[Peace-discuss] The Faith Factor]

[Susan Parenti]

>
>> 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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