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.
There are a couple of inter-related things I get really tired of in politics. Unfortunately, progressives tend to be just as prone to them as conventional wisdom junkies, which is sad because bad analysis hurts our ability to win. These two annoying things are:
(a) Either/or politics, and
(b) Dogma
I would define either/or politics as a certainty that one strategy alone is the only strategy for winning, and that all other strategies suck or are just generally unimportant. The most prevalent example of this has been an argument raging for as long as I've been in politics: swing our base; we can only win by appealing to swing voters. While I think conservative Dems are dead wrong when they blithely say stuff like "well, base voters have nowhere else to go," I also think my progressive friends who think we can win national elections if we just turn out more base voters are wrong as well- after all, we did more in 2004 to do base turnout than any campaign by a factor of at least 10 and still fell short.
Dogma in politics is the quasi-religious belief that some people tend to invest in their own tactical research, or ideological biases. Again, I think progressives need to be just as careful of this as other folks in politics. For example, I am a real believer in a populist economic message as a winning message (for both base and swing) in national politics, but I always work to be really careful to examine the data in any given state or district, and in any given election, to make sure my own strategic biases are right. There are some districts, some states, some demographic groups, some candidates, and even some specific election years in general where a populist economic message is not necessarily the right one, although I would argue it works a lot better in most circumstances than a message built around, say, "office park dads."
Either/or politics and a dogmatic belief combine in Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Prosperity, the new book by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. I don't know Ted, but Michael is an old friend, and I respect him and their research work in general. They bring new methods and thinking to a polling industry badly in need of fresh thinking. But I fear they have become just as dogmatic in their assertions about their research as some of the traditional pollsters they have criticized. Their new method of public opinion research, modeled on long-term business-oriented consumer research, is to go deep into the psyches of those they are interviewing, do 3-hour in-person surveys about their basic values and beliefs rather than doing the classic 20-minute, over-the-phone polling technique favored by political pollsters.
That kind of research, and the analysis they do with it, is useful and interesting, and it provides us another layer of information about the public's attitudes. But to compare it to more traditional polling methods is an apples-and-oranges test, to be sure. And as far as I know, Nordhaus and Shellenberger haven't yet figured out how to provide tangible evidence that you can cross-check their methods and verify their analysis with any other data, or figured out how to exactly win a political campaign- for a candidate, ballot initiative, or legislative fight with their data.
Where they seem most dogmatic, though, is when they get into the either-or thing. On climate change politics, they are sure that enviro groups are all wrong in their approach, that they are too nostalgic about the past to be effective, that their support of regulatory policy is doomed to failure. Instead, they support a huge new investment, a la the Apollo Alliance in new technology and green jobs and green industries that will solve the climate crisis, they say.
Um, guys, why do we choose here between these two ideas? We are facing the most fundamental, monumental, life-threatening problem in human history here, and we have to choose between regulating fossil fuel companies and investing in new technology? I would argue that there is political support for both, and will be more of it every year from now on as the overwhelmingly scary impact of climate change becomes more and more obvious.
Look, here's the truth: for all of our passion about ending the Iraq war, I am convinced that in 50 years, the only thing our grandchildren will remember about this era is that we screwed the pooch on making the changes that would have saved them from the changes climate change has wreaked. And from what scientists are saying, if we don't start making truly big changes within the next 5 years, there may not be very many grandchildren at all.
So here's my suggestion: rather than debating whether we should regulate the fossil fuel producers or invest in new technology, let's do it all, and do it all aggressively. Either/or politics has no place on an issue of this kind of importance.
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