Like plumbers or auto dealership owners, right wing Christians are a special interest group. A remarkably successful one. Did you see the Charlie Kirk memorial? The project of right wing Christians to seize control of America’s government in god’s name is going a bit too well for comfort. Stopping that project is going to require more than just arguing against their particular megachurch-flavored brand of Christianity. It is going to require the establishment of a norm against the presence of religion in public affairs that is much, much stronger than the feeble one that is now being drowned in a sea of red hats.
Let me try to speak plainly about what I mean. The US has “freedom of religion.” That means that everyone is free to practice the religion of their own choice in their own life. Fine. Great. This is a fundamental right. We all support this.
Then we have “the separation of church and state.” The realization that certain religious people would always try to take over the government is not new! The founding fathers had seen the downsides of theocracy. It is clear, however, that the legal separation of church and state is now being systematically eroded—as a direct result of the lack of a cultural wall between church and state. There is not today and has never been in my lifetime a political party that truly stands for the rejection of religion as an ingredient in the public policy process. That has to change.
The Republican Party long ago struck a bargain with the religious right, to champion their goals in exchange for their support of the goals of the rich. This, in essence, is how a party that exists to serve the interests of capital has managed to assemble a coalition of half of the electorate: It has waved the flag and the Bible, along with racism. The rich, who want tax cuts, do not care about the weird shit that evangelical Christians want, but the rich do need the votes of evangelical Christians, so a marriage of convenience has long existed. Inside the manic and corrupt Trump administration, we are seeing a moment of ascendance of the religious right due mostly to their ability to appeal to the strongman’s ego. But the ingredients of the Republican coalition have not changed, and will not any time soon.
So let’s talk about the other side, the Democrats, the unfortunate opposition party. Democrats will generally profess to believe in the separation of church and state. Yet their ability to maintain that separation has been utterly discredited by events in the world. Their methods have clearly failed. Why? Because they have long thought that they could happily don the trappings of religion themselves—campaigning at churches and ostentatiously praying on the floor of Congress and loudly declaring how important their faith is in their campaign literature—and then, after election day, operate in a secular environment. Not true! This does not work. The alleged believers in the separation of church and state have opened the door to religion and welcomed it into the heart of the political process and praised it and tried to use it for votes, and then have been surprised when it proceeds to do what it must naturally do, if you take it seriously—to capture all of the power, in order to arrange earthly affairs as God wants.
Democrats have assumed that they, too, could wave around the Bible, and then win an argument—both in the public sphere, and within the government—that the real version of Christianity actually respects the separation of church and state. Wrong. You cannot win an argument of religious interpretation, for the simple reason that religion itself embraces faith over reason and is therefore immune to any shared basis of settling intellectual differences. You cannot tell right wing Christians that they are right about Christianity being true but wrong about their interpretation of what it demands. It cannot be done! That is why these arguments have historically been settled with the sword. Religion defies logic. Once you allow it to participate as an equal in the realm of public policy debates, you have already lost. The only way to truly exercise a meaningful separation of church and state is for those who believe in that principle to reject the presence of religion in politics entirely.
Does this mean you should not respect the freedom of religion? No. It means that religion properly belongs in your personal life and not in the democratic arena where decisions are made for everyone based on reason. My doctor is free to be a Christian, but if he tells me that he is going to select my medications by using prayer, he has crossed a line. An engineer is free to be a Christian, but if he is going to decide how strong the bridge supports should be by asking Jesus, he has crossed a line. Likewise, public officials are free to be Christians, but as soon as they cite the Bible or their religious faith to justify policy choices, they have crossed a line. This is a healthy and indeed necessary boundary for an advanced nation that is trying to fight off the ascendance of a theocracy. In order for us to strengthen this norm, I regret to inform you that the cowardly Democrats are going to have to get into the habit of giving religion much, much less respect.
Religion is like masturbation. You are free to do it, but not on the floor of the legislature.
If the Republican Party is the party of right wing theocracy, then the opposition party must be the party of science and reason. It cannot be “the party that also loves Jesus, folks, we love him, we’re just Episcopalians, so we don’t do all the crazy shit Baptists do!” No. This will not work—because, to reiterate, getting religion out of government requires asserting the fundamental belief that faith is not a proper ingredient of the public decision-making process. This in turn requires politicians to model a belief in facts and logic and reason. Every time they kiss the Bible and pray in a public, political context, they undermine that belief. So don’t do it.
Don’t have Bill Clinton leaning into his Southern accent from a church pulpit, don’t have Barack Obama constantly attending Christian church to try to stave off right wing Islamophobia, don’t have Joe Biden always talking about his Catholicism, don’t have Democratic members of Congress attend the National Prayer Breakfast. Don’t do it! Yes, I am asking politicians to do something that requires a certain amount of moral backbone. Even for the subset of these Democrats whose religious belief is sincere, the reality of the world—amply demonstrated by actual events—requires them to make a choice. If the separation of church and state is desirable, and if public policy decisions should be made based on reason rather than on mysticism, it is important for political leaders to demonstrate this to the public by keeping their own religion out of the political setting. We need at least one opposition party that does not stand for religion. If they both embrace religion, religion is going to operate in places where it should not be.
This hard line against religion in politics is, I think, both morally and practically necessary. It will also be dismissed out of hand by any political consultant. Oh no! The candidate must go to church and practice looking rapturous during the prayers before every Chamber of Commerce chicken dinner! I dispute this. This, I say, is untrue. We are trying to establish a norm here. We are trying to build a wall to keep out a Noah-style theocratic flood that is going to drown our democracy. It will require a little work and perhaps a little discomfort. It would be nice if many Democratic candidates were brave, or had the courage of their own convictions. Few really do. But even so, anti-religious politics has a bright future. Since 2007, the share of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen from 78% to 63%. And the trend gets more and more pronounced among the young, who are increasingly skeptical of not just Christianity, but religious belief as a whole:
Let the Republicans be the party of the past. Let them be the party that believes in weird ancient magic books instead of science. Let them be the party that doesn’t give a shit about the climate change that is going to devastate the lives of today’s kids. Let them be the party of old racists, old bigots, old demented fools. Let them have it! And let all the rest of us have a party that does not cower in fear of being accused of believing in the opposite of these things. Let us have one, just one, political party that realizes that you cannot win a debate with someone who thinks god is whispering the truth in their ear. Leave the zealots and psychos for the other party. You aren’t going to win their votes anyhow. The counterpoint to The Crazy Party is the Not Crazy Party. Please follow the things you already believe to their logical conclusions and stop patronizing everyone.
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Related reading: We’ve Given Religion Too Much Respect; You Are Not Religious; Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!
Last weekend I spoke at a fundraiser for the Atlanta DSA, a group that I heartily recommend joining if you are in Atlanta! On that theme, this week’s “Good Cause to Donate To” is this campaign to purchase and forgive medical debt in the Atlanta area. How nice.
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I can't think of many grooming strategies more effective in engendering the explicit or implicit embrace of authoritarianism than the ideologies that proclaim that there's a sky daddy watching your every move and ready to punish you but only because he loves you.
The parallels between the conservative death cult and the religious death cults are not an accident. To HamNo's point, Dems trying to govern and campaign like conservatives is doomed to failure.
I'd argue they are doing this because they are, in actuality, conservatives! Or atleast conservative by any objective measure of that word and not just relative to the other side of the aisle.
Even Barry Goldwater said the religious right scared the shit out of him, and bemoaned the party being overtaken by them. Ayn Rand lovers marry Bible Thumpers. And their evil spawn rule.