Fred Clarkson will no doubt slip around to remind me that the Religious Right's institutional and organizational abilities remain strong, of which I have no doubt. And of course there will always be conservative Christians participating in American politics, for which I am actually grateful.
But in the wake of the trumped-up controversy over Jeremiah Wright's preaching, it has become clear to me that from here on in, it's just a matter of time before the Religious Right as such collapses. They're already losing coherence and leadership. Sooner or later, the whole thing is going to lose relevance.
There may be more to come or that I've missed, but so far, this statement from Ken Blackwell seems to be the best the Religious Right could throw at Barack Obama's speech yesterday:
Barack Obama just gave an eloquent speech, but one that does not address the underlying nature of Senator Obama's beliefs. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, like Mr. Obama, believes in a state-centered 21st century form of big-government socialism. This 21st century form of socialism is at the heart of the Liberation Theology Rev. Wright preaches from the pulpit. Today, Mr. Obama again made it clear, with all his eloquence, that he still embraces these beliefs that would require dismantling the free-market system that has made our country's economy the most prosperous in all of human history.
In contrast to Liberation Theology, the Christian orthodoxy teaches about the nature of God, the nature of man, the relationship between the two in this life, and about the hereafter. Liberation Theology, on the other hand, is a belief system about political agendas, socialistic economic policy, and redistribution of wealth. Proponents of Liberation Theology, like Rev. Wright, teach that God commands us to form a government that will supervise our economy to create government-subsidized jobs under central-government planning; guarantee healthcare and education by having government control both; and achieve "economic equality" by redistributing wealth through massive taxes on the affluent and massive government entitlements for the poor. And it advocates replacing governments that do not embrace this socialistic agenda.
Notice what's missing here? Along with a not-insane political perspective, a theological statement. Blackwell criticizes Liberation Theology and contrasts it with "the Christian orthodoxy", but that's an argument about religious practice. I'm quite confident Blackwell's wrong to say that Jeremiah Wright never speaks about God, humanity, or the world to come. But more important, he never actually advances his own argument about any of those things.
For those of you without advanced theological education, that's roughly the equivalent of a scientist criticizing evolutionary theory because it doesn't live up to "the ancient creeds of the church." Whatever the emotive power of such a statement, it doesn't actually correspond to the subject at hand. It's not a way to win an argument.
By itself, that would be meaningless. There are too many examples of conservatives winning public debates by shifting the conversation from anything resembling intellectual coherence to gut instinct. How many times have they gone to the well of Scary Brown People, for goshsake?
The good news is that every time they do it, it loses a bit of its power. It still has some bite, however. It would be so refreshing to say that blacks, gays, and women had no longer had to fear the oppressive power of conservative ideology, but you and I both know that's not true. It won't be for many years to come.
Christopher Hayes explains that conservatism is going to go down swinging:
When I asked a conservative friend how his pastor's spiritual beliefs would stand up to scrutiny, he countered that the problem with Wright was that his sermons weren't religious, they were political. (Politics from the pulpit! Heavens, no!). This is, if tendentious, also clearly much of what motivates the outrages. Alongside some mildly nutty conspiratorial innuendo, Wright was offering, in heated even, hyperbolic terms, a set of fairly standard left critiques: He said America is run by "rich, white people" which it is, that it has a gruesome history of oppression and racism, which it does, and he used the occasion of 9/11 to ask his congregation to consider for a moment the violence, death and destruction brought to innocents under our own flag, with our own righteous justifications.
After three decades of the mainstreaming of dangerous and reactionary viewpoints, though, even the mildest bit of left-wing radicalism is deemed toxic and taboo. So while Ann Coulter can call John Edwards a faggot, Grover Norquist can say he wants to drown the government in the bathtub, and a host of imperialists can foment an illegal and pre-emptive war based on lies, Barack Obama's pastor isn't allowed to mention that America has been throughout its history the site and cause of much evil in this world.
All true. Yet in the wake of Wright's preaching spread across the media landscape and Obama's reflections on race, suddenly all those narratives have become contested because the Right had no theological argument to contest them with. For every conservative Christian who heard Wright out of context and was repelled, at least one liberal Christian felt a refreshing wind blow over them. Worse, from the conservative perspective, perhaps one-and-a-half or two secular people heard the same thing and were moved by it. Here, at long last, was a pastor and a faith that stood up for social and economic justice! And he did it without apology or equivocation!
This is how the Overton Window is captured: the Right, religious or not, tried to make Jeremiah Wright a big black bogeyman. They failed. Now his narrative has been introduced to the public discourse, and we are inching closer to the day when it will be the standard against which religious discourse is measured. It's only a matter of time until conservatives attack a pastor in favor of marriage equality or reproductive rights or a sane immigration policy or whatever, and the same thing will happen. With every failed salvo against Christians who are actually, you know, Christians, they lose a little of their grip on the religious conversation.
Things move slowly in the religious world, but make no mistake about it. The day is coming when progressives, secular or religious, will decide the limits of acceptable discourse.
From the perspective of faith, this process is neither morally nor theologically neutral. For all that the Religious Right has charged liberals with faithlessness, they have their own idolatries to address. Peter Laarman argues in Religion Dispatches that the cult of Mammon is alive and well in our society:
A more neutral word would be economism: the conviction that what matters most—perhaps all that matters—is money in private hands, and not money fairly distributed but money flowing ever upward to the cleverest and most aggressive. This belief carries the sanctity of holy writ among its well-placed gurus and adherents within the economics establishment, within the Fortune 500, and within innumerable conservative think tanks and media shops.
The political ideology known as neoliberalism functions as the practical expression or engine of economism’s sacred truth that greed is actually good. Neoliberals in office invariably demand free trade, weak unions, low or no taxes, deregulation of industry (to the point, most recently, that Bush-infected agencies have allowed corporations to conduct federal-level health and safety testing of their own products), and/or the privatization or elimination of traditional government functions. Private for-profit prisons—once a bit of a scandal—are already old news; now even military operations in Iraq and elsewhere have been massively outsourced to private vendors.
Laarman says, and I believe him, that economism is perhaps the single greatest threat to a progressive agenda in the coming years. It is deeply embedded in American practice. He also says that liberal pastors will play an important role in challenging economism by exposing its shortcomings to their parishioners. I believe that too.
In fact, any Christianity that takes the message of the prophets seriously will have to confront the neoliberal idolatry. (This simply means that it will have to address the temptation to rely on one's economic ability instead of God's providence.) The consistent message of Isaiah, Amos, and Jeremiah is that adherence to the will of God requires a just and equitable distribution of wealth and freedom with political oppression. Good government is a religious obligation.
Jonathan Walton shows that the prophetic message makes hash of comparisons between Jeremiah Wright and preachers like John Hagee or other members of the Religious Right:
There is a difference between speaking truth to power in defense of the least of these, and scapegoating the defenseless on behalf of the status-quo. This is why it is inappropriate to compare Dr. Wright with Christian conservative voices like the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson or John Hagee. The latter group turns attention away from the interests of a privileged elite-class and lays the ills of society at the door of America’s “usual suspects.” Hence, it is easy to blame racial/ethnic minorities, Islam, feminists, illegal immigrants and the homosexual agenda for events such as 9/11. It is much harder, however, to point the finger at corporate controlled government, a neo-conservative military agenda, and the capricious whims of an exit-poll obsessed administration. And this is what Dr. Wright has attempted to do on a consistent basis over the course of his thirty-six years as pastor. Unlike his conservative opposition, his critique of American society points up as his hand of compassion and justice reaches down.
And there's why the Religious Right has lost the game. It is more difficult to defend accumulated power than to attack it. But more important, the God of Abraham and Isaac, of Jesus and Muhammed, is the God of the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed. The partisanized religious movement of Falwell, Robertson, Hagee, Parsley and so many others has forgotten that. In the place of any affirmation of God's work to redeem and renew social relationships, it offers economic ideas in defense of privilege that are becoming more threadbare by the day.
Now, they will continue in this error for a long while to come, if for no other reason than that they don't read - and don't particularly care about - the prophets. They won't even recognize their long slide into irrelevance for years, if not decades. (And watch out: the media won't either.) But with every assault on pastors like Jeremiah Wright, with every decision to stand with the rich and powerful rather than the poor and dispossessed, they are revealing themselves and their faith to be a sham.
You can say that's the product of shifting public opinion and increased awareness of the pernicious quality of their religious brand if you like. Personally, I think it's the movement of the Holy Spirit working to correct and improve the practice of faith in this nation. Potato, potahto. Tomato, tomahto. Who says both can't be true?