About that Bending Arc of Justice

Religion in Our American Politics

This essay may not prove as interesting to you as others that feature the history and practices of yoga and the spiritual life. If you’re not up for a bit of the news, grim as we all know it to be and I think impossible to ignore, you might want to save it for later or skip it with my promise to “return to regularly scheduled programming” soon enough. However, I consider myself a humanist and particularly a student of religion as a subject. I think it best to consider religion not as if it were somehow apart from our politics, economics, our social and personal lives but a feature of human life. I also think it wise to study as much as we can about our shared humanity if we are to become more, even better spiritual persons. I seek a soulful life, neither clinically academic nor spiritually apart from everyday living. We can’t honestly separate our interior conversations and our deeply personal experiences from all of the ways in which we live in the world. As a scholar of religion, all religions are my subject (as is religion) not to advocate much less defend any of them but to take seriously and to heart how people experience themselves and choose to live with others. So with that prelude, here’s today’s fugue.

A good friend, erudite and compassionate, noted this week the absence of influential leadership particularly from liberal religious leaders in representing the values and aspirations that define the American experiment. He noted astutely how religious leaders---ministers, rabbis, and others---were at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Where are such people now in our streets, leading the way of protest and inspiring a vision of a more just and inclusive America? How does religion feature within the resistance against the authoritarian MAGA regime set upon privilege and power for themselves without the slightest concern for equal justice for all?

On the eve of MLK Day perhaps we should take closer notice of the role religion continues to play in shaping 21^st century America.

In fairness there have been religious leaders, such as the Episcopal bishop of Washington and even Pope Leo who have spoken out against the injustice, cruelty, and immorality of the MAGA regime. Most of our political leaders profess a religion or religious allegiance despite the fact that some one in three Americans profess no religion at all. Trump may not make any such professions (and comically fails as we would expect whenever he speaks about religion) but he is deemed an instrument of those motivated by their religious convictions.

This week the Christian Right announced again the need to pray for “our president.” This is nothing surprising but for their shameless advocacy of violence and indifference to the plight of the innocent and vulnerable. Their interest is to herd their sheep and sustain their vision that depends on compliance and submission. Let’s not forget that those most deeply convicted religious vote more reliably than any other group.

Unless one is overtly religious or somehow claimed by a convicted religious community, it seems nearly impossible to be elected or appointed to our government. It is worth noting too that five “conservative” Supreme Court Justices profess to be Catholics (and Gorsuch, raised Catholic, is now an Episcopalian). Is it their “secular” commitment to the law that has led them to ignore their Pope or are they acting on the basis of their Catholic faith? How one is informed by their own religious conviction can’t be ignored if, as the religious claim, being faithful is an essential feature of their human decision-making. One way or the other, there appears to be little moral influence on these enablers of the adjudicated rapist, grifter, and serial liar elected (by the majority of voters) to be their unified-executive President.

The theme of compliance to authority and the apostasy of dissent is an important feature of many religious communities. Who is not encouraged to have the courage of their convictions? Even those whose religious leaders suggest thinking for one’s self and the guiding force of human reason arrive at their versions of truth that appear to be beyond disproof.

Religious leaders who profess more liberal views may indeed be speaking out but it’s plain that their followers have ideas of their own and don’t seem to take much heed of this leadership. Despite current polls, the demographic difference among “independents” and former Obama/Biden voters that elected Trump marks them as more religious than those who voted for the Democrat. In effect, the more religious you are the more likely you are to have voted for Trump. This is not to say that people who vote in opposition are not religious. Rather, it is that their opposition is not founded on the claim that we should all profess the same religion. Religious profession and acts of moral conscience are not necessarily in consonance.

The reasonable conclusion is that religion does not have anywhere near the same influence on the left as it does on the right. Further, pleadings and admonishments from liberal Christians that the Christian Right are not “real” or authentic Christians preaches to their choirs but also misrepresents the facts. The majority who voted MAGA profess to be Christians. What makes these Christians somehow less Christian is yet another kind of religious claim.

Say what you will about the teachings of Jesus and the traditions that putatively represent them, American Christians not only have a long and storied history of being on the wrong side of civil rights and moral decency, liberal Christians have failed to address with seriousness that those they oppose, those supposedly not “true” Christians are Christians because their Christianity is a principal feature of their oppressive ideologies and behaviors.

We can appreciate the disdain (shall we call it “love”?) that liberal Christians direct at their fellow religious but let’s not forget that they too claim theirs to be the “true” belief. Any claim to apostasy or misrepresentation fails to appreciate that professions of faith always go both ways. Who doesn’t think their beliefs and actions to be the “authentic” mission?

Liberal Christians may offer more nuanced versions of their claims, but they are as stewed in their convictions and clear in their mandates as any others claiming the faith. The point is both sides assert that their actions represent the faith. We must reasonably surmise people are who they say they are and when their religion is a feature of their ideas and actions, we should take them at their word and consider what motivates their deeds.

This internal debate among Christians about who represents the “true” teachings is nothing new but, more importantly, not of much importance unless we take as seriously how the Christian Right is convicted of their religious mission and its role in our politics. And to my friend and colleague’s point, that liberal religious’ “authorities” have not had comparable influential effect on their communities.

We all know that much of Trump’s support comes from the Christian Right and while this may cause us to scoff at their claims to moral credibility in the face of the plain facts, we may be failing to appreciate what they mean by “moral” and “credible.”

Christians profess submission to a “higher” authority and from the point of view of the Right this means not only obedience and compliance to their “correct” views but an imperative to use any means necessary to enforce their religious mission. Thus, the peaceful protesters on the streets of Minneapolis (and elsewhere) are not only to be rejected for their liberal political views but are in fact apostates, enemies of the true faith—-and we might add because they are liberals. In contrast, the January 6^th insurrectionists who beat police, threatened to hang Christian Mike Pence, and overthrow democracy are heroes of the true faith. We need not assert that all of the J6-insurrectionists were motivated by religion, only that the zeal, conviction, and their claim to moral authority bears every stamp of being religious.

The Christian Right may not have “right” on their side but they have instilled into their coalition the necessary religious zealotry. They can’t be wrong nor can they lose this war, the next election, their next crusade. Don’t count on future free and fair elections when one side can’t admit defeat and to do so would violate their deepest personal convictions.

In Mike Johnson’s view, Renee Good is not only a liberal agitator who failed to comply with the law (and therefore got what she deserved), she is equally guilty of sin and warrants damnation for her life choices. This was precisely the point made by Franklin Graham and others on the Christian Right this past week. What Johnson doesn’t say in public, his religious leaders say for him. Let’s not for a moment think Johnson disagrees.

When SCOTUS granted Trump imperial power---making Nixon’s claim that if the president does it, it can’t be a crime---it was a decision perfectly aligned with their religious sensibilities that dictates compliance to an authority divinely authorized.

Authority has always had a religious sensibility in America. Our truths are not only self-evident but are said to be “endowed by our Creator.” Even the rationalist Deists who wrote America into being used God to justify their claims and, importantly, as the source of incontrovertible authority. Despite their well-justified fear of tyranny and objection to the divine right of kings, they did not shrink from suggesting that our rights and laws bear the moral authority of a God. How else to found an ethical claim? Could it possibly be that morality is merely a human responsibility? Our founders may have been Enlightenment rationalists (among other things) but their hypocrisies like their religion provided them the cover of authority they sought to implement a vision that remains decidedly imperfect. We Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the fact that our justice is not only imperfect but demands that we be better human beings with or without religion.

A diverse and pluralistic America can include religious advocates, but the foundations of democracy must be secular or, at the very least, clearly founded on a rationalism that marginalizes any particular religious authority. We don’t need to be religious to be moral or to demand “equal justice under the law” be divinely sanctioned, but neither can we dismiss the way religion informs people’s claims to moral authority (or its absence).

What we need to understand is that in 21^st century America, religion’s role in our politics not only leans Right but helps us distinguish Right from Left. What can be said of the liberal religious is that their influence and effect does not compare with that of the authoritarian Christian nationalist vision that has made its alliances with less explicitly religious factions (think: Stephen Miller, Bannon, et.al.) who are as convicted in their view of an American not for all people but just for their people. This exclusionary vision provides the basis for their coalition. In contast, and let us say to their credit, the liberal religious most often claim that their concept of justice includes those who profess no faith but somehow share values and vision.

To the Christian Right both the liberal religious and non-religious are by definition immoral, apostates to the true faith, and have right to govern or even participate in a shared society. They remind us repeatedly that they are the real America and the rest of us don’t belong. Their mission is to implement this claim by removing, eliminating, marginalizing, and punishing anyone they deem apostates to their cause. Some of us may call this UnAmerican but surely it is not without all of historical religious zealotry and ideology at its core.

Surely Martin Luther King, Jr. deserves our admiration in his mission to advance justice and bring a measure of decency into the American experiment. But let us be frank, the claim of a so-called arc of morality that bends in the long term towards justice may be more part of our American problem than a vision for our betterment.

All religious aspire to their own view of the world. Whose arc? Bending towards what sort of “justice”? The religious Right in America clearly has its own ideas and intends to bend our society, change history, and instantiate a future based on its own certain convictions. They are on a mission from God and their arc of justice theory is in full swing.

What if instead we admitted that religion is used every day to justify every and any point of view that claims its version of truth and justice.

To impute a kind of divine influence that “bends” to this or that moral vision fails not only to acknowledge how religion manipulates to suit human purposes, it outsources the necessary human responsibility to bring aspiration into reality.

How are we to be held accountable to one another when every side claims God is on theirs? Maybe we need less God in any of this democratic project for justice and a great deal more human accountability. No one is coming to save us. That it’s up to us to save ourselves is an idea still too novel to America to be considered a shared future.