It’s no longer news that organized religion has teamed up
with right-wing politics in the United States. Or that organized religion has split into what we call
“mainstream” and “born-again” or “evangelical.”
Also familiar to most of us paying attention to what’s going
on in America is the fact that this sharp divide between left and right, or
liberal and conservative, is
reflected in this divide between Mainstream Christians and Christians of the
Born Again variety. And that the
Christians labeled Mainstream often have more in common with the non-religious
than with their evangelical co-religionists.
I remember some interesting discussions in my seminars, on
the meaning of culture, back in my teaching days, over how to frame the
concepts of religion and culture.
Is religion a subset of culture?
Or is it the other way around?
It’s been some years now since I had such discussions, but I would
certainly want to bring in the example of what is going on in America today to
make the case that religion is a subset of culture.
Putting aside, for the sake of this discussion, the fact
that clumping all the varieties of cultural ways in America into one is
problematic, I would propose that “American culture” still exhibits its origins
in Protestantism, both Calvinism and Lutheranism, and that Catholics and Jews
and others in America have been profoundly influenced by such Protestant ideas as the importance of the individual, the work ethic, a faith in ultimate
justice, the certainty of punishment and reward, in this life or the next, and
the importance of working toward the progress of mankind in this lifetime.
The reason I think there is a strong case for putting
culture above religion is that Catholics seem to have split themselves into
evangelicals and mainstreamers in a form virtually identical to the way
Protestants have evolved in recent years.
With an interesting twist – the “evangelicals” are the upper level clergy,
and it has become clear just how far apart they are from the “mainstream”
majority in the pews.
Which corner of the culture (values, attitudes, beliefs) we
take refuge in determines whether we adhere to an ideology of enlightenment
values, universal human rights and a focus on improving our lives in the
here-and-now – or to an ideology of discipline and obedience to authority. Religion these days seems to take its
cue from that cultural choice. If
one is Protestant, and given to authoritarian ways, authority is adherence to
“biblical” values as the only path to heaven. If Catholic, it’s the magisterium, the hierarchy, the
infallible Bishop of Rome, and a monopoly on the keys to Heaven.
If one is anti-authoritarian (or at least non-authoritarian
by inclination), and Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim or purely secular,
one spends one’s time seeking personal goals, whether selfish or altruistic,
working for better government, greater global equity, universal education,
health and welfare. Catholics want
their churches to restructure themselves the way Mainstream Protestants tend to
structure theirs, run on democratic principles without regard to sex, class or
ethnicity. Catholics of this
stripe focus not on the hierarchy as the church but as the entire “body of
Christ” – the entire collective of believers, including the clergy.
These conflicting cultural values are what lie behind the
Culture Wars which the Republicans and Democrats are now fighting, and which
loom larger for the right as they see themselves losing the economic and labor
arguments, and have been front and center all through the selection process of
a Republican presidential candidate.
MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes’ had two separate programs, one February 18th and one
February 19th, dealing with what he took to be Rick Santorum’s
Catholic attack on Protestants, but his panelists pointed out were in fact an
evangelical attack on non-evangelicals.
The issue is Rick Santorum’s comment made in a speech to Ave
Maria University in 2008, which goes:
We all know that this country
was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a
Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but
this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline
Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in
this country and it is a shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as
I see it.
Chris Hayes himself, one of the more astute observers of the
American sociopolitical scene, misses the division, and uses “evangelical”, as
most people probably would, in contrast
to Catholic. He is corrected in
this by Reihan Salam (Columnist for The Daily), one of his panelists, who also makes the point I
am making from a different perspective.
Will the average American, he asks, understand Santorum’s attack in the
evangelical way it was intended?
Or will they see it in the old (implication: no longer relevant) way, as
Chris Hayes just did, as a Catholic attack on Protestant?
Chris Hayes repeats the charge the next day with a different
panel that Santorum has “excommunicated” the majority of Protestants, this time
to have somebody else “correct” his way of looking at the situation once
again. This time it’s Chrystia
Freeland of blogs.reuters.com who suggests Santorum is not so much maligning
folks as making the objective (and accurate) observation that, as a group,
mainline Protestants have lost the clout they once had in the culture. Even they would admit they have fallen
on hard times, in other words. Sam
Seder (Majority.fm) then makes the point that “the same thing is true for the
Catholics.” They too believe the
folks at the other end of the divide – he doesn’t use the word authoritarian,
but he doesn’t have to – are “theologically” wrongheaded.
What’s going on here is that, thanks in large part to
Santorum, we are now openly using “religion” as a stand-in for “politics.” Note that “conservative religion” is a category
largely synonymous with “conservative politics,” whether it’s Catholic or Protestant,
and all those theological issues (sola scriptura vs. papal authority which
Luther tore the medieval church apart over) seem quite secondary at the
moment. That begs the question, is
this change only temporary?
Hayes points out how things have evolved in America. When JFK was about to be president he
stressed that he would be a secular president and would not take his orders
from his pope. Romney now is at
pains to stress that he is theological, and not secular, and a member of the
same political right – non-secular, Mormon, evangelical, Catholic – folk who
take their orders from God first and foremost.
But this is telling only half the story, that with Kennedy the contrast was between the secular (bad) and mainstream religion. Today it's between secular/mainstream religion (bad) and evangelical religion. And whereas, to win, Kennedy was putting secular values over religious ones, today the Republican candidates, at least, are putting evangelical values over all the others. What’s missing when the media talk about "religion" is that when we say
theological, or religious, we are referencing authoritarian, power-centered, judgmental
religion, not “Sermon on the Mount,” pastoral, compassionate religion. Our battle over church and state is not
over whether the secular (read: atheistic) unfeeling state rides roughshod over
the rights of our citizens for their love-of-God religion. It’s over which power group gets to
call the shots and whether religiously conservative folk can impose their ways – their opposition to women’s rights, abortion, gay dignity and rights, denial of
evolution, global warming – all in the name of freedom of today's kind of religion.
Mainstream Protestants (Jeff Greenberg identifies them as
members of the National Council of Churches) have gone left. Evangelicals, once apolitical, have
gone politically right. And
Greenberg makes the important point that since the divide is no longer
Catholic/Protestant but liberal non-evangelical/conservative evangelical,
Santorum can be an extreme right wing Catholic and still get support from
Protestant evangelicals.
Religion in America ain’t what it used to be. Some would say it isn’t even religion,
but politics masking as religion.
The change shows up sometimes when you least expect it. Recently, when the Supreme Court
decided unanimously to support a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church’s right to fire
one of its employees on the grounds she was a minister, and therefore in the
religious category and not subject to labor protections, a secular issue, I
found myself agreeing with the Court, because I believed the greater principle
of separation of church and state was at stake here. Catholic theologian Bill Lindsey disagreed with
me. He saw the legal rights aspect
as trumping religious freedom. I
found it interesting that I should be on the side of the power of the religious
institution in this instance, and a practicing Catholic should be on my left,
so to speak. But this is
surprising only when you make the mistake I did, and most people do, of
allowing the bishops and cardinals to speak for the entire church. Once you realize that even
self-identified Catholic theologians (and there are many of them) can be
articulate voices in opposition to their bishops and cardinals, and when you
look at statistical evidence that Catholics as a whole are more liberal even than
the average American, you get some decent perspective on what is right and what
is left.
The point is, in the Church v. State arguments, church isn’t
what it once was.
In some ways, you might wonder if we haven’t grown a whole
new American religion.
Santorum’s popularity is commonly attributed to his
“authenticity”. Unlike his Mormon
chief competitor and many of his evangelical ones as well, he is seen as
somehow more genuine.
But let’s not for a minute confuse his sincerity and
devotion to conservative Catholicism with Catholicism – or even American
Catholicism – itself.
Santorum and his co-religionists would have you think the
church is under attack, and if given the power to do so, he would put God back
into American life.
But he represents a narrow band of authoritarians. Not Christianity. Not even Catholicism.
For that matter, when you hear him lecture young rape
victims on the necessity of welcoming the rapist’s baby they’re carrying and
bearing it with joy, you might ask yourself how much he even represents
American conservatives.
credit photo: http://www.mygospelworkers.org/currentevents/?p=286
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