July 21, 2012 |
Editor's Note: A short time ago, AlterNet received a very
thoughtful letter from one of our readers. Professor James Rohrer wrote
that while he was a long-time loyal AlterNet reader, he was concerned
about our coverage of faith and religion. His complaint was that
AlterNet too frequently portrays religion as the domain of right-wing
fundamentalism and carries an overall anti-religious editorial tilt.
Rohrer argued this has the effect of alienating millions of our readers
who are progressively inclined. He challenged us to consider whether
this approach stands in the way of building the unity we need to achieve
the broad social change that the vast majority of Americans want.
"One would never know from AlterNet that there are today
significant numbers of evangelical Christians who work for peace and
justice, such as the Christian Peacemaker Teams who embed themselves as
witnesses for peace in the midst of war zones," Rohrer wrote to us. "One
would never know that much of the history of socialism in America has
been intertwined with religion. One would never know that many
brilliant philosophers, scientists, artists, and scholars in virtually
every field of research are also people who have a deep personal faith
in some traditional religion."
Rohrer's letter, which echoed concerns we receive from time to time
from colleagues and readers, prompted an extensive internal
conversation, and we concluded that something has to change. In that
spirit, we asked Prof. Rohrer to write an article about his thoughts on
the matter, published below. Over the coming weeks we will be
relaunching our Belief section, and publishing a wider array of coverage
on faith and religion and its role in daily life and politics. (We have
already started down this path with Vision editor Sara Robinson's
recent article, "Six Reasons We Can't Change the Future Without Progressive Religion.")
***
My brother and I took divergent spiritual paths at an early age. More
than half a century ago my brother, now a high-school science teacher
and a militant atheist, mortified my mother when he told a sweetly
smiling Sunday School teacher that he planned to return the following
week “to break every damned window in this place.” My mother was not
shocked by his lack of piety—she was a feminist with Unitarian
Universalist leanings and had left orthodox Christianity behind years
earlier –but by his rudeness. In truth we rarely ever attended church
because my mother refused to sanction patriarchal religion and my dad
hated to worship alone. But mom was gracious, even to people that she
disagreed with in matters of religion and politics.
While my brother over the years has steadfastly scorned all expressions
of religious faith as irrational superstition, I have been drawn to a
lively spirituality since my earliest recollections. As a child on our
Appalachian farm I wandered the hills and forests and prayed to a God
that I truly felt as a living presence. I did not acquire my beliefs by
having them forced upon me by parents or any organized religion; they
grew as naturally and effortlessly as my physical body.
Over the years I have participated in many faith communities, have
studied religion professionally, and have taught history and religion at
several colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, some
of them public and some of them religious institutions. I know that the
line between good and evil does not run between religions -- any more
than it runs between nations or races (all three are social constructs
after all); my colleagues and close friends represent many different
faith traditions, and some, like my brother, embrace a wholly secular
stance toward life. By choice, however, I identify myself as a
Christian. After half a century, I could no more deny my religious
convictions than I could deny any other part of my Self.
Lately the progressive blogosphere has been filled with pieces by
humanists who apparently take for granted that religious faith is
unhealthy for individuals and society, and something that the
progressive community needs to combat with the same dedication it fights
racial and economic inequality, militarism, and the rabid privatization
of everything that even remotely smacks of a public good. Just as
“liberal” and “socialist” are code words for “un-American radicals” in
the weird world of Fox News, sometimes it seems that “religion” and
(especially) “Christian” are code words for “twisted sociopaths” or
“patriarchal fascists” in the otherwise generally saner world of
progressive journalism. The problem is that in both cases the rhetoric
conflicts with something that journalists of any ideological stamp
should care a great deal about: truthfulness.
It is simply false that all (or even most) people of sincere
faith—including those who are conservative in their religious
commitments—are intrinsically irrational, anti-social, patriarchal,
racist, or closed to meaningful dialogue. It is equally false that
humanists necessarily see the light and embrace progressive politics. In
my case, I am a Christian, a scholar, and for more than 30 years now a
socialist who supports public healthcare, gender equality, separation of
church and state, environmentalism, and pacifism. My humanist brother
reads Ayn Rand, watches Fox News and is a dedicated member of the
National Rifle Association. He opposes gun control, is a global warming
skeptic and supports expanded use of fossil fuels, including fracking
(he owns land in an area where you can scarcely hurl a stone without
beaning one or two Chesapeake Energy employees). My brother and I do not
conform to the stereotypes, and neither do countless other people.
That is, of course, always the case with stereotypes—they ignore
flesh-and-blood human beings. We should know better by now than to
engage in a politics of social typing, whether it is promulgated by
xenophobic racial profilers on the Right or those of the secular Left
who delight in demonizing folk who stubbornly choose to believe things
that cannot be proven empirically.
Sara Robinson, who is one the most perceptive journalists in the biz today,
recently posted a wonderful article on AlterNet
that I hope all progressives will read and read over again. Robinson
reminded readers that there is a long tradition of progressive religion,
and rightly suggested that religious movements do a better job than
secularists at building and sustaining authentic communities. If we are
going to build a progressive community that has any hope of transforming
the United States and the world, we are going to need religion or the
equivalent moral force of religion to make it happen.
But we should be careful not to divide religion into artificial and
inevitably arbitrary categories like “progressive” Christianity versus
“conservative” or “traditional” Christianity, as though one is
acceptable and the other beyond redemption. People are almost
unimaginably creative, both individually and collectively, and they
always defy easy categorization. The political behavior of religious
traditionalists—Christian or otherwise—historically has been a moving
target. We should not assume that theological conservatives think alike
on every issue, or that they will inevitably vote as a block, or that
they cannot be persuaded to join in support of progressive policies that
affect the well-being of everybody’s children. There are today folk who
identify as evangelicals -- even theological fundamentalists -- who
work for racial equality, oppose U.S. military policy and hold economic
views that might consistently be termed socialist. Sadly, one would
never know this from reading recent progressive journalism.
The consequences of our myopia about American religion could be
catastrophic, especially as we face an upcoming national election in
which a swing of even a few votes could conceivably have a major impact
upon the path our nation takes during the next critical years. For
decades we have watched as Karl Rove and his cronies on the Right have
repeatedly used volatile wedge issues to win the support of millions of
religious conservatives who might otherwise have voted against their
brand of radical individualism and greed. Contrary to what some talking
heads of the Left and Right imagine, there is nothing in either the
Bible or the Christian tradition that automatically pulls theological
conservatives into alignment with antisocial political agendas.
Don’t believe me? Let me cite just one of many possible examples that
underscore the malleability of conservative Christianity. Alton is a
village in Sioux County, Iowa, which is statistically one of the most
reliably Republican counties in the United States. It is a stronghold of
evangelical Christianity, the sort of place where neighbors might scowl
at you if you mow your lawn on the Sabbath. Every four years Republican
presidential candidates swarm Sioux County during primary season the
way bees hover over clover fields. Despite his Catholicism, Rick
Santorum signs sprouted like dandelions across Sioux County this past
year, as the overwhelmingly Protestant electorate set aside their
theological views for the sake of political expediency. This is “red
state America,” proudly dyed red, white and blue.
Most Sioux County voters are descendants of Dutch Protestant immigrants
who settled the area more than a century ago. Their grandparents and
great-grandparents were if anything even more theologically
conservative, more pietistic, and more inclined to lace every
conversation with biblical injunctions. But a century ago, the local
folk opened their Bibles and found admonitions against rich rulers
exploiting the poor. They found Jesus preaching that the "sinners” would
enter the Kingdom of God before the Chamber of Commerce types, and
understood that disciples must speak out against the Trusts and war
profiteers. I just spent a week reading through the Alton Democrat
for 1900, which routinely drew upon the Bible to editorialize against
the imperialist ambitions of the United States --even dubbing its
capitalist rulers “immoral” and “evil”-- and to denounce the moneyed
aristocracy that unjustly controlled the destiny of the people.
The folk who now constitute the strongest base for the Republican Party
have forgotten that they are descended from the Populists who once
thundered their scripture-laced jeremiads against the railroads and the
banks and who demanded radical democracy in the name of both God and the
people. William Jennings Bryan, the “silver tongued orator of the
Platte,” three times tapped into that moral fervor to make runs for the
White House. Bryan, of course, hated the Trusts, hated militarism and
waged holy war against the Gold Standard. (“You shall not crucify
mankind upon this cross of gold.:) He was also a devout Presbyterian
Sunday School teacher and fundamentalist who died shortly after leading
the charge against evolution in the infamous “Monkey Trial.”
The Bible has not changed, and neither have the core theological
beliefs of the people of Sioux County. But society has changed and the
nature of political action has evolved almost beyond recognition since
the turn of the 20th century. The Bible and the Christian tradition can
be tapped as resources for an array of political agendas. That the
“heartland” has in recent decades swung so far away from the populist
tradition of Bryan is not because there is something intrinsically
authoritarian or anti-democratic in the religious beliefs of the masses,
but because Republican strategists in the last two generations have
done a far better job than progressives at organizing, marketing and
communicating their message in a way that appeals at a visceral level to
the hopes and fears of many people. To change America, we must change
this reality.
Although some progressive bloggers apparently think that organized
Christianity is on the way to extinction, there is every reason to
believe that religion is going to remain an important component of
culture for as long as humanity survives. There is no conceivable
progressive future—for America or the globe –that does not embrace
people of diverse religious faiths. Within the American context any
possible future will almost certainly include a Christian majority for
many years to come. Militant secularists who care about building a
better world for everybody need to accept this truth and start to learn
how to communicate and build relationships more effectively with people
of faith, including the evangelical Protestants and traditional
Catholics they most frequently tilt against.
Posting blogs on progressive sites that engage in simplistic
stereotypes or that employ derogatory language is a bad start. In a
college course on American democracy I routinely send students to
AlterNet in the hope that they will open themselves to new ways of
thinking about racial politics, inequality and the public good. Sadly,
the religion posts too often serve as static, distracting them from the
urgent issues that I want them to engage.
Most of my students are hardworking middle-class folk from rural
communities, who grew up in places where life revolves around family,
the church and the local school. For the most part they are sincerely
idealistic and intelligent people who recognize quickly when they have
been insulted or patronized. It is difficult for them to hear and trust
progressive analysis of healthcare, civil rights, militarism, and
economics when it comes packaged with attacks upon their most deeply
held spiritual convictions. Insulting intelligent voters is simply bad
politics, whether it is done by dogmatists of the Right or the Left.
James Rohrer is a professor of history at University of Nebraska-Kearney.
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