Faith in the Common Good

Recently “socialism” has become a principal pejorative in political rhetoric. The label is applied to anything and everything that smacks of affecting, usually to their benefit, the majority of the population. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), so-called Obamacare, has been labeled as “socialist” in the same sense that Social Security was so labeled by its critics when it was created in 1935, during the Great Depression. One might be excused for confusing the “social” in Social Security with “socialism” were it not for the fact that such confusion, particularly now, is political rather than definitional. In the eyes of Obamacare’s critics, socialism equals bad, therefore any program that can be painted with the brush of socialism can be characterized as bad for the nation. This is patent nonsense, of course. But it sells well in some sectors.

Social Security was created at a time when more than half of all senior citizens lived in poverty. PPACA has been enacted—and upheld by the Supreme Court—at a time when more than 50 million Americans are without health insurance, which in this country amounts to being shut out from adequate health care. More than 60 percent of the uninsured live in households earning less than $50,000 a year. Children living in poverty are more likely to be uninsured than others. Indeed, the lower one’s income, the less likely one is to have health insurance or adequate health care. This situation might be excused in a developing nation but is unacceptable in one that claims to be the world’s leading democracy and is the world’s wealthiest nation.

Socialism is an economic system wherein means of production are owned by the society, the government in the case of state socialism, which is what most politicos who use “socialism” as a pejorative mean. To conflate “socialism” and the “common good,” which is a tenet of American democracy, is disingenuous at the very least. One is reminded of something Hubert Humphrey said, “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” The idea of our nation being founded on the belief that democracy provides the best possible hope for the common good is imbedded in the first sentence of the Constitution, in the phrase “promote the general Welfare.” The common good is fundamental to our “more perfect Union.”

Faith in the common good also is a tenet of Christian belief, though the Christianists on the far right seem to disavow it. For those crying “socialism” of a religious bent, it might be piquant to quote Woodrow Wilson, himself highly religious, a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister: “There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.” I also like Rev. Matthew Dutton-Gillett’s take on the notion. In a commentary dated February 19, 2010, on the blog, Below the Surface (subtitled A Conversation Between a Priest and a People about Life in Christian Community), Dutton-Gillett of Trinity Episcopal Church in Menlo Park, California, writes:

All that stuff about loving your neighbor as yourself, taking care of the poor, giving people who asked you for your coat more of your clothing than they had asked for, the suggestion that we should sell what we have and give it to the poor, the parable about the rich man and Lazarus the beggar—these are all teachings about redistributing one’s own wealth so that the more vulnerable in society would be protected and provided for. It seems clear to me that if we were to classify Jesus’ views according to today’s political definitions, he would probably fit into the category of “socialist” more easily than any other.

Faith in the common good seemed evident when Mitt Romney, as governor, signed the Massachusetts healthcare insurance reform law (referred to as Romneycare) in 2006. The law mandates that state residents obtain government-regulated minimum health insurance coverage and provides free health insurance for residents earning less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Now, ironically, as the Republican presidential candidate, Romney must—in order to align with the “socialism”-shouters in his party’s rightwing base—argue against the common good, against the very law he championed that is mirrored in Obamacare.

Faith in the common good—for the good of us all and for the good of American democracy writ large—ought to be unwavering. When it is smeared by epithet and battered by the hot winds of political expedience, we should be wary of those doing the smearing and blowing the hot air.

Falsifying Faith

Galileo Galillei once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” The Italian physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who shook his head in dismay in the seventeenth century at the Catholic Church’s opposition to heliocentrism—the scientific discovery that placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of our solar system—would be equally dismayed and bewildered today by the coopting of Christian faith by persons and parties determined to enshrine their ideologies as “true religion” and thereby to subvert democratic governance.

The discussion that follows here will be as heretical to these interests, which I cluster under the rubric of “Christianist,” as Galileo’s advocacy of heliocentrism was to the dogma of seventeenth-century Catholicism. A definition is necessary. “Christianist” must be understood as distinct from “Christian.” Time magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan (2006) made this distinction: 

Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque.

Christianism falsifies faith through ideological alignment, which is almost universally negative in character—excluding rather than including. Ideological alignment involves a calculated cherry-picking of faith documents, such as the Bible. For example, to justify homophobia and thereby a plethora of antigay civil rights actions, from DOMA to state constitutional amendments that enshrine homophobic prejudice, ideologues often cite the Bible. Leviticus 18:22 is popular; it can be translated, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable” (New International Version). While they adopt this passage (through a willful misreading) as justification for homophobia, these same ideologues completely ignore other literal admonitions in Leviticus, such as:

19:26. “Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it.” 

19:27. “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.” 

19:28. “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.” 

19:31.  “Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them.” 

19:33. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.”

So, if taken literally, the Bible would admonish true believers to avoid rare steaks, haircuts and shaves, tattoos, and spiritualists (presumably of the ilk routinely consulted by Nancy Reagan during her husband’s presidency). And what about all those anti-immigration laws that ill treat foreigners residing among us? But, of course, these strictures do not accord with Christianist ideology, and so they are ignored—faith falsified to serve political ends.

It is no great leap from falsification of one’s central religious documents to the falsification of other historic documents, such as the Constitution, which, if read honestly, contravenes the secular ideology that accompanies Christianism. The founding documents of American democracy provide numerous examples of ignorant, willfully ignorant, or malignly ignorant reading to suit ideological ends. The furor over Second Amendment rights is an example.

The amendment to the Constitution, as ratified by the states, reads:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The amendment speaks to weapons in the context of an organized defensive military cohort. It was never intended, nor can it be legitimately construed, to provide justification for maintaining a personal arsenal, as indeed rightwing ideologues, including several Supreme Court justices, have averred. Thus faith in the founding documents also has been ideologically falsified to suit political ends.

Neither Christianity nor our American system of governance—if democracy is to be preserved—are well served by ideological falsification of faith, whether religious or secular. The essential understanding that this is the path on which the Radical Right is determined to set the United States is not yet pervasive enough in our society to provoke a necessary counter-movement to prevent the loss of freedom and democracy as we know them.

__________ 

Sullivan, A. (2006, May 7). My problem with Christianity. Time. http://www.time.com/time. Accessed April 8, 2011.

Right Faith, Wrong Religion

With the demise of Rick Santorum’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the focus has shifted to Mitt Romney. In Romney the Republican faithful are challenged. As is well known, the candidate is Mormon. For the religious rightwing of the party this is almost as bad as being Muslim, something the most ardent radicals accuse Barack Obama of being, despite solid evidence to the contrary.

The Latter Day Saint movement (Mormonism) was founded by an American, Joseph Smith, in the 1820s and has been characterized as a form of Christian primitivism. Bruce McConkie, a general authority of the LDS Church, has said that “Mormonism is indistinguishable from Christianity.” However, it was not a mainstream Protestant movement from the beginning. The magical discovery of new biblical texts, such as the Book of Mormon, and early practice of polygamy set it apart from mainline Christian orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant. In fact, Mormonism usually is seen as a type of cult by Christian traditionalists (such as the fundamentalists who largely populate the Republican right).

Mormons are lumped into a kind of limbo reminiscent of Dante—literally on the edge of Hell. Consequently, the far-right faithful see themselves as damned if they do support Romney—right faith, wrong religion—and damned if they don’t, because that will give the election away to Obama.

If we think of faith as a general belief orientation—one of many possible definitions—and regard religion as a specific expression of faith, then all American presidents have identified with the Christian faith. Even those who haven’t been affiliated with a specific religious denomination have held beliefs that were Christian in orientation. For example, among those without specific affiliation, Thomas Jefferson was raised Anglican but his mature beliefs were closer to Unitarian, though he died shortly before the establishment of institutionalized Unitarianism. Abraham Lincoln likely was a Deist, neither particularly Christian nor non-Christian, though he occasionally attended Presbyterian services and often read the Bible and quoted from it. Barack Obama is currently unaffiliated, following his resignation from Trinity United Church of Christ over the Jeremiah Wright controversy, but he was previously affiliated with the UCC for more than twenty years.

Twelve U.S. presidents have been Episcopalian, the most populous religious category. They’ve ranged from George Washington to George W. Bush (though he converted to Methodism later in life). John F. Kennedy, famously, was the only Catholic. Most have adhered to some form of Protestantism.

Ardent religionists cherry-pick the Bible, selecting and interpreting its passages to suit their personal or political ideologies. Politicians do the same with the Constitution. Those who have read the U.S. Constitution will have noted the passage saying that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The wisdom of this ideal is self-evident, as is the wisdom of separating church and state so that our democratic governance is not parochialized. But actualization of any ideal is never easy. Too many biases, preconceptions, egos, and ideologies are at stake.

Will we ever have another Catholic president? A Jew? A Muslim? Or perhaps even a Mormon?