Memo to Mark

To: Mark Hyman
From: The Counterpoint
Re: Religion and Politics

Mr. Hyman:

In your latest “Short Takes,” you continue to castigate those who express concern or disapproval of evangelical Christian ideology driving political voting. As you may know, some of the individuals you single out, such as E.J. Dionne and Garry Wills, have spent years looking at the role of religion in U.S. politics and consider it a valid, important component of the American political scene. They don’t, as you suggest, shudder at the idea of walking past a church. But in order to make your ideological point, you seem determined to equate their critique of the fundamentalist aspects of Christianity with a general antipathy toward religion generally. This is both factually wrong and ethically suspect.

But the larger and more important point is this: you just don’t seem to get the fact that one can be religious and still find the relationship between sects of fundamentalist Christianity and the Bush administration troubling. Moreover, it seems simply odd that conservatives would applaud this commingling of religion and politics. After all, don’t most conservatives (including yourself) bemoan government intrusion into our life? How many installments of “The Point” have you spent railing against the ineptitude of Washington politicians and bureaucrats? Isn’t the mantra of conservatives “less government, more individualism”?

If you want to know why so many find the connection between the Religious Far Right and the current administration troubling, think about it this way: if you find government oversight of business practices and regulations invasive, how should one feel about government oversight of religious principles? For many of us religious belief is far too important and profound to become mixed up in politics. Our religious beliefs certainly inform our political behavior, but the overt mingling of religious belief and political discourse bothers us, not because we worry that religion will taint our politics, but quite the opposite: that the overt politicizing of religion cheapens it.

We object to having the Ten Commandments placed in courthouses, public prayer in school, and public funding of religious education not because we hate the basic religious tenets from which these political actions spring, but because we recognize how sacrosanct religious belief is. We can imagine ourselves living in a society in which our deeply held spiritual beliefs were not held by most people and how we would feel should government take actions that seemed to endorse one belief system over our own. It is the value and respect we have for religious belief that fuels our objections to its politicizing, not fear of it. “The majority rules” is a political truth; it should not be a religious one.

As we’ve pointed out before, most of the liberals you criticize would be more than happy to see government policy truly based on the principles of Christianity. Whether they are believers themselves or not, they want a government that is there to make society better by helping to clothe and feed those in need, helping people learn, caring for the sick and elderly, solving conflicts through peace rather than violence, and accepting even the most marginalized as valuable people worthy of respect. The problems we have with the Religious Right are that they (and you) seem to define religious belief generally, and Christianity specifically, narrowly and inaccurately. It’s hard to fathom an interpretation of Christianity that sanctions institutionalized bigotry against homosexuals, but is against universal health care and increased funding of social programs that help the needy.

Moreover, the Far Right use this fundamentally flawed (pardon the pun) construction of Christianity as a political tool (and often weapon) with which achieve specific policy objectives. It is this conviction that many members of the Religious Right misinterpret basic truths of Christianity and simply ignore others, along with the overt commingling of religious belief and public policy in a way that demeans and cheapens religious belief, that we find abhorrent.

People who truly think religion is harmful point to its use as a justification for war and persecution as evidence of its malignant effects on society. But what they don’t understand is that it’s not religion itself that led to these atrocities. The cause has been the appropriation of religion as a way of justifying political ends. Not only has this use of religion directly led to untold human suffering, but it has also demeaned the very religious beliefs that served as the pretext for these actions. This is why many who have sincere and abiding religious faith find its use by conservatives so unsettling—it’s not that we fear religion’s effects on politics; it’s that we fear politics’ effects on religion.

God bless,

The Counterpoint