In a comment on my previous post, Patrick mentioned that maybe I was a libertarian, and pointed out this blog entry from Andrew Sullivan on the difference between “secularism” and “Christianism” (basically saying that secularism is a fine and grand tradition that is about freedom, not persecution, therefore not an enemy of Christianity at all). The following isn’t directed at the comment (I’m not dumping at Patrick :-) ) … but his comment made me feel like opining …

First, the “secularism” thing: what a lot of liberal/progressive people don’t seem to get is that for over a generation “secular humanism” has been systematically taught as a “religion” within evangelical Christian circles. When I was a teenager and going to “non-denominational” mega-church Sunday school, I heard it said time and again (and read it in the various books I was reading) that secular humanism is, in essence, a religious point of view that worships the human being, and that is actively “anti-God.” That secular humanism’s aim is the eradication of faith in anything other than our own abilities as flesh and blood people. That it was an insidious movement full of conniving, conspiring elitists who were at the forefront of bringing on the age of the Anti-Christ.

No, I am not kidding.

So, I think Sullivan is a little naive on this score. He doesn’t want to see “secularism” stained with the same stigma we now see with “liberalism” — but he doesn’t seem to realize we’re dealing with millions of people who hear “secularism” and react as if you said “Nazism.” Secularism sounds much worse to them than merely “liberal.” They feel that saying our founding fathers were secularists is a revision of history; and that teaching secular values in our schools is essentially breaching the separation of church and state, because to teach it is to deny their children their beliefs in God and Christ.

[Edited to add: upon reading Sullivan’s later posts, I see that others took him to task on this already.]

So, as my folks back home would say, “we got a tough row to hoe.” Overcoming this systematic indoctrination in misinformation is a tall order.

Second, as for libertarianism, there are elements of it that definitely appeal to me. I’m relatively liberal in terms of my politics, I suppose, but I’m not a party-line person, and there are a few bits of conservative thinking I tend to agree with as well as libertarian thinking. For example, I agree government should leave us alone as much as possible. That is, government should not initiate interference in our lives unless it’s necessary for the public good. And even then, only when absolutely necessary.

But what is necessary? I think that’s where I differ from a lot of libertarians. I think it’s necessary that the country provide opportunity to even the most downtrodden. By opportunity, I mean helping to remove barriers to improving their lives, not necessarily subsidizing the continuation of their current state. Much harder to do than to say, I realize, but that takes government.

I believe in having excellent infrastructure within which individuals and communities can thrive. But I don’t think it works to leave that up to the grass roots or the “rugged individual” — it takes government too. People like to point to Bill Gates and other success stories and say “they earned their money, they should be able to keep it” but without an infrastructure supported by a strong federal system these companies wouldn’t have had a chance to exist.

Also, I believe in the idea of public education. It’s an important part of socializing citizens into the national fabric, and requiring our children to grow up literate is essential to having an informed public. Without that, the Constitution simply wouldn’t work.

Basically, I’m not a believer in the idea that if you just leave the “market” alone, it will do everything right, or that smaller government is always good. It took government to keep the Union together during the Civil War. It took government to break apart monopolies and trusts, and to create better working conditions, and to enforce civil rights (a little late in the game, but better late than never).

I do think, however, that huge government programs should only be created if they include baked-in limits on themselves. That is, huge programs should, whenever possible, make themselves obsolete by actually solving problems and not just covering them over. I do think we have layer upon layer of inefficient band-aid stuff in government that people get used to and take for granted. (Much like people say that “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is “an American tradition” when it’s only about 60 years old.) I agree there’s a lot of waste. Some of it, unfortunately, is just going to be there no matter what we do — there’s noise in any human system. But government is absolutely necessary, and sometimes it has to be big to save its citizens from chaos, oppression, and despair. It’s our responsibility as the people who comprise our own government to keep it in check, though, and shrink it back down when we can. I suppose that’s a conservative value? But I don’t know any liberals who would disagree with this essential premise.

People should be made to take a test on the US Constitution before they can serve in any government post.

Karen Hughes, W’s whitebread image-stylist, is quoted at the Guardian:

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bin Laden’s little helper

“Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans’ lives,” she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why Mr Bush mentions God in his speeches, Hughes asked him whether he was aware that “previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our constitution cites ‘one nation under God’.”

The problem is, she’s an ignorant git. Our constitution cites no such thing. On purpose.

In fact, our constitution doesn’t explicitly invoke the name of any deity. Go to any text of the Constitution of the US and search for God or Deity or even Providence and you won’t find any mention. (Providence is mentioned once, but only as the name of a geographical area, not as invoking a deity.) Not even the Articles of Confederation, which was the first “constitution” of our country, contain the word “God.”

But wait… I think there was once a US Constitution that mentioned God … the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. Yeah, the slave states. Their constitution, which is sort of a bizarro-version of the US Constitution (much like a satanic black mass is a twisted version of a catholic mass?) adds the words “favor and guidance of Almighty God.”

Maybe Ms. Hughes is trying to secede?

Honestly, for myself personally, I had to learn about the US Constitution several times over my school career from primary through college before it really started to stick. I’ll admit it. The ideas upon which our country is founded aren’t super-easy to grasp. It requires at least a rudimentary understanding the history that made the document necessary, and a grasp of the differences in powers and how they all work together in creative tension to form a sort of word-machine (for that’s precisely what this constitution is; a machine invented by a group of diverse enlightenment rationalists).

An understanding of the Constitution should be required for everyone wanting a driver’s license, in my humble opinion. Except that, frankly, such a policy would probably be unconstitutional. Alas.

It’s worth doing a little reminding of the major roots of what has become pop-mainstream Protestant culture in the US. Once again, Wikipedia rises to the challenge.

Dispensationalism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dispensationalism is criticized for other reasons. It teaches that Christians should not expect spiritual good from earthly governments, and should expect social conditions to decline as the end times draw nearer. Dispensationalist readings of prophecies often teach that the Antichrist will appear to the world as a peacemaker. This makes some dispensationalists suspicious of all forms of power, religious and secular, and especially of human attempts to form international organisations for peace such as the United Nations. Almost all dispensationalists reject the idea that a lasting peace can be attained by human effort in the Middle East, and believe instead that “wars and rumors of wars” (cf. Matthew 24:6) will increase as the end times approach. Dispensationalist beliefs often underlie the religious and political movement of Christian Zionism.

Some dispensationalists teach that churches that do not insist on Biblical literalism as they deem appropriate are in fact part of the Great Apostasy. This casts suspicion on attempts to create church organisations that cross denominational boundaries such as the World Council of Churches. (See also ecumenism.)

I say “pop-mainstream” because there is still a more old-school mainstream of church leadership in Protestant denominations in the US, in the vernacular tends to mean by “mainstream Protestant” — but this doesn’t count the incredible swell of “non-denominational” churches and those that may have a denominational name attached but have basically shot into their own trajectory. While many of these churches are Southern Baptist, it’s worth noting that historically Southern Baptists (and Baptists in general) weren’t really considered “Main Line Protestant.” There’s some question as to whether or not the SBC (Southern Baptist Convention) is still even the same denomination it once was, since it has adopted a very hierarchical, creedalistic character.

So, yeah, “pop-mainstream” means the current pop-church incarnation of Crystal-Cathedral-and-Rick-Warren-like mega-churches.

The “Contemporary Christian” ethos that suffuses so many of these institutions has a bland, suburban ease to it, but also a dramatic call to personal awakening, that is a really powerful combination for people who are moderately ambitious, comfortable with homogeneity, but still seeking meaning in their lives. (For an illustration of this brand of piety, see the description of the last family listed here.)

In my own experience, growing up in and around these churches, I found that the focus in these places is on living a clean, decent Christian life — which, if you dig a little, is really just code for “stay away from sexual sin.”

Sexual behavior is a convenient bugbear: it fits with the Puritan/Calvinist cultural strain in our culture, it taps very efficiently into secret shame and guilt, and in spite of its generally private nature, it touches on much of what makes public society work: property, family, health. The result (or the cause? it’s very chicken/egg) is that the American perspective of sexuality is a lot like the old New Yorker cartoon map of the country that has New York huge in the middle, and everything else backgrounded to a smear of irrelevance.

While the word “sex” doesn’t make it into every sermon, it’s the first thing that seems to get mentioned when anybody’s asked for examples of sin, especially the kind of sin that’s supposedly destroying our country. (Example: Rick Santorum’s answer to Jon Stewart’s quip about his moral/cultural concerns. Steweart half-jokes if Santorum’s worried about chameleons “shilling for beer” [re: the Bud ads a while back … I took this as a real question, not so much a joke, asking if cute talking animals advertising a controlled substance for adults was one of the things Santorum* thought problematic] but Santorum replied: “Actually, I’m more concerned about Victoria’s Secret ads.” And he was serious. )

This is an amazing feat, though … what it means is that social issues, like workers’ rights, personal privacy, bigotry, etc, end up fading in the background, and working-class /middle-class people end up obsessing over their sexual fears to their own detriment, voting for candidates who then turn around and pass laws that enable their cable company to charge 3x what they should, their employer to lay them off without a pension for no reason, and a war that will kill their children. But they have these Americans just happy as clams… basically thinking “well, it’s ok that Bobby’s in the Army and getting shot at for no reason, as long as he can’t marry another dude if he gets back alive.”

Ok, that was a bit of a tirade…let me get back on track…

Also in my experience of these churches, there was also a lot of self-helpish “how does this Bible verse help me in my daily life / carpool / soccer team / YMCA intramurals” prooftexting. Sure a lot of it dealt with personal grief and suffering, but it was important not to get things too downbeat.

There was always a carefully metered helping of guilt about personal distance from God, about not praying enough or not giving enough to the church (not to charities or actual poor or needy people, mind you, but the church in which you were sitting, which surely does a lot for the needy, once the mortgage on the Wellness Center is paid).

I heard very few sermons about the poor or downtrodden, and I heard very little anger at greed and self-righteousness (though now there’s a lot of anger at “liberal” self-righteousness, evidently).

Oddly enough, when I read the Gospels, those latter items are almost *all* that Jesus teaches against, and the clean-living and self-helpy stuff is in short supply. Of course, the dispensationalist influence means that every single page of the Bible’s current incarnation is treated with equal weight (when it’s convenient) and read with “inerrancy” (as if there is no question how to interpret or see the intention or meaning or context of extremely ancient texts), so the actual words of Jesus in the Gospels get lost in a sea of conjecture and bias posing as education.

When I became an Episcopalian, I heard a lot more of what I read in the Gospels. A focus on the poor and sick and disempowered, on understanding and loving those around us, and warnings to avoid self-rightousness judgmentalism. Oddly, this denomination’s numbers are in decline. I suppose people prefer the milquetoast lonzenge with the liquid-hate center?

You know, honestly, I’m being somewhat disingenous here. The truth is that, as in all things, there was a mixture of great stuff and not-so-great stuff going on in the churches of my youth. I witnessed hurting people helped and loved, folks with their hearts broken finding solace and comfort and purpose. Communities that came together through hardship. All these churches did a lot of that really great human stuff. And the Episcopal churches of my adulthood, while they had politics and theology I found more palatable, generally felt somewhat dusty and asleep at the wheel.

But it’s not the dusty/asleep ones that have been working to put their minions in public office, quietly and with great discipline, over the last 20-30 years, and working to dissolve the ever-eroding sepration of church and state. And they’re not the ones loving their “you look like me” neighbor, but then preaching hate-filled self-righteous messages to their congregations about sexual minorities and other religions.

I’d be curious to know if our cultural fixation on cleanliness and purity across the board, religious or not, is waxing or waning? I mean, there just has to be some connection between the popularity of antibacterial soap and “clean Christian living.”

*A quick post-script about Santorum. Now that I live in PA, I’m going to make it my personal hobby to help get this joker out of office.
If for no other reason that the title to his “book”: It Takes a Family.
Naming his book that (as a long-delayed “nuh-uh-no-you-dihunt” response to Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village”) shows how humorless and lacking in imagination this guy is. It’s like hearing the HBO slogan “It’s not TV, It’s HBO” and saying, “Um, hey! They can’t get away with that! That’s false advertising! It *IS* TV!! It’s right there on my TV!!!”
The whole point of Hillary’s title was to run against the grain of the conventional wisdom in the US that everything is about the nuclear family. Her point was that the family doesn’t live in a vacuum — it’s a part of a whole society, an organic community context, and that how we treat our children needs to reflect an understanding of this anthropological truth. That it’s unhealthy to insulate and fetishize one-man-one-woman “family” to the detriment of the reality of the majority of human beings on the planet: people who depend on other relatives and friends to form a network of support.

Just saw this editorial reprinted at Common Dreams: Who’s Taking Blame for Christian Violence?

How do our current religious leaders think Jesus would react to the concept of collateral damage?

I’d love to see somebody ask that question in a press conference.

Rick “Burn the Witch” Santorum shows his poor grasp on reality, morality, and basic logic.
Catholic Online – Featured Today – Fishers of Men

Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

This is so wrong in so many ways.

These priests he mentions are pedophiles. Pedophiles don’t do what they do because of “liberal society” or because of what professors teach in class. They don’t even do what they do because of their sexual orientation toward male or female. They do what they do because they’re sick people who have a compulsion to breach the trust and consent of children.

I sort of expect ignorant cretins walking the streets to connect same-gender orientation with pedophilia, because it’s the kind of thing the truly stupid and hateful of society tend to assume.

But the idea that an elected official, a Senator no less, would buy in to such wayward and criminally irresponsible thinking — it’s sickening to me. And that a church publication would put it out there without at least saying “um, this guy’s an idiot and we don’t endorse him, but here’s what he had to say” is equally creepy to me.

It was academic and political and cultural liberalism that has championed children’s rights in this country and elsewhere. Without liberalism, they’d still be working in factories and treated as less-formed humans and purely as property.

When is the liberal leadership going to stand up in this country and unashamedly state that being liberal is NOT the same as being relativist?? I hear them tip-toeing around it… and God bless Howard Dean in spite of any eccentricities, he’s actually trying to get this message across. But come on. Make a noise. Shoot this stuff down.