Keep My Religion Out of Your Politics

I’m a bit of an odd sort, both a Libertarian and a Christian. Ayn Rand would spank me I suspect. (Insert your own sophomoric spanking joke here. By the way, Angelina Jolie is going to be in the film version of Atlas Shrugged if it ever makes it to the big screen. That might make your spanking joke a bit more interesting.) That’s okay. I never quested to be normal, just correct.

Organized religion has become something of a “bad word” these days, much like the term “liberal” thanks to Ronald Reagan. Church attendance has gone up and down through the years, but the trend, over time, is definitely down. So many people state that, as opposed to being religious, they are spiritual. This likely means they have a notion of God that is something akin to a New Age pantheism. In any event, they certainly would not step into a church.

A bit of a backlash against organized religion can be traced back to the organized religion itself, but that is a post for another blog. Most of the backlash, I believe, comes from a pair of insidious groups: televangelists and politicians. I could go on for months about the televangelists, but since this is a political site, lets concentrate on the politicians.

While many in the agnostic and atheist world surely blame religion’s decline on a new era of naturalist enlightenment, the truth is much more pedestrian. The average person of the twenty-first century has no more an understanding of natural selection or quantum gravity than did the average person of the Roman Empire. What we modern humans do have an almost perfect understanding of is the use of the television, which may have supplanted money as the root of all evil. It was once said that all things depraved found a home in Rome…Do I even need to finish that thought?

Television has created a way for politicians to communicate, through mindless sound bites, directly with the American people. To this end, they make superficial use of Christianity as a political weapon. It does not bother me any more that politicians are a collection of predictable, pandering hypocrites. I might as well be bothered by the color of elephants. What bothers me is that they are combining my religion, the television, and their ambitions to help drag Christianity down to political depths at a time when Christianity needs no such help (see Missions to Europe and America).

While it is certainly true that a combination of deists and Christians formed our great nation and that God is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, the creators of our constitution were very careful (and with good reason) to form this country on secular grounds and create a separation of church and state. Every time some political nitwit attempts to post the Ten Commandments (or suggestions, as the Liberals would have it) in a public place, it gets plastered all over the news. The nitwit wunderkind usually opines that if he’d tried to post the Qur’an that no one would have cared. Statements about prayer in school, burning the flag and apple pie are sure to follow. While many Christians and conservatives jump up and down, wave their hands in the air and say, “Amen!” (I can’t blame them. It gets to me, too), others who are not so committed see this as just another mindless religious attack on our secular foundation.

Now we have a new phenomenon, analyzing a candidate’s pastor. How much Jeremiah Wright’s ignorant and hate filled sermons have actually damaged the Christian cause is open to debate. Perhaps he is seen as such a lunatic that he is given little credence. It is impossible to believe, however, that these sermons, snippets of which have played on the news for some time now, have a positive impact on Christianity. The al-Qaeda press releases that circulate every six months or so show about the same amount of Christian love as his sermons (at least the snippets that made the news).

All of this ends as an act of rhetorical opining. I don’t really see a way out. As long as pandering to the base is politically profitable, there is no end in site. The reality is that our government has been set in place with the sorts of checks and balances that a candidate’s religious views cannot greatly alter our country regardless of the office he or she wins. I suppose that could change if we ever had a candidate who was truly Christian and followed the tenets of “turning the other cheek” but I don’t see that happening. To be a Christian, one must be a Christian truly and in whole. It leaves no room for the primacy of being a publicity whore.