Reply #100: good thread [View All]

Thanks for the good thread and for discussing this so thoughtfully.

You are asking us to carry political activism into the Church to counter political activism, and I would suggest that this is the wrong way to go since it accepts as a given, and reinforces, the problem of the co-mingling of theology with politics.

There are a couple of assumptions that I see being made often on these threads that I would question. First, as others have pointed out, the words of an extremist few do not represent the Church as a whole, nor the body of parishioners. It doesn't even matter if "most" of "them" vote one way or another. Putting the whole group into the same category undermines the efforts of those who are fighting against the Church's involvement in reactionary politics.

Another assumption is that anything contributed to the Church is tantamount to funding the dark side. Others have explained the inadequacy of this overly simplified analysis, and I would add to that one thing. Identifying an entire group as the enemy contributes to the problem, as it accelerates the trend toward the us versus them thinking that is the prime strategy that the tyrants are using to divide and conquer us.

Then we have the liberal versus conservative religion debate, as though one should pick a church to match one's political philosophy. This also reinforces the idea that we need to line up on opposing teams for the coming battle. I am very conservative theologically while very liberal politically. There is no inconsistency, if one can truly separate politics from religion. If one cannot truly separate politics from religion, then I would say that one is part of the problem regardless of which team they join.

To my way of thinking, both ideas - a progressive religion and a reactionary government - are contradictions in terms. A reactionary government is not much different than no government at all, since the only purpose of government is to arrange things in such a way that the rich and the powerful do not make slaves of the rest of us. A progressive religion is like no religion at all, since religion rests on myths and on the concept of great unchanging timeless moral truth.

It is probably true that both Western Civilization and the Church are dying. (For this view I should give credit to the historian Jacques Barzun.) Much of the political debate revolves around one group of people resisting the collapse of the Church, and the other resisting the collapse of enlightened rational liberal society. Both groups are acting irrationally, and most people in both groups are equally guilty of failing to see their own shortcomings, and of failing to take a stand against the collapse. Each see different parts of the problem and not others, and each blames the other group for the entire problem.

I will give one example, which I hope can be given some consideration despite the fact that we are a partisan group here. We accuse reactionaries of supporting policies that chip away at the integrity of the Constitution, and rightfully so. Yet how much commitment to the Constitution is there in liberal circles? When I suggest reaching out to conservatives on the principles and the shared values as expressed in the Constitution, it is the rare liberal or Democrat who can step out of partisanship and political bickering to consider that course of action. Are Democrats willing to put the Constitution and patriotism above the fortunes of the Democratic party? For instance, can the stolen election be seen as something more important than a Kerry "win?" Just peruse the threads about the election for your answer. If the issue of the stolen election cannot result in Kerry being in the White House, many people lose interest in it and are ready to move on. So for many, hatred for the "repukes" and the "fundies" transcends their commitment to the Constitution and the country.