Franklin Evans passes along this post by Gus diZerega, who writes the Pagan blog on Beliefnet, in which Gus talks about how Pagans find themselves pulled in both directions in the culture war, between the forces of mainstream conservative religion and the secular liberal science-minded folks. Excerpt:
On the one hand we have no choice but to push back on the attempts to demonize us, and entrench their demonization into the law, by many Evangelicals and conservative Christians. Whether in the schools or the prisons or the military, even a single victory to the haters will give them a precedent to push further because there are no logical limits to their creed hold over people until it has come to dominate all of society. It is fundamentally totalitarian in this respect. The Enlightenment brought this totalitarian urge under control. But…
But on the other hand, the secular scientistic world view that sees religion as a atavistic holdover from an earlier time is simply wrong. It’s not even close to the truth. I see modern secularism as itself deeply myopic, and when its internal implications have come to fruit, as they are doing today, tending in most of its forms towards nihilism and the worship of power. In this conclusion I find I am often at one with the conservative Christians who denounce us!
Gus recommends reading a new book, “In the Land of Believers,” by an atheist who went undercover at Jerry Falwell’s Baptist church in Lynchburg, Va., to see what it was like from the inside. Gina Welch spent two years inside the congregation posing as one of them … and was amazed by what she learned. Here’s a speech on the author’s website, in which she talked about how as a self-described “secular progressive,” she hated Evangelicals and all that they stood for, and accepted that they were the only people it was safe to mock. But she went to live among them, and came to see them as far different from the caricature she’d previously accepted. Welch writes that she came away believing that there could be common ground between people like her and people like them. Sounds pretty hopeful!
posted March 12, 2010 at 10:18 pm
I heard an NPR interview with the author of “In the Land of Believers” and it sounds interesting.
A good thing about the new blog is the elimination of the culture war component. People seem like they’ve been mixing it up in a more friendly manner and this makes the alternate viewpoint less threatening. It also makes the people on the other side of the argument less threatening as well.
posted March 13, 2010 at 2:28 pm
I can see how this would work on a short-term personal level, but the culture war issue is a large barrier to resolving this issue. Yes, many non-Evangelical/Fundamentalist people (and I know there is a difference between Evangelicals and fundamentalists) don’t see the decency in many Evangelicals and fundamentalists. But many on the politically conservative side of Christianity don’t see how their “good” intentions appear on the other side.
One example is Dreher’s repeated discussion of the politically conservative Christian group that went into a predominantly gay neighborhood just after Prop 8 passed to bring their message to the neighborhood. Dreher seems to think they were just singing and preaching. But to the people who lived in the area, the people who had just had just lost a vote where people claiming to act for Christianity voted to use the power of government to rip apart families, it probably felt a lot more like the obnoxious Protestant Orange parades through Catholic parts of Northern Ireland.
And this brings up another barrier to “common ground.” I hate to keep coming back to it, but until we come to some sort of resolution concerning the whether we are going to encourage gay monogamy or instead punish the kids of gay parents (by taking away their health insurance, limiting their inheritance rights, limiting their right to child support and visitation if their parents break up, etc.), I don’t see how any meaningful common ground can be maintained.
One side want to legally, economically, and socially stigmatize gay families, the other side wants to legally, economically, and socially stigmatize people who want to legally, economically, and socially stigmatize gay families., How can this be resolved other than through the exercise of raw political, economic, and social power? It seems like a zero-sum game. And it’s personal.
I have gay friends with kids. Many people do. If you won’t treat them and their family with respect, why should I treat you and your family with respect? If you won’t accept them as gay people, why should I accept you as politically conservative Christians? If you want to legally, economically, and socially discriminate against gay people, why is it wrong to legally, economically, and socially discriminate against you for acting on that belief?
On Speaking of Faith, Dreher said he couldn’t support Obama because of abortion. That issue was a deal breaker for him. Well, for many of us on the left, ending legal, economic, and social discrimination against gay people and their families is a deal breaker.
Is their any way to resolve this other than the exercise of raw political, economic, and social power? I don’t see it. And as Dreher noted, over time, Americans are becoming more and more accepting of gay people and their families. How will politically conservative religion fare in this country unless it can come to an accommodation with gay people, their families, and non-gay people who oppose discriminating against gay people and their families?
posted March 13, 2010 at 9:27 pm
The culture war has been going on a lot longer than gay marriage has been a hot-button issue. Andrew Sullivan has pointed out repeatedly that when he started out, he was savaged for his position on gay marriage by the left.
Also, the flare-up over gay marriage has largely been driven by the fear that it would be imposed on society by the courts. If society decides that’s what they want, I suspect that CCs will make their peace with that legal arrangement much like they’ve made their peace with legalized gaming, rescinding blue laws, no-fault divorce, and a whole host of other (former) hot button issues that seem rather quaint now. It isn’t so much that CCs have changed their moral stance on these issues, rather they realize that society has moved on and they lost fair and square.
If you look at the culture war issues that are still raging (or at least that CCs use in their fund raising appeals), it is largely ones in which they feel they were robbed. A court decided that prayer in school was unconstitutional, abortion was a right, and made teaching creationism in public schools illegal. These kinds of top-down decrees (whether correct or not) create a huge amount of resentment. Going back to gay-marriage, I suspect that CCs will treat it like divorce if GM is normalized legislatively. If the courts decide that it is unconstitutional to ban GM, then I suspect CCs will respond the way they did against abortion.
I’m not judging the merits of these various issues (and I realize that I’m painting with a very broad brush – some states had legalized abortion prior to RvW, etc…). But in the minds of CCs (and this is what counts in this context), the democratic will for the right position was upset by oligarchs.
I expect that conservative religion will fare just fine in a society that normalizes gay marriage, just as it has fared just fine with the normalization of no-fault divorce, mainstreaming of porn, an educational establishment that teaches that many of their fundamental beliefs are false, and so forth.
As a CC of sorts who tends to lean libertarian on social issues, I would hope that we could engage civilly in the public sphere (rather at work, in the political realm, or in our neighborhood) even if we disagree pointedly on several moral issues.
posted March 14, 2010 at 5:21 am
I don’t think the difference between enforcing a constitutional right in court versus enforcing political will through the legislature is really the difference. Cultural conservatives are happy to go to court to protect what they perceive as their constitutional rights (including, for example, the “right” to socially, economically, and legally discriminate against gay families).
As to engaging civilly, we can do that, but I just don’t think this issue permits us to resolve anything through such “engagement.” On some issues, one side must simply defeat the other. And on this cultural issue, I see no middle ground on which the sides could come to any durable and meaningful consensus.
And please note that I said that “I see no middle ground.” Maybe I’m missing something. That’s part of why I keep up the “engagement.” But so far, it seems there is no tenable middle ground, and this issue will remain a barrier that makes it much harder for liberals to see the good intentions of cultural conservatives.
posted March 15, 2010 at 11:29 am
From the Pagan blog:I see modern secularism as itself deeply myopic, and when its internal implications have come to fruit, as they are doing today, tending in most of its forms towards nihilism and the worship of power
Because nobody ever liked power until the atheist web forums really took off circa 2005?
I am bored silly by paganism. It’s all the supernatural woowoo drawbacks of mainstream religion but without the benefits of great art, writing, music, and architecture.
And seriously, don’t talk to me about how much better pagans and/or a pre-scientific worldview were at protecting the environment. Pagan woowoo is responsible for a good part of the current extinction crisis, with literally hundreds of millions of people believing they have to acquire tiger whiskers and rhino horns and what-have-you to go into some worthless potion in the witch doctor’s hut. There’s a reason the Great Pleistocene Overkill is called the PLEISTOCENE Overkill and not the It Only Happened After Einstein Overkill. This is basic enough history that I shouldn’t even have to point it out. The world isn’t Pandora.
posted March 19, 2010 at 3:27 am
You do a good job of besmirching all Pagans with a single brush stroke. I wouldn’t say that Pagans were better than Christians at conservation or what-have-you, because we don’t know what Ancient Pagans would have done with the technology Christians built far later on, or what they would have done with the technology we have now. What we do know is that their respect for the natural world was often built into their individual faiths (i.e. respect for trees as spiritual beings, animals as representatives of Gods). You’re also completely conflating ancient Paganism with Neopaganism, and ancient medicinal remedies which are rarely practiced to begin with, (I’ve never heard a Neopagan use or suggest using such ‘medicines’ in my 5 years as a Pagan), as a reason to denigrate the whole of modern Neopaganism.
Your tastes of art and culture aside, a lot of Ancient Pagans WERE the scientists of their era. How about Imhotep, credited with being the founder of medicine? Perhaps Hippocrates and his admonishment to “let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food?” Look at how much diet can affect our whole body system. What of the ideas of logic, structured debate, democracy and the whole host of ideas that still permeate American culture?
Yes, so much to denigrate there. Further, you mention that “Pagan woowoo” contributes to mass extinction when actually, consumerist “woowoo” as you put it, is to blame for much of the extinction in the world. Regardless of how you feel about global warming, if people didn’t pay abominably high prices for rhino and elephant horn as decoration, and the occasional ancient ‘medicineal cure’, their wholesale slaughter would crawl further and further towards halting.