Jennifer Moses at WaPo tries to make sense of the role of religion in contemporary political life. Based on this piece, she has a few hopelessly cliched and wrongheaded ideas about religion (e.g., "religion incites violence," which is true, but no more so than property rights), but as a secularist Jew living (happily, it would appear) in Louisiana, she has a few decent insights:
If one common mistake liberals make is assuming that the great majority of Bible-thumping (or tapping) comes from the right, a second -- and to my mind, more important -- mistake is equating this style of religiosity with something as simple as narrow-minded ignorance. Rather, bringing God and his word as expressed in the Bible into the debate points to a profound lack of meaning and vision in our public discourse, and a searing pessimism that anyone, or any institution, in public life might put things right. It points, also, to disgust: disgust not only with our elected leaders but also with the cheapening of life around us, whether by blatant sexuality on television, soaring drug abuse, the acceptance of out-of-wedlock birth or the loss of the communal ties that once grounded us.
As far as I can tell, progressives and liberals of all stripes don't even begin to fathom the despair and confusion most ordinary Americans feel when they hear the latest violent rap song or see a billboard plastered with an image of a 16-year-old clad only in Calvin Klein underwear. The right wing of the Republican Party, on the other hand, has long understood that most Americans yearn for something nobler in our national life, but it doesn't care unless it can use frustration and despair to harvest rage, and rage to harvest votes.
I tend to agree with her statement that "bringing God and his word as expressed in the Bible into the debate points to a profound lack of meaning and vision in our public discourse." I'm sorry if that shocks you, but there's a difference between quietly letting God and His Word inform your world view and using the Word to konk your political foe on the head. The latter is not only obnoxious, but it's also a short-cut: Instead of reasoning up to the divine truths (often with help of scripture) and then bringing the truths back down into the political sphere with reason, too many just resort to a Bible passage or two and say the matter is settled. That's no way to win over enemies or convince the uncertain.
G.K. Chesterton's words come to mind: "It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not his own."
