December 1, 2006--Fanaticism LXXVI--The Religious Wrong

Now everyone’s involved in sectarian struggles.

Of course, most prominently in the news is the version underway in Iraq. And then the Democrats, even before officially taking control of Congress, are spatting among themselves—the redeployers are fighting with the cut-and-runners; the Jack Murtha faction is wrestling with the Denny Hoyerites. Even the traditionally well-disciplined Republicans are getting into the act—it’s hard nowadays to find any GOP members willing to say a good word about President Bush, the Neocons are being disavowed by most of their former supporters (as well as by each other), and Republicans strategists are saying that the party needs to return to its true conservative roots or move more to the center where the majority of voters appear to be situated.

What’s a fella to do in the midst of all of this confusion? And now to make matters worse, if that were possible, of all groups, the Religious Right is also engaged in a fierce internecine battle.

This all surfaced the other day when the Reverend Joel C. Hunter, the president-elect of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson’s organization which has been the most activist of all such evangelical groups, stepped down saying he would not agree to assume the presidency because the Coalition’s board would not add to its agenda “stewardship of the earth” (a Christian version of Al Gore’s A Matter of Conscience) nor would they allow him to make fighting poverty (loving thy neighbor) a Coalition priority.

He complained that the Christian Coalition is more interested in getting certain laws passed than, in his words, “living what Jesus would do.” (NY Times report linked below.) He wants to see evangelicals move beyond focusing on just abortion, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage. But, he contends, the Coalition leadership does not want to broaden its agenda in this way because they are, again to quote him, “deathly afraid of being labeled liberals by other Christians, the media, and talk radio.” God forbid! There’s nothing worse than that.

This so well exposes the fact that this debate within the Religious Right is as much political as theological. Politically they serve as both the arm of and the guiding force for the Republican base—they turn out to vote in disproportionate percentages and in return are ceded substantial control over the Republican agenda. Note how aggressively John McCain is running to his right as he kicks his presidential campaign into high gear.

And then this obsessive concern with sex and the womb, what goes on inside it as opposed to the rest of life outside it, is theologically (and psychologically) telling. There is in fact nothing in the Bible on the subject of when life begins or for that matter very much about same-sex relations; and yet these fundamentalists, who insist that their followers take what is written in the Bible as the literal truth, requiring no interpretation, are comfortable making things up and passing it off as God’s direct word.

Even ignoring the biblically-required stewardship of the earth has its quasi-biblical roots—to pre-millennialist fundamentalists who see the Rapture and Armageddon to be imminent, why waste one’s time tending to the environment when everything is about to be destroyed by, yes, God himself?

So maybe not all sectarian struggles are such a bad thing.