Hamas and the Evangelical Right
In this commentary (also reprinted in a comment on this post) from The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich brilliantly likens the ascendancy of the American evangelical right to that of the Hamas movement. What she means is that the Christian right in the US, like Hamas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has succeeded not by appealing to the faithful so much as by creating an alternative welfare system that serves as the safety net for those -- and there are more and more in the Territories as well as in the US -- who are on the edge of (or already facing) economic catastrophe. And, like Hamas, the evangelical right in America also advocates the destruction of the existing system of social welfare, which would further increase the movement's power. The struggle for equitable and sustainable Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, as well as the battles in the ongoing culture war in the US, will prove all the bloodier and more intractable if progressives on the left do not understand the marketing and economics lessons taught by the successes of these savvy and intensely focused religious movements.
--Lincoln
--Lincoln
posted by Lincoln Z. Shlensky at 1:23 PM
1 Comments:
Here's the full article from the Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=ehrenreich
The Nation
Comment
November 11, 2004
The Faith Factor
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Of all the loathsome spectacles we've endured since November 2--the
vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing
his "mandate"--none are more repulsive than that of Democrats
conceding the "moral values" edge to the party that brought us Abu
Ghraib. The cries for Democrats to overcome their "out-of-touch-ness"
and embrace the predominant faith all dodge the full horror of the
situation: A criminal has been enabled to continue his bloody work
with the help, in no small part, of self-identified Christians.
With their craven, breast-beating response to Bush's electoral
triumph, leading Democrats only demonstrate how out of touch they
really are with the religious transformation of America. Where
secular-type liberals and centrists go wrong is in categorizing
religion as a form of "irrationality," akin to spirituality, sports
mania and emotion generally. They fail to see that the current
"Christianization" of red-state America bears no resemblance to the
Great Revival of the early nineteenth century, an ecstatic movement
that filled the fields of Virginia with the rolling, shrieking and
jerking bodies of the revived. In contrast, today's right-leaning
Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which
even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly
routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to
offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is
concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative
welfare state, whose support rests not only on "faith" but also on
the loyalty of the grateful recipients.
Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and
you'll find the McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Senator James
Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday
night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in
the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job
tips at the "Career Ministry"; divorced and abused women gather in
support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free
clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city
ministry for at-risk youth in DC and operates a "special needs"
ministry for disabled children.
MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a
medium-sized airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a
similar array of services--childcare, after-school programs, ESL
lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash
handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for
surviving bouts of destitution: "First, you find a church." A
trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to
his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious
spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest
analogy to America's bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas,
which draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own
miniature welfare state.
Nor is the local business elite neglected by the evangelicals.
Throughout the red states--and increasingly the blue ones
too--evangelical churches are vital centers of "networking," where
the carwash owner can schmooze with the bank's loan officer. Some
churches offer regular Christian businessmen's "fellowship lunches,"
where religious testimonies are given and business cards traded,
along with jokes aimed at Democrats and gays.
Mainstream, even liberal, churches also provide a range of services,
from soup kitchens to support groups. What makes the typical
evangelicals' social welfare efforts sinister is their implicit--and
sometimes not so implicit--linkage to a program for the destruction
of public and secular services. This year the connecting code words
were "abortion" and "gay marriage": To vote for the candidate who
opposed these supposed moral atrocities, as the Christian Coalition
and so many churches strongly advised, was to vote against public
housing subsidies, childcare and expanded public forms of health
insurance. While Hamas operates in a nonexistent welfare state, the
Christian right advances by attacking the existing one.
Of course, Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy only
accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the
right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly
proselytizing social services; not only do they attack candidates who
favor expanded public services--but they stand to gain public money
by doing so. It is this dangerous positive feedback loop, and not any
new spiritual or moral dimension of American life, that the Democrats
have failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based welfare
system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular
welfare state.
In the aftermath of election '04, centrist Democrats should not be
flirting with faith but re-examining their affinity for candidates
too mumble-mouthed and compromised to articulate poverty and war as
the urgent moral issues they are. Jesus is on our side here, and
secular liberals should not be afraid to invoke him. Policies of
pre-emptive war and the upward redistribution of wealth are
inversions of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is for the most part
silent, or mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion. At the very
least, we need a firm commitment to public forms of childcare,
healthcare, housing and education--for people of all faiths and no
faith at all. Secondly, progressives should perhaps rethink their own
disdain for service-based outreach programs. Once it was the left
that provided "alternative services" in the form of free clinics,
women's health centers, food co-ops and inner-city multi-service
storefronts. Enterprises like these are not substitutes for an
adequate public welfare state, but they can become the springboards
from which to demand one.
One last lesson from the Christians--the ancient, original ones, that
is. Theirs is the story of how a steadfast and heroic moral minority
undermined the world's greatest empire and eventually came to power.
Faced with relentless and spectacular forms of repression, they kept
on meeting over their potluck dinners (the origins of later communion
rituals), proselytizing and bearing witness wherever they could. For
the next four years and well beyond, liberals and progressives will
need to emulate these original Christians, who stood against imperial
Rome with their bodies, their hearts and their souls.
This article from The Nation can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=ehrenreich
Post a Comment
<< Home