Obama, The Religious Right, and the Rise of Secularism
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Kevin
Two interesting bit today. First, Obama directly challenges the morally crippled version of Christianity that the Religious Right pushes:
Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.
“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.
“Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Illinois senator said.
“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,” according to an advance copy of his speech.
“There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich,” Obama said. “I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.”
This needs to be said over and over again. The version of Christianity that the religious right pushes, with its reflexive Republicanism, its support for supply-side voodoo economicts, its contempt for society and democracy as agents of the common good, and its un-Biblical and out-sized obsession with homosexuality is one that many, many of do not recognize form our Sunday sermons and religious educations. The usual talking heads will claim that this speech is an attack on all religion, or that Obama is somehow out of touch with mainstream Americans. That is nonsense. Fortunately, the American people recognize it as such:
In the United States, the Bush era has summoned up — arguably for the first time in this country’s history — a mass secularism that looks to Europe and sees a model for America to follow. […]
America’s secular turn actually began in the 1990s, though it wasn’t until 2002 that two Berkeley sociologists first noticed it. In a paper in the American Sociological Review, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer announced the startling fact that the percentage of Americans who said they had “no religious preference” had doubled in less than 10 years, rising from 7 percent to 14 percent of the population.
This unexpected spike wasn’t the result of growing atheism, Hout and Fischer argued; rather, more Americans were distancing themselves from organized religion as “a symbolic statement” against the religious right. If the association of religiosity with political conservatism continued to gain strength, the sociologists suggested, “then liberals’ alienation from organized religion [might] become, as it has in many other nations, institutionalized.”
The text is from a Ross Dohout article in the Atlantic and is quoted by Josh Marshall.
Many people in this country look at the religious Right and see not the mainstream values they were raised with, but rather a monomaniacal obsession with a handful of issues that simply do not resonate with the religious teachings of their youth. People see the religious right trying to force all children to say the religious right’s version of a prayer, regardless of their own beliefs. They see the religious right attempt to use the power of the federal government to interfere in the most difficult and private of matters. They see an organization more concerned with who people have sex with than with how to help starving children. And they are turning from that crippled version of religion in droves. Ironically, the establishment press and the GOP have done such a good job in pretending that the religious right is religion that a rapidly expanding number of people are turning their back on all organized religion. God, as the platypus should attest, apparently has a sense of humor.
Obama is trying to speak for those religious people who derive value form their religion but are uncomfortable with the narrow and often radically un-Biblical obsessions of the religious right. It will not play well with the establishment press. Religion, to the Broders and Russerts of the world always speaks from the right side of the aisle and only speaks about a narrow subset — the least radical subset, it must be mentioned — of the Bible. Obama, on the other hand, knows about the entire Bible and knows that he is not alone in that knowledge. Maybe, just maybe, in six months when Obama is doing quite well among the religious in this country, the Borders and the Russerts will begin to question their assumptions about what the term “religious” means in a country like the United States.
Probably not, though. I suspect that shaking the Heathers of the national press loose from their biases and reflexes is a taller order than even the loaves and the fishes.
Ironically, the establishment press and the GOP have done such a good job in pretending that the religious right is religion that a rapidly expanding number of people are turning their back on all organized religion.
“Fate, it would seem, is not without a sense of irony.”
Comment 6/25/2007
The thing is there is a great opportunity here for those of us in more moderate (what used to be called mainstream) denominations to reach out and help bring actual Christian values back to what the public views as Christianity.
On a related note:
On the death of Jerry Fallwell, one of the many many 85-year-old Norwegian ladies at my ELCA (not Missouri synod!) Lutheran Church said:
That man kept more people out of church than anyone else in the last 50 years.
Comment 6/25/2007
Whether it is a political liberal or a religious liberal, what he means when he says that we should be united is that he wants everyone else to embrace his radical political or religious views and give up their principles. If the political and religious liberals would give up their beliefs and embrace conservative views, then we could be united. Works both ways. Unity in and of itself is not a admirable goal.
As to the comment of the lady about Jerry Falwell, the liberal churches were losing membership long before Jerry Falwell came along. I think her comment was ignorant and ill-informed.
Comment 6/25/2007
[…] Wesley Clark Link to Article barack obama Obama, The Religious Right, and the Rise of Secularism » Posted at Lean Left on Monday, June 25, 2007 Two interesting bit today. First, Obama directly challenges the morally crippled version of Christianity that the Religious Right pushes: Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right-wing evangelical leaders … one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich,” Obama said. “I don’t know what Bible they’re reading View Entire Article » […]
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