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02/11/2005: ""
As if stealing the Republicans' clothes on economic issues wasn't bad enough, it now looks as though the Democrats are trying for a spot of triangulation on Gaaawd too. Don't do it, guys! If you won't listen to me, then the ever-excellent Katha Pollitt will tell you fer why.
Replies: 2 Comments
Speaking as a Christian it seems to me that the best reason for leaving religion out of party politics is that a Christian is pretty well committed to the argument that only one vote actually counts. If only we knew which way God planned to cast it, life would be easier.
Of course, unless we're arrogant enough to believe we know what God thinks, we have to come up with a second best, which is usually some sort of democracy on the grounds that basically nice people will make the right choice more often than not. The history of papal elections suggests that there may be a wee flaw in this argument. If cardinals who expressly ask for the Holy Spirit to guide their choice don't produce a near-unanimous result, what chance have the rest of us got?
Graham Brack said @ 02/16/2005 06:05 PM GMT
Although a 'devout atheist' myself, I don't really object to religion being brought into politics, if it's done in an overt, serious manner. Indeed, I'm concerned when someone like Ruth Kelly claims she can entirely divorce (wrong verb, surely, but you get my meaning) her religious views from her political duties. What are we to take from this? That she regards her role as a Cabinet Minister as having nothing much to do with her personal ethics? Or ethics at all?
(Or is it simply the case that our Cabinet is really now so Presidential that the personal views of individual ministers have no bearing on policy?)
No, my objection is to the form that religion has adopted in US politics. In the first half of the 20th Century, it was quite conceivable for even quite fundamentalist Christian politicians to be concerned primarily with issues of social justice & fairness; William Jennings Bryan, for instance, was a fire-breathing creationist, but also so redistributist as to practically merit the epithet (whisper it) socialist.
Similarly, the Labour tradition in the UK is replete with men (& women) of God: from RH Tawney to Roy Hattersley, religion has been no obstacle to progressive politics. If anything, for these people, quite the contrary.
No, my niggle is with the particular manifestation of religion that we now see in US politics. As Peter Singer says in The President of Good and Evil, the religiosity of George Dubya is - as far as we can tell - of the unquestioning, ultra-literalist, over-confident kind that speaks, worrying, of an unquestioning, ultra-literalist, over-confident approach to ethics in general. If, as Singer rhetorically asks, the guy doesn't see the need to ask searching questions of his own creed, is it any wonder he equally sees no need in relation to his policy decisions?
My other concern relates to the fact that the presence of a 'Christian' political agenda has, in recent times, been largely synonymous with a conservative social one. And that's true here as well as there. When is the last time we saw Cardinal O'Brien speak out on child poverty, or the obscene remuneration of our executive classes? Rather, in the language of our religious 'officer classes', 'morality' really means 'sexual morality' - all this despite the fact that, from my long-distant Biblical readings, I seem to remember that nice Christ chap having a lot more to say about wealth & poverty than about sex education or civil unions for gay couples.
CJG said @ 02/17/2005 09:40 AM GMT
