Religious Right Watch

Grandeur beyond what holy books' authors knew

(Photo: The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies; credit: Jim Misti, Misti Mountain Observatory. "Each of the fuzzy blobs in the above picture is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster.... It takes light roughly 300 million years to get here from this region of the Universe, so we see this cluster as it existed before the age of the dinosaurs.")

The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how may stars that means…It’s something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.

- Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience. The Penguin Press, 2006, p.27. (The author's 1985 Gifford lectures.)

ReligiousRightWatch on YouTube

ReligiousRightWatch is now on YouTube with Playlists including clips featuring Michelle Goldberg, Ken Miller (against Intelligent Design), Tony Campolo, the influence of Christian Reconstructionism on US policis (as of 2004), Chris Hedges, and more.

Tony Campolo's take

For an evangelical, Tony Campolo articulates a less-than-typically-conservative perspective about issues with moral and political dimensions, such as global poverty. He represents a bi-partisan (not de facto anti-Democrat) evangelical perspective. "Overcome evil with good deeds."

The rigorously secular state: a surer source of national unity, the wisest common value

The freedom of religion is not our national glue.

The freedom of religion allows citizens of different and even opposing religious beliefs to practice what they will; but it doesn't bind the republic together. It gives freedom to disparate groups to follow their religious convictions, or to at least hand-in-hand with the freedom of speech to speak their religious convictions--even Dominionist ones; but, if we are honest, it doesn't unify the nation.

What can unify? What should be our national glue?

I think it is the concept of secular government that binds us, or should. To mix metaphors, secular government is the umbrella or over-arching concept above important rights such as the freedom of religion, and above differing religions among Americas...or for that matter above differing races of Americans, differing immigrant strains among us, differing generations among our citizenry, and differing socio-economic tiers. I don't believe allowing for the free practice of religion really does much binding of any kind except within each respective religious group.

An example, perhaps not a good one: if one is an atheist American, it is not the freedom of religion that binds you to, say, a moderate Protestant Christian...it is more likely to be a shared desire for a secular government that can, say, protect your freedom to worship or not as you choose. The same can be said for a conservative Southern Baptist and a Hindu, or any two Americans relative to faith: it is not that each American has the freedom to practice his or her faith that actually binds him or her together with another American of a different faith or no faith. The common ground for both of them to stand on is more likely to be--and should be--secular, Enlightenment-influenced representative democracy: the mechanisms that keep the civic square civil and open to all. I guess the tension arises when a group's religious beliefs--like those of the Dominionists--call for what is in effect the dismantling of that very same secularism so under-valued these days, and so important to the proper working of our republic.

Department of Defense & crypto-proselytization crusade among our troops

A proselytization crusade by conservative evangelicals using, in part, the distribution of an eliminationist video game to our troops in Iraq is being supported by the Department of Defense. The game, "Left Behind," as Orcinus summarized, rewards players "for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian."

A tale of two "secular Republicans" - Were both burned?

Lou Dubose's "The collapse of Karl Rove" on Salon.com is informative. He opens with an anti-Bush lament from a "secular Republican" he knows.

Secular Republican. The term is extremely rare. But now it emerges baldly. Yes, Virginia, there are secular Republicans. But they must be qualified as such, and that was not always the case. Among secular Republicans there is great diversity, of course; as there is among religious Republicans. But secular versus religious may be the new GOP dividing line. Dubose seems to think so.

Collectively, secular Republicans have for nearly 20 years been a minority partner in the shadow of the religious conservatives--conservative evangelical Protestants, conservative Roman Catholics, and conservative Mormons--who loom larger. (Dubose at one point refers to them as "social conservatives," but for most of them the greatest foundation of their social conservatism is religion-informed or religion-based bigotry or superstition.)

Lou Dubose, like many commentators, credits Karl Rove, President Bush's soon-to-resign political adviser and himself essentially a secular Republican, as a principle architect of this confederacy. Rove's plan for the GOP called for courting religious conservative voters. Rove saw that the religious vote was taking over the GOP in many states anyway--including his own Texas. He didn't merely play along; in time, he actually found the conservative religious Republicans their candidate: George W. Bush.

But as Dubose's unnamed friend demonstrates, not all secular Republicans went along willingly with this confederacy. (But went along they did, as Republicans do well.) Some of them have been holding their noses since at least the early 1990s'.

Dubose suggests that 1994 was the tipping-point:

In Texas, we saw this modern iteration of the Republican Party come together in the summer or 1994, as Bush kicked off his first successful run for public office.... Social conservatives had already joined together with economic conservatives when Ronald Reagan got into bed with the Rev. Jerry Falwell. But it was Rove who consecrated the union.
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[T]he Christian right showed up at the Republicans' state convention in Fort Worth, in 1994, with enough delegates to seize control of the party. The dominant Christian faction tossed George H.W. Bush's handpicked state chairman and longtime friend, Fred Meyer, out of office and replaced him with a charismatic Catholic lawyer from Dallas. It banned liquor from convention hotels and replaced hospitality-room bars with "ice cream sundae bars".... It summoned delegates to Grand Old Prayer Sessions, required Christian fealty oaths of candidates for party leadership, and made opposition to abortion the brand by which Texas Republicans would be defined.

The secular Republicans who welcomed their religious fellow partisans and the secular Republicans who (mostly secretly) did not probably both got burned in the process. The Religious Right's battle to takeover American culture and government through electoral and party politics has, for now it appears, left the GOP unsteady in the face of a relatively resurgent Democratic Party itself dragged kicking and screaming into action by a grassroots outraged by what the Religious Right's own George W. Bush had done to the health and standing of the republic since the Supreme Court gave him the presidency in 2000.

Dubose is much too quick to spell the end of the secular-religious co-existence within the GOP. The Religious Right has many means by which it asserts influence, and its rank and file can be outraged into action far more easily than can some Democratic constituencies. The Religious Right doesn't need Karl Rove as a broker--albeit a very cynical one--in the White House in order to spread lies (new ones all of the time), take over school boards, launch state-wide ballot initiatives, target friends of civil, publish best-selling books about American exclusivity or the "End Times," yammer away on talk radio, handout voter guides in tax-exempt churches, and wrap such efforts in the American flag. Thus they retain their influence, and remain a potent political power with evolving tactics. They will remain relevant to the Republican Party leadership for years to come.

From deism to Laplace's remark: the unnecessary God hypothesis

(Image of Joseph Wright's Le Philosophe faisant un exposé sur le planétaire, 1766. Click to enlarge.)

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory.
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[T]here would be no...churches...if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable. And also if humanity had not been compelled, on pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion.
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Before Charles Darwin revolutionized our entire concept of our origins, and Albert Einstein did the same for the beginnings of our cosmos, many scientists and philosophers and mathematicians took what might be called the default position and professed one or another version of "deism," which held that the order and predictability of the universe seemed indeed to imply a designer, if not necessarily a designer who took any active part in human affairs. This compromise was a logical and rational one for its time, and was especially influential among the Philadelphia and Virginia intellectuals, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson....
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[Pierre-Simon de] Laplace (1749-1827)...the brilliant French scientist...took the work of [Isaac] Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving systematically in a vacuum.... [Napoleon Bonaparte] asked to meet Laplace.... [H]e wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the...response, "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.".... [Laplace] simply stated that he didn't need it.

And neither do we.... [T]he end of god-worship discloses itself at the moment...when it becomes optional, or only one among many possible beliefs. For the greater part of human existence, it must always be stressed, this "option" did not really exist.... [F]rom the time of Socrates, who was condemned to death for spreading unwholesome skepticism, it was considered ill-advised to emulate his example.... The pathetic vestiges of this can still be seen, in modern societies, in the efforts made by religion to secure control over education, or to exempt itself from tax, or to pass laws forbidding people to insult its omnipotent and omniscient deity, or even his prophet.

- Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great, Twelve, 1st ed, p 66-67

No chaplains, please.

Have you heard about the kerfuffle over a Hindu praying before Congress? Some conservatives are upset, as this conservative news site will tell you.

The United States Congress should have no chaplaincy. The republic as our Founders intended was to be as secular as practicable.

James Madison wrote in "Detached Memoranda" that: "The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles." This quote can be read in context here.

Huckabee leverages Christian home-schoolers; and my own straw poll experience 20 years ago

From Salon.com regarding the stronger-than-expected showing of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in Iowa's straw poll this weekend:

Huckabee...had no buses, no broadcast advertising and 1,850 tickets.
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But when the votes were all counted at 8:30 [p.m.], Huckabee beat the odds, surprising the other campaigns and many in the political press corps. "Holy shit," exclaimed one reporter when the results were read -- Romney, 4,516 votes; Huckabee, 2,587 votes; Brownback, 2,192 votes; and Tancredo, 1,961 votes.
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If he does get traction in the form of campaign checks, Huckabee is likely to position himself as a candidate who can unite the country, even though he takes more conservative positions than the leading Republican candidates. An ordained Baptist minister, he is vocal about his religious beliefs, unassailably pro-life, a skeptic of evolution and an opponent of gay marriage. He was helped at the straw poll by supporters of Christian home-schooling, and the poll results may mean that Huckabee, at least on Saturday, won the duel with Brownback for evangelical voters, who will loom large in the upcoming caucus.

I attended the Iowa GOP straw poll in 1987. I think I voted for Vice-President George H. W. Bush, but I might have voted for Rep. Jack Kemp. I vaguely recall paper ballots were distributed by hand, I think passed down each row, inside the arena in Ames, even to us high up in the nose-bleed section: me and my generous patron of the day, Oliver (a local Iowa county GOP organizer), and his wife. My family attended the same small conservative evangelical church that Oliver did. Our pastor was a country coordinator for Jack Kemp. But, apparently Oliver was also somewhat old-school GOP. He was backing Bush, even as most evangelicals were backing Pat Robertson.

I assume my vote was counted. I was only 16, but I was handed a ballot, and I voted. I'm told that nowadays participants at least have to show an ID revealing date of birth and Iowa residency.

I remember the Pete du Pont supporters were wearing buttons that said, "Don't vote for a 'From Runner,'" which they invariably had to explain meant "somebody who runs from the issues." This apparently meant someone other than du Pont, who, apparently, one should vote for instead. Even at 16, I thought this was a colossally stupid political button. Of course, by then I think Vice-President George Bush had already referred to du Pont as "Pierre" in a debate and effectively destroyed him.

I remember eating popcorn in Bush's tent, and meeting Barbara, shaking her hand, getting my picture taken with her. As many a biographer has pointed out, she is a formidable woman. I look at the photo now: I am amazingly young and utterly ecstatic. She looks hearty--the thyroid condition had not set in--pleased, matronly without being stodgy, and even a tad short: like the disappointing statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the FDR Memorial, which looks like a mixture of Eleanor, Barbara Bush, Dr. Ruth, and Frances Bavier--Andy Griffith's Aunt 'Bee.' (The statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, by Penelope Jencks, in Riverside Drive at West 72nd Street is a more fitting homage.)

Thanks to NPR online, we can know what happened that day in '87:

...Vice President George Bush was viewed as the front-runner. He had all the money and the key Iowa endorsements. Sen. Bob Dole, from neighboring Kansas, was hoping that his Midwest connections would help his cause. No one foresaw the victory of Pat Robertson, the televangelist. Robertson, who had already done surprisingly well in the early skirmishes in Michigan, won the straw poll with 1,293 votes, compared to 958 for Dole. Bush finished third, with 864 votes, followed by Rep. Jack Kemp of New York (520), ex-Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont (160), and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig (12). Iowa Republican officials were stunned, saying that the people who showed up for Robertson were completely new to the political process.

Surely this is the first time Mike Huckabee and Eleanor Roosevelt have appeared together in prose.

- IseFire

Clergy Against Hate

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Get the facts about The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (S. 1105).

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