This morning, DarkSyde pimped a new player on the left of the blogosphere — Street Prophets. This Kos community site serves as a beacon for the progressive/left-wing Christians to gather and rally for the cause:
What we are about in 2006 is not about the correct interpretation of scripture, or taking back Christian values, or gospel politics. It isn’t about making the Democratic party safe for people of faith, or capturing the church-going vote, or “practicing fully our authentic being,” as the NYT quotes one minister as saying. It isn’t about what you believe or what tradition you are or are not about.
It’s about one thing: getting these corrupt bastards and their stupid, malignant ideology out of power, for good.
No one should be ashamed about being a liberal, but I’m betting that progressive-minded peoples who attend chuch regularly are often made to feel that way. Given that the liberal agenda synchs nicely with what Jesus Christ actually preached and believed, this is particularly ridiculous. I’m glad voices like pastordan are out there for these people of faith.
But when political parties get into bed with religion, immediately I get antsy.
Before you get too mad, let me sing the Happy Tolerance Song: I am totally cool with you following whatever personal religious beliefs feel right to you. If you believe Jesus is the son of God, rock the gospel with it. If you believe the Grand Fairy Amaala created the universe by farting pixie dust, by all means, poot in harmony. Religious tolerance is a fundamental precept of the Democratic Party, and I subscribe to it. Tra-la-la-la-la.
Before you get too happy, though, know that tolerance of your right to your religion doesn’t restrict anyone from teasing the institution (and especially Christianity) mercilessly. It’s been the justification for way too much death and destruction to warrant any less. You can have it, and I can make fun of it. That’s tolerance, baby.
If you’re religious and you sign up with the Democrats, this tolerance come with another price: you can’t govern or ask the Dems to govern based on your religion. It would sort of imply that your religion is the only one that matters, and, um, that ain’t so tolerant.
In the case of pastordan, I don’t grasp how anyone can be both deeply Christian and truly tolerant of other faiths or no faith. If you really believe in an afterlife and that your method is the only method that reveals how to buy your way in, aggressive pursuit of mass conversion seems the only path to pursue (unless you want keep those heavenly real estate prices down). So I’ve always understood the appeal of the right wing’s call to a Christian; the Republicans don’t actually believe in or live by Christian beliefs, they just use them as a means to loosely justify social control for profit, but at least they openly pretend to care about making everyone live Christian. Maybe the secret to tolerance and religion living in harmony lies in the whole “you can’t force someone to the church, they have to come themselves” idea, I dunno. But I’m at a loss.
Still, if you are Christian and still want to go Democrat, presumably you’ve made peace with tolerance.
I’d also like to think you’re cool with the idea of not governing based on your religion, but pastordan kind of leaves that door open for discussion at a later time:
And I know what some people are going to say to that. But Pastor Dan, aren’t you just substituting one set of religious values for another? Aren’t you just creating a mirror image of the Religious Right?Those are important questions, and they will have to be addressed in time. But right at the moment, I’m not concerned with building a movement. I don’t particularly care about getting faithful progressives on television or radio, or if Jim Wallis is invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention or if the Senate has to consult with the United Church of Christ Justice and Peace Action Network before they nominate Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s eventual replacement. None of that matters.
What matters is getting these particular miscreants and this particular ideology out of government, for everyone’s safety.
BEE-YOOO! BEE-YOOO! WHOOOOOOP! WHOOOOOOP!
Look, things are so bad right now that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I understand that we all want to take on anyone who will help us overturn the grave evils of this administration. But we have to be careful not to sell ourselves out in the process.
I don’t think pastordan has any sort of sinister agenda. I don’t think he’s trying to co-opt the Dems at their moment of weakness. Nothing evil is being said in the above passage. But I still _strongly_ disagree with it.
There should never be a time where we entertain the idea of Democrats consulting with religious leaders on anything. I think pastordan was trying to exaggerate with his example of clearing a court justice with some religious groups, but he doesn’t exactly shut it down, either. Street Prophets seems to want to bring in as many Christians as possible who are fed up with Bushchev. To do that, they don’t want to alienate those who might like the idea of “building a movement” to make this a Christian Democratic Party. He says he is not interested in this “right at the moment” in the hopes that they will ignore those concerns and do the important work of voting out these evil bastards first.
I applaud pastordan’s intentions. He may not ever want to actually create this movement… but others will. We should be careful not to let them get the idea that we’ll ever become the mouthpiece of the Bible, because if the Democrats sell out to governance by Christianity, we will have lost all claims to tolerance. And Americans will only have a choice between the Christian Party and the Crazier Christian Party.
Governing by religion hasn’t worked so well in human history. We need to separate the value system by which we decide laws and raise armies from it. You don’t need Jesus or Muhammed to tell you to value and respect human life and to try and lead in such a way that we maximize good. There will always be disputes on what those terms mean, how to employ them, and even which value system is best, but those debates should remain grounded in knowable reality. Once we start basing our arguments on old books other humans wrote, or the idea that we have invisible souls animating our bodies, or the possibility of getting into a magical heaven, or the idea that some Eternal Being speaks to us third-hand or through signs that some see and some don’t, well, the unprovable he-said/she-said inherent in all of that doesn’t take long to descend into chaos and war.
Religion (not spirituality, but religion) usually boils down to following some crusty old text or other, and governing by ancient literary interpretation or criticism just doesn’t do it for me. I sure hope it doesn’t do it for the Dems, too, regardless of who votes against the Republicans the next few years.
See, that’s why, growing up, I thought that religion was something people used to do “back then”, and since in the modern world you can’t really truly follow pretty much ANY religion that I know of (with exception of Japanese ancesor worship, possibly).
Like, there were old decrepid women who still had icons put up in their homes, and who would cross themselves and stuff, but that just further proved to my naiive mind that religion is dying out.
I STILL don’t know how can any modern person claim that he or she follows the word of Christ. Really? Are the women silent in church? Do people give up their posessions and/or not wash their hands before their meal? And if illegitimate children (and their offspring to the seventh generation, then a whole lotta people (including I worked at a Hasidic company where you could get fired if you worked after sundown on a Friday (Sabbath), but I did not see them stoning their sons for not listening to them, and they seemed ok with marrying foreign women.
And there’s no bloody way I can dedicate the amount of time required to attain Nirvana.
So, like, who decides what parts of holy books get dropped?
[...] And here we see demonstrated the tendency for the wingnut to justify his position “because God says so in the bible.” We’ve been over why this is a bad idea before, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind David that doing anything because any book says so isn’t actually a moral argument. If the book makes a compelling argument, like _why_ Israel benefitted from an impassioned speech by Ruth as opposed to if she’d just offered a “what’s up” chin nod, then talk about those reasons, not the book itself. Otherwise, you just sound like a dunsky who relies on “my mommy said so.” Plus, the damn book says a lot of things, and plenty of them conflict. It’s kinda hard to decide what to do based on the bible when even the bible can’t agree. And let’s not forget that accepting the bible at truth isn’t (yet) a requirement of US citizenship, which means not everyone in our nation has to believe in it. That means that any laws put in place here have to be based on more than just The Word. [...]