JustASC

In an oped the ADL’s Abe Foxman warns that “there have been increasing signs that the presidential race will present the American public with a profoundly unsettling infusion of religion and religiosity.”

Writes Foxman:

Some of what we have been seeing in this campaign is excessive and aggressive. It goes beyond a candidate’s discussing how religion shapes his or her worldview. Rather, it’s saying, “Vote for me because I’m a person of faith” — and that is directly contrary to the constitutional principle that there shall be no religious test for public office.

Actually, I don’t think the Constitution worries about a candidate making a religious pitch — by a “religious test,” it means a federal employee or elected official can’t be made to adhere to a particular faith or creed as a condition of taking office. If the voters want a Christian, a Buddhist or a Sikh, that’s okay, just as long as the government doesn’t endorse their motivation by demanding an oath or a background check.

Certainly all the religious pandering violates the “spirit” of Article VI, section 3, and one could make the case for a world in which politicians only talk about their convictions and policies, and not the supernatural motivations behind those principles. It’s a Lennon world, where there’s no religion, and a Hitchens world, where core beleifs are derived through rational contemplation.

But since that’s not the world we live in, what’s the difference between a candidate saying “I oppose abortion because my God tells me to” and one who says “I oppose abortion because the whole idea grosses me out”? We have to derive our beliefs from somewhere.

The issue, as Foxman points too, is not with politicians describing how ”religion shapes his or her worldview.” Anyone who freaks out when Sarah Palin suggests that we “are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God,” needs to consider how Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders took their cues and their rhetoric from the Bible.

My problem is that I have very strong doubts about the specificity in which God speaks to believers — or believers speak to God. I’m a regular in  synagogue, but don’t pretend that I accept every word of the prayers that celebrate God’s attributes and intentions for us. When I come to the prayer that blesses God for making it possible for us to act like the angels in honoring the Creator, I’m not sure who’s listening, or whether I believe in angels, or whether I can honestly even speak of a “creator.” And so I make a metaphor of the prayer — a metaphor that reminds me to express my gratitude for the blessing of creation, and to appreciate the ways in which human beings can rise above their animal natures to act a little like the angels.

Religious liberals assume others are taking a similar metaphorical approach, and that interfaith amity is possible because we all have different languages and metaphors expressing the same basic human impulses, and the same basic notion of right and wrong. REligious liberals who don’t believe in Jesus can still be stirred by King’s words because the powerful metaphors of his faith point to a vision of over-riding justice.

Religious liberals are confounded by two things — people who actually believe that the words of individual faith religions are meant to be taken literally, and competing metaphors that point to a very different set of convictions and ideologies than their own.

What scares religious liberals about Palin is not that religion shapes her worldview. What scares them is that her worldview seems so at odds with her own, and their suspicion that the “godliness” of the Iraq War is not a metaphor for its rightness, but a statement of objective reality.

Religous metaphors are inherently pluralist; religous doctrine is not. REligious metaphors are open to interpretation; religious doctrine leads to lethal ceertainty. Religious liberals hear Sarah Palin in church, and see someone who, in the balance between human agency and surrender to the supernatural, has tipped to the latter.  And that challenges their own religious enterprsie, which is predicated on the idea that you can speak in a faith language without taking dictation from a Supernatural Being.

I can’t speak to Foxman’s beliefs, but his oped expresses the liberal religious quandary — We want this much religion but no more. We want to speak God-talk at home, but not in public. We want to invoke God when it speaks to a public consensus, and censor God when belief leads to a particular place or policy.

Committed atheists, like True Believers, aren’t troubled by this. Atheists are convinced all religion is nurishkeit, and are rightly offended by all religious talk, from the pulpit or the political soapbox. To an atheist, the statement “I support (or don’t support) the war in Iraq” is an opinion. But the statement hoping the war is “a plan and that that plan is God’s plan” is a sign of mental imbalance.

Atheists, however, are a minority in this country. We tolerate religion, in private and public, because most Americans see it as a force for good. Many are troubled by religious fanaticism, which they take as an inability to separate the metaphorical from the literal. But we’re a forgiving people, and assume when a politican says he or she is following “God’s plan” he or she is speaking in a metaphor we can all accept.

As religious libeals, it’s a leap of faith most Americans are willing to take.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.