Posted by Andy
If the maniacs are getting a stranglehold on the Grand Old Party, our Maximum Leader doesn’t seem to have gotten the message: Bush went out of his way, at his last news conference (and not for the first time), to emphasize that religion is a private matter, that people have a right to believe or not believe as they see fit, without having their good will or patriotism impugned on those grounds. He has explicitly dissociated himself from the pernicious notion that opposition to some of his judicial nominees is “an assault on people of faith.” Also interesting to note, in passing, that the high-octane Christian pro-lifer Rick Santorum strongly endorsed pro-choice liberal Arlen Specter in last fall’s Republican primary (as did the White House), over an ideologically pure conservative challenger. Political expediency, no doubt, but still…
Hitchens is an engaging writer and a talented polemicist; I share his religious views. But he hyperventilates. I was about to note Taranto’s counter-argument, only to find that both Nick and Harcamone had already read it and, like me, largely agreed with it. Taranto is correct: the religious right (not by the way exclusively Christian) is anything but monolithic, and talk of an incipient theocracy is “either utterly cynical or staggeringly naive.” Today’s religious activism is largely defensive; the militant secularists, the ACLU types and their allies in the judiciary, have done much to provoke the culture clash, not least by their arrogant attempt to expunge all traces of our religious history and cultural traditions from public life. No more Christmas carols in the public schools of Sioux Falls, South Dakota! Religious people meanwhile see their moral values under siege, find it impossible to shield their children from what they regard, rightly or wrongly, as a culture that has lost its compass.
Hitchens is right, of course, about a certain disjunction between Jesus and his latter-day disciples. But that’s one of the neat tricks of Western Christendom: Selective double-think that permits genuinely pious believers to reconcile the idealistic proto-Marxism of the New Testament with the realities of the human condition. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
I concede that my sympathy for the religious right was somewhat challenged by the Schiavo case, and the grandstanding by Bush and Congress (though not only Republicans). But for whatever the polls are worth, about a third of the people who describe themselves as evangelicals thought the congressional intervention was wrong, and a smaller though still sizable percentage said such decisions should be left to the spouse. Many of the judges who stood their ground were church-affiliated conservatives and/or Republicans. Again, hardly a benighted monolith. The Democrats are so conventional and moderate? No doubt many of them are. But the Michael Moore/Tom Hayden fringe has been granted as much respectability on the moderate left as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on the mainstream right (and not a few of the evangelicals in general vote Democratic).
If the U.S. were about to consign women to purdah, persecute homosexuals and install a contemporary version of the Spanish Inquisition, Hitchens’ point about a conflict with our attempts to promote democratic secularization in the Islamic world would be valid. The fact is that he’s constructing a straw man: American democracy, tolerance and church-state separation remain demonstrably real, and the secular state is not in any realistic danger of being chucked overboard. Insofar as American moral authority in the world is undermined, the reason is not our domestic arrangements but our hegemonic tendencies abroad, real and perceived, and double standards in foreign policy, notably regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In any case, those who agree with Maureen Dowd that we’re on the verge of a repressive theocracy here at home make Chicken Little look like an optimist.