It's been awhile, but I've been unavoidably (and productively) busy elsewhere.
Ever since Bush supposedly won the 2004 election on the backs of the so-called "values" voters, Democrats have been urged to "get religion". Prominent spokepeople for this position are Jim Wallis, Michael Lerner, and Amy Sullivan.
The idea is this: it's not religion that's bad, it's the right-wing fundamentalism associated with the likes of Pat Robertson and Rod Parsley that's bad. A religious progressivism has been a prime factor in any number of welcome developments in the country's past, most notably the black civil rights movement, which featured the heavy involvement of the black church and ministers such as Martin Luther King.
Today, we can supposedly put together a message that provides faith-based support for certain policies dear to the progressive heart, such as a sounder tax system, universal health care, a higher minimum wage, environmental protection, and so on.
While that's true, I worry about getting in bed with religion mainly because of my belief that we want to keep religion and politics separate as much as possible, even if religion can be drafted in support of progressive causes. The nightmare that plagues the world right now is the injection of religion into public life, most blatantly in the case of Islam, but also here in the US, where the effort to legislate Christianity as America's "public religion" is ceaseless.
Politics and religion clearly have points of contact. Most religions have some sort of moral teaching, and morality is a major element in much civil legislation. Therefore, to the extent that both religion and politics deal in morality, there will be an overlap, and the temptation to simply carry over the moral teachings of ones religion into the political domain is palpable. In Islam, a central teaching is the inseparability of religious life and civil life, thus we have the insistence that sharia double as civil law, backed by the coercive power of the state.
Yet there is a major incompatibility between politics and religion, namely the fact that politics is based on negotiation and compromise, while religious beliefs tend to be absolute and non-negotiable. Any attempt to inject religious content into the political process thus inevitably leads to an impasse, as those who sponsor religious initiatives refuse to participate in the natural process of political compromise. This is a practical objection.
More troublesome is the actual nature of religious faith itself. Now there are many people I respect who are religious, to one extent or another. However, it is my considered opinion that religious belief is simply not intellectually respectable.
Any serious and unbiased analysis of religious belief can only conclude that people become religious out of a need to feel safer in the world. The cold hard fact of the matter is that the natural world is completely and utterly oblivious to the concerns of living beings, including humans. The physical processes that drive nuclear fusion in the core of the sun, that govern the motion of the planets, stars, and galaxies, are entirely unaware of the many dramas that pervade human existence. A person dies, somewhere else another person is born, and meanwhile a few billion more hydrogen atoms are fused into helium.
This is reality, and it's a reality that many throughout the ages have found indigestible. The response is to interpose a layer in between the individual consciousness, seeking meaning, and the natural world, which offers none. This new layer, itself entirely a creation of the human mind, is fully aware of, and sympathetic toward, all of the various human needs: love, comfort, justice, and so on. The name given to this synthetic boundary that we insert between ourselves and reality is "God".
In this new configuration, the indifference of nature to our hopes and fears is greatly mitigated. Nature may not care about how badly we want that promotion, but God does. Nature may not care about our grief in losing a loved one, but God cares. Nature doesn't care how angry we are to see egregious criminal behavior go unpunished, but God cares, and even better, God will see to it that those who escape punishment in this life will receive it in the next.
God, then, and religion, is a device for converting an unbearable situation into one which is considerably more palatable. This is accomplished at a cost, namely the occasional but necessary denial of reality. In most cases, the Gods that people believe in aren't merely fuzzy and indistinct bundles of love and affirmation. No, these Gods are highly verbal, often spelling out all kinds of very specific codes of behavior, frequently touching on such carnal topics as food and sex. We also find sacred writings which insist on the truth of certain scenarios in the physical world which we now know, many decades after these writings were first committed to paper, are false. The world wasn't created in six days. Eve was not created from Adam's rib. None of these doctrines can be regarded as even remotely true, except in the vaguest symbolic sense. And there are many believers whose interpretations of scripture are anything but symbolic, tending instead toward the rigidly literal.
So, with religion, we have a belief system that is partly, but unavoidably, predicated upon a denial of reality. Such a system is absolutely incompatible with a political decision-making process that must begin by comprehending reality as it is, not as we might wish it to be, or even as some believe it to be. No, the nature of reality is an empirical question, not a psychological one, at least as far as politics is concerned (though not, say, literature).
If there's one lesson that we in America have learned, it's the importance of privatizing religion. It is only when religious belief is kept separate from politics that the political system can function, unimpeded by the intrusion of non-negotiable demands originating out of religious belief. Indeed, it is only by privatizing religion that religion itself can be kept free, free that is from the coercive intrusion of the State. As I've said, I don't believe that religion is true in any sense except possibly the emotional, but at the same time I don't wish to impose that particular opinion on others, and I hope and expect that society will reciprocate.
So, even though I appreciate that a religious case for certain progressive policies can be made, based on the teachings of Jesus, I find it necessary to reject the idea that we should proceed on that basis. Progressive policies must be promoted whether or not Jesus might agree, and whether or not the audience for those policies happens to believe in Jesus. Progressive policies are either right or wrong, on the merits, without reference to religion, and if they're right they should be viable even if no scriptural support for them can be found.
