The Religion Bogeyman

[Bonnie]

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/tonysnow/2005/10/21/172193.html


HOUSTON --

Team Bush, in its desperation to court conservative favor, recently leaked word that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is a church lady -- earnest and regular in her devotions; marked deeply by the words and precepts of the Good Book; traditionalist and Protestant to the marrow of her soul.

The leak naturally inspired a cannonade of yawping and protesting. Conservatives pointed out that religious views ought to have no bearing on one's candidacy for anything (a position reflected in the Constitutional prohibition against religious requirements for federal office), while left-wingers complained (again) about what they consider the unseemly kinship between Republicans and conservative Christians.

The deeply inept sales pitch, like most idiocies, presented some glorious teaching opportunities -- including a chance to knock down the all-too-popular Religion Bogeyman.

The rant goes something like this: "Republicans need to stop claiming they have cornered the market on morality. They must stop asserting that people who don't agree with their view of religion and God not only are wrong, but bound for perdition. They have to cease and desist with their persistent attempts to force their beliefs upon an American public that embraces a wide variety of religions and spiritual views." The litany almost always includes references as well to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority, or a combination of the three.


Not one component part of this complaint has any grounding in fact. To begin, Republicans in general have never claimed to have locked up the morality market -- although politicians in both parties have been known to hint that their opponents are sin-saturated scum.

Sure, politicians love donning the mantle of morality, provided it doesn't impose any affirmative obligation to act upon religious edicts. But Mark Twain was on to something when he described the member of Congress as the only distinctively native American class of criminal: It is as silly to get one's moral instruction from an office-seeker as it is to adopt the politics of the parson.

As for the cavil that conservatives have decreed their enemies inferno-bound; poppycock. Members of the political class don't predict that their foes are headed for Hades. Real fighters tell their foes where to go.

Next comes the "forcing of views" trope, which is rich coming from a party that supports the forcible, court-ordered imposition of radical social change, from legalized abortion to gay marriage to the criminalization of the mere mention of the Almighty. If any ideological camp stands guilty of imposing views, it's the American left, which has worked its will through the courts, the media, Hollywood -- and educational institutions that now worship at the Altar of Political Correctness.

Finally, the nattering about Rev. Falwell and Mr. Robertson. Jerry Falwell stepped out of the political ring long ago; the Moral Majority has all but collapsed as an organization. Pat Robertson still enjoys modest currency as a television personality, but long ago lost his ability to make elected officials quake with fear. The warnings about these fellows are comically anachronistic: It is rather like waving one's arms and warning about the awful menace of Daniel Berrigan.

The Religion Bogeyman is less an appeal to thought than a cry for help. It seeks simultaneously to suppress open religious expression, deride men and women of faith as hateful hayseeds and deflect attention from the fact that the Democratic Party has embraced a politically fatal hostility toward the most widely practiced and deeply rooted of American practices -- religious observance.

It also reveals an utter blindness to religion's profound impact on American life. Faith over the centuries has defined us, drawn us together.
We Americans trust each other because we take for granted certain views about right and wrong, and about the dignity of human life. We don't have to waste time watching our backs (or at least waste as much time as other cultures). We owe this sense of security to one thing: a tradition of faith -- the very tradition the American left has tried so mightily in recent decades to destroy.

The more left-wingers complain about religion, the more they expose their misunderstanding of American history and contemporary culture. This disconnect always becomes obvious during heated Supreme Court confirmation hearings; it became more so during the alarmist reaction to the clumsy Miers sales job.

If Bushphobes want to confront a bogeyman bent on wrecking the country and the Democratic Party, they should stop whining about Jerry Falwell and pick a more appropriate target -- like the ACLU.