The Left Mark

There's a New Reverend Al in Town

I know that I've been extremely delinquent in my posting recently and I'm sorry about that -- I've been quite busy with work.    However, I thought that readers who have enjoyed (or hated) my musings over the years on religion in politics, religion in my life, and religion in general, might get a kick out of this clipping from The Oregonian earlier this year.

Congrats to Dan and Jenna.    They're great friends, and being a part of their wedding was one of the best days of my life....and certainly something that I never thought I'd ever experience.

The Omnipresence of God

It's been a long time since I last posted on my blog, and I have to admit that I've missed it a great deal.     So, what better topic to bring me out of my blogging hibernation than my continued fascination with religion.    I know that this is a touchy subject, and I want to be clear that in writing this post I am in no way trying to "win people to my side" or propound on why I am right and others are wrong.   To the contrary, my previous posts on religion started some of the best dialouge that this little blog has seen, so let's see if we can't repeat some of that success.

I Realize God is Omnipresent - But Does He have to be in Every Story?
As the Great Backlash continues to march onward, gaining strength with every day despite that fact that there appears to be nothing left to backlash against, it seems that we are finally reaching a point where a majority of issues are viewed through the lens of religious faith.   Perhaps this feeling is influenced by the fact that it's hard to find a news story these days that isn't about Terri Schiavo, but I don't think it is.    Books like God's Politics are near the top of the non-fiction bestseller list, and Tim Lehaye's Left Behind series has now sold something like 50 million + copies (presumably these count in the fiction column).    Moral Values were supposedly key to Bush's re-election (I actually think this "Moral Values" catch all was more indicative of the fact that people didn't/don't believe Kerry had ANY values, than showing some countrywide shift towards evangelical belief, but that goes against the thread of this post, so I'll leave it alone).    Whether or not Creationism should be part of the US public school curricula seems to get more attention than how to fix the current shortcomings of an eduction system that has US high school students consistently testing in the 3rd decile worldwide in math and science.   Medical progress seems tied to stem cell debate.    Environmental policy is purportedly influenced by politicians' interpretations of biblical passages about Man's dominion over the Earch (Bill Moyers recently wrote a fascinating review for the New York Times Review of Books on this subject).    Some argue that Foreign policy is influenced by the "need" to have Jews reclaim the entire original Kingdom of David before the return of Christ, and on....and on....and on.

Watching all of this transpire in the media at the headline level, I find myself wondering if it has always been this way.   If so, then it would seem that our country has been built with the perfect equilibrium of faith and science, belief and curiousity.    If not, then I wonder where we are heading with this newfound desire to incorporate faith into every aspect of pubic life.

Religion in the US Government
It wasn't always this way.    Brooke Allen wrote a piece (it's an amazing article and well worth a read for anyone interested in this subject) earlier this year in The Nation about the role of God with our founding fathers.     In it, he starts by asserting that, contrary to what George W. Bush and Tom Delay would tell you:

Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enllightenment ones.    God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspiciously absent.   The omission was too obvious to have been anytime but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot."   But as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954.

As someone clearly out of the mainstream on this one, I have to accept the possibility that I am woefully wrong on this issue.  And, as I recently discussed with my friend Brian, I may be heading towards a really miserable 10 years starting the day I get on the subway and there's nothing there but me and a bunch of clothes people have "left behind".    However, I have to say that I hope I'm at least partially right and that people will begin to get back to keeping their beliefs to themselves before this gets too out of hand.    Perhaps Ben Franklin said it best when asked about his own belief system a few weeks before he died:

Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure.

For safety sake, however, it's also worth noting another of Ben Franklin's quotes on the matter:

A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.

Putting Terrorism in Context

As is now clear from the tone of both conventions, the 527 sponsored ads that have been most effective, and the current media focus, the election dialogue is going to be dominated by "the war on terror". The degree to which this is the case, took another unsurprising turn today as Vice President Cheney stated that the country would risk another terror attack if it made the wrong choice in November. His exact quote was as follows:

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice," Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, "because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

That's right, according to the Vice President of the United States, a vote for Kerry is a vote for more terrorist attacks. This is a somewhat shocking thing to say in its own right, regardless of its legitimacy. However, I personally think it's more shocking when considered against a backdrop of current polling and known threat regions. Almost everyone would agree that the major threats to the United States are focused on the cities of New York, Washington, Chicago, LA and San Francisco, and the landmarks within those cities. Interestingly, all of these places will seemingly vote for Kerry in a landslide this fall. On the flip side, I think that few would argue that Billings, Montana or El Paso, Texas is legitimately threatened by terrorism. So what we have here is a situation where those who are living, working and sleeping on the defensive frontline of the "War on Terror" are voting for a very different prescription for safety than those who are cheering patriotically from the sidelines. I think that this point is particularly interesting when considered in light of the Vice President's most recent campaign comments.

Alan Krueger (the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton University) and David Laitin (the Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University) recently wrote an article for Foreign Affairs called "Misunderestimating Terrorism". I found a particular passage in this article to be very eye opening from the perspective of putting terrorism in context:

"The State Department has rightly emphasized that the threat of terrorism remains serious, but a close examination of its data helps put the magnitude of the threat in perspective. In 2003, a total of 625 people -- including 35 Americans -- were killed in international terrorist incidents worldwide. Meanwhile, 43,220 died in automobile accidents in the United States alone, and three million people died from AIDS around the world. Comparative figures, particularly when combined with forecasts of future terrorism trends, can help focus debate on the real costs people are willing to bear -- in foregone civil liberties and treasure -- to reduce the risk posed by terrorism."

I believe that in order to beat Bush, Kerry and the Democrats need to figure out a way to put terrorism in context for the rural American public. Krueger and Laitin's question hits the heart of the matter. At the end of the day, how much real cost are people going to be willing to bear for a threat that is likely to have a much smaller direct impact on them than rising health care costs, domestic job loss, an education system that is not preparing much of the public to compete in today's global economy, and the long-term economic burdens of an exploding national deficit.

* As a footnote, the article also pointed out what is factually known now, but still not widely talked about amongst the general public, that contrary to what the 2003 Global Terrorism report initially stated and what President Bush and Vice President Cheney have repeatedly said that a) we live in a safer world now, and b) terrorist activity has decreased as a result of the "war on terror", the actual data points the other way. The initially release report experienced some "database errors", which led to faulty data. In fact, their were 169 significant terrorist acts in 2003 worldwide. This was the highest count in 20 years, and a 29% increase over the average over the previous 5 years. Needless to say, the administration has pointed to this non-partisan report with a little less frequency since the data was corrected.

Is Religion All That Matters?

I was talking politics with a friend of mine last night, and in the midst of our conversation, I surprised myself by stating that Democrats were just secular Republicans. This is certainly a tremendous oversimplification, but more and more these days, it seems that religion (and its offshoot issues) is the single most important difference between Republicans and Democrats. Both camps are for some form of the Patriot Act. Both camps are for at least the idea of the war, if not its strategy and tone. Both camps are for some tax cuts. In fact, both camps sound somewhat similar before you get into the details.

Got Religion?
So what is the most important differentiator between Democrats and Republicans these days? It seems that the answer, amazingly, is how they view religion. Time Magazine wrote an interesting piece on this fact last week, in which it summarized that people who went to church more than once a week were more than twice as likely to vote for Bush than Kerry, while people who went to church less than once per month were even more in favor of Kerry. This is a startling fact, and the more you look at the data (click on the poll link in the article), the more obvious the relationship becomes.

God Plays for the Red Team
Perhaps the link is more indirect than implied above and actually has its roots in the issues on the table, which would imply that this seemingly direct link is actually a sort of political "Chopstick Gene" scenario - geneticists often point as an example to the idea that the gene for blue eyes actually controls the ability to use chopsticks, which is clearly a cultural issue wrongly attached to a genetic characteristic. But, if believing in God doesn't directly correlate with believing in Conservative values, and is in a sense more "accidental", what is the cause of the current link?

As a Democrat and someone interested in long-term strategies to strengthen the party, this seems to me to be at least A central question, if not THE central question for the decades ahead. How can a party that seems more rooted in rational, scientific thought bridge this gap and maintain appeal with the ranks of the increasingly faithful? Failing to ask and answer this question will leave Democrats increasingly vulnerable to strategies like Bush's current courting of the Baptist church as a sort of nationwide, uber-organized Meet-Up.

Where does the difference stem from?
The first step in creating the necessary strategy seems to be understanding the very roots of the human pre-disposition towards religious belief in general. This is an interesting article on why Religion comes natural to people, and I think it is helpful towards understanding the bigger picture. Carl Sagan also described a "belief gene" in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (which is really an amazing book and well worth a read). If a capacity for religious belief is a part of our genetic makeup, why is it that some people exhibit this tendency with so much more vigor than others and are these same people necessarily born Republicans? The natural tendency of many secular Democrats is to assume these people are simply dumber or lazier, and hence don't have the capacity or the interest in learning how/why things work the way they do. According to this argument, Religion is the great simplifier and acts as an eternal "no homework" pass. It would make sense to draw the parallel that the same type of person who would be drawn to religion for this reason would be the same type of person that is drawn to the simplicity of the Conservative message. It's your money, why should the government get any. Unfettered patriotism. Pure Ayn Randian capitalism. Small government. Strong Defense.

How Do Democrats Expand Their Appeal With This Group
However, its foolish to generalize like this and assume that this billing fits the entirety of the religious base. Quite the opposite is in fact true, and it's with these religious people that the opportunity for Democrats lies. There can be great complexity in faith and religion, just as there is great complexity in foreign and economic policy. Generalizations act as a platform for general understanding, and in basic comprehension lies genuine interest. This gets to the head of the issue - secular Democrats need to make a concerted effort to learn to better understand the faithful center and their interaction with religion, and simulataneously find better ways of articulating the very real complexity of the world around us. In helping to elevate the level of debate and subsequent understanding, Democrats will be able to cultivate interest in real, non "faith-based solutions" and will be better prepared to compete in an increasingly conservative world.