From The 77% Weekly
The 40 Out Of 52 Weeks A Year Newsletter
of Rabbi Brian & Religion-Outside-The-Box

Control — or suffer!

If you have ever felt a bit under the weather and stared glassy-eyed at the myriad of choices of over-the-counter cold remedies available at a pharmacy, you know how overwhelming choices can be.

This "confusion of choice" was recently proven in a study where doctors were asked what they would choose for a patient who seemed to need surgery but had one non-surgical, medical option that could be tried first. Almost 50% said they would have the patient try the non-surgical option. But when the same situation was presented again, this time with two non-surgical options, the percentage of doctors who said they would have the patient try either non-surgical choice dropped to just over 25%!

Choices can be overwhelming.

The attempt to pull in "swing Evangelicals" has never been one of my favorites. Obviously, it seems like a pretty low-percentage shot to me.

But I have always liked the Vanderslice/Common Good Strategies tactic of having Democratic candidates more or less invade hostile territory. Ted Strickland advertised on Evangelical radio stations, and Bob Casey appeared at some conservative Evangelical or Catholic events. In both cases, it worked.

What the tactic does is keep a Democratic candidate's negatives down. The conservative voters won't necessarily vote for him or her, but they'll give some grudging recognition to a liberal brave enough to take them seriously. That can make a significant difference when the Republicans have nothing to run on and have to pin their hopes on tearing down their opponent.

It's not a universally applicable strategy, but it is one that would work well for somebody like Obama, whose charisma forms a major asset, and who's demonstrated some skill in telling audiences things they don't particularly want to hear.

I predict that before the convention, he'll appear at a conservative Catholic function somewhere in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Progressives will freak out and want to know why their candidate is pandering to the Religious Right, the sky will fall, and then we'll all get over it and get on with the campaign, Obama's "centrist maverick" credentials well established for the fall.

But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions.

• 2 Peter 2:1*

People are happy and excited now that an end is finally in sight for this godawful primary season. No reason they shouldn't be: it's tough on everybody. But we should resist the temptation to read uncritically every apparent piece of good news for Barack Obama. There's been a fair amount of baloney published already about the presumptive nominee, and more to come.

Not surprisingly, Jeremiah Wright divides voters:

In network exit polling, about the same number of voters in each state said they considered the situation with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. "very important" to their vote as those who said it was "not at all important." And most who gave the issue a heavy weight voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), while those who said it was not a factor went for Obama, the Illinois senator, by wide margins.

In both states, frequent churchgoers were more apt to say they were influenced by Wright than were less actively religious voters. In North Carolina, among those who said they attend religious services weekly, nearly six in 10 called Wright important to their vote, almost double the figure among those who never attend services. Even among Obama's own supporters in the Tarheel state, 45 percent who attend services weekly called the controversy important to their vote; among those, a third who rated it "very important."

In Indiana, the issue also split voters: About half of those who attend services weekly or occasionally rated the Wright issue important, while only a third of those who never attend services said the same.

This reflects one pre-existing divide in American society and one emerging. The latter is that the most religious voters (as measured by frequency of participation) are becoming increasingly distinct from the rest of society. And by "distinct," I really mean " conservative." Most everybody else is headed in the opposite direction.

This frequent-flyer cadre has every right to their political opinions, of course. But I'm not clear why it is that they should be given control over our political discourse, especially since they continue to age and shrink. There's some kind of weird fetish that holds them up as the "real Americans," while everyone else is apparently French. (This is spoken by someone who works for them, by the way.)

Of course, by "weird fetish," I really mean " wankers like Michael Gerson obsess over them or their absence":

It is also a striking reversal of fortunes. Obama is easily the most religiously fluent and informed Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. But, over time, Obama has assumed a much more familiar Democratic electoral profile -- the candidate of the young, the educated and the secular (he has consistently won religiously nonaligned voters), who also gets nearly universal support from African Americans. He increasingly resembles Bill Bradley or Gary Hart -- a candidate of new liberalism -- with this additional element of black enthusiasm.

What, exactly, is wrong with putting together a coalition of the young, the educated, the secular and the black? Why would Gerson assume that white regular church-goers should take precedence over everyone else?

I'm not just being snippy here: I honestly don't see why it is that one subculture should be prioritized over another or have its opinion on a pastor deferred to, especially when their numbers are on the wane. There are other religious people in the US, and simply showing up each week doesn't guarantee an intelligent opinion. Just ask the people who have to put up with my sermons.

Today's topics: Impact of Indiana and North Carolina Primaries, McGovern changes endorsement from Clinton to Obama, Update on teacher John Freshwater and the movement against separation of church and state, and lawyer blames school (not shooter) in death of Lawrence King.

Is This the Song that Never Ends?

Following her defeat in North Carolina and her very narrow win in Indiana, Senator Hillary Clinton remains in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, even as insiders declare that a Clinton win has become all but impossible.

But Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, suggests that maybe the continuing two-way race for the nomination is not such a bad thing for the Democratic party.

I wrote last Saturday about the so-called Evangelical Manifesto calling on Evangelical Christians to - among other things - give up on being "useful idiots". You may recall that I wasn't holding out very high hopes for the statement: I thought it wasn't going to break new ground, and seemed mightily convenient as the country moves away from conservatism.

Well, the Manifesto was released today, and it seems I was half right, anyway. It's not very satisfying politically: its most direct statement on politics is a rather mild injunction against partisanship.

Called to an allegiance higher than party, ideology, and nationality, we Evangelicals see it our duty to engage with politics, but our equal duty never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality. In our scales, spiritual, moral, and social power are as important as political power, what is right outweighs what is popular, just as principle outweighs party, truth matters more than team-playing, and conscience more than power and survival.  
The politicization of faith is never a sign of strength but of weakness. The saying is wise: ―The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.

The Evangelical soul is not for sale. It has already been bought at an infinite price.

From The 77% Weekly
The 40 Out Of 52 Weeks A Year Newsletter
of Rabbi Brian & Religion-Outside-The-Box

Stop!

Part of the human condition seems to be that we try to improve everything around us — that we are infrequently content with the realities of life.

We try to improve things... but why?

Often it’s because it makes us feel important and involved.

We needn't do so much.

Really.

*This post is to discuss the finer points of Islam at a comfortable yet informative pace.
Comments and questions are welcome :)

[editor's note, by PoliSigh] Bumped while I work on the Prayer Closet!

Today's Topics: online HIV education, investigation of Army barrack conditions, and other stories

GoodIdeaOrNot?

Reuters points out a new website, PosorNot.com, in which site visitors are shown photos of different individuals and asked to guess if they are HIV-positive or negative:

The site, www.PosorNot.com, was unveiled on Wednesday by mtvU, the Kaiser Family Foundation and POZ Magazine and presents viewers with photos of people of different ages, colors and genders, challenging them to guess whether the person has tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.

Having visited the site, I think it resembles "Hot or Not," a site that was popular when I was in college and asked visitors to rate the appearance of various male and female young adults. While I'm strongly in favor of comprehensive sexuality education, I'm feeling a little conflicted about this site because it invites visitors to actively stereotype people based on appearance (albeit with the purpose of then challenging those stereotypes). What do you think?

To an extent, the Reverend Wright controversy was inevitable.  It was only a matter of time.  I saw this coming, though the package it arrived in took me greatly by surprise.      

Expect to see lots of headlines like this one between now and November: McCain Keeps His Faith to Himself, at Church and in Campaign. Or like this: McCain doesn't put his faith out front. The campaign has pretty obviously decided to finesse McCain's history of refusing to be The Second Coming of George W. Bush* by not pandering to the Religious Right. They're going to do it just the way you see in those headlines: oh yes, McCain is a religious guy, he just doesn't like to wear it on his sleeve, unlike those shallow not-Christians Obama and Clinton.

We know how well that strategy worked for John Kerry. It'll be interesting to see if it works any better for McCain. He's certain to get a friendlier media narrative out of it than Kerry ever did.

I will give McCain props for this story, as related by the Bloomberg piece:

In Vietnam, a pared-down church service provided some routine in captivity. As the senior lieutenant in his Hanoi cell block, McCain led an 11 a.m. Sunday service after the prisoners' morning meal of "weed soup,'' said Swindle, a former commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission who is advising McCain's campaign.

When the guards had cleared, the senior officer would cough or tap the letter "c,'' signaling to other captives that it was time to worship. The service began by reciting the 23rd Psalm, though "we did it in the plural,'' said Swindle, "so it was 'Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil.'''

I love that bit about the 23rd Psalm, it seems very appropriate to the context.

By itself, of course, this wouldn't work. There are too many red-meat Republican evangelicals out there. So the McCain campaign is going to pair his personal narrative with a political one. CBN's David Brody quotes RNC Deputy Chair Frank Donatelli to that effect:

“All I can say is that it will be aggressive. Senator McCain’s aides at all levels will be talking to pro-family groups. Senator McCain himself will engage with pro-family groups. The problem with the DNC outreach is the party that embraces abortion on demand and retreating in the face of our enemies I would think would have a great deal of difficulty reaching pro-family voters.”

“We are going to have a very aggressive program to reach out to religious voters whether they are Evangelical, Protestant, Catholic or whatever. That is a staple of our campaign because what we find is that the most religious voters certainly in terms of Church attendance tend to vote Republican more than the general public. There are a lot of voters there for us. The senator’s team has been meeting with these (pro-family) groups. He has conducted some meetings and he’ll continue to have such meetings. I think the test here is what we are saying in terms of issues. The issues that are of concern to religious voters namely winning the war on terror and appointing and supporting judges to the federal bench that will interpret the constitution and not make social policy, those are bedrock issues as far as Senator McCain is concerned. I believe that as the campaign goes on this will become more and more evident. We’ve got plenty of time here, lots of time for meetings and interaction and I just believe that as we go forward that the groups you’re talking about will become more and more comfortable with our campaign.”

Ordinarily, I'd rip Donatelli a new one for equating faith with the "pro-family" agenda. But in this case, his comments are fairly easily translated. There is a demographic within the GOP (IIRC, about 10-15%) who are hyper-vigilant on these issues. Those are the so-called "values voters," and they really do put abortion and homosexuality at the top of their agenda. So Donatelli is signaling them: we hear you, and we won't forget you when the time is right.

Again, we'll have to wait and see how well that works.

*Which of course would make him the Third Coming of Ronald Reagan.

MoJo has the down-low:

Shirley Dobson, wife of James Dobson, the conservative founder of Focus on the Family, is this year's chairperson of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a non-governmental organization based in Focus on the Family's offices in Colorado Springs and charged with organizing various events. According to Jay Keller, national field director of the Interfaith Alliance, Dobson has made a point of "excluding Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, and even mainline Christians" from the National Day of Prayer.

Thanks to Dobson, this year's task force volunteers are required to sign pledges, stating: "I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those of differing beliefs are welcome to attend." Volunteers must also affirm that they "believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God" and that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God." Such oaths violate the non-sectarian nature of the National Day of Prayer and clearly align "a government-sponsored event with a particular Christian denomination, in violation of the basic provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution," says Keller.

Check out the National Day of Prayer Task Force homepage. It's pretty creepy, with imagined paintings of George Washington kneeling devoutly beside his steed, flyers declaring prayer "America's strength and shield," and a video connecting prayer with various monuments in Washington. It's Civil Religion as reimagined by the black-velvet-Elvis set.

It used to be that the NDP was an excuse for the church ladies to get together with their cronies from other denominations. In recent years, it's been getting more and more conservative. I personally won't have anything to do with it, nor will I support my churches' involvement in it. There's plenty of ways to work across faith lines that don't involve empowering the narrow-minded.

There are political and spiritual consequences to the Dobson brand of exclusivism. Randall Balmer recently caught Barack Obama explaining them at the Compassion Forum:

Obama suggested that the danger in the political realm is a kind of religious absolutism, and the danger to the faith is self-righteousness. “And it is important for us not to try to kill the debate by saying, ‘Well, God tells me I’m right, and so I’m not going to listen to you.’ Rather, we’ve got to translate whatever it is that we believe into a language that allows for argument, allows for debate, and also allows that we may be wrong.’”

If I didn't know better, I'd say he'd been reading Habermas.

We have got to get serious about this stuff, though. The National Day of Prayer might sound like an irrelevant observance of no importance. But if people like Shirley Dobson have their way, their religion will choke out all others, leaving us with a weakened monoculture. It's not good for faith, and it's certainly not good for our politics. Obama may be pathologically addicted to dialogue, but in this case, he's got a point. Politics can't work without some difference of opinion, and faith...well, unless you're not telling me something, ain't nobody hearing the voice of God these days.

You can sign a petition for a Inclusive Day of Prayer put together by the good folks at Jews On First. Or you can participate in the National Day of Reason, if that's your bag.