Category: Religion

Constitutional Doublecross ©2008 Emily Duffy Photo by Sibila Savage

Dimensions: 58.75″ x 41.25″ x 4.50″.

Description: Paper cross mounted on maroon velvet in gold wood frame.

Materials: Wood, shredded of reproductions the U.S. Constitution and relevant newspaper clippings (woven together), velvet, gold paint, GOP logo, glass beads.

Book Review

Piety and Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom, by Rev. Barry W. Lynn, New York: Harmony, 2007 , 270 pp. hardcover

Barry Lynn is angry. Furious, in fact. And the object of the man’s fury is the politicized, evangelical religious fanaticism that has seized control of America’s moral discourse. As a minister in the United Church of Christ and executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Lynn is an unlikely figure to be standing in the front ranks against the tide of militant Christianity that threatens the United States. Unlikely or not, Lynn seems to be hitting the right keys and pressing the right buttons: he has incurred the wrath of right-wingers like Jerry Falwell and Patrick Buchanan, and Lynn has the distinction of having once been described by Pat Robertson as “lower than a child molester.” If one can be known by one’s enemies, then I like the guy already.

Lynn does not waste any time, wading right into the middle of the battle almost from the first page. He takes an almost boyish delight in going toe-to-toe with the Religious Right on some of their favorite obsessions: public education, religious symbols, the church in politics, censorship and sexual politics. Lynn believes that the Religious Right has it all wrong, that their Bible-based worldview is an unacceptable basis for approaching the question of how America should be run. He demands that American politicians stop their pandering attempts to use the Bible to justify their actions and instead put their faith in the document that they are all sworn to defend: the U.S. Constitution. But Lynn is no wide-eyed naïf; he knows the history of his country, and he understand how tenuous the separation of Church and State is, especially now.

“When, in the history of the world, has a union of church and state ever been a good thing?” With these words, Lynn attempts to reason with the fundamentalists, posing a question that they are unwilling to consider and ill equipped to answer. Unlike the Religious Right, Lynn knows the true history of his country, and is able to describe religion’s long struggle to usurp America’s secular system of government. Those Americans who believe that the current spasm of fundamentalism is something new, or even exceptional, will perhaps take comfort from Lynn’s insightful analysis of the history of a fanaticism that has always been embedded in the fabric of American culture,  and his explanation  of how America has (so far) survived the ill effects of this fanaticism.

Quite simply, there was never a time when some form of struggle between secularism and fanaticism was not taking place. We must remember that the first colonists in New England came to the New World seeking religious freedom because their fanatical brand of religiosity was too radical for the Europe of the time. Mind you, we are talking about a Europe riddled with religious wars, a Europe where witches were burned along side heretics who dared to claim the Earth was not the center of the universe. And yet America’s “Puritan forefathers” were too radical to be tolerated in that environment. If we keep this thought at hand, we have no problem understanding the eruptions of bizarre religiosity that litter American history with almost monotonous regularity.

In the 19th century, “tensions over religion in public school rode so high … that in 1844 a riot erupted after rumors circulated that schools were going to remove Protestant religious exercises.” An organization called the National Reform Association (the Moral Majority of its time) engaged in a protracted campaign to have an amendment to the Constitution declare that America was “a Christian nation,” and propagandized at the local level to write into law the idea that commerce and revelry should be curtailed on “The Lord’s Day” (an idea that continues to enjoy wide support throughout many areas of the U. S. to this day).

Very little changed in the 20th century, except that the Religious Right became more sophisticated and clever as they struggled to infect the Constitution with the virus of religiosity. Lynn reminds us that the seemingly immutable slogans “one nation, under God” and “In God We Trust” are relatively recent innovations, driven by the decision in the 1950s to recruit God “in the battle against juvenile delinquency and communism.” The propaganda campaign to portray secularism as “some amoral, libertine perspective on life” also gained enormous traction in the second half of the 20th century, and not just among those who were obvious fringe cases. One cannot help but think of Joe Lieberman during the 2000 presidential campaign, making the truly alarming claim in his stump speech that “faith is necessary for good behavior.”

Lynn oscillates between sadness and ill-concealed amusement when he discusses the fact that, in the United States, “secularism is mandated by the government, but religion still pervades the culture with a strong and vibrant voice. In much of Europe, there is no government mandate of secularism, but the cultures are effectively secular.” This is no exaggeration: I have driven through much of Europe, from the Spanish border to Bavaria, and it is only in Italy that one sees even a faint echo of the old religious madness. For the most part, the old churches of Europe, from the grand cathedrals to the most humble village church, are now nothing more than museums. As Lynn observes, the churches of Europe “lack for only one thing: congregants.”

Lynn seems to recognize, at least implicitly, that America’s tribal and atavistic religiosity will never wither away the way it did in Europe. There is something unique about the tightening grip that religion has on America, something toxic and not a little bit mad. Yet even within this historical context, Lynn is forced to admit, “I’ve never seen the situation this bad.” The disease of religious fanaticism has mutated, growing ever more dangerous as it turns the tools of modernity against modernity itself in a struggle to undermine America’s secular foundations.

Lynn has no illusions about the nature and ambitions of America’s new crop of fundamentalists. “I’ve studies the tactics of these groups for more than thirty years. I know what they want. They want to run your life, mine, and everyone else’s as much as they possibly can.”  While these Christian zealots always portray themselves as oppressed and marginalized, “members of the clergy walk the halls of Congress … pressing their views and often being warmly received. You see them in the senators’ dining room. I’ve been there myself.” These influential members of the clergy – effectively, lobbyists for the Christian fundamentalist worldview – have admirable persistence and remarkable message discipline. Everything wrong in this country, without exception, can be laid at the feet of the godless and dubious plot by secularists and their lackeys to promulgate the separation of Church and State. Whether it is rampant immorality, plunging SAT scores, the epidemic of unwed motherhood, gay marriage, or the scourge of drugs in our urban ghettoes, all of it is the fault of the separation of Church and State. If only America could go back to those halcyon days when religion was the basis of every aspect of American life, all would be well.

This is a seductive message, perhaps because of its simplicity, perhaps because it appeals to the seemingly universal yearning for a Golden Age that never was. America’s Golden Age was brought to ruin when “that mean old Supreme Court, prodded by an atheist, intervened and threw prayer out” of the public schools. Within this context, an “activist judge” is “simply a judge who writes an opinion the Religious Right doesn’t like.”  As a proudly “God-centered” Bush administration loaded the American judicial system with judges who held the “correct views,” the leaders of the fundamentalist movement, never noted for their timidity,  shook off the last of their inhibitions and began to speak more openly about their grand vision of what a God-besotted American future would look like. Lynn cleverly allows fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to reveal themselves – and betray themselves – with their own words. They really do make it almost too easy for Lynn to mock them and then dispose of them.

We are dealing, after all, with men who genuinely believe that “God punishes communities that displease him with hurricanes, floods, and meteors; who assert that demons control major U.S. cities and who think Harry Potter books lure children into practicing witchcraft.” As he offers us up a seemingly endless smorgasbord of choice tidbits from the mouthpieces of the Religious Right, Lynn gives us a feel for the deeply strange beliefs of America’s fundamentalists, an archaic, tribal view of the world that would seem more at home being articulated by some shaman crouched around a Neolithic campfire, or by a priest standing atop an Aztec sacrificial pyramid. The fact that this deeply uncivilized way of understanding the world finds millions of adherents in the world’s sole remaining superpower should do more than give us pause – it should scare the hell out of us.

What Lynn gives us along with his analysis of the thinking of the Religious Right is a deep and disturbing sense of how radically opposed to America’s freedoms these people really are. They want to control what all citizens do, and they are perfectly willing to enlist the government, the courts and law-enforcement if that is what it takes to rid themselves of the burden of a freedom that they are unwilling to embrace. Lynn, to his credit, continues to believe that the American people are too smart to stand for this, and that most Americans want a government that is free of religious dicta. Those of us who share his deep concern for the influence of the Religious Right in American life can only hope that he is right. I for one do not share his optimism.

Lynn tells us that “a get-along philosophy … will increasingly prove disastrous” and that we will end up “whistling past the graveyard of our Bill of Rights and religious freedom if we take that road.” Yet, having said this, Lynn continues to preach restraint and an insistence on “sweet reason” as the best approach for dealing with the predations of the fundamentalists. Relating an anecdote about a televised confrontation with a member of the Religious Right, Lynn recalls that the host told him off-camera, “your side isn’t as passionate as his side.” Therein lies an enormous problem, and therein lies the reason that in America today, the Religious Right marches on, rampant though not (yet) completely triumphant. The forces of common sense and reason continue to lose ground to the forces of religious bigotry and intolerance. And in a country where every candidate for public office feels compelled to outdo the others with ever more over-the-top proclamations of personal religiosity, the problem is not going to go away when a new tenant moves into the White House.

While Lynn remains a strong proponent of a rational, even-handed approach, one occasionally gets an exciting sense of the rhetorical power that Lynn must deploy when he is in the pulpit and the spirit moves him. I found myself wishing for more of the sort of fire that Lynn displays when he shouts – and though they are only words on the page, I had no problem imaging him shouting them — “I am weary of their gay bashing. I am weary of their crude attacks on nonbelievers. I am weary of their constant effort to sneak their bogus “creation science” into our schools. I am weary of their meddling in the most intimate areas of our private lives. I am weary of their attempts to politicize houses of worship. I am weary of all that they do.”

  Preach on, Reverend.

I am always amazed when in the company of other progressives and liberals how truly regressive and unwilling to change we can be. Diary after diary, comments by the thousands about what? How we can’t, how we shouldn’t and how Obama is going wrong. Well Obama hasn’t gone wrong, we’ve just stopped listening and started grinding the same old axes. We spend too much time bashing and not enough time listening, fear and ignorance is abundant on BOTH sides of the ideological divide. Follow me below the fold for hopefully some insight into how all the fears of your worst nightmares coming true are in fact the realization of your most heartfelt dreams for this country.

“If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the patterns of their words.”

                              Isaac Asimov

I no longer call myself an atheist. Oh,don’t get me wrong: I still don’t believe there is a God or gods, but I have decided that the label “a-theist” makes no more sense as a positive self-description that describing oneself as an a-Bunnyist or an a-Santaist or an a-ToothFairyist. It is a negation, is it an “I am not” rather than an “I am”. Defining oneself on  the basis of what one is not is quite literally absurd.  I am not a scrapbooker, but I do not view “not a scrapbooker”  as a self-descriptive label and a basis for solidarity with other “not a scrapbooker” people. One can quickly see how absurd this really is. How sad, how limiting to define oneself  in terms of one thing  out of the many things one does not believe.

I refuse to make a religion out of my lack of religion.  I don’t organize my life or my thinking around my lack of belief. My life and my life’s projects are driven by things that matter. If I have to call myself anything, I could do a lot worse than steal an idea from Kierkegaard and label myself:

                       AN INDIVIDUAL

The science editor of The Telegraph, Roger Highfield, reports on a new study by two biologists from the University of New Mexico. The scientists’ theory is that Religions thrive to protect against disease.

Religions thrived to protect our ancestors against the ravages of disease, according to a radical new evolutionary theory of the genesis of faith…

It seems that people became religious for good reason – actually to avoid infection by viruses and other diseases…

The study is the research of Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill. In their introduction, they ask: “Why does the country Cote d’Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?”

Cross posted at  KOS

Social Justice. Some of us were introduced to the idea in church, appropriately because Jesus preached social justice. Altho social justice is an important theme in all major religions, some churches like the Catholic Church have offices of Social Justice. In deed the term was coined by a Jesuit priest in the mid 1800’s, based on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas.  

It got a lot of press both good and bad in the 60’s when Jesuit priests preached social justice and organized the impoverished of South America. Social Justice is the heart of Liberation Theology and Black Liberation Theology.  Follow me below the fold for a little background on social justice, why shooting the messenger is counter productive and oh yes, the grand experiment of YES WE CAN.

For many years God was a registered independent.  He mainly spoke to the government through Reverend Billy Graham, who has met with and advised every president from Harry Truman through George W. Bush.  Graham has seldom been publicly political, and according to Wikipedia:

Politically, Graham has been a registered member of the Democratic Party and leaned Republican during the presidency of his friend Richard Nixon.  He has not completely allied himself with the religious right, saying that Jesus did not have a political party.  He does not openly endorse political candidates, but he has given his support to some over the years.

He refused to join Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979, saying: “I’m for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice. We as clergy know so very little to speak with authority on the Panama Canal or superiority of armaments. Evangelists cannot be closely identified with any particular party or person. We have to stand in the middle in order to preach to all people, right and left.”

On May 15th, the Supreme Court of California struck down all of the laws preventing same-sex marriage. Here’s my thoughts on the creatures attempting to overturn that decision

Cross-posted from GentillyGirl http://gentillygirl.com/2008/0…

If you think about it, there is not a broader category of human experience to talk/write about than sex. It deeply informs and influences every aspect of human activity and interaction, as I pointed out in Sex: Part 1. From politics to spirituality to health to science, there is just a amazing amount of subject matter. In this edition, I had intended to write about the patriarchy and its cowardly attempts at domination and oppression of women over the past few eons….might makes right and all of the social and political aspects of that, sad state of affairs. But I find myself moved instead to write about the deepest reality and aspect of sex. The pure human aspect of it. The comfort and warmth and joy of it, the giggling slap and tickle….the lonely, longing, deep despair of losing it, the flush of excitement and horniness, and fear….of finding it. There is nothing more universal, human, and natural

than sex.

I sneezed 13 times in rapid succession this morning. Not just your little golf sneezes into closed hands mind you, but body wracking man-sneezes that sprayed spit and sputum hither, thither and even yon. Tears not only ran down my face, tears broad-jumped from my spasmodic chin onto my chest and flowed south, eventually pooling in my navel. It was the triathlon of tears.

I contemplated this and concluded that this sneezing was indeed very mysterious, and since we are taught God works in mysterious ways, it must be divine.

Blinded by the tsunami of tears that now formed a salt-water sea in my bellybutton where millions of my DNA molecules frolicked ecstatically like Spring Breakers high on PNA (Peptide Nucleic Acid), I reached for my handy-dandy Bible.

With closed eyes, I opened the book to a random page and with my finger, blindly selected a passage for spiritual guidance. As I waited for my eyes to clear, I wondered if this is how God selects where a lightning bolt will strike during a thunderstorm, or if he intends that an occasional church steeple gets zapped along with a few unfortunate parishioners.

As my eyes cleared, I struggled to read these words…