The Culture War Heats Up

"A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives." C.S. Lewis.

There was quite a bit of coverage of the Christian rally held on Friday about the fight over the President's judicial nominees. James Dobson, in his own understated way, claimed that nothing less than "the future of democracy and ordered liberty" was at stake in this fight over judicial nominees. And to think, I always thought that the future of our liberty was in the hands of Someone bigger than the federal judiciary. But what do I know?

The rally styled the debate over Bush's nominees as a fight between Bible believing Christians and those who stand in opposition to people of faith. The basic question is whether people may use the Bible to formulate their political beliefs and to what extent that is permissible. Ostensibly, James Dobson and Tony Perkins don't favor the literal use of the Bible for the purposes of Constitutional interpretation. But if they aren't advocating a theocracy, what do they mean when they talk of a war against people of faith?

They must mean that a "Christian" stance is more or less embodied in a conservative agenda, and to work against Bush's conservative nominees is to work actively against people of faith. What this does, then, is it transforms political debate into a religious one. Working against Republican ideals might have been an nuisance in the past, but now that the debate is about what a Christian's response to current events is, the debate takes on apocalyptic overtones. Does James Dobson think that a conservative agenda still needs to appeal to shared premises in order to work? I think so. But he would probably argue that no matter what a conservative might say to a liberal, no amount of reasoning will ever be sufficient. The reason is because the basic hostility liberals have to conservatives is no longer political. The hostility, instead, is religious.

The question, though, is what right do James Dobson and Tony Perkins have with styling this debate in religious terms? The reason why some conservatives think the debate about the judiciary really is about religion is based on that initial premise about the relationship between conservativism and faith. But political conservativism is not a necessary consequence of an orthodox Christian faith. (I welcome comments if you disagree with this statement.) And when Republicans claim that this debate is really about faith only exacerbates the problem. It's no surprise that liberals are anti-faith if they think that the faith you happen to be selling means they have to commit themselves to a political framework they find repulsive. In this sense, we seem to be in a vicious circle. Liberals are leery of Evangelicals because we seem to be selling a strange hybrid of faith and politics. Evangelicals look at the rejection of our faith and our politics in tandem, and instead of looking inward, simply chalk it up to an irrational prejudice against faith. And in this debate, there are no solutions, just a widening gulf.