2.3.1 Why Is There So Much Doubt Right Now?
There have always been significant numbers of Americans skeptical about the advisability of religion and politics influencing each other publicly, which is symbolized by the main logo for this website (right). However, in the past three decades the so-called “Religious Right” went through a dramatic rise and fall from political power. Its rapid fall from grace after the 2004 election was a primary cause of the rapidly growing number of skeptics about any form of mutual influence between religion and politics. This was because so many secular Americans equated the Religious Right with all of religion, partly due to the media's obsession with the controversies. This page and its sub-pages describe this trend, and how we all can help correct the misperceptions that caused it.
|
But first, a clarification: why the shift from talking about "faith" to talking about "religion?"
I’ve shifted here from discussing the broader topic of “faith and politics” to the narrower one of “religion and politics” (as I began to define them on page 1.4). This is necessary because it’s the latter phrase that most often frames the debate today.
This section will give you an idea of why it’s decisively important for more and more of the general public to understand and accept the postmodern paradigm shift that radically redefines these terms. Like all paradigm shifts, it’s hard to grasp at first (like the famous example of the Copernican paradigm shift in astronomy which pictures the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of our solar system, radically challenged the scientific and religious assumptions of the day and transformed the meaning of everyday language, e.g. the sun “coming up” in the morning).
In our case, it’s the Enlightenment secularist assumption concerning the difference between religion (seen as always grounded in irrational faith) and supposed secular, universal reason (seen as not requiring faith of any kind) that’s being challenged in our current paradigm shift. This makes trying to equate the common modern understanding of the terms “religion and politics” to the postmodern understanding of the terms “faith and politics” a serious category mistake--equating apples and oranges. This is because from the postmodern perspective, not only religion, but all secular systems of thought, are grounded in faith; and religious faith (or faith of any kind) is not by definition irrational. If this is new and strange to you, you’ll soon be familiar with it, whether or not you end up agreeing. |
Now, back to the main topic
The story of how more and more people became doubtful about the possibility of religion influencing politics in healthy ways is complex. It is told in quite different ways by several of the resources we’ll examine, each from the author’s own perspective and values. For our purposes here, let me just list a few of the key elements (of course, from my perspective and values):
- There have always been a minority of American extremists who have wanted to impose their religious and/or political views on everyone else. However, the moderate majority has usually kept them from gaining complete power.
- However, far-right religious extremists finally convinced enough more moderate conservative Christians to support socially conservative Republicans for election in 2000 that they narrowly won, and politically extremist neoconservative Republicans, who took us into an unjust preemptive war in Iraq, were given power in an elected administration for the first time by presidential appointment.
- Fortunately, this so-called “unholy alliance” so overstepped and abused its power before the 2004 election that they started to lose their influence on more and more moderates who were essential to their coalition, so that by the 2008 elections the Democrats swept back into power (admittedly, due to other factors also).
- Even though immediately after the 2004 election religious moderates and liberals began to strongly declare their differences with the “unholy alliance” (many of which are included in the resources highlighted on this website), many Americans continue to this day to lump the center and left of the religious spectrum in with the far-right, which leads them to want to keep all religion and politics totally separate.
This chart (right) from the Pew Research Center reflects the dramatic increase between the 2004 and 2008 elections, especially among Republicans, in those who believe that churches should keep out of social and political matters. Not reflected in this chart is that a similar change also happened during these years among many conservative Christians (especially in the younger adult generations). These were precisely the insiders in the powerful coalitions that dominated the 2000 and 2004 elections. |
- As a number of the resources reviewed on this website show, it wasn’t just the unprecedented, strong reaction from outsiders (Democrats, Independents and moderate-to-liberal Christians, especially) that changed the minds of political and religious conservatives about the health of their merger into the so-called “Religious Right.” A good number of these insiders came to see for themselves that this merger resulted in a double whammy--it had corrupted the central purposes of both their political party and their religious faith.
From my perspective, while this was a positive change of viewpoint on this particular merger of unhealthy forms of religion and politics, to generalize it to apply to all kinds of interrelationship between the two is a serious mistake.
(This scepticism needs to be addressed differently for persons who are moderates in their faith and/or politics and those who are more extremist. The next two pages point to these differences.)
|