The conservative Hudson Institute's Paul Marshall wrote in the Washington Post yesterday that "This faith-drenched political primary season is enough to cause even an enthusiastic religious scholar like me to throw up my hands and contemplate joining the ACLU."
I'd run with that epiphany, Paul, but alas, he can't bring himself to it. Instead, he exhorts us to "demand that politicians address these fundamental issues [of the religio-political] in a serious, coherent and empirically grounded way."
Is he serious? Because that sentence sure isn't coherent, since there is no "empirically grounded way" to address the metaphysical. I believe Kant nailed that down a couple hundred years ago. Nevertheless he argues with exquisite circular logic that although some find the intrusion of religion into politics questionable, religion has indeed intruded into politics, hence we must permit religion into politics. Pretty nifty.
Yet, having settled that introductory debate once and for all, Mr. Marshall is still worried, because he finds that the real "problem with our contemporary talk of faith and politics is not that it exists but that it is so often so very shallow."
Imagine that: shallowness in politics, which, of course, the introduction of faith merely compounds and exacerbates. For faith is, by definition, a shallow endeavor -- there exist preconceived theological answers to every secular problem, and they're to be found in the inerrant Good Book (choose your version).
The U.S. Constitution? Well, it's so damned humanly democratic, anticipating, as it does, all that otherwise necessary compromise and unremitting controversy -- neither of which is permitted by the theological mind, because one doesn't argue with God, and one doesn't compromise on His written demands. Controversy begone, because it's all there, right there before you (assuming we're all reading the same biblical version and belong to the same religious sect).
No one in recent history has spotlighted these parenthetical difficulties better than the gubernatorially Most Right Reverend Mike Huckabee. For rather than merely exhorting his followers to participate in the democratic process, the subtext of his exhortations is unavoidably, theocratically authoritarian.
Said the Reverend Mike in Michigan yesterday to a gathering of about 100 conservative pastors: "I don't presume that you automatically support me because of a common faith." That in itself, of course, is disingenuous; why wasn't he instead addressing 100 rabbis? Need I remind you, Governor, there are otherworldly consequences for transgressing the Ninth Commandment, which, along with the other nine, you have intimated you "would be comfortable displaying ... in the White House." Again, referencing the parenthetically difficult, which version? Protestant, Catholic or Hebrew?
But Huckabee continued: "I also recognize that there is a unique kind of opportunity. For a long time, those of us who are people of faith are asked to support candidates who would come and talk to us. But rarely has there been one who comes from us." (Question, Mike: How many atheistic or agnostic pols can you name?)
Rarely has there been one who comes from us. But who is "us"? Believers? Christians? Protestants? Methodists? Pentecostals? Baptists? Southern Baptists? United Baptists? Calvinist Baptists? Free-will Baptists? Primitive Baptists?
Will each have a say in your administration? Will you convene some sort of Generally Christian Council of Nicaea before you make each executive decision? The finer points of God's Will are in play here, and people of faith -- whatever and each and every faith -- are entitled to weigh in with equal influence. Right?
But that, of course, is unworkably chaotic. There can be only one final voice of religious authority -- of "one who comes from us" -- in this secular setting, and that voice would be ... yours. Not ours, not theirs -- yours. Screw the Catholics and Free-will Baptists. They're on a different and staticky line with God. And how the ultimate result would differ from a pure, theocratic authoritarianism escapes me.
But moving on to the ridiculously sublime, there was this gem in the Post's coverage of Huckabee's Second or Third Coming in Michigan: He "complained ... that debate questions about his faith are of 'an unconstitutional nature,' since the Constitution forbids a religious test for potential officeholders."
I find myself speechless in the face of such unctuous, having-it-both-ways hypocrisy.