A Mike Lux Golden Oldie
From Mar 15, 2010. Original HERE I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
This time of year my thoughts naturally turn to God and religion. Not because I'm conventionally religious: I'm not. Not because I have any certainty that God exists: I don't. But this is the most religion-oriented season for me: I hear and sing lots of Christmas carols with God and Jesus mentioned; I go to church for Christmas Eve services, and sometimes on Sunday morning as well; I listen to (and sometimes am even asked to say) lots of family pre-dinner prayers; I may well get into family conversations or even debates about theology and faith; and I do think of my religious upbringing and the Bible I read so much growing up, and still do fairly often. Talking politics and religion are two of my favorite things to do. The first one is my job, so I get to do it a lot. The second I mainly get to do with my family (outside of the random blog post), so that is part of why I enjoy this season a lot.
I stopped thinking or worrying much about whether there was a God about 35 years ago, when I was in high school. Once I realized that there was no way to be sure what the answers were to whether God existed, whether there was an afterlife and what kind it might be, whether there was a soul and what that meant, and all those other metaphysical issues, I stopped worrying about it much. I figured if God was the jealous, hot-tempered, unpredictable, sometimes even genocidal God of much of the Old Testament, I was screwed anyway: I have never been very good with that kind of authority figure. And I figured if I had to guess right as to which of the many religious dogmas that claimed to be the only path to salvation, my odds really sucked and I wouldn't make the cut anyway.
However, I did come away from my upbringing with certain core beliefs still intact. The moral teachings of the Jesus of the Gospels have never left me: treating others as I would wish to be treated; loving mercy and kindness and compassion toward those weaker and more vulnerable than I; being generally non-judgmental toward others, but caring passionately about justice. And I was raised to believe that at the end of my days, I would ultimately be judged by how I treated the poorest and most desperate among us: whether I fed the hungry, whether I gave thirsty water to drink, whether I clothed the naked, whether I gave shelter to the homeless, whether I helped those in prison and welcomed the stranger. That belief has never left me, although the judgment I expect does not necessarily come from God, but from my own sense of self worth and from the people I know.
I come out of my upbringing with the sense that something binds us humans together spiritually, with the feeling that we are something more holy than just a bucket of bolts. The humanity we share feels deeper than just a common ancestor 5,000,000 or so years back. I don't know what that common connection is, whether a godly creator, a universal soul, a collective memory as Carl Jung described it, a "force that flows through all things" as George Lucas described it, or something else. So maybe I do believe in some form of God after all, although I sure don't understand what it might be. I do still like to get into all those theological arguments back home, and I think if there is a god(s), he/she/it/they must have made us so we argue constantly about the existence of one mostly for its own enjoyment. I do some theological debating via email with a very conservative, very Christian nephew, and the way I put it to him recently was this:
This arguing back and forth is always interesting and enjoyable. But again, argument is all it can ever be, because the world of spirituality, of the soul, of God if he exists, is unknowable. However, in a sense, I do have faith, in the way the Greek word for faith is originally meant: trust. I trust there is a spiritual force in the world greater than myself, but I don't invest a dogma with that trust, I don't claim to understand what it all means. I have trust in something greater than myself, but I have doubt at the same time, because I don't claim knowledge or certainty about the unseen.
In my view, the Bible from its very beginning never had a single message. When its editors started to put together various books and oral traditions into a scripture, they happily and intentionally included different stories and different visions of God, sometimes literally side by side as in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And in those early days, writers and editors are known to have edited heavily, written new things to fit the political and spiritual needs of the times, and given entire new meanings and interpretations to the stories. These different visions and ideas and philosophies and interpretations made the Bible more holy in my view, not less. The fact that God casually walked among us in some parts of the Bible, and could not be seen or spoken to in another; that faith was more essential to Paul but works were more essential to James; that man was created before the animals and plants in one version of Genesis, and after in another; that Jesus was in utter despair on the cross in one story but peaceful and accepting in another: these variations and contradictions make the Bible all the more beautiful to me because they show the writers were wrestling with their beliefs about God. There was no dogma that all must follow; there were debates and ideas about what God was and intended all in the same scripture.
And so the debate goes on. We are meant to struggle with it. We are meant to wrestle with it. We become holier when we do so. At the end of the day, I have faith that what we believe has nothing to do with our soul's fate, unless that belief leads us to evil acts. Faith is not dogma or doctrine, it is trust in a spirit of goodness that we all have access to. And if we love our neighbor as ourselves, if we treat others as we would wish to be treated, if we love mercy and kindness, if we treat the least of these as if they were Jesus himself, we can come to the end of our days knowing that we have lived with grace and go happily to our resting place.
So that's my quasi-religious, somewhat-agnostic Christmas message. Let the debate go on, as long as us humans exist, but hopefully we can do it in a way where we aren't killing and condemning each other while argue. And hopefully, when we stop debating and start acting, we can embrace a community where we look out for each other in a way where the weak and the ill and the hungry and the stranger are welcomed into that community as brothers and sisters.
You all recall that Ralph Reed was the head of the Christian Coalition for many years and is still considered a leader of the Christian Right, fully forgiven for all his sins.
And you'll also recall that Elliot Spitzer is an immoral libertine who had to be run out of politics for sleeping with a prostitute.
Here' the tail end of the quoted interchange:
SPITZER: It's impossible to get a job out there. You cannot say to those folks -- we should not as a society say, we won't give you enough money to put food on the table for your kids. And the threshold that you're talking about, everybody agrees there should be a threshold. And you know what? We can set it when unemployment gets below 7 percent, 6 percent, 5 percent -- pick a number that we can agree upon that makes sense but not when it's 9.6 percent, or realistically, 16, 17, 18 percent.
This is simply not humane to say to people we won't give you food -- money for food and yet we're giving a tax break to millionaires. That's not the society I believe the United States represents.
REED: Well, that's the problem with making fiscal policy based on the misplaced compassion that doesn't work. The empirical evidence, Eliot, is very clear, which is that people are more likely to reenter the workforce and find a real job that carries with it dignity, self support and no longer being dependent upon the government when those unemployment benefits run out.
That's the empirical evidence.
And then digby says:
The empirical evidence that there are no jobs is simply not relevant to Reed, who evidently truly believes that the long term unemployed are all malingering cheats who need to be "motivated" and that government has no business being compassionate. It's a perfect example of the moral depravity and selfishness of the Christian Right. Meanwhile, it's the horrible (Jewish) commie libertine who's arguing for compassion for his fellow Americans --- as Jesus would surely do.
But this is surely far too intellectual. And far too secular, too.
So, what I want to know is where in the Bible does a poor man come to Jesus, asking what he needs to do to be saved, and Jesus tells him: sell yourself and all your family and all your descendents-to-be into slavery, and take all the money you get and give it to Pharaoh for a tax break.
Just show me one place in the Bible where it says that, and I'll sign up for the GOP economic program--BAM!--just like that.
So all this talk against masturbation by Republican candidates reminded me of an email exchange I was having with a conservative relative recently. He said that us liberals always talked about Jesus talking about helping the poor and oppressed, but never talked about his stands on sexual immorality. Okay, fair point, I thought, so I decided to check my Bible and see how much emphasis Jesus placed on such issues compared with his discussion of social justice related issues. I figured the easiest way to check this out was just a verse count, which could give some sense at least of how much time he spent on one area vs. another.
I found 19 verses in the gospels where Jesus mentions divorce, which he was against. At that time in Jewish culture, men were quite cavalier about divorcing their wives, leaving them deserted in abject poverty (women of the time had little in the way of economic or civil rights) frequently with little prospects for remarriage, and Jesus was appalled at that idea, and so spoke out against divorce. His focus in these passages was not about the sex part, and was focused on marriage as an institution.
I found 9 verses which specifically referenced adultery and/or fornication. Three of these verses listed one or both on a long list of sins he was mentioning on his way to another point- for example, in Matthew he is discussing the idea that what makes you a sinner is at least as much about what is in your heart than what you do. The final six verses mentioning sexual morality were in the long (29 verse) section of Matthew where he again talked about how we should not just obey the laws but hold ourselves to a higher standard of personal morality, and he used several examples including murder, violence, lying, loving others, and adultery (the famous lusting in your heart verses which Christine O'Donnell was so eloquent about). That's it in terms of Jesus' worries about sex-related sinning- 4 mentions, all of them in the context of explaining a much bigger point he was making about how what's inside matters as much as whether you obey specific laws in the Jewish scripture.
Now, let's compare those to the social justice areas of the Gospel, which I think of as where Jesus talks about showing mercy to those weaker than us, not judging others, loving/forgiving/turning the other cheek to our enemies, forgiving enemies/blessing peacemakers in general, loving/treating others as we would ourselves, and what I would call the class warrior verses (the blessed are the poor/woe to the rich sections). Here are the numbers for these kinds of verses:
Mercy to those weaker: 24 verses
Do not judge others: 34 verses
Love and forgive your enemies/make peace: 53 verses
Loving your neighbors (defined as all other people, not just those who live next door) and treating them as you would treat yourself: 19 verses
Help the poor/the rich should sell all their possessions and them away: 128 verses
All told, that is 258 verses about mercy, forgiving enemies, not judging others, loving all people, helping the poor and woe to the wealthy vs 9 verses which mention adultery or fornication in any way, and 19 more saying divorce isn't good. Oddly enough, Jesus didn't say a single word against homosexuality or masturbation or abortion or birth control, although if you listened to some of our conservative friends, you would think he was obsessed with those topics.
Those ratios are pretty daunting. About 14 to 1 on class war vs. sex. Almost four to 1 on just the simple idea of not judging others as compared to all the mentions of sex sins. If you combine all the things Jesus said about sex and divorce, and compare it to all the stuff he said about helping the poor and how the rich should give away everything they own, you get close to a five to 1. And if you combine all the stuff about sex and divorce vs all the stuff about social justice, it's more than to 9 to 1 in favor of us social justice lefty types.
Of course, 2,000 years after Jesus lived and preached, we can't know for sure how much he said or cared about these issues. All the evidence we have of his life and ministry are those four gospels, written probably 40-60 years after his death by fervent believers who didn't always agree with each other on the details of his life, death, and ministry. But what is obvious from the gospels is that the Jesus of the Bible preached and cared overwhelmingly about just two things: his followers' relationship with God, and their love and kindness toward others, especially the weak and the poor.
Why is this important to our modern society today? Because conservatives try so hard to twist the religion of the majority of Americans into a warped, unrecognizable version of the message its founder had for us.
At least conservatives like Ayn Rand were honest in their disdain for religious pieties about compassion and helping the weak. Those of you conservatives who are trying so hard to wrap yourselves in the Bible ought to try actually reading one someday.
It was a busy Labor Day weekend. A bunch of new polls came out and, shocking though it may be, Democrats are behind in some of them (although not in others, there's a ton of volatility). Lots of polls in individual races, and there the news looks a little better for Democrats. The NY Times had a story about Democratic "triage" that was promptly denied by DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen, but there isn't any doubt that a whole lot of Democratic incumbents are in trouble. Obama came out with some new jobs ideas, the infrastructure I liked a lot more than the corporate tax cut, but I'm happy to see he is putting jobs ideas out there, and his Labor Day speech in Milwaukee was good. I'm also very happy he is standing tall on eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which is both the right policy call and smart politics. Anyway, there is a whole lot to write about, and I will be doing a number of pieces on the election and the economy in the coming days and weeks, but I feel compelled to just take a moment away from all of this electoral politics to delve into the far nastier world of religious politics.
Religious politics has been in the news quite a lot lately between the blatant Muslim bigotry being practiced by Gingrich, FOX News, and their crew regarding the NYC community center site, the outrageous Koran burning being planned by the church in Florida, and the Glenn Beck pro-theocracy rally on the Mall last week. Here's a classic quote from this weekend by a tea party organizer named Geoff Ross that sums up a lot of the sentiment of the anti-Islam people out there:
I'm not anti-Islam, I'm anti-terrorist. But if you take quotes from the Bible and compare them to the Koran, the Bible might say "turn the other cheek" while the Koran would say "strike your enemies down and kill them.
I love quotes like this one, which show no knowledge at all of either the Koran or the Judeo-Christian Bible. My apologies to my religious friends of all faith traditions, but let's be honest: every religious scripture has lots of questionable quotations and ideas in it. They all have a lot of good in them, teachings about morality and generosity and mercy and kindness, beautiful ideas and poetry and stories, but they all have what theologians technically refer to as icky stuff as well. To take one of Jesus' gentlest quotes and line it up next to one of the Koran's most violent isn't what you would call, well, kosher.
Let me just remind Mr. Ross and all of the other Islam-is-so-violent bigots about the Bible I grew up reading. After I saw Mr. Ross' quote, I went to my Bible and proceeded to look it up to make sure my memory was right: I count no less than 15 different chapters of the Bible where God either orders, blesses, or Himself commits the mass slaughter of innocents, including children. On several different occasions, God says that his warriors may not spare the life of any living creature in towns being attacked. Once, when a king of Israel (Saul) disobeyed an order to "make war on [your enemies] until they are exterminated" and showed a small bit of mercy, God was angered and rejected Saul as king of Israel. In the Exodus story, as you may remember, Pharaoh was ready to cave and let the Israelites go multiple times, but God "hardened his heart" so that God could show He was powerful enough to kill off all the first-born Egyptian children, including even the children of slave girls. In the book of Numbers, God demanded the slaughter of 60,000 men, women, and children for the crime of interracial marriage. In the book of Joshua, God mandated that Joshua kill every man, woman, and child in at least 11 different towns so that they could take the land of the people who lived there. In the book of Genesis, Abraham actually tries to talk God out of slaughtering every man, woman and child in a couple of towns because there might have been some good people there, and God decides to do it anyway.
Look, I don't recite these passages because I think the Jewish or Christian religions are bad. I think these religions have a great deal of good in them, and I love and honor the Christian faith tradition I grew up in. The Old Testament prophets, Moses, Jesus, and other Biblical figures were great moral teachers. The Bible has profound passages about morality and justice, kindness and mercy, charity and equal rights for the poor and oppressed. It has stirring poetry and powerful stories about good and bad; it has beautiful discussions of philosophy and the nature of humans and God and their role in creation. But the Bible of Jews and Christians, along with the Koran, has passages of violence and injustice, stories that would make any moral person question the God portrayed in those pages. Similarly, the Koran has some violent passages in it, but it also has teachings of great morality and beauty.
I love the Judeo-Christian Bible, but part of what I love is the complexity of the stories in its pages. The debate in its pages, the conflicting ideas about the nature of God, the goodness of God, the relationship between God and humans, is worth the read. But it's not all pretty. To say the Koran promotes terrorism because of the violent passages in the Koran is as wrong as saying the Jewish and Christian faiths are all evil because the way God is sometimes portrayed in their Bible sometimes gets a little nasty. The people spreading religious bigotry in our country are doing us all a disservice, not the least of which is threatening our own national security by helping the Muslims who practice terrorism to spread their anti-American message.
Jesus once suggested that before his disciples obsess about the speck in their brother's eye that maybe they should focus on the log in their own. When it comes to religious bigotry, that seems like pretty good advice to me.
Much to my amazement, a post I did on Christianity and conservatives on May 10th has generated as much buzz and reaction as anything I have ever written. I have been quite surprised by this, as it was a post I wrote as much for myself, my family and a few old friends as it was to generate a wider debate. The issues I raised go over well-covered ground by many other writers and preachers: that Jesus identified far more with the poor than the rich, that he treasured the beloved community far more than rugged individualism, that he would be appalled by the Social Darwinist, selfishness-is-a-virtue brand of conservative politics currently in vogue in the modern conservative movement.
But it did get people going. There have been at least a half dozen posts written in response; I have gotten hundreds of email and Facebook responses, many by people I don't know; I have been asked by bloggingheads.tv to do a debate with a conservative minister tomorrow- Bill Shuler- and as of this post, there are more than 2,300 comments on the post at Huffington Post, which blows by my old record for post responses by close to 2,000. Apparently, this post really touched a nerve.
The responses I enjoyed the most were the foul mouthed, sometimes even threatening, nasty grams from all those "true Christians" who look forward to seeing me in Hell. That's always fun. But I was also touched by the large number of warm, thoughtful responses who wanted me to know that they agreed with me and were glad someone was saying what I said. I got the sense that there are a lot of people who are tired of conservatives loudly quoting the Bible and claiming to speak for all Christians when they really don't know much about the religion they claim to speak for. I also did have some Christians write me who misinterpreted my post, and thought that I was saying that all Christians are conservative-they wanted to assure me that was definitely not true, as they were both a committed Christian and a strong progressive. Since I have a lot of family members and dear friends who are both of those things, I did not think that, but was glad to get the additional reassurance.
The funniest response someone sent me was from a man who, among other things, asked if I was anti-Jewish, because some people when they move to the left go against Jews and Israel. I hadn't heard that one before, but its always refreshing to get some completely new (and utterly off the wall) question or response.
One of the most interesting blog posts published in response was by a conservative writer named Jameson Graber. He contended that I had made two mistakes. The first, he said, was that I viewed economics as a "zero-sum game". The second thing he talked about as a mistake was creating a false dichotomy between rich and poor, because "prosperity comes from all of us".
I respond to these, and talk more about this, in the extended entry.
I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
I have been on the progressive side of the aisle virtually my whole life (being around a lot of Republicans in Nebraska, I did flirt with being a Republican when I was eight years old, but fortunately my older brother and sister talked me out of that quickly), but I have always believed that conservatives in American history had an honorable tradition in part. Yes, they have the pro-slavery, anti-women's suffrage, and Great Depression inducing Republicans in their midst, but they also had honorable patriots like John Adams and Everett Dirksen. Modern-day conservatives, however, have decided to throw the honorable part of conservatism under the bus along with every other sentiment that might get in their way.
The pro-torture crowd has taken over modern conservatism. People at the CPAC convention are firing themselves up with cries of "waterboard them" and cheering wildly as speakers advocated locking political prisoners away forever at Gitmo. Republicans are embracing a movement that trafficks in secessionism, birtherism, and making threats about armed revolt.
While there has always been a crazy streak in the conservative movement- the John Birch Society founder used to call Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent- the most wild extremists have never taken over the movement lock, stock and barrel before. Today they are thoroughly in control.
Here's what I find so puzzling. Let me throw out some random quotes for you, and you tell me which socialist tract they came from:
"Love mercy, show kindness, and walk humbly with your God"
"I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me... in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me"
"He has filled the starving poor with good things, and sent the rich away empty"
"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour [when the poor would be forgiven their debts] from the Lord"
Okay, you probably guessed it: the socialist tract of which I speak is what is otherwise known as the Christian Bible. I've looked all through it for passages about how you should torture people, and perpetuate cruelty, but I couldn't seem to find them.
Jesus didn't talk about torturing people, he talked about helping the poor. George Washington forbade the use of torture even in the darkest days of the American Revolution when the British were doing it to our troops. Jesus and Washington seem to be the two people conservatives claim as their greatest heroes. Can you explain this to us, guys? The answer to "What Would Jesus Do" is definitely not torture.
I respect a conservatism that worries about the unintended consequences of change, and gets uncomfortable when government gets bigger or deficits get higher. A conservatism that exults in waterboarding, in torture used by the Inquisition and the Japanese in World War II? There is no honor in that. There is no justification for it. The conservative movement has been taken over by the pro-cruelty faction, and is on a dark, dark path.
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