I’m always happy when something I write attracts the attention of bloggers of the religious-political right. I take it as a sign that I’m on the right track when this happens. The hot replies that often come forth from those sites, full of outraged (and outrageous) claims that their positions have been distorted, suggest to me that I’ve hit the bull’s eye.
The combination of Monaghan’s staunch anti-abortion stance and pro-free market capitalism make him a natural fit for the Republican Party. His willingness to spend his fortune promoting these ideas makes him a power broker, especially as the bloc of 47 million Catholic voters nationwide continues to fragment.
[Hudson] was also a major player in the organized effort by conservative Catholics to demonize liberal Catholics, and remake the church in their own ideological image; turn it away from concerns about economic and social justice missions and towards embracing narrow social issues.
As CBS and other networks touted Biden’s "working-class Catholic roots" growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, they refused even to note that the Bishop of Scranton had announced it wrong to give Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians like Biden (here).
There is something terribly indicative here of the degree of contentiousness in the United States Roman Catholic Church today. Hopefully, someday our bishops will call us to end this awful conduct, which hurts not only those of us targeted, but more importantly, the unity of the church itself.
I’ve noticed an interesting trend in recent weeks, as the influence of the religious right in American politics wanes. The trend is an increasing—and increasingly shrill—emphasis on that movement’s support of the civil rights of African Americans, as opposed to its resistance to the notion that LGBT Americans deserve civil rights.This is all the religious right has left, frankly: the possibility that it can engineer deep resentments and suspicions of LGBT Americans, in order to get the faithful into the voting booth in the coming elections, and to assure that the faithful will pull the right lever. If the price to be paid for drumming out the vote is a little lie here and there—as in, the religious right has promoted and supported the civil rights of African Americans—what’s that, in the grand scheme of things? When we’re fighting devils, God surely winks at our picayune misstatements, no?
The argument for the noble intentions of the religious right in the area of civil rights for African Americans has gotten so ludicrously divorced from reality and fact in recent public discourse that some rhetoricians are even suggesting that William F. Buckley invented civil rights! William F. Buckley: the mater si magistra no man, who rejected Catholic social teaching about human rights; the man who told us that his job is to stand astride history and shout no. The man who hissed at Gore Vidal in a t.v. interview in my youth, calling him a vicious queer, or words to that effect . . . .
This is the noble inventor of civil rights for African Americans. Not Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks, or Sojourner Truth. William F. Buckley, with that patrician drawl of the social elite of the Northeast, the disdainful frozen face that barely suppressed his distaste for the base-born opponents he sought to decimate over the years.
I’m thinking today of these ludicrous claims of the religious right, and the willingness of members of this movement to depart from the truth in the service of the right, in light of yesterday’s California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Already, the blogs are popping with fireworks provided by the religious right. This is going to be a useful tool, they think, for getting out the righteous vote in the coming elections. It will play well (they assume) in the heartland, with its churches of the radical middle.
And perhaps it will. If so, I hope that those churches begin counting the cost of their refusal to oppose the lies and tricks of those with whom they’ve cast their lot politically and theologically, in this ugly use of gay and lesbian persons to make political points.
What interests me in particular is the willingness of fundies to log onto even liberal websites in the past day, to spread disinformation about and hate for gay people—in the name of Christ, of course. The weblogs are full of Leviticus today. They’re peppered with scriptural quotations. They’re dripping with spite.
I have racked my brain to think of any comparable cases in recent American history, in which people purporting to speak for the churches feel so free to vent hate and tell lies, in the name of Christ (of course). I remember some of this from my youth, growing up in the middle of the struggle against segregation in the American South. I remember the lurid fliers that circulated in my school when integration finally happened, with their pictures of blond white Southern girls dancing with black men, the ultimate nightmare of the Christian South.
I remember the dire warnings of what was going to happen to Christian civilization if we permitted the racial line to be crossed—the interracial mingling that would take place, the mongrel race that would ensue, the infection of the toilets of pious white Christian school children by hordes of dirty immoral black children who would pour into the schools when they were integrated.
And I remember the use of the bible to support all of this venomous hatred—the lies, the distortions, the lurid warnings about lines that must not be crossed if we wished to maintain our Christian culture. I remember the discussion in my own church, in which the bible was used by some members of the church as a weapon against anyone who proposed that we had hardly built an admirable Christian culture around the practice of racial exclusion.
In other words, I remember what the fathers and mothers, the grandfathers and grandmothers, of the current religious right were doing some forty and fifty years ago, to—well, as they now say—to promote the civil rights of African Americans. As I recall this not-so-distant history, I have to wonder why African Americans like Crystal Dixon, the University of Toledo H-R officer on whom I reported recently, would allow themselves to be duped by the arguments of people who decidedly do not have the best interests of African Americans at heart, and who are trying to use African Americans as pawns in ugly political games as cynically as they use gay Americans.
As I reflect on these games, I think back to the long, long history behind American support of slavery. Two factors loomed large in the social foundation of slavery. One was scripture. The other was longstanding, taken-for-granted custom. These are the same two factors being exploited by the religious right venom dispensers on blogs following the California Supreme Court decision yesterday.
Scripture: I remember a discussion Oprah had a few years ago on her talk show, with several African-American men who were adept at quoting the bible to bash gays. Oprah probed their knowledge of other portions of the bible. As she pointed out, though their knowledge of the tiny set of texts that have been used to beat gays into submission was impeccable, when it came to anything else in the bible, they had a decidedly deficient knowledge.
Love? Justice? Mercy? The 99.99% of the bible that unambiguously stands on the side of those virtues and makes them—not bashing of already stigmatized brothers and sisters—central to religious life? Oprah concluded (and told her African-American brothers this) that their use of the bible was not only selective and hateful: it was politically engineered and had long since departed from any religious intent at all.
Just as our use of the Noah and Ham story, or the New Testament admonitions for slaves to obey their masters, did in the American South of the civil rights period . . . . Oh, yes, though slavery had ended some 100 years prior to the integration struggles, we had not forgotten those useful texts about slavery, and about the need for slaves to obey.
The point being, the biblical texts are full of everything in the world. That tiny handful of texts that falls so easily out of the mouths of right-wing homophobes today, while the bunches and bunches of texts about love, justice, and mercy never reach the lips of these folks: it’s really no different from the tiny handful of which we who wanted to hold the line against African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s were so certain.
We had, after all, the weight of history on our side. We had longstanding, taken-for-granted custom on our side. The bible had always been used as it was used in the American South in slave days and in the Jim Crow era. Throughout Christian history, the scriptures were used to support slavery.
Why? Because slavery existed in the culture of those who wrote the biblical texts—as did patriarchy and the subjugation of women to men. In defending slavery, Christians of the American South were not defending some aberrant, novel departure from scripture and tradition. Slavery was taken for granted by Christians because it is biblically endorsed, and because it was part of the social fabric taken for granted by the writers of the biblical texts.
We were defending what had been normative throughout most of Christian history. We were defending normative uses of scripture throughout Christian history.
Just as opponents of gay rights are today, in their use of their handful of bash-texts . . . . This misuse of scripture can seem plausible—it can go without any challenge from the churches of the radical middle, to their eternal shame—because it is bolstered by longstanding, taken-for-granted custom.
We changed our minds, we Christians of the righteous South, only when the Supreme Court forced us to do so. We changed our minds only when culture changed. Our churches did not lead cultural changes towards a more humane society.
To their shame, they carried up the rear, kicking and screaming about lines that should not be crossed, about the scriptures that have to remain intact if civilization is to endure, about “orthodoxy” and “purity” and “the truth.” Just as they do today . . . .
The churches of the radical middle will one day see the light about their hateful abuse of LGBT persons at this point in history. They will do so when culture itself changes to such an extent that they have no choice.
Then, when they rewrite history to try to imply that they led the way to gay civil rights, will anyone still be listening? Where will the descendants of this generation of advocates of “orthodoxy” be, some 100 years from now? Inside the churches of Main Street USA? Or outside them, having given up hope for the churches to stand for countercultural positions informed by ideals of love, justice, and mercy?
What’s that you say? Silence?Well, yes, it does sometimes seem preferable—to talking that is just clamor, ships hooting at each other as they pass in the fog. Yes, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately, as Holy Week gets underway and what passes for discussion and debate in my nation’s political process becomes ever more clamorous hooting.
“And I say, ‘Oh for the wings of a dove to fly away and find rest.’ ” That line from psalm 55 has been constantly in my mind this week, as Good Friday and Easter approach.
And then there were the stuffed peppers. No, not at all—not any kind of Easter tradition I know about. But there they were, in the Kroger bins last Saturday, bags and bags of wizened smallish bell peppers, culled out from amidst the large, heavy, unwrinkled ones, marked down to a very modest price.
Given the cost of peppers these days, how could I pass them up? What’s a kitchen without a ready supply of bell peppers—for spaghetti sauces and chilis, Spanish omelets and creole dishes, lentil soups and baked beans, pepper slaw and stuffed squash, salade Niçoise and ratatouille . . . .
Naturally, then, when Penny and Philip invited us for Easter dinner, I proposed stuffed peppers. I had the peppers, and something about stuffed peppers as a counterpoint to ham, potato salad, deviled eggs, and ambrosia seems meet and right—piquant green tang to enliven traditional pastel Easter food.
Then there were those dratted pecans, local, organic ones, no less, that have been eyeing me reproachfully from the sideboard in the dining room ever since Christmas. Anything not eaten from the Christmas dessert table inevitably stays there, from Christmas day forward. On St. Pat’s day, as I rummaged in the sideboard for a bottle of Irish whiskey to make Irish coffee, I was surprised to find two tins of those stodgy molasses cookies I made this Christmas, which no one much liked unless they were dunked in coffee.
No, no better with age. In fact, the opposite. Even drier and mustier tasting. From Christmas to Easter, I haven’t wanted to look at a nut, a spice, a bar of baking chocolate, a dried fruit. My fast—at least from certain foods—begins far earlier than Lent (and in Lent, I never fast, anyway, or at least, not from food).
So. It was time to crack those pecans or discard them, and who can throw food away with a good conscience? Hence the vegetarian stuffed peppers that will now be my contribution to Easter dinner: basmati rice mixed with grated parmesan, coarsely chopped pecans, eggs to bind the forcemeat, a few spoons of tomato paste, and a mix of finely chopped celery, onion, parsley, and garlic sautéed in olive oil with touches of cinnamon and marjoram for seasoning. All done, mixed, stuffed into the peppers, baked and stored for re-heating on Sunday morning.
And I just haven’t felt like blogging. What’s there to say that hasn’t been said to death? And more to the point: what’s there to say that will really change anything? In a political process dominated by the gotcha politics of the religious right, what really can be said? When the parameters of conversation are so constructed that one must always be answering an accusation either overt or implied, never moving towards a hope-engendered vision of social life that comprises many more options than those permitted by the status quo, words become swords. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not instruments to forge new, more humane visions of how we might live together, but swords to lop off each other’s limbs, heads, hopes.
I grow weary of such political “discourse.” I sometimes wonder if the readers of this blog from places outside the U.S.—my statistics counter tells me there are such readers—can even begin to appreciate how narrow, claustrophobic, and ultimately devoid of hope our political conversations in the U.S. have become in the past few decades, under the controlling impulse of the right, and, in particular, of the religious right.
One doesn’t have to be a majority to control a conversation, and thus the future of a relationship or of a social contract. All one has to be able to do is shout no loudly enough to keep the conversation forever stalemated—to keep hope at bay. He who says no ultimately controls any relationship.
And saying no—stopping the conversation, keeping hope at bay—has been the raison d’etre of American conservatism for a number of decades now. As one of the chief spokespersons and ideological founders of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley, once said, the quintessential neo-conservative impulse is “standing astride history, yelling ‘stop!’ ”
Neo-conservatism is not about building. It’s not about moving forward. It’s not about enlivening imagination. It’s not about spinning new ideas for better, more humane arrangements for communitarian life. It’s not about hope. It’s not even about respect for tradition and the past, since any such respect inevitably spots in previous human social arrangements ample reason for new social experiments that will carry forward the suppressed hopes of the past.
Neo-conservatism is about saying no. As Buckely himself said in response to Pope John XXIII’s brilliant encyclical of hope, Mater et magistra: Mater si, magistra no!
No, no, and no again: to change, to hope, to any social arrangement in which I and my tribe will not prevail. No to any vision of the future that will include others in a way that challenges my own dominance—as a white male, as a straight white man from the upper echelons of American society.
Neo-conservatism is about trying to stop history, because history inevitably means Something Else, and I do not want to imagine anything else, not in a world in which I am the primal link in the socio-economic chain, the pinnacle of social evolution. History is over and done with, as far as I am concerned. The most I will permit in the political and economic sphere is the kind of tinkering that keeps drastic change at bay, by balancing competing interest groups. As a neo-conservative, I am perfectly willing to work with liberals (since neo-conservatism is itself a variant of classic liberal ideology) to keep the status quo in place. If that means handing a crumb to this group here while denying the claims of that group there—all in the name of balancing interest groups and claims to justice—I’m happy to cooperate.
Just don’t expect me to entertain any nonsense about imagining other social arrangements in which conflict would be less omnipresent because more folks had access to the basic stuff of human existence. Don’t clatter on about human rights and justice. I’m not listening, not even if Jesus himself should walk through the door and announce the reign of God, or if the church claims that this was Jesus’s mission: mater si, magistra no!
A political landscape dominated by those whose only and ultimate word to history is no quickly becomes scorched earth. We in the
Declining empires always end up occupying such landscapes before their final demise, with court theologians to advise the emperor about how to negotiate the process of decline, so that he remains, as long as possible, at the top of the heap. The leaders of the religious right, churches that have not decisively distanced themselves from the religious right in this period (and few have): these are all part of the process of decay, of decline, of last-gasp imperialism, of the glozening lies of court theologians.
Insofar as our churches have implicated themselves in the social arrangements of declining imperialism—arrangements in which spying on citizens becomes routine, in which growing inequities between rich and poor become not shocking but taken for granted, in which the practice of torture of innocent people meets with shrugs, in which police and civil authorities are permitted to taser even school children, in which unjust war and carnage of despised Others is not merely justified but celebrated in our media—insofar as our churches accept these social arrangements, and never raise their voice against them, they lose the right to proclaim the gospel.
They have stopped doing so. The gospel is good news. The very center of the gospel is hope. Hope for history: the gospel is about a vision of human existence in which history is always possible, always mandated, because hope has not yet had its day. Hope has not yet been fulfilled. There is more to be done. History cannot be stopped, from a gospel-oriented standpoint, because there is more to hope for.
I have been heartsick this week as I have watched the mainstream media and many liberal Democrats participate in the pillorying of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. I am heartsick for a quite specific reason: there is a shocking, clear, undeniable double standard in how we have chosen to treat this African-American preacher of the gospel, and how we choose to treat the court theologians.
Who are everywhere, but whose influence is never acknowledged or discussed by the mainstream media. The Alternet blog today carries a posting from Cenk Uygur at Huffington Post on the double standard the media applies to Rev. Wright and to the white preachers who are the court theologians of our declining empire—see www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/80253.
As Uygur notes, Rudy Giuliani’s priest has been accused in grand jury proceedings of having abused children and covered over the abuse of other children, but no one has ever asked Mr. Giuliani to denounce his pastor or disavow any relationship to him. Mitch Romney belongs to a church that, into Romney’s thirties, actively discriminated against people of color. Romney never disavowed his church then or now. The media have not hounded him to make statements about the racism of his church.
John McCain has accepted the endorsement of Jerry Falwell, who blamed the 9/11 attacks on
Brent Childers of Faith in
As it notes,
How many talking heads are made sick when the Religious Right, day after day, condemns
Week after week, right-wing religious organizations work to shore up the Republican Party base and use America’s pulpits to condemn not only America but good, decent patriotic Americans. It’s not just religious leaders spreading a message of religion-based bigotry. Many elected officials and candidates are doing the same.
No one sought to give any context that Wright’s words were spoken from an interpretation of Holy Scripture. Poor presentation of the story, indeed. Even less context.
A nation where corporate greed holds sway over hard-working Americans? A nation that goes to war under false pretense? A nation in which political forces cater to prejudice and racial division? A nation in which gay and lesbian teenagers are being sacrificed on the alter of religion-based bigotry.
Would Wright’s God frown on such practices?
What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself is held at bay by the court theologians, by the preachers that advise (and support and excuse) the powerful of the land? What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself has become a dirty word, a taunt in the mouths of those left and right who want to stop history?
Not much, I think, until someone, somewhere, begins to expose the treachery and lies of the court theologians. Not much, until churches that really want to proclaim the good news openly, decisively repudiate the treachery and lies of the religious right.
We will, in coming weeks, see more and more treachery and lying. The ultimate intent of those engaging in these underhanded political games is to stand astride history and shout, “stop!”
The only hope to stop the games is for those with connections to faith communities to call for an end to the political games, to the treachery and lying, to the attempt to stop history by saying no rather than yes (which is God’s word to the created world). For the faith communities that claim to speak in the name of Jesus, hope lies in remembering that the crucified one was not the success all court theologians claim to be.
He was, instead, a dismal failure, hung to die upon an instrument of torture reserved for the lowest, most powerless of criminals in his society.
His resurrection is premised on his death, on his failure, on his humiliating death. The failure and death are, in fact, the precondition for the resurrection. Anyone who preaches otherwise—who preaches the bizarre "gospel of success" of which the court theologians are so enamored, who allies the Christian church with wealth and power—departs from the very warp and woof of the gospel, the good news that it is in dying that we rise.
What’s that you say? Well, you did ask. And I did tell.