1."Christian Nation" Myth Is Gone. What Fills the Void?
President Barack Obama has made it perfectly clear: We're not a Christian nation. We're a nation made up of religious and not religious people with a secular government that respects all religions. But for a devotee of secular government, Obama appears to be giving a lot of weight to religious voices.
Of course we all know Obama rejects the Christian-right mythology that God ordained America as a Christian nation and that Christians are charged with taking dominion over its government, its culture, and the world. Good riddance. But in creating his own mythology -- that his White House is open to all faiths, all religions, and wants to hear from that ill-defined "people of faith" demographic -- Obama has created a new problem. When is it supposedly important for him to listen to religious voices while crafting policy, and when is it not? And how does he determine which religious voices deserve credence over others?
Most cynically, outreach to religious communities is seen as a crass electoral political strategy. Between election cycles, constituencies have input, policy gets made, and constituencies get satisfied -- or not. With religious constituencies, though, it's both more difficult to claim a commitment to a non-sectarian, secular government and to give more weight to some religious communities over others.
Barely four months into his presidency, a host of issues have come to the fore that shows the complexities of Obama's claim to listen to "people of faith" as a separate constituency. Stories in the news this week -- from proselytizing in the military to torture to the religious right's reaction to potential Supreme Court nominees -- demonstrate just how tricky navigating that territory can be.
2.Message to Obama: Fix the Military's Evangelism Culture. Now.
In this month's Harper's, Jeff Sharlet has written the definitive investigative piece on the rampant yet unaddressed problem of hyper-aggressive evangelism in the military. Read it, and you'll know what troops and military watchdogs have known for years: Our military's chaplaincy has been taken over by radical-right ideologues who marginalize service members who don't adhere to Christian-fundamentalist beliefs and who actively promote proselytizing of civilians around the world.
The evangelism and proselytism -- in contravention of the Constitution, military law, common decency, and yes, respect for "people of faith" -- has been in plain view for years. It's not a surprise that George W. Bush didn't lift a finger to fix it, but Obama also has yet to give signals about how he will deal with the problem.
A new Al Jazeera English piece plainly demonstrates the evangelical takeover of the military's chaplaincy: The Arabic news network's video shows military chaplains at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, urging enlisted men and women to "hunt people for Jesus." The "hunted" would be Afghan Muslims.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the Al Jazeera report.
Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), says, "There's nothing that appears there [in the video] that we don't have thousands of testimonies on." The MRFF has 12,000 clients, Weinstein says, 96 percent of whom are Christians, mostly mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. In the military, Weinstein says, "fundamentalist Christians are telling their fellow brothers that they're not Christian enough." (You can imagine how the atheists, who make up about 20 percent of our military, and Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Wiccans, and service-members of other religious faiths feel.) MRFF has filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon over such practices.
Sharlet interviewed "dozens of Mikey's clients: soldiers, sailors, and airmen who spoke of forced Christian prayer in Iraq and at home; combat deaths made occasions for evangelical sermons by senior officers; Christian apocalypse video games distributed to the troops; mandatory briefings on the correlation of the war to the Book of Revelation; exorcisms designed to drive out 'unclean spirits' from military property; beatings of atheist troops that are winked at by the chain of command."
Evangelism within the military is just part of the problem, of course. The other part is the proselytization of civilians. The Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress, Weinstein says, have done nothing to address either situation. The activities shown in the Al Jazeera segment, he says, violate Central Command's General Order 1-A, which prohibits proselytization in the Middle Eastern theater of operations.
Upon seeing the Al Jazeera video, Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, called for an initiation of grand jury investigations of the two chaplains shown. "Given clear video evidence," says Torpy in an e-mail, "this should lead to court martial." Torpy adds that inspector general personnel should be dispatched immediately to investigate violations at Bagram and that the Pentagon should issue a new policy specifically limiting Bibles for service members' personal use and prohibiting chaplains from storing more than are required for the service members on post.
"Here's what I'd say to Obama," says Weinstein, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. "In the end we remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends, and there comes a time when silence becomes betrayal. [Obama's] betraying us. … I don't know what else we can possibly be doing right now to encourage already pissed off and angry young Islamic men and women right now to join the jihadist, insurrectionist al-Qaeda and the Taliban. … We look just like the Crusaders."
3.Torture, the Bible, and the Golden Rule.
The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), a coalition of over 250 religious organizations opposed to torture, has called for a commission of inquiry into America's use of torture and, less forcefully, criminal investigations. Yet Obama, despite claiming to listen to "people of faith," seems "not too interested," says David Gushee, president of Evangelicals for Human Rights, which partners with NRCAT.
"It's abominable," Gushee adds. "It reflects real weakness in our body politic right now. I wish the president didn't feel constrained from exercising leadership here."
But Gushee, as an evangelical, is in the minority of his own religious tradition. A recent Pew Forum poll showed that the more "religious" one is (i.e., the more one goes to church), the more likely one is to find torture justified. That finding was most pronounced among white evangelicals.
Indeed a poll commissioned by Gushee's own organization last year showed that Southern white evangelicals -- the religious group most likely to find torture justifiable -- were more likely to find torture justifiable if they applied biblical principles rather than the Golden Rule.
So whose version of the Bible should be our policy guide?
4.Supreme Court Nominations, "People of Faith," and Abortion.
The religious right is gearing up to contest Obama's Supreme Court nomination, who will replace retiring Justice David Souter.
Expect issue No. 1 to be abortion. After all, if torture can't get evangelicals protesting in the streets, abortion certainly can. Despite the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (assuming Al Franken is finally seated), the religious right will raise a stink in the halls of Congress, the airwaves, and in the court of public opinion.
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is already relying on a new Pew poll that showed a drop in support for legal abortion since August -- when Obama became the Democratic Party's nominee. The country has become more conservative, Perkins argues, and the Supreme Court nomination should reflect that.
That poll, however, is at odds with other polls showing support for legal abortion holding steady. Still, the Pew finding raises the question of how support for legal abortion could decline during the ascendancy of such a strongly pro-choice president.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Obama has declined to deploy the rhetoric used by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in framing abortion as an issue of women's moral agency or even as one of reproductive health. In response to a question on the topic at his press conference last week, Obama uncomfortably labeled it a "moral issue." When faced with discontent from his evangelical center-right allies over his repeal of the global gag rule, Obama failed to explain why its repeal promotes not abortion but reproductive health worldwide.
So perhaps the question is not whether the country is becoming more conservative on abortion but whether pro-choice political leaders don't have the stomach to frame the issue as one of reproductive health and freedom out of fear of alienating "people of faith."
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