An American Heresy
Is there any doubt that the enormous pull of religious zealots threatens to tear this country apart politically as well as culturally? Here’s two excellent pieces that touch on how destructive these religious thugs are. The first from Al Gore :
It is no accident that this assault on the integrity of our constitutional design has been fueled by a small group claiming special knowledge of God’s will in American politics. They even claim that those of us who disagree with their point of view are waging war against “people of faith.” How dare they?Long before our founders met in Philadelphia, their forebears first came to these shores to escape oppression at the hands of despots in the old world who mixed religion with politics and claimed dominion over both their pocketbooks and their souls.
This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place.
James Madison warned us in Federalist #10 that sometimes, “A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction.”
. . .
I remember a time not too long ago when senate leaders in both parties saw it as part of their responsibility to protect the senate against the destructive designs of demagogues who would subordinate the workings of our democracy to their narrow factional agendas.Our founders understood that the way you protect and defend people of faith is by preventing any one sect from dominating. Most people of faith I know in both parties have been getting a belly-full of this extremist push to cloak their political agenda in religiosity and mix up their version of religion with their version of right-wing politics and force it on everyone else.
They should learn that religious faith is a precious freedom and not a tool to divide and conquer.
I think it is truly important to expose the fundamental flaw in the arguments of these zealots. The unifying theme now being pushed by this coalition is actually an American heresy — a highly developed political philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of the United States of America.
This article from Robert Kuttner takes the “American heresy” argument further :
America, which separated church and state precisely to protect the private right to worship, has long had its share of religious absolutists who have wanted to harness the power of the state to their own view of revealed truth. But never before in our history has the government deliberately and cynically intervened on the side of the zealots.
. . .
What’s under siege here is nothing less than the Enlightenment. Please recall that what we benignly remember as the Renaissance coexisted with centuries of vicious religious persecution — Christians persecuting heretics like Galileo, expelling and slaughtering Muslims and Jews, then doing bloody battle with each other following the Protestant Reformation.The philosophers of the Enlightenment were men of science who understood that faith could not be disputed but that reason could be subjected to the test of logic and evidence. The American Revolution was a triple triumph — for political democracy, religious tolerance, and for the free inquiry demanded by the scientific method.
Today’s religious extremists are not only trying to use the state, with all its power, as religious proselytizer. They oppose science when it happens to conflict with their version of revealed truth. They twist history to claim that the Republic’s freethinking Founders, like Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, were really theocrats like themselves. They long for the presenate world of absolutes circa 1500.
. . .
I never thought I’d live to see a time when the Enlightenment — the Enlightenment! — was politically controversial. Democracy, like science, depends on debate, tolerance, and evidence. And in a democracy, nothing is scarier than a political force convinced it is getting irrefutable truth directly from God.
It’s amazing that I can even sleep at night knowing how far these lunatics are willing to go to rebuild this country to fit their flawed view of what Jesus would have wanted. I still can’t help but think we wouldn’t be in half as much trouble as we are now if these people payed more attention to what Jesus actually said than what hypocrites like James Dobson and Bill Frist say.
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You know, they do want to turn back the enlightenment. That is absolutely right. And they’ve gotten this far in part because no one realizes this.
Comment by JOe — April 29, 2005 @ 6:36 pm
No some people do realize it. Mr. Gore is only saying what has been said before. It is hard to sound reasonable with these facts and it may take the words that Al uses to get across to some folks. Or perhaps it just takes a former VP, though I have my doubts that credibility will find a home under the Gore name. Not that I don’t think he is credible, just that I think Joe American has already bought into the lie that he is a crackpot.
None the less, he will now occupy a space next to the likes of Jefferson and Madison in my mind.
Comment by Fr33d0m — April 30, 2005 @ 6:24 am
Good stuff. I especially like Kuttner’s article.
It’s funny…I feel like the events of the last few years have actually driven me away from religion. Every day I can see more clearly how it’s mostly just a tool for controlling people.
Comment by jim marquis — April 30, 2005 @ 9:51 am
Thanks for posting from the Gore piece, I’ve seen other people linking to it but I haven’t had the patience to sit through the Salon show to read it.
I really think the left at some point is going to have to sever the right from their claim to own Christianity. Carving out a couple of select quotes from a very contradictory book then using them as a political cattle prod does not a religion make.
Just stopped by to say hi, I like your blog a lot and link to it on mine.
Jane
Comment by firedoglake — April 30, 2005 @ 4:29 pm
Religious voters, if you’ll remember, used to be Democrats, because they were the party of “help your fellow man” and urged on welfare and other social programs.
So why does it seem like Republicans have heartily embraced the religious voters? Because they want to win. They understand that by addressing a few key social issues, coming out against sexual education, abortion and a few other pet causes, they can get large numbers of voters to agree with them on anything else. At the same time, Republicans who believe in the financial doctrine of the party keep voting for them because the religious stuff is secondary to actual policies.
The danger now is that, by pandering to a group that “evangelizes” their political beliefs, we’ll see the Democratic party try to capture the same lightning in a different bottle. And that would leave those of us who don’t want Government by God out in the cold.
Comment by Dr. Pants — May 2, 2005 @ 8:52 am
If God had wanted them to know what was in the Bible, he would have put it on TV. Books are so European.
Comment by Kip W — May 2, 2005 @ 3:24 pm
Funny, you know all those things that you folks list as the benefits of the Enlightenment in America…I wonder how many people in America have actually experienced those benefits.
“The American Revolution was a triple triumph — for political democracy, religious tolerance, and for the free inquiry demanded by the scientific method.”
Political democracy which was shortly co-opted by political machines, religious tolerance which applied to mainstream Protestant denominations, and the scientific method for the elites who, throughout most of our nation’s history, were the only ones to have any sort of education not to say the type of education that would even make the application of the scientific method a realistic possibility.
And the idea that quoting Mr. James Madison makes everything better is just farcicial, Mr. Gore. Why not quote John Locke or Hobbes or, failing that, someone else from the 18th century on political democracy…or at least a political philosopher, which Madison was not.
He was a politician who was well read.
I’m sorry, this whole Enlightenment in America business is a conveniant fantasy for those who already have privilege. I’d wager anything that most of the unwashed masses couldn’t give a damn—and I’m saying this as a person of the Left.
Comment by Summerisle — May 2, 2005 @ 7:13 pm
Well, Madison did co-write the Federalist papers, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Sure, we was “well read”, but he wrote some pretty good stuff too. Since Gore was talking about the American revolution, it makes sense to quote the man who’s generally regarded to be “the father of the constitution”.
Comment by greg — May 2, 2005 @ 9:45 pm