[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: The Faith Factor

Wed Nov 17 23:11:22 PST 2004

>
>The Faith Factor
>
>by BARBARA EHRENREICH
>
>The Nation
>[from the November 29, 2004 issue]
>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=ehrenreich
>
>Charlottesville, Virginia
>
>Of all the loathsome spectacles we've endured since
>November 2--the vampire-like gloating of CNN
>commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his
>"mandate"--none are more repulsive than that of
>Democrats conceding the "moral values" edge to the
>party that brought us Abu Ghraib. The cries for
>Democrats to overcome their "out-of-touch-ness" and
>embrace the predominant faith all dodge the full horror
>of the situation: A criminal has been enabled to
>continue his bloody work with the help, in no small
>part, of self-identified Christians.
>
>With their craven, breast-beating response to Bush's
>electoral triumph, leading Democrats only demonstrate
>how out of touch they really are with the religious
>transformation of America. Where secular-type liberals
>and centrists go wrong is in categorizing religion as a
>form of "irrationality," akin to spirituality, sports
>mania and emotion generally. They fail to see that the
>current "Christianization" of red-state America bears
>no resemblance to the Great Revival of the early
>nineteenth century, an ecstatic movement that filled
>the fields of Virginia with the rolling, shrieking and
>jerking bodies of the revived. In contrast, today's
>right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly
>Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in tongues,
>if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized
>and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have
>to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal
>salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have
>become an alternative welfare state, whose support
>rests not only on "faith" but also on the loyalty of
>the grateful recipients.
>
>Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for
>example, and you'll find the McLean Bible Church,
>spiritual home of Senator James Inhofe and other
>prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday
>night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-
>priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed
>people meet for prayer and job tips at the "Career
>Ministry"; divorced and abused women gather in support
>groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free
>clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an
>inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in DC and
>operates a "special needs" ministry for disabled
>children.
>
>MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could
>serve a medium-sized airport, but many smaller
>evangelical churches offer a similar array of
>services--childcare, after-school programs, ESL
>lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the
>occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis
>gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of
>destitution: "First, you find a church." A trailer-park
>dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to
>his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking
>problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due?
>Find a church. The closest analogy to America's
>bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which
>draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own
>miniature welfare state.
>
>Nor is the local business elite neglected by the
>evangelicals. Throughout the red states--and
>increasingly the blue ones too--evangelical churches
>are vital centers of "networking," where the carwash
>owner can schmooze with the bank's loan officer. Some
>churches offer regular Christian businessmen's
>"fellowship lunches," where religious testimonies are
>given and business cards traded, along with jokes aimed
>at Democrats and gays.
>
>Mainstream, even liberal, churches also provide a range
>of services, from soup kitchens to support groups. What
>makes the typical evangelicals' social welfare efforts
>sinister is their implicit--and sometimes not so
>implicit--linkage to a program for the destruction of
>public and secular services. This year the connecting
>code words were "abortion" and "gay marriage": To vote
>for the candidate who opposed these supposed moral
>atrocities, as the Christian Coalition and so many
>churches strongly advised, was to vote against public
>housing subsidies, childcare and expanded public forms
>of health insurance. While Hamas operates in a
>nonexistent welfare state, the Christian right advances
>by attacking the existing one.
>
>Of course, Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy
>only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy.
>Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches
>offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social
>services; not only do they attack candidates who favor
>expanded public services--but they stand to gain public
>money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive
>feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral
>dimension of American life, that the Democrats have
>failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based
>welfare system is being fed by the deliberate
>destruction of the secular welfare state.
>
>In the aftermath of election '04, centrist Democrats
>should not be flirting with faith but re-examining
>their affinity for candidates too mumble-mouthed and
>compromised to articulate poverty and war as the urgent
>moral issues they are. Jesus is on our side here, and
>secular liberals should not be afraid to invoke him.
>Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward
>redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo-
>Christian ethic, which is for the most part silent, or
>mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion. At the very
>least, we need a firm commitment to public forms of
>childcare, healthcare, housing and education--for
>people of all faiths and no faith at all. Secondly,
>progressives should perhaps rethink their own disdain
>for service-based outreach programs. Once it was the
>left that provided "alternative services" in the form
>of free clinics, women's health centers, food co-ops
>and inner-city multi-service storefronts. Enterprises
>like these are not substitutes for an adequate public
>welfare state, but they can become the springboards
>from which to demand one.
>
>One last lesson from the Christians--the ancient,
>original ones, that is. Theirs is the story of how a
>steadfast and heroic moral minority undermined the
>world's greatest empire and eventually came to power.
>Faced with relentless and spectacular forms of
>repression, they kept on meeting over their potluck
>dinners (the origins of later communion rituals),
>proselytizing and bearing witness wherever they could.
>For the next four years and well beyond, liberals and
>progressives will need to emulate these original
>Christians, who stood against imperial Rome with their
>bodies, their hearts and their souls.
>
>_______________________________________________________
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand