On Religion Dispatches, Chrissy Stroop remarks on an underhanded rhetorical trick currently in use by evangelical leaders:
In any case, whether in more or less secular or overtly religious form, the rhetorical trick of grasping moral authority by claiming to be outside of or ‘above’ politics—as if any such thing were possible with respect to social issues and their accompanying human conflicts—works depressingly well for America’s right-wingers, who understand that many Americans will accept the claim. Further, in both its secular and religious incarnations, this type of rhetorical power play serves to uphold white supremacism.
To my mind, both secular politics and religion exist, in large part, to guide the conduct of those who they can reach. As religious texts are always open to varying interpretation – as attested to by dozens of wars – and, more importantly, often function as Rorschach tests, it seems only natural to equate the two in terms of category. The primary difference between regular politics and that of religion is that the latter is making the claim – specious in my view – that their reading of the divine texts means that they have the divinity in their corner. This leads to mad fanaticism, followed by blood and burning at the stake.
And, folks, I do not exaggerate.
Now, this isn’t to say secular politicians can’t be rigid in their ideologies. They come in just about any stripe you can name, too. People do love their cults. But, in this, again these two occupants of this category are roughly equivalent: rigidity very often corresponds to a greed for power and prestige. The thirst for importance envelopes many people. President, pastor, priest – they can all love power, and put forth ridiculous assertions in hopes of creating that power.
Given all this, Stroop’s following remark is quite disappointing.
While I am inclined to agree with Megan Goodwin’s claim that religion has “always been politics, full stop,” unfortunately, many otherwise savvy journalists and commentators forget that “the personal is political” when it comes to religion. They seem to sign on to a tacit agreement that anything Christians label “religious belief” shouldn’t be examined or criticized, regardless of the impact powerful conservative Christians’ politics have on those who don’t share conservative Christian beliefs. This is often accompanied by the nonsensical positing of a clear division between religion and politics that allows conservative Christians’ claims to be above politics to go essentially unchallenged, thus reinforcing the (white Protestant inflected) Christian supremacism that pervades American society.
Those journalists need to get up on their hind legs and show some grit. There are no Pulitzer Prizes for groveling to your interview subjects.
It’s the duty of journalists to uncover the unseemly side of all things, and religion is simply full of it.
