death-threats-against-Barack-Obama.html). Shipman notes that Palin’s attacks on Obama “provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him’ until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.”

During the campaign, two plots to assassinate Mr. Obama were broken up. Others remain under investigation. The Secret Service has warned Obama that he “is a high risk target for racist gunmen.”

Once again: the hate rhetoric that fanned the flames of potential violence walked hand in hand with pro-life rhetoric in the recent campaign. As leaders of a religious community that accentuates the need to respect life, the bishops have an obligation to speak out on behalf of life values and against violence.

Unambiguously, strongly, clearly. Though the campaign is over, when demagoguery begins to elicit violence, people of faith and their leaders have an exceptionally strong responsibility to speak out repeatedly—against violence and for life. And to distance ourselves from those using pro-life rhetoric who simultaneously foment violence and hate.

As one small voice in a large flock, I continue to call on the U.S. Catholic bishops to offer pastoral leadership to the flock. And to offer the nation the moral guidance on which the Catholic community prides itself. The bishops’ voice needs to be heard, particularly when a member of their body, Bishop Rene Gracida of Corpus Christi, released a radio statement during the campaign speaking of Mr. Obama as Barack Hussein Obama as he instructed Catholics to vote against Mr. Obama (www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=30221, www.crossleft.org/node/6606).

This is inflammatory rhetoric. It deserves to be roundly condemned by the bishops as a body. It should be repudiated in a way that makes clear to the American public that the bishops reject violence as a Catholic value.

And on the subject of the pastoral leadership of the bishops—another topic I have repeatedly addressed on this blog—I want to note an 8 November article of Peter Steinfels in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/us/politics/08beliefs.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink). Steinfels asks,

By appearing to tie their moral stance on abortion so closely to a particular political choice, have they [i.e., the U.S. Catholic bishops] in fact undermined their moral persuasiveness on that issue as well as their pastoral effectiveness generally?

In my view, the answer to that question is an indubitable yes. Particularly when there are undeniable indicators of a growing collusion between those using outright hate rhetoric and those who claim to promote the bishops’ pro-life stance. I have documented that link in detail on this blog as the campaign unfolded, and will not repeat what I have said about it.

As I have also noted, a percentage of bishops perhaps greater than in any previous election played overt partisan politics in this campaign, making statements that were either outright endorsements of Mr. McCain (as was Bishop Gracida’s), or were obvious endorsements wearing a disguise so thin no one was in doubt of what lay underneath the scant vestments. Steinfels notes the estimate of 50-60 such partisan bishops that was circulating as the election ended, an estimate I have cited several times from Rocco Palma’s Whispers in the Loggia Blog.

As I have also noted, given the partisan statements of such a significant number of bishops—and the silence of their brother bishops as these statements came forth—the public now has a strong perception that the bishops as a body were strongly partisan in this election.

For many Catholics, it no longer suffices to suggest that the bishops oppose single-issue voting and recognize a range of values and issues that ought to merit Catholic attention. As Steinfels notes,

Many Catholics may understandably feel that the bishops are talking out of both sides of their mouths: Catholics are not supposed to be single-issue voters, but, by the way, abortion is the only issue that counts. The bishops do not intend to tell Catholics how to vote; but, by the way, a vote for Senator Obama puts your salvation at risk. Catholics are to form their consciences and make prudential judgments about complex matters of good and evil — just so long as they come to the same conclusions as the bishops.

Given the now widespread perception of Catholics and the public at large that the bishops play partisan politics as a body, and that their real judgment about the Democratic party and its candidate are clear no matter how carefully some church leaders parse political statements, Steinfels wonders how the bishops will confront their apparent defeat in the election, as they gather in Baltimore.

Steinfels’ emphasis on the (self-created) threats to the bishops’ pastoral leadership is well-placed. The real question that ought to be front and center in the bishops’ minds as they meet now is how to deal with their failed pastoral leadership of the American Catholic people.

The Bitter End: Bishops' Politicking Continued to Election Day

Rocco Palmo’s list of U.S. Catholic bishops who have now weighed in against the Democratic candidate for president and for the Republican one grows longer as election day is upon us (http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com). And as I begin to talk about that topic, I’d like to add a gloss to yesterday’s statistics re: the bishops’ partisanship.

As I noted yesterday, Palmo's list suggests that some 28% of Catholic bishops in the U.S. had by yesterday made statements—more or less, but who’s truly in doubt about what these mean?—instructing faithful Catholics to vote for Mr. McCain. Lest blog readers think that this percentage is low, I’d like to make a few observations about the statistics.

As Palmo and others commenting on the role the bishops are playing in this election have noted, it’s important to recognize that, for every bishop making a pro-McCain statement, there has been another noting that the Catholic church does not endorse candidates. To justify their refusal to exercise partisanship, a number of bishops have pointed to the “Faithful Citizenship” document released by the U.S. bishops in 2007, which was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the U.S. bishops.

The document reminds Catholics that the formation of voters' s consciences requires attention to a wide range of issues, including but not limited to the “non-negotiable” issues of abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage. Many commentators have seen “Faithful Citizenship” as a compromise document that tries to hold together those who view abortion as the overarching issue for Catholic voters, and those who maintain that Catholics serve the common good more productively when they pursue a “seamless garment” approach to life issues.

Those who see “Faithful Citizenship” as a compromise document are correct. Unfortunately, however, a sizeable (and apparently growing) proportion of the American bishops adhere to the "non-negotiables" approach of bishops such as Joseph Martino of Scranton, about whom I have blogged several times in this election cycle (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/talking-pro-life-or-acting-pro-life.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/talking-pro-life-or-acting-pro-life.html).

As my postings about Martino’s surprise appearance at a political discussion group at St. John’s parish in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, on 19 October state, when Bishop Martino interrupted the forum, he announced, “No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese. The USCCB doesn’t speak for me. The only relevant document . . . is my letter.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) document to which Bishop Martino was referring was “Faithful Citizenship.” When a bishop can boldly and flatly reject the validity of a document issued by an entire conference of bishops (of which he is a member), and when no brother bishop raises his voice in fraternal correction, I think we are not misguided in concluding that the U.S. Bishops’ Conference—as a body—has, for weal or for woe, succeeded in representing itself as the friend of the Republican party and the enemy of Democrats.

Whether this is a true impression or a false one, it’s an impression that the American public in general has, regarding where the bishops stand. And the repeated statements of bishops such as Martino, or, in the last several days, Finn of Kansas City, Curtiss of Omaha, and Burke of St. Louis-Rome are doing nothing to dispel that notion. Indeed, a clear picture is emerging in which—and this is a crucial point to note—as a body, as a conference of bishops, the U.S. Catholic bishops continue to play partisan politics in this election even more than in previous elections.

And the partisanship is grossly on the side of the Republican party. It is driving wedges between the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church in the U.S. and those pitifully few Catholics who continue going to church faithfully and paying any attention at all to what the bishops say. In an interview yesterday with Chris Stigall of KCMO radion station in Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn endorses McCain outright (www.lifenews.com/state3615.html). He states, "I don't think any Catholic can in good conscience" vote for Obama.

In a statement issued two days ago, Archbishop Elden Curtiss endorses McCain in similar terms (www.lifenews.com/state3605.html). As the Lifenews.com report of Bishop Curtiss’s statement notes,

Yet another Catholic bishop has drawn the line on how Catholics should vote in the upcoming election and Catholic Archbishop Elden Curtiss of Obama, Nebraska says Catholics should vote pro-life. He says there is no reason to support a pro-abortion candidate, like Barack Obama.

In an interview yesterday with Inside the Vatican correspondent Andrew Rabel, Archbishop Raymond Burke continues his rhetoric about the Democratic party as the “party of death” and continues promoting the “non-negotiables” approach (http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com). Burke states,

It is not my intention to engage in partisan politics . . . .The Democratic Party, however has, over the years, put forth and defended a political agenda which is grievously anti-life, favoring the right to procured abortion and "marriage" between persons of the same sex.

Overt partisanship. By leading prelates of the American Catholic church. Overt rejection of documents issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. With brother bishops standing by in silence. Giving the impression to both Catholics and the nation at large that the bishops of the Catholic church in the United States endorse one political party. That they belong to one political party, as a trophy bought by that party and proudly displayed on its keychain.

I realize that in blogging about this today I am taking some of the luster from the elections. It is not my intent to do this. However, since the timing of the bishops’ meeting each year is so closely connected to the elections (and since the conversation is dictated, in part, by the outcome of those elections), I believe it is important to keep exploring this issue on election day.

It is important for American Catholics. It is important as well for the nation as a whole because the bishops have actively sought—a significant number of them—to throw the election. Finn’s statement came on the heels of polls showing that McCain had made inroads in the last several days in the key swing state of Missouri. To view his statement in isolation from that development, and as anything other than an obtrusive attempt of this bishop to influence Catholic voting in his state, would be naïve.

What the bishops continue doing in this election is important for American Catholics because their partisanship is bound together with their abdication—as a bishops’ conference—of good pastoral leadership of American Catholics. I will not rehearse the arguments I have made to that effect, the arguments that the bishops are, on the whole, failed leaders of their flock. Those arguments remain compelling, in my view, and the last-minute intervention of some bishops in this election only makes them more compelling.

What I do want to probe a little more now, though, is the why of the bishops’ intervention, of their meddling, of their overt partisanship. To my mind, their panic as polls indicate that their party will probably not carry the day today is about much more than abortion.

It’s about power. It’s about misuse of power. It’s about back-room deals and boardroom tables. It’s about their ability to sit with powerful men who guard their backs, and to sway those men and be swayed by them.

It’s about getting into bed with rich donors and power-wielding politicians. And not knowing how to quit them, when they no longer have the ability to coerce others to do their bidding.

And, as all this has gone on in recent years, millions of American Catholics have walked away, shaking their heads. Thousands of American Catholics have reported abuse by priests when they were children, and have, on the whole, been treated cruelly and shamefully by these men too busy with the boardrooms and the back rooms even to meet with those wounded brothers and sisters.

Too busy to sit with hurting members of their flocks. Too busy cutting deals and power-brokering to see the faces of the wounded of their flocks, or to seek out the faces of the absent. Too enthralled by power, influence, money to spend time with those who lack power, influence, and money—that is, with the majority of American Catholics.

Too busy to walk among the flock. Inclined, in fact, on the whole to slam the door if a member of the flock who is not rich, influential (and Republican) comes to the door.

This is downright disgraceful. It’s scandalous. In the extreme. And, barring a miracle, those of us who have watched the bishops carry on this way for some years now have very little hope that their meeting in Baltimore will effect any change at all in this anti-pastoral behavior.

Even if their party loses this election, which many people around the world are seeing as a significant referendum regarding the direction the country has taken. Which is to say, a referendum about the route the American bishops have taken as pastoral leaders, to the extent that they have gotten into bed with our current leaders and don't know how to quit them.

Especially if their party loses. If their party loses, the lines are in fact likely to harden, the lessons to go unheeded. Even if the Spirit of God might possibly be speaking to the bishops through their unheeded, wounded flock at this significant turning point in our history.

Even when they pray the Magnificat together in assembly, remembering with Mary that God inevitably casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly . . . . That's how history works in God's hands, isn't it? In God's hands.

Points to Ponder: Approaching Election, Approaching Bishops' Meeting

Election times are number-crunching times.

I'm pondering some numbers of my own, as tomorrow's election nears.

And as the U.S. Catholic bishops prepare for their annual meeting in Baltimore this month.

Here are the numbers I'm pondering:

Percentage of Americans who are former Catholics: 10%*

Percentage of American adults raised Catholic who have left the church: 33%**

Percentage of American Catholics attending weekly Mass: 23%***

Percentage of bishops appearing to endorse McCain-Palin: 28% (roughly)****

Percentage of bishops found in 2002 to have shielded sexual predators: 66% (roughly)*****

Percentage of Catholics voting for Obama: 59%******

As the bishops prepare to meet, and as I ponder the preceding numbers, I'm also thinking of some observations Paul Krugman makes today in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled "The Republican Rump" (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/opinion/03krugman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin).

As Krugman notes, one would like to think that, if the Republican party loses tomorrow as decisively as pollsters and pundits are suggesting it will, the party and its adherents would do some careful soul-searching. And would perhaps reorient themselves.

Krugman is not sanguine about that possibility, however. In his view, the party is likely now to transform itself into the party of the hidebound rump, the one we've seen, to the dismay of many of us, on display at Sarah Palin rallies in recent weeks:

Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place

Which leads me to wonder about the men who rule us in the Catholic church, and who are still fulminating, God help them, though nobody much appears to be listening. They're still shaking their croziers, a goodly number of them, and threatening Democrat-voting Catholics with eternal damnation, while a third of adult Catholics have left the church and 1 in 10 Americans is a former Catholic.

They're still hurling down excommunications and cozying up to political interest groups whose values have nothing in common with Catholic values, even though the glass house in which most bishops live was decisively exposed in 2002 when the statistics about the clerical sexual abuse crisis first broke.

Still threatening, damning, excommunicating, betraying. Still not listening. Not to anyone but each other. And the men on top of them.

Will they begin to do so in Baltimore? Given the dismal statistics with which this meditation begins, one would like to hope so.

My prediction: they will continue to follow the hidebound rump, even if it leads, well, nowhere at all. Nowhere good at all.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*Pew Forum, March 2008: http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=293.

**Ibid.

***Results compiled by Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) as of February 2008: www.chnonline.org/main.asp?SectionID=14&SubSectionID=13&ArticleID=1133.

****I’m using Whispers in the Loggia’s number of 90 and counting (as of 3 November), of a total of some 250 bishops: http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com.

*****Data compiled by Dallas Morning News: www.dallasnews.com/cgi-bin/bi/dallas/2002/priests.cgi.

******New York Times/CBS Poll: www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/la-oe-rutten29-2008oct29,1,3091816.column.

Playing the Race Card: McCain Campaign and the Ashley Todd Story

And a quick addendum to the lengthy post I just made, re: the Colorado Catholic church and its ties to the Republican party.

For those pursuing the other information trails I sketched on Sunday, Huffington Post yesterday carried valuable commentary by Marty Kaplan about clues pointing to the McCain campaign's active involvement in promoting the now-debunked Ashley Todd story before that story had been verified. In his “Move Over, Willie Horton,” Kaplan pursues the involvement of McCain's Pennsylvania communications director Peter Feldman with pushing this story (www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/move-over-willie-horton_b_138196.html).

Money quotes:

I don't know Peter Feldman, and the only mayhem he's suspected of is metaphorical, and the drip, drip, drip of evidence against him is coming out in the court of public opinion, not in a court of law. I realize that politics ain't beanbag, and I'm familiar with the riptides and undertows that can seize anyone working in a presidential campaign, especially an apparently losing one, in its final days. Still, for the sake of the reputation of Jewish ethics, and even for the sake of the reputation of Republicans, I sure hope he didn't do last week what it kinda sorta looks like he did.

And "…[I]t appears to be Peter Feldman -- not the police -- who told local reporters that her (fictional) big black assailant said to her, 'You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson.' Move over, Willie Horton.'

Major Religious and Cultural Shift: The Current Election

Further confirmation of the major cultural realignment going on with the current U.S. presidential election--and the self-marginalization of those religious figures who can only say no to the realignment, and who refuse to engage postmodern culture creatively: a Barma Group poll released yesterday shows Obama and McCain in a dead heat among self-professed "born again" Christian voters (http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/10/mccain-and-obama-in-dead-heat.html).

Why is this big news? Because, until this election, for several decades now this constituency has always voted Republican. Churches aligned with right-wing Republican political platforms have done all they can to bring in the vote for the Republicans. An internal Southern Baptist Convention poll this election shows 80% of Southern Baptist pastors voting for McCain, and only 1% for Obama (the rest are undecided or have chosen a third party) (www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=28134&ref=BPNews-RSSFeed0528).

People are moving away from the "non-negotiable," naysaying, fear-driven approach of the Christian right, with its overt theocratic agenda. This cultural shift dooms Christian leaders--including a significant proportion of the U.S. Catholic bishops--who continue to shill for the political right to irrevelancy in the culture now forming around a seismic political shift.

That place--that place of irrevelancy--is not a place a religion centered on hope should ever find itself.

And as all this takes place, those "Catholic" websites trying to drive the Catholic vote into the Republican fold continue to spring up like fungi in the night. Clerical Whispers links today to a new website for Latino Catholics, VotoCatolico, that claims not to endorse a candidate but to offer Latino voters intellectual and spiritual resources to choose wisely (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/10/website-promotes-hispanic-catholic-vote.html and www.votocatolico.com).

And, lo and behold, the "resources" offered by the website are the same old, same old "non-negotiables" about abortion and same-sex marriage. If this website has a sponsor, I can't locate it by clicking on the site. Interestingly enough, it gives Archbishop Chaput a high profile, and looks very much like the website I mentioned yesterday, the one sponsored by the Colorado Catholic Conference.

Once again: I'd dearly love to know where the funding for these "Catholic" websites is coming from. They are an extension of Republican marketing in this campaign.

Finally, in an article yesterday on Huffington Post, CC Goldwater, granddaughter of Barry Goldwater, explains why she is repudiating her grandfather's party in this election:

Myself, along with my siblings and a few cousins, will not be supporting the Republican presidential candidates this year. We believe strongly in what our grandfather stood for: honesty, integrity, and personal freedom, free from political maneuvering and fear tactics.

Honesty, integrity, repudiation of manuevering and fear tactics: the kinds of values one would expect faith-based values voters to endorse in any leader. More's the pity, when some Christian pastoral leaders continue to give the impression of being on the side of dishonesty, lack of integrity, and fear tactics--even as large numbers of their flock look for something new when business as usual is no longer working for us.

On the Failure of Repetition as a Political Stategy: Need for Creative Paradigms

Fascinating commentary these days on the feebleness of the tried and true strategy that has consistently worked for neoconservatives for some time now. This is the strategy of repeating rather than convincing, of restating rather than engaging in dialogue, of parroting instead of engaging minds.

As a blogger responding to my recent open letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops says, “This repetitious imprinting of an 'obvious reality' is symptomatic of the entire program of Conservative campaigning” (http://ncrcafe.org/node/2172; the blogger’s username is WOJO). Repetitious imprinting of an “obvious reality” as political strategy: saying something over again often enough to make it appear obvious, as if it is a reading rather than an interpretation of reality . . . .

Note that this approach has nothing to do with rational argumentation or with thought. It’s about convincing people by coercing them. It’s about framing social reality such that we make others see what we want them to see through sheer repetition of symbols until the repetition appears to be mirroring what is out there rather than imposing an interpretive scheme on it.

We make people begin to “see” that all poverty originates in the lazy venality of the “welfare queen” who rips off the system. We force people to begin noticing that all theft involves menacing black men wearing do-rags. Through repetition masquerading as reading of “obvious reality,” we impose blinders that deprive people of the ability to see that the vast majority of those ripping off the system work in white-collar venues (e.g., on Wall Street) and that those appropriating our earnings in underhanded ways normally wear top-end business suits.

Fortunately, political dialogue as the repetitious imprinting of an “obvious reality” is simply not working in this election cycle—not nearly so well as it has done for several decades now. In Sunday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman analyzes what is happening as a failed marketing plan (“The Real Plumbers of Ohio,” www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/opinion/20krugman.html).

Krugman notes that Nixon invented a marketing strategy that has carried the day for neoconservative politicians up to this election. Nixon discovered that neocons could mask their plutocratic economic and social platform through a politics of distraction and division that channeled the resentment of angry white males fearful of change. By bombarding us with repeated symbols of those we are to resent, by shouting hate rhetoric at top volume on Fox news or right-wing talk radio programs until it pours out of our ears, neoconservative spokespersons have adroitly convinced us that they have our “real” needs at heart, even as those real needs go singularly unaddressed and, in fact, become more pronounced under neoconservative administrations.

In this election, increasing numbers of us have stopped listening. Unfortunately, however, “John McCain’s strategy, in this final stretch, is based on the belief that the old formula still has life in it.” Repetition of the slogans of distraction and division has become so ingrained in the political movement that rose to power through this marketing strategy, that it is now well-nigh impossible to stop the repetition—even when it is failing.

In an article in today’s Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington characterizes this failed strategy of repetition as an ““antediluvian approach” (“The Internet and the Death of Rovian Politics,” www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-internet-and-the-deat_b_136400.html).

As with Krugman, Huffington notes the reliance of the McCain team on repetition of the failed marketing slogans: “And it seems that the worse McCain is doing in the polls, the more his team is relying on the same gutter tactics.”

In Huffington’s view, what has changed in this election cycle is our access to information that breaks the back of the misinformation fed to us in repeated hate slogans. As Huffington notes,

Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed. . . .

Back in the Dark Ages of 2004, when YouTube (and HuffPost, for that matter) didn't exist, a campaign could tell a brazen lie, and the media might call them on it. But if they kept repeating the lie again and again and again, the media would eventually let it go (see the Swiftboating of John Kerry). Traditional media like moving on to the next shiny thing. But bloggers love revisiting a story.

The internet—the rise of citizen blogging coupled with tools such as YouTube—has forever changed the way we do business politically in this nation. The strategy of coercion through endless repetition, of framing reality by shouting slogans over and over, can no longer work so well in a technology-driven political world where we can now see the faces, the actual faces, of haters at a political rally. Where can now hear those slogans coming out of the mouths of those faces, and can assess for ourselves, using our own eyes and our own ears, the worth of those hate slogans.

Unfortunately, institutions that have not anticipated these developments are marginalizing themselves in the world coming into being through these new technologies and the political realities they generate. This is among the reasons I have noted that the U.S. Catholic bishops’ continued reliance on simplistic sloganizing (“pro-life,” “baby killers,” “intrinsically evil”) is not merely ineffectual: it is a failed pastoral strategy. This way of doing business no longer conveys the values bishops claimed to want to convey to the faith community and the public at large through these slogans.

In fact, the repetition now does the opposite. It foreshortens thought, ethical analysis, and political responsibility. It draws people together around slogans now contaminated with the toxins of hate, since the same mouths shouting “baby killer” are also shouting “commie faggots” and “kill him.”

Because of my background in higher education, I’m interested as well in the failure of many educators with whom I’ve worked to foresee how quickly information technology would refashion the political playing field in postmodern culture, and how important it was to prepare for that cataclysmic shift, if we want to continue transmitting core civic values to a new generation.

In this regard, Shannon Rupp’s half-satirical, half-serious article “Could We Blame the Financial Crisis on Too Much Testosterone?” on yesterday’s Alternet blog captivates my attention (www.alternet.org/workplace/103502/could_we_blame_the_financial_crisis_on_too_much_testosterone_harvard_researchers_say_yes).

Rupp reports on the Excess Testosterone Effect theory (her phrase) developed recently by Harvard scholars Anna Dreber and Coren Apicella. In an article in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Dreber and Apicella report research findings suggesting that men with high testosterone levels take greater risks than those with lower testosterone levels.

Rupp proposes that testosterone-driven risk taking may have served a useful function in the evolutionary process at one time, when social groups required “just enough practitioners of hormone-driven irrational acts to provide us with some regular protein.” Now, not so much.

Now, “male politicians trading on an appearance of strength are actually the guys who, in evolutionary terms, have outlived their usefulness.” Our current economic crisis indicates the downside of testosterone-driven risk taking for the human community as a whole. What we now need more crucially are thinkers, nurturers, people with talents to build teams, harness the energies of groups of people, work collaboratively, generate new ideas for a world on the edge of disaster.

I say that Rupp’s article sparked my thinking about the failed strategies of some educators (who have been under the spell of neoconservative political figures) for a very specific reason. As I have noted in previous postings, one of the astonishing experiences I have had in my academic career was being informed that I lacked the “aggressiveness” to be a successful academic leader.

To be specific: at one of my workplaces, I was repeatedly informed by my supervisor, an African-American female, that I was not “aggressive” enough to be an academic leader. This same supervisor brought in an African-American male to “evaluate” me—a much younger man who had never met me before, who did not know me or my work. A Baptist Sunday School teacher who writes homophobic articles about the social construction of black masculinity . . . .

I mention the racial context because I had naively thought, before running into this web of prejudice and deceit, that many African-American women might share the interest of gay men to critique and overcome the oppression worked in the lives of women, people of color, and gay folks by "aggressive" men. I had naively assumed that African-American women might understand (and so shun) the harm done to the souls of another human being when we employ demeaning phrases like “not aggressive” to control those we supervise.

As I noted in several meetings with this supervisor, “not aggressive” was a code term for “gay” when my supervisor used the phrase. It is a term designed to marginalize, to bash, to demean a person's dignity. The real core of my supervisor's objection to me was clearly that I was a gay male who would not hide my identity.

I put my objection to my supervisor's use of this term into letters that I asked to have placed in my personnel file. As these noted, I objected as well to her “evaluator’s” characterization of me as “not aggressive.” My letters noted that no best-practices manuals for an academic vice-president emphasize aggression as a desirable quality in an academic leader.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Successful academic leaders (those successful in contexts not poisoned by homophobia, as this university was, through its president) deliberately work against aggression and towards collegiality. Successful academic leadership takes place when an academic vice-president gets people working together in a synergistic way that releases the better angels of their nature.

Why bring this up now? Because it’s related to what’s going on in our political life. Those who have invested everything in failed paradigms—models of masculinity centered on males as aggressive risk-takers, for example—are not seeing the pronounced cultural and political needs of this moment of our history. When those who are failing in this way are educators and self-professed transformative leaders in educational life, our future is imperiled.

The old paradigms aren’t working any more. Shouting slogans that divide us has waning power to move us to build a better world. Merely repeating ideas or symbols that once appeared to work but no longer demonstrate effectiveness is not going to solve the problems we face now. They’re real problems, and they’re complex. They require the best energies we can all give them collaboratively.

News of the Week: Sally's Baaack; Church of the Two Kevins, etc.

Strands that connect to topics I’ve discussed earlier this week:

There’s a lot more evidence of (and commentary about) the hate now bubbling around through the Palin-McCain rallies this past week. I won’t link to the articles, since readers can easily retrieve them through web searches.

In a way, I’m conflicted about even giving attention to them. A superstitious part of me feels that noticing rising social hatred, and pointing out its possibility to elicit actual violence, actually help feed the hatred.

On the other hand, when the sub rosa hatred that is always there in any society claims an open hearing in the rhetoric of people vying for the highest offices in the land, how can one justify not speaking out? There are too many clear historical precedents that show us how little it takes to produce actual physical violence, once such hate unmasks itself and comes out into the open,

If now is not the time to speak out, when will that time be?

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Connecticut legalized gay marriage yesterday. It is now the third state to recognize the right of gay citizens to marry. Commentary on the state supreme court decision to equalize marriage rights in Connecticut notes that the majority opinion recognizes that the decision to withhold marriage rights from gay citizens is inherently discriminatory (www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/10/connecticut-gay-marriage_n_133605.html). Withholding the right of marriage from gays continues historic structures of discrimination that turn gays into second-class citizens. The court notes that the tendency of American jurisprudence is to keep extending rights over the course of history to groups shut out of the structures of participatory democracy by unjust discrimination, including people of color and women.

I’m disappointed to hear that Republican governor M. Jodi Rell disagreed with her state’s supreme court decision, noting, "I do not believe their voice reflects the majority of the people of Connecticut.” In looking at Rell’s biography, I find she was born in Virginia in 1946. She was educated in Virginia.

She’s roughly my contemporary. Like me, Governor Rell came of age in a Southern state during the Civil Rights crisis. It cannot have escaped her attention that the majority of citizens in her state, as in mine, as in all Southern states, bitterly resisted the rights of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

We had to be brought kicking and screaming into the land of liberty and justice for all. We had to be forced to do the right thing. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to make us begin to reconsider our longstanding history of discrimination.

Equal rights for all should not be determined by popular vote. They should be determined by fundamental principles that are essential to the constitution of a humane body politic. They should be defended by courts even when those rights are not popular with the majority—defended because it is right to defend equality in a society based on the contention that all people are created equal.

Governor Rell should know this, from her experience growing up in the South in the Civil Rights period. I am disappointed that she defends a denial of equal rights in the case of gay citizens that I doubt she would any longer defend in the case of African-American citizens.

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Two more U.S. Catholic bishops have come out this week. That is, have come out overtly for the Republican ticket in the coming election.

Whispers in the Loggia blog today reports on a joint pastoral letter released yesterday by the bishops of Dallas-Ft. Worth, Kevin Farrell and Kevin Vann (http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com). The two Kevins argue that a “vote for a candidate who supports the intrinsic evil of abortion or 'abortion rights' when there is a morally acceptable alternative would be to cooperate in the evil -- and, therefore, [is] morally impermissible."

As American Catholics have learned, this is codespeak for, “Good Catholics vote Republican.” I’ve long been appalled that Catholic bishops are willing to pimp for candidates who in key respects betray central Catholic values. The “pro-life” record of the candidates some bishops have promoted in election after election is abysmal. It completely contradicts the claim that the party being endorsed by the bishops is authentically pro-life.

Since we have sufficient evidence now that the candidates for whom some bishops have been pimping have absolutely no intent to be pro-life, why do bishops like the two Kevins keep up the pro-Republican game? Sadly, I’ve come to the conclusion that they do so because some of the “values” of the candidates they’re promoting—including some of the most dubious of those candidates’ “values”—are actually more in line with what bishops like the two Kevins really want than are gospel values. “Values” like the subordination of women to men. “Values” like the subordination of secular society to church control. “Values” like the racism that is at the dark heart of those screams to kill Obama at recent Palin rallies.

To say I am disappointed in bishops like the two Kevins would be an understatement. I’m repulsed by them. Ultimately, I am repulsed most of all because they are willingly informing a large number of good, conscientious Catholic voters that we are not welcome in the Church of the Two Kevins. That Church is Republican, thank you very much. Democrats need not apply.

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I reported earlier this week that the city of Orlando has just extended benefits to partners of city workers living in same-sex unions. I also reported (in my posting about “Camp Out”) about one church that is seeking to provide safe places, sanctuary, in which LGBT youth can deal with questions of sexual orientation without fear.

As a follow-up to both of those postings, I’m happy to note an article in today’s Daytona Beach News Journal which highlights a gay-affirming fraternity at Embry Riddle University (www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/frtHEAD02101108.htm). The article reports that Delta Phi Lambda fraternity on the campus of this Florida aeronautical school welcomes gay members.

Embry Riddle’s decision to allow safe spaces for LGBT students is not without a price. As the report indicates, after news of the fraternity broke (as well as news that the school had begun a Gay-Straight Alliance and had celebrated National Coming Out Week), at least one angry parent called to say that he/she did not want “gay things” going on at the university.

Despite the anger of that parent, the school’s administrators continue to support these gay-affirming developments on the campus. I applaud their courage. During the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, it was often not easy to do the right thing. It is not easy today, in the midst of the struggle for equal rights for gay Americans. When university administrators defend the core values of civil society in the face of prejudiced pressure groups, they deserve our admiration and support.

The right thing remains right, even when people exert pressure to make us betray our instinct for fundamental human decency. Young people moving towards adult identity deserve safe spaces in which to claim their adult identity. They deserve good adult role models to guide and counsel them. This is a large part of what college education is about: adult role models helping emerging adults find their way in the world, their unique identities, their calling in life.

Just as universities provide countless support groups for students of every background imaginable, they have a responsibility to offer support and safety to LGBT students. After all, parents who do not want such support offered to their youth can always find universities that still engage in overt discrimination. Church-owned schools have tested their legal right to discriminate on religious grounds in the courts. Surely there are such schools around for those angry Embry Riddle parents to find, if an environment of discrimination is what they want for their young people.

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Speaking of discrimination, I haven’t mentioned Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kern in a while. As readers will recall, Kern was in the news earlier this year when someone attending a secret meeting she held with supporters leaked audiotape of the meeting to the media. The tape has Kern stating that gay people are a greater threat to America than terrorists.

Kern is back in the news. This week, she held a debate with opponent Ron Marlett, in which she sticks to her guns (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7500). She continues to promote her claim that gay citizens pose a greater threat to the United States than terrorists. She backs this astonishing claim with statistics: terrorists have 3,000 people in the U.S. in the last 15 years; gays have killed 100,000.

Kern is, readers will recall, the wife of a Baptist minister. And she’s an educator. Her opponent Ron Marlett finds her ideas “chilling.”

Indeed. Question for Governor M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut: after listening to Sally Kern, do you have second thoughts about wanting to submit the rights of some marginalized citizens to popular vote? Question for the bishops of the Church of the Two Kevins: is this kind of hatefulness—in the name of Christ—really what you want us to support by our votes?

As always, just asking.

An Open Letter to the U.S. Catholic Bishops on the Rise of Violence in American Political Discourse

Dear Bishops,

As I watch the latest developments in our national presidential campaign, I am intently concerned. And I find your silence baffling. Your silence concerns me as much as do some of the alarming incidents in the political sphere in the past two weeks.

I am speaking in particular of the transparent fear-mongering and hate-fomenting tactics of the pro-life candidates Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin in recent days. I am intently concerned, in particular, about the violence Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin’s rhetoric is inciting, and about their seeming refusal to curb or even address that violence.

Credible news reports from many sources state that at recent rallies, after these candidates have dishonestly labeled their opponent a terrorist, those hearing the rhetoric have shouted, “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” Not only did Mrs. Palin (at whose rallies these shouts are said to have occurred) not condemn these hateful anti-life cries when they took place, but to the best of my knowledge, neither she nor Mr. McCain has taken any responsibility for inciting hate that may well lead to acts of outright physical violence against one of our presidential candidates.

I cannot recall a presidential campaign in my lifetime in which such overt hate-mongering, with overt attempts to stir violence among citizens, has taken place. The rage-distorted faces I see on my computer or television screen at these political rallies frighten me. They frighten me for the future of my country.

We are at a precarious moment in our history as a democratic nation. Yesterday, the world markets took another precipitous nosedive. History demonstrates that in difficult economic times, people look for scapegoats. They look for someone to target, to blame, to hate. Demagogues know how to twist and turn this hatred to serve their own goal of gaining power over a troubled populace.

Such social hatred, fed by economic uncertainty, led to the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. You know what bitter fruit that movement bore. You also surely know how muted, how diffident, how ineffectual the response of the German and Austrian bishops to what happened in Nazi Germany was.*

To this day, the church and its pastoral leaders contend with well-deserved guilt because far too many bishops stood by in silence as the fires of hatred began to burn out of control in Europe. Too many actually stoked those fires, to the eternal discredit of the church—just as many pastoral leaders did in the Spanish Civil War and in the conflicts in Latin America in the latter part of the 20th century.

You have told American voters to make the protection of life paramount as we go to the polls. I see a very stark pro-life issue at stake in what has happened in the past week at some American political rallies.

I grew up in the American South in the middle of the Civil Rights struggle. From the formative experiences of my youth and adolescence, I know well that it is entirely possible for hate groups to target and even to kill those who represent alternative visions of the future that the hate group will not tolerate. I have seen violence used as a tool of terror to try to stop necessary social change.

I remember the assassination of Dr. King vividly. I recall as well the murder of Medgar Evers. I will never forget the lynchings of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner in 1964, and the shameful length of time it took to bring one of the killers, Rev. Edgar Ray Killen, to justice for these murders in 2005.

I remember what happened to Violet Liuzzo, as I also recall the countless other scenes of ugly violence from that period, the burnt churches in which children died, the dogs turned on peaceful civil rights marchers, the fire hoses. I will never forget pictures of the faces of those in my hometown of Little Rock who lined the sidewalks to keep African-American students from integrating Central High School, or the stories I heard as a child of lunch trays dumped on the heads of those students when the school finally integrated.

From these formative experiences, I know that it takes very little to tip a culture in the direction of social violence and outright murder, when there is fear of change, or economic disturbance. I also know how easy it is to remain silent.

My conscience will not permit me to be silent now, as I read about the cries for violence at political rallies of candidates who call themselves pro-life, and who appear to have the endorsement of many of you as bishops. My conscience has been formed by the church, and it instructs me to speak out when I see social violence threatening to escalate, lest I become complicit in that violence through my tacit consent to it.

One of the reasons I left my childhood church and became Catholic in a small south-Arkansas town in the 1960s was that this church appeared to be the sole “white” church in my town that welcomed members of all races. I was impressed with the priests and nuns I saw marching in Civil Rights marches in the 1960s, placing themselves in positions in which they might pay the price that others paid, when they asked our nation to live up to its historic ideals of liberty and justice for all.

I am profoundly disappointed by your silence now, in the face of the shouts to kill Mr. Obama, in the face of the silence of Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin as these appeals for violence take place among their supporters. I find it difficult to believe in your commitment to pro-life policies, when you remain silent about this shocking breach of civil discourse in our national political life.

I have to confess that I even entertain the thought that some of the rage-distorted faces I have been seeing at these rallies in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin are Catholic faces, people who believe they are following your lead as pastors. When I look at some of the faces of fellow Catholics who appear to be entertaining violence, when I read their political comments on blogs or in letters to the editor, I wonder what has happened to our church. These comments are all too often full of venom and the desire to punish others.

I wonder how it happens that, though you have drummed into our heads the principle of voting on the basis of life and life alone, so many Catholics who claim to value life seem intent on allying themselves with movements that are clearly destructive to life. If you will permit my saying so, your pastoral strategies in recent decades seem to me to have failed.

They have failed because you have not connected the ethic of life to the entire range of political and cultural issues in which principles of life are at stake. The alacrity with which many citizens today—among them those most strongly committed to what they see as Christian pro-life values—are willing to speak of violence against those who disagree with them suggests to me that your teachings about life have not reached deep into believers’ consciences. To the extent that you have focused solely on the issue of abortion, and have over-simplified that issue and also allowed it to be used to stir social hatred, you have not fulfilled your calling as good shepherds.

Nor will you do so now, if you remain silent about what is happening in our political life at present. You will certainly not do so if you appear to endorse candidates who incite violence while claiming to be pro-life.

My voice is certainly not an important one, bishops. I doubt it is one you will hear. I speak out not because I imagine I have influence among you or anyone else. I do so because I must. I cannot live with myself if I remain silent when I see signs that our culture is tipping towards the kind of violence that occurred in my adolescence—or in Nazi Germany, in Spain as Franco rose to power, and in Latin America in the latter half of the 20th century.

I speak because, as your brother bishop Thomas Gumbleton noted in his homily this past Sunday,

Clearly it seems to me, if we're listening to the gospel today, Jesus is saying to you and to me, “We must challenge our leaders, call them to be the leaders God has ordained them to be.” Jesus did it and paid a terrible price, and perhaps we would have to pay a price, but it is our task, I think, if we want to follow Jesus, to challenge sometimes, even those who are in positions of leadership.

Bishop Gumbleton’s homily makes plain that he considers the church’s pastoral leaders among those we the people of God have a gospel-determined responsibility to challenge, when we see our pastoral leaders failing to be good shepherds.

Your flock needs to hear your voice now, bishops. Will you speak out as unambiguously about the need of our political leaders to stop inciting violence as you have against abortion? This is a moment in which a strong pro-life voice is imperative. The future of our nation may depend on hearing that voice. Your credibility as pastoral leaders surely depends on it.

*For a recent Jewish perspective on these events and their echoes in the violence now entering our political discourse, see Jesse Kornbluth’s open letter to Joe Lieberman’s rabbis at www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/a-yom-kippur-letter-to-jo_b_133262.html.

More on Failed Leadership and Character

My apologies for chattering today, but it's impossible not to be fascinated by some of the commentary about leadership in our nation as the campaign unfolds.

The following is from an article by Mitchell Bard at Huffington Post, on how smears of others' character is the ultimate resort of failed leaders (www.huffingtonpost.com/mitchell-bard/mccains-desperate-smears_b_132617.html):

If Americans want any hope of changing the culture of failed leadership that the United States has endured for the last eight years, they have to reject a candidate who has allowed himself to fall into the gutter, and who has displayed an acute lack of understanding of what is needed in a challenging time.

Absolutely true, it seems to me. When the only weapon in a "leader's" arsenal is to smear others, then that leader reveals a serious character flaw. Good leadership depends on a leader's strength of character--demonstrated character. The diversionary tactic of smearing the character of others to draw attention away from one's own lack of character only underscores the emptiness of the one going on the attack.

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Well, I can't stop. The more I read, the more I find. I highly recommend Baratunde Thurston's "Silence in the Face of Hate Makes McCain-Palin Unfit to Lead" on Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com/baratunde-thurston/silence-in-the-face-of-ha_b_132660.html).

Excerpts:

Everything we need to know about John McCain and Sarah Palin is summed up by their reaction to these incidents [i.e., to the hate rhetoric spewed at their recent rallies]. Their positions on health care no longer matter. Their tax policies are irrelevant. Their talking points have been made moot. Not only do they bring out the worst in people, but they feed the worst in people. They are basing their campaign on painting Obama as a terrorist and monster. They are cultivating prejudice, racism, fear and ugliness.

America has been down this path before, and it is the exact opposite of what this country needs right now. . . .

We can be a better nation than this, and we deserve better leaders than these.

Amen. And if we don't stop it--we who stand by in silence as it's being done--then we'd better be preparing for the fire next time.

A Moment of Mediocrities: Serious Reflections on the Dearth of American Leaders

As the day goes on: an article at today’s Huffington Post website demands serious attention—Steven Weber’s “We Are in Danger” (www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-weber/we-are-in-danger_b_132654.html). Weber takes on the overt hate-mongering to which the McCain-Palin ticket is now stooping.

As he notes, if we let this happen and sit on the fence, if we let the hate pour out and do nothing, we are in real danger as a nation. Allowing a small group of citizens to incite hatred, while the rest of us stand by in silence, is a preliminary to fascism.

It perturbs me more than I can say that McCain and Palin have not only allowed people at their rallies to shout that Obama is a terrorist while they have done nothing to quell such hate speech, but that they have actively egged this rhetoric on. But even more disturbing to me is Sarah Palin’s absolute silence when someone at one of her rallies recently shouted that Obama should be killed.

As this goes on, where are the Christian leaders who tell us we should vote on the basis of candidates’ stands about life issues? I’m not hearing a peep—not even from the Catholic bishops, who have (many of them) done about everything but stand on their heads to instruct us to vote for the “pro-life” candidates.

Our own silence speaks volumes about us as a nation—our refusal to raise our voices in protest when we are offered morally vacuous leaders who are caricatures of everything authentic leadership stands for. As Matt Taibbi recently noted, "The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is -- it's what her candidacy says about America" ("Mad Dog Palin," www.alternet.org/election08/100551/mad_dog_palin).

And as Bob Herbert observes, "This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role" (Bob Herbert, "Palin's Alternate Universe," www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04herbert.html). Arianna Huffington was absolutely right when she noted last Sunday, “When it comes to leadership, this last week proved we are living in a moment of mediocrities—a long moment” (www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sunday-roundup_b_131827.html).

A moment of mediocrities: one in which there is no possibility of looking to areas outside the political arena, like higher education or the churches, for viable models of alternative leadership. In a column on the role of the Catholic bishops in the current election in the National Catholic Reporter today, theologian Fr. Richard McBrien notes that in the long papal reign of John Paul II, the unchecked power of the papacy resulted in a crop of non-leaders appointed not because of their leadership skills or strength of character, but for their willingness to say yes to the man at top (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/2089):

In a question and answer period, on a different subject, he asked the audience to imagine a scenario in which President Bush “were in office for life and that he had the authority to make appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court and throughout the federal court system at will, without even a U.S. Senate to hold hearings and vote on the nominees.”

“That's exactly what Pope John Paul II -- or any other pope for that matter -- was able to do in his long term of office, and that is why the Catholic church finds itself today -- and especially during the height of the sexual-abuse crisis in the priesthood -- with such a dearth of pastoral leadership.”

McBrien said John Paul’s greatest failing, as pope, were the bishops he named. “Men were appointed bishops or promoted within the hierarchy on the basis of loyalty to the Holy See rather than on the basis of pastoral aptitude, theological sophistication and leadership skills.”

The willingness to say yes to those who give us orders, rather than pastoral aptitude and leadership skills: I think that if any aspect of my contact with some conspicuously bad leaders in academic life has given me most reason to ask what I consider good leadership to be, it has been the moral bankruptcy of some of the church-affiliated academic “leaders” I know. The lack of character. The willingness to lie. The willingness to treat other human beings as things to be moved around on a game board rather than flesh and blood persons with real lives and real emotions. The belief that, in the final analysis, only I and my feelings count, that only I have rights, and that if I can get away with it, then it must be right—especially when the object of my scorn is already a member of a despised group that has no legal rights.

Character: it’s absolutely essential to sound leadership. And it begins with us. Until we demand it first in ourselves, and then in those who lead us, we’ll keep being offered the kind of “leaders” who are now inching us towards total dissolution as a viable democratic society. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for: when we expect more of ourselves, then perhaps we’ll be offered leaders who reflect that heightened expectation.

God Told Me: The Extreme Danger of Rule by Divine Will

Soon after the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin was announced, the McCain campaign team informed the American people that she would not be doing many interviews, until the media learned to show her “respect and deference” (see, e.g., “In Search of Gov. Palin,” www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/opinion/11thu2.html).

After her interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, I think we now know why Sarah Palin is in purdah and will probably remain there for the duration of the campaign. She is clearly not ready to lead. She hasn’t a clue about foreign policy. As we are struggling to extricate ourselves from the bottomless pit of an undeclared war in the Middle East (one pursued on the basis of misinformation and lies), this paragon of pro-life politics is willing to rattle the saber at yet another nation: Russia. She does not even know how to define the foreign policy of the president she has loyally supported, George W. Bush.

In what follows, I want to sketch the mental and moral context that gives rise to such foolhardy, dangerous ignorance of even the most rudimentary aspects of American foreign policy and of our relationship to the rest of the world. I do so as a citizen who has a right to know what someone who may one day sit in the White House thinks, believes, and will do in a moment of crisis. I do so as well as a person of faith who needs to evaluate the policies of a potential president from the standpoint of my faith commitments and values.

The root of Sarah Palin’s ignorance is something she denied in her interview with Charles Gibson, but something we know from many speeches she has given that she does believe: Sarah Palin believes in governing in accordance with the will of God. And, more importantly, she is confident that she and those within her religious worldview know the will of God. In very specific ways. The will of God for the rest of us. For our nation and our world.

This is a dangerous worldview. It is part and parcel of the theocratic platform of the religious right that is embracing Sarah Palin so warm-heartedly. Sarah Palin is a rising star of the religious right because her advocates know full well that she does believe, absolutely and uncritically, that she and her political-religious allies have direct access to the mind of God when it comes to making political and moral decisions that affect all of us. She has explicitly stated this on numerous occasions. One faint denial that she believes this, in the context of an interview in which she was clearly being vetted by the American public, is not going to make the belief vanish.

She would act on that belief if elected. This is why the religious right wants her elected. It is why anyone who does not buy into the ideology of the religious right should be mightily concerned about the possibility that Sarah Palin may one day be president.

Mind you, as a nation, we have never been far from political God-talk. But the kind of God-talk that has infused our national political discourse from the start of our nation has been far from theocratic: in fact, it has been in very specific ways anti-theocratic. The writers of our nation’s foundational documents were terrified at the possibility that our new experiment in democracy would succumb to the battling religio-political ideologies (based in conflicting theocratic visions themselves based in the belief that each side directly represented God’s will) that led to warfare, mass murder, abolition of entire towns, and widespread hunger in Europe the century before the U.S. was founded.

As a result, we have a long tradition of speaking as if God somehow guides us as a nation, and as if the civil values that bind us together derive loosely from religious worldviews, without ever claiming that God directly imparts God’s will to our rulers, in specific ways, on an everyday basis. And that is precisely the claim that Sarah Palin and her religious-political allies want to make.

Why is that claim so dangerous? Let me recount some stories from my personal experience to make my point. These experiences occurred in academic life, which closely parallels political life, in that it has a pyramid structure in which a few folks at the top try to “rule” the rest of a college or university. Like political life, those at the top are subject to public scrutiny and are accountable to their various constituencies—that is, when a college or university is healthy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of unhealthy colleges and universities out there. I have had the misfortune to end up at several of them. Perhaps not coincidentally, in each case, these have been colleges/universities owned by churches. And perhaps also not coincidentally, they have all been in the American Southeast, where theocratic dreams most persistently invade political discourse of late.

One college at which I worked a few years—this happens to be a small Catholic college in North Carolina—is owned by a community of monks. The Benedictine tradition of the monks who own this college is centered on the idea that the abbot’s word is final: the abbot stands in the place of Christ within the monastic community. Monks take a vow to obey the abbot.

At its best, the relationship between an abbot and a monastic community is collegial—as college life itself is at best, when it works right. That is, the abbot consults with the monastic leadership council and the community at large. The rule of St. Benedict has the radical notion, in fact, that the insights of the youngest monk, the “least” in the community, ought to be particularly valued. At its best, in monastic life, discernment occurs in a communal, collegial context, and the abbot’s decision reflects the community’s discernment of what the Spirit is saying to the community.

At its worst, abbatial rule is tyrannical. This is the kind of abbatial rule I happened to encounter with one of the abbots at the college at which I worked. And it affected the college and my own career, in that the abbot began to claim a direct control over the college—rooted in his own unique direct access to God’s will—that had not been part of the college’s polity following Vatican II.

In my period of association with this college, the monks voted to renovate a beautiful but shaky old building made of bricks hand-crafted by the brothers of the first monastic community to arrive at the location. One day, to their surprise, they awoke to see wrecking crews demolishing the old building. In the night, the abbot told them, God had spoken to him and had told him to have the building torn down. The monks were vowed to obedience. And monks obey.

This was an abbot who, the day he was elected, pulled from his habit a thank-you speech congratulating the monks on electing him unanimously. Only problem was, he was not elected by a unanimous vote. But never mind: he was the abbot; monks obey.

This abbot’s novice master taught obedience to novices by having them dig a hole in the ground half a day, and then fill it the second half of the day. Monks obey. Under the rule of the last two abbots, the college has been returned to a pre-Vatican II situation of direct abbatial control. That is to say, it is now under the direct control of any abbot who happens to believe that God speaks directly and specifically to him—and my experience with the college and monastery showed me that this is a distinct possibility, and that it can have very deleterious effects on the life of the college. And will be unchallenged by the monastery itself. Monks obey.

My other experiences have occurred at colleges in the Southeast representing another church tradition, one different from my own Catholic tradition. They have also been in a cross-cultural setting in which I often witnessed claims of direct divine guidance by the president that I found baffling, but which I struggled to see in a frame new to me, since these colleges were also rooted in an ethnic culture different from my own, and I wanted to respect and understand that culture.

About these experiences, I am not yet prepared to write specifically, though I may do so at some point. They included “manifestations” that seem utterly bizarre to me, now that I am removed from the context in which they occurred, and from the frame through which I struggled as a respectful outsider to try to understand these experiences. Experiences like nighttime exorcisms of college offices, which sometimes included (I was told by a participant whose word is impeccable) casting out the demon of lesbianism from said offices; claims by authority figures that they have reincarnated and are channeling famous predecessors; statements that gay and lesbian people got “caught” in their own reincarnation process and ended up half one gender and half the other; and so on.

Start with God—start with the assumption that a leader (of a state, a corporation, a university: you name it)—has direct access to God, is led by God, represents God to the rest of us, and where do you end up? Here is what I have seen in academic institutions in which I have worked, where that claim has been made:

▪Gross abuse of authority, with claims by top leaders to have absolute authority in institutions whose ethos (and standards of accountability) demand collegial and not authoritarian behavior.

▪Irrational and destructive behavior, including public fits of rage that target perceived critics, justified by the claim that the leader engaging in this behavior has a direct pipeline to God.

▪The claim that the leader is off-limits, not to be approached or questioned, even by those reporting to her/him, and even when her/his choice to slam the door in the face of a member of the leadership team impairs the functioning of the university.

▪The deliberate choice of the leader to surround herself/himself with mediocre and ethically-challenged councilors,

▪Because those councilors are more easily controlled (spelled s-y-c-o-p-h-a-n-t-s),

▪And because those councilors will not detract from the public image of the leader as the only real light in her/his administration, the one pulling all strings, the one with the direct pipeline to God.

▪The extremely ugly and unethical practice of seeking to obtain dirt on one’s mediocre and ethically-challenged councilors, in order to assert one’s control over them.

▪The use of money (e.g., huge pay raises not given to other hard-working councilors) to buy off and silence some key mediocre and ethically-challenged councilors.

▪The use of powerful political and financial connections to lean on the local media to force it to suppress negative investigative coverage, spin-control image-management attempts to manipulate the media obtrusively, and the dissemination of disinformation to the media.

▪Direct commands from on high, which purport to have religious validation (God is on my side), forbidding anyone to question, contradict, show disrespect to, or fail to be deferential to the president of the university.

▪Claims by the top leader that she/he is more skilled at doing the job of each member of the leadership team than they themselves are, even when she/he has no expertise in the areas in which she/he claims absolute authority.

▪The deliberate development from the top of a culture of secrecy and non-disclosure in which spying on others and collecting dirt is actively encouraged and pursued, even to the extent of breaking laws prohibiting such spying.

▪The maintenance of a team of corrupt lawyers to defend the one engaging in behavior (in the name of God, of course) which skirts the boundaries of law and moral norms.

The ultimate outcome of such behavior—behavior justified by outrageously illicit appeals to the leader's direct pipeline to God? A culture of mediocrity, corruption, and lies pervading the entire institution, from the top down. This is the kind of culture we are now seeing unmasked in recent reports from the Department of the Interior (see, e.g., “Anything Goes, Apparently,” www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12fri1.html?hp). As numerous news reports are indicating, the gross behavior now being exposed in that department is a manifestation of deliberate decisions on the part of our federal leaders to place in key leadership positions people who take kick-backs, who engage in you-scratch-my-back behavior, who are unsuited to do their jobs either by professional background or by strength of character.

And I believe this is the kind of governmental culture we can expect if we allow the theocratic minority to have its way in the current election. As news reports are now noting about the Department of Interior story, and as I have noted in several academic institutions, the establishment of a culture of ethical failure (one masked in religious rhetoric that gives unquestioned authority to leaders who claim to know God’s will) inevitably leads to dysfunction.

There is another parallel to be drawn between that Department of the Interior story and my academic experiences. As long as the books balance, people charged with overseeing an institution and its leaders will tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the person who claims God has put her/him in charge. Some of the key players in the scandal now breaking in the Department of the Interior were allowed to continue behaviors that damaged the Department and its reputation for far too long, because they were bringing in big bucks.

When university boards of trustees, for instance, narrow their ethical focus to money alone—when all they look at is books, whether they balance, whether there seem to be any shoddy financial practices going on—they betray their trust to the institutions they serve. The values leaders must embody to be good leaders go far beyond book balancing: they include transparency, accountability, honesty, collegiality, respect for those whose opinions differ from that of the leader, respect for diversity, etc.

Just as I have not seen those virtues in some university leaders I have encountered, who claim God leads them directly, I do not see them in Sarah Palin. And as a result, I predict not merely the extension of the culture of mediocrity, lies, and corruption we already see in D.C., if she and her running mate are elected. I see a significant deepening of that culture. In the name of God.

As Jane Smiley notes (“Palin in Purdah,” www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/palin-in-purdah_b_125526.html), in a democratic society, it is outrageous for any leader to use a divine shield to dodge accountability to those she governs:

So, the McCain campaign has decided to make Sarah Palin off limits. Can't talk to her. Can't talk about her. Can't let any audience infer anything about her. You must uphold her honor at all times, or the McCain campaign will rush to her defense and attack and punish you. What does this sound like? It sounds like Islam! It also sounds like something much closer to home called "bullshit". . . .

People in the public eye get reviewed . . . .

But more important, it's contempt for the voters, contempt for the citizens, and a prelude to ever more tyranny.

As anyone who has read Jane Smiley’s magnificent Pulitzer prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres knows, girlfriend knows whereof she speaks, when she writes about human nature and the propensity of authority figures to corruption—in the name of God.

Theocracy Redivivus: Standing on the Recycled Promises

Yesterday, the National Catholic Reporter website uploaded a Religion News Service article by David Finnigan entitled “McCain to Make Full-Throttle Push for Catholic Vote” (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1754). The article notes that Catholics attending the RNC are confident that McCain can gain the Catholic vote, especially now that he has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Finnigan notes that the warm reception by Catholic leaders in the Twin Cities is in marked contrast to how the Catholic officials of Denver related to the Democrats. Minneapolis-St. Paul Archbishop John Nienstedt hosted a cathedral Mass for Republican delegates on Sunday, and the cathedral pastor offered the closing benediction at the convention on Monday. Officials of the archdiocese are speaking of the obligation of Catholics to vote exclusively on the basis of life issues—Catholic codespeak for abortion, which is to say, Catholic codespeak for, “The church tells you to vote Republican.”

Flashback: 1992 again. I submit an essay to a national contest. The “prize” is an invitation to present winning essays at a conference sponsored by a research center for the study of religion in American culture.

My essay is one of several chosen for presentation at the conference. Unbeknownst to me (or to any other “winner,” I later discover) the format created by conference organizers is to have each of us read our essays—all on the progressive edge of American religio-political thought—and then have a “respondent” read an essay countering everything we’ve just said.

And we’re not to have any opportunity to respond. It’s a set-up, pure and simple. We’re told that this is what “balance” and “objectivity” are all about. The person chosen to critique (that is, trash) my essay is a woman whom no one knows to be African American until she identifies herself as such in her “critique” of my essay. She calls herself a black feminist conservative. She finds my work garbage.

I’m baffled not only by the patent meanness of how the conference is organized—to set up progressive thinkers for trashing against which they cannot defend themselves, in front of an audience composed largely of religion reporters who are also largely sympathetic to the conservative respondents. I’m also baffled by the transparent absurdity of what some of the respondents say.

A woman (since the conference, a friend of mine) who played a leading role in helping develop a statement on sexual ethics for the Presbyterian Church USA gives a stunning paper documenting the way in which the secular media helped torpedo this document, through collusion with conservative groups working inside the Presbyterian Church to keep it on the “right” path. In the response to her, a neoconservative Jewish scholar from the East Coast talks about how wonderful religion is in the American South (where most of those conservative Presbyterians who helped torpedo the statement on sexual ethics in the most underhanded way possible, smiling to beat the band all the while, happen to live).

I wonder as he talks if he’s ever been to the South, if he’s ever lived there, if he knows—as I do, from intimate experience—what most of those folks he’s defending think about him and his religious beliefs. Does he know the potential for malice and harm in the religious worldviews he’s defending—for political reasons? And malice and harm projected at not only those he feels other than himself, but towards himself and his own group of folks?

He should. It was, after all, only twelve years before this conference that Dr. Bailey Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, informed us that “God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”

I was dumbfounded, too, by a Mormon respondent to a paper that had nothing at all to do with Mormonism, but was on the progressive end of the political and religious spectrum. The respondent held some official role in the Mormon church. He told us how wonderfully supportive his LDS stake had been to a young man who came out as gay, who was sent off for reparative therapy, and who came back to live in the stake.

What we never heard was whether the young man was “repaired.” What we never heard was what it was like for him to live as an out gay man in a Mormon town in Utah—if he wasn’t “repaired.”

What I learned from this conference was how willing powerful political forces in our nation—including the mainstream media—had become to make themselves tools of the religious right, to bend the truth in service of the political agenda of the religious right. I learned that progressive scholars of religion were fair game for those forces, to be set up as targets for derision in a conference that professed to be interested in objectivity, balance, and dialogue.

I learned that scholars, journalists, and neoconservative political activists living outside the regions of the country in which the theocratic agenda of the religious right has most power to determine the lives of those folks are among the most ardent supporters of the religious right. If one lives in, say, Nantucket rather than Charlotte, it’s easy to talk about what a wonderful role the religion of the bible belt plays in American life.

It’s not, after all, one’s own personal liberties that are in danger of being curtailed by theocratic activists in Nantucket. It is one’s own life that’s on the line in Charlotte, though. In Nantucket, it might be unthinkable to imagine people with bibles ranting in the streets when “Angels in America” is staged by a local theater company. Not in Charlotte. In Nantucket, nude statues in the streets might not raise an eyebrow. In Charlotte, they could well do so.

In Nantucket, elected local officials would probably think twice before they spoke of the need to drive all gay folks in the world from the face of the earth. Not in Charlotte. Gay in Nantucket and out of the closet? You’d find laws protecting you from firing simply because you were gay. Not in almost any city in the bible belt.

Libraries in Nantucket seldom have to contend with questions about whether a young-adult novel portraying a gay couple sympathetically would be yanked from the shelves, due to protests from pressure groups that scan the library shelves with eagle eyes on a regular basis. In the bible belt, such behavior is old hat.

I suppose the point I’m wandering around to with this flash from the past is that Faulkner turns out to be right: the past is never truly the past. For all of us who hoped and predicted that no major political party would try this election cycle to play the religious-right culture war card, those hopes and predictions proved to be false.

We had placed our hopes on the waning power of the religious right to appeal to American voters. It’s not, after all, as if we haven’t now seen the face beneath the mask, we said among ourselves, we who had hoped for new political and religious options. The religious right has so thoroughly discredited itself through scandal after scandal—scandals that show the central propositions of the theocratic agenda to be based on pure hypocrisy—that no one with a sound mind would choose ever again to go that route.

Would they?

Turns out they will, and with a vengeance. And if we don’t like it, those of us dreaming of alternatives for our nation that address real needs and not the largely fictitious ones the religious right keeps asking us to consider, we might as well lump it.

When you can’t persuade people through reason, through the power of your example, through the validity of your ideas and your vision for society, then take the gloves off and force them. That’s the ultimate card that fascist movements always play. It's really the only card in their deck. All else is prologue, an attempt to coerce covertly rather than overtly.

Learn to lie. Learn to deceive. Learn to paint over the green with red paint and dare others to call what you've painted anything but green. If people persist in asking you to disclose information and to prove your point in rational debate, try changing the subject. If they rudely continue persisting, tell them you refuse to talk to them anymore.

God is on your side, after all. What's a little lie, a little deception, a bit of coercion, when you're doing the Lord's work?

If anyone doubts that the religious right has been and remains a fascist movement, I invite him or her to move to any small (or large) town beneath the Mason-Dixon line and begin asking questions about issues or practices that the local theocrats have declared off-limits. If you want to know the religious right, and what theocracy will be all about when it’s finally fully enacted across the land, don’t head for Cape Cod. Head for Harrison, Arkansas, or Columbia, Tennessee. Go to Gastonia, North Carolina, or spend some time in Shreveport.

They’re baack. And we’d better accept it and stop the nonsense—the talk about change, the demands for rational arguments to back up social proposals. The platform may be so thoroughly frayed, so worn out, that sound buyers wonder why they think they can sell it to us again. The version we’re being offered may be so different than the one originally advertised that we find it impossible to believe they think we can’t see the discrepancies between the advertisement and the product.

But never mind. It’s not about change at all. It’s about the opposite of change. It’s about trying to force people to accept the same tired old idea—even packaged as something different, though we're not supposed to notice the difference—one more time. It’s about telling people to elect the same officials who have promised to “protect” life one more time (don't look at the record: look at the promise), and to call that reform—reform of those who originally went to D.C. to reform things and who must now be themselves reformed.

But from the inside. We’re being asked now to allow the reformers to reform themselves, and not to notice any sleight of hand in the orders issued to us from one election cycle to the next. And, oh yes, to trust, of course, since only one political party has God on its side.

And it’s that party for whom the mitered men of the Catholic church want to throw parties.

Think you've seen meanness and lies—in the name of God—up to now? Get ready: you haven't begun to see what they're capable of. In the name of God . . . .