Leaps of Faith

[cbayer]

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/leaps-of-faith/

March 1, 2012, 10:23 pm
Leaps of Faith
By MOLLY WORTHEN

For the past three and a half years, Republicans have struggled to explain a great conundrum. If they are the party of authentic America with a mystical connection to the will of the people, then how, exactly, did Barack Obama get elected president?

Some Republicans have come up with an answer that allows them to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of their own party’s failures: Obama must be a great deceiver. He won the White House by subterfuge.

Claims that Obama concealed nonnative birth or faith in Islam failed to gain mainstream traction, but conservatives like Sean Hannity were more successful in labeling Obama as covertly “anti-American” based on his association with the incendiary pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By this logic, Obama was a paragon of Christian piety. He “savored” every word on Sunday mornings and would surely govern by these traitorous principles: his beliefs were dangerous because, well, he really believed them.

Now his critics have reversed course: they say Obama is a sham Christian. He thinks religion is not heartfelt belief that demands full expression, but only a matter of showing up at church. He is not the first president to stand so accused: in the election of 1800, one clergyman charged Thomas Jefferson with “disbelief of the Holy Scriptures,” and Abraham Lincoln battled the suggestion that he was a “scoffer of Christianity.”

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[Shadowflash]

1. I dunno

As an atheist, in 2008, I was doubtful about it when all these loony fundy rightwingers spent lots of time in churches and prayer meetings, just praying away that the right canidate would be elected as president. I thought - 'pfft. You are wasting your time! There's no one there to hear your prayers'.

And then, lo and behold, the Right person WAS elected. Now I don't know what to think.

[cbayer]

2. LOL. I wondered the same thing in 2000 and 2004.

It seemed to me to be so unlikely that W could win, particularly in 2004, that I wondered if all that praying might have actually had some effect.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Republicans are for the merging of church and markets; and church and politics

even if they are nominally OK with the separation of church and 'state', in its strictest meaning.

They might acknowledge that the 1st Amendment means the federal government can't pass explicit laws in favour of a particular religion or denomination; but they think that politicians must bring their church and beliefs into any discussion, speech or policy decision; and they think they have the right to denounce any position they disagree with as religiously evil, and any attempt to keep religion as a matter of conscience and personal reflection as an attack on religious liberty.

They also love the idea of mixing religious dogma and commerce; to them, it's OK for a Catholic organisation to form a monopoly on local healthcare, and then impose the local bishop's idea of morality on any employee or user. If they don't like it, then the 'free market' (which they idolise, breaking, since they are practically all Christian or Jewish, the commandments they claim to hold in such high esteem) means the employee/user must go elsewhere, however much it costs them in money, time or effort.

It is, in effect, the desire for religions to form monopolistic trusts, which coerce others to conform to them, while any 'anti-trust' move would be blocked by the Republicans as a restraint of 'freedom of religion' in the peculiar Republican form of "exertion of force by religion is holy". At its worst, it's morphing into fascism - use of demagoguery to force compliance of individuals to the chosen corporations of a faux-populist political movement. Limbaugh and Santorum are the most obvious current examples who are dancing with fascism.