"... a breakdown of the constitutional order ..."
The problem is that, under the US Constitution, states can join the Union, but there is no provision for states to leave the Union:
"New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; ..." (Article IV, Section 3)
That is fundamentally anti-democratic.
1
Does the definition of "privileged" include "subsidized by taxpayers"?
20
All religion is the United Stated is privileged. They are an unelected, tax exempt fifth column in american politics. People who think their gods gives them special privileges in our secular state. I do hope someday we get serious and examine how so many churches abuse their tax exempt status.
38
Many members (not all) of the religious right are racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic.
20
“...a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before.” Douthat’s very accurate description of what he is trying to disprove. He fails to disprove it.
27
Douthat’s column rewards careful reading. He tries to depict a Church victimized by liberal society and the legal system, instead of acknowledging that liberal society is actually resisting the imposition of Catholic beliefs through the legal system.
"….abortion, a form of lethal violence that the church opposes for the same reasons it opposes infanticide… "
The Church opposes abortion for the same reasons it opposes birth control and gay marriage —- a reluctance to sanction sex that doesn’t involve some risk of pregnancy. Better access to birth control means fewer abortions, an outcome that should be greatly desired by an organization that equates abortion with infanticide but the Church is willing to tolerate those abortions, promote them as a practical matter, rather than compromise its opposition to sex for sex’s sake.
"...a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing."
Douthat’s religion is resolved to impose its views on sexuality, grounded in religious belief, on a larger society that has not embraced them. Why does he expect his religion to flourish without opposition when his religion presents an ongoing challenge to the separation of church and state, to ordinary citizens trying to live their lives without the interference of religious believers.
45
Adam Serwer's article is well worth reading.
Serwer is right in his assessment of religious conservatives' pleading for religious tolerance towards Christians who don't want to acknowledge gay marriage or make cakes for gay couples. Those same Christians showed no kindness, no mercy when they were in control. Now that they're losing the culture war (which they gleefully started) they are acting like a bully who, once cornered, begs for permission to keep slapping his former victims whom he used to punch and kick.
Ahmari, the main target of Serwer’s article, is a religious warrior who is willing to subvert democratic norms in order to establish a religious state in America. He is seemingly out on the fringe, but the decision by so many conservative Christians to support Donald Trump suggests that his views are solidly in the mainstream.
Douthat’s invocation of assisted suicide is a red herring, of sorts. Conservative Catholics react to birth control, same-sex marriage and other affronts to their patriarchal views of sexuality with the same fervor with which they greet assisted suicide. They regard same-sex marriage as a provocation worthy of abandoning liberalism; on the other hand, they are strangely silent about the life-destroying effects of untethered capitalism, and resent Pope Francis for his critiques of global capitalism.
27
Hatred. Greed. Lying. Fear Thats what the religious right gets when they support Trump. Even my kids know that. It's clear as day.
20
Ross’ pieces say too little in too many words. In all do respect let’s get to the point.
18
Douthat, a believing Catholic, always omits entirely any discussion of the fact that a rapidly growing share of Americans don't share his certainty that god exists.
To retain one's faith in the face of all the refutational discoveries made by science, one must rationalize all of life's absurdities and evils.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who still believes in god as the creator of the universe cannot be trusted to make rational decisions about the really important issues like climate change and nuclear war, because their view of the end times is dangerously absurd.
21
This is an ugly debate brought on by Ross Douthat once again trying to get away with lecturing the lesser of us (in his opinion) who happen to be liberal and secular.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it bears mentioning again the religion he practices and defends once burned “heretics” at the stake and sent armies to attack Muslims in their own lands.
In my lifetime, I became aware of segregated Catholic churches here in the North, and the violation of children by clergy, followed by cover up and denial. Where I live, it was reported in the local paper, a bishop paid a family to get their 15 year old daughter an abortion after she was impregnated by the parish priest, who was then reassigned to another town. This retired bishop still attends Catholic Conference meetings.
Perhaps Mr. Douthat can explain why he feels liberals have it wrong. There is no movement on the left to persuade people to abandon their beliefs. The complaint is about the imposition of constraints on constitutional rights and freedoms that cross the very definite barrier known as the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
36
Mr Douthat makes a cursory and sanitized mention of his Roman Catholic church's "particularly salient" scandal (privileged, predominantly white men raping children and forcing their paramours to have abortions) and then alleges liberalism works against his religion's "flourishing."
Mr Douthat fails to acknowledge what is all becoming so clear due to liberalism--orthodox religions led by legions of men are not religions, but associations which prey upon children and women. This subjugation of women and children is enshrined in ancient, unquestioned myths of male superiority and sovereignty, "infallibility" even.
Religious leaders entrusted with the moral development of their "faithful" do not rape them. Those are criminals, not clerics.
The Catholic Church is not the only organization of men who rape children--all the world has now seen the SBC, the Orthodox Jewish and Christian organizations and others all exposed for their hypocrisy and enforced silence.
Organizations that silence those who have been abused and then wish to have their organizations flourish are criminal syndicates, not religions.
31
I went to Catholic school from 1st grade through high school. The nuns who taught us belonged to the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, and when I was high school, they were prominently involved with social justice work in South America. Although they were as anti-abortion as any Catholic, they taught respect for those who are different, tolerance, ecumenism, the empowerment of women and girls, and the lifting up of the poor. This is the Catholicism I learned. The Church Mr. Douthat writes about seems rather foreign to me.
23
What exactly is this liberal order forcing upon Catholics and evangelicals?
I can't think of anything. That liberal order simply wants those religious groups to persuade others to willingly practice what they see as proper behavior, not to use the power of the state to force those religious concepts on those who do not share their religious beliefs.
29
I can’t stop the tears. Of sorrow or derision or both. The Douthat theory of Catholicism seems much to me like conservative Islam. Both would like their values and rules imposed on everyone.
My life began in Roman Catholicism, then moved to hard core atheism in my teens that lasted fifty years. This past year, reluctantly, warily, unwillingly really, but very sincerely I converted to Greek Orthodoxy (I’m not the least bit Greek). My church also condemns abortion, but fully understands separation of church and state in the U.S. its priests can’t vote and don’t pontificate on political issues from the pulpit. So I can support freedom of choice and be a solid Orthodox Christian with no feeling of conflict or contradiction.
A main reason for that is that our church stresses free will. It doesn’t classify sins. It recognizes areas of mystery. It leaves judgment of individual choices and actions to God, not humans, even clergy. I find that satisfyingly rational without in any way undermining my faith.
The white male patriarchy, fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic alike, misread the Scriptures in their efforts to force very un-Christian policies on everyone, especially women and LGBTQ people. They are self-interested and corrupt, and I have no doubt, without judging, that they will have uncomfortable conversations with Our Lord on Judgment Day. I expect to also, but not for seeking to impose my beliefs or way of life on others. Methinks Mr. Douthat doth protest too much.
15
Hocus Pocus.
"...progressive politics is also nurturing a fashionable occultism, whose rituals may be practiced somewhat ironically or performatively but whose anti-Catholicism seems quite sincere."
A believer in science could claim Catholic Mass is occultism;
fashionable?
Depends on the priest's vestments.
13
Here is the problem with religion. Why do the adherents to each think that THEY are chosen, that they are right?
Given that, and that there is no way to answer this, ALL religion should be kept away from ALL politics. Period.
18
Note how throughout this comments section the terms, "white, "male," and "Christian" are thrown around as if they were slurs. The left absolutely hates the other "Side." The vicious, mean-spirited stereotyping is repulsive, and wouldn't be dreamed of if the adjectives were "black," "female," "Muslim" or any other combination of terms.
Christians would be chased out of public life, and hounded out of jobs and homes if the left wasn't thwarted by that pesky thing called the Constitution.
It is time to drop the pretense that the left is liberal. They may be worse than the illiberal right, in that they still use the rhetoric of anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-bigotry in pursuit of their hateful, bigoted goals.
5
I don’t even need to read this. Of course they are. People occasionally say no to them it’s true. But they are privileged, and this special pleading can’t obscure it or make it not so.
5
Part of the problem here is that American conservatism always presents any current difference from its ever-shifting orthodoxy as a deviation from a pre-existing order, as a loss. Rhetorically and psychologically, people with conservative mindsets presume themselves to be defending what was once the status quo. That's basically a definitive feature of conservatism.
So while Douthat is of course correct to point out that if you examine actual history, you don't find that dominance, it's because conservatism has always already made a claim to having possessed historical dominance. I know it sounds weird, but the basis of conservatism is to relate to the pre-existence of a state of affairs as self-justifying.
Basically, for a conservative to say, we were not once in charge, is to say, I am seeking change. The fact that there never has been a consensus on anything - in Christianity, in politics - and that history's only two constant unvarying features are dissension and change - leaves conservatism in an inherently paradoxical relationship to history.
7
I can't quite follow Ross anymore, his prose flies higher and higher, and escapes me.
11
The religious right are basically bullies who never grasped the most brilliant thing our founding fathers gave us the separation between church and state. They are bullies. I'm guessing Ross hasn't lived next to a Hasidic community. Try it. Laws that the rest of us are expected to follow don't apply to them. Get in a car accident with one and you will be forced to wait for the special "Jewish police" arrive at the scene because they don't recognize legitimate law enforcement . They'll cheer on the next war with Iran but will never actually serve and fight any wars. Dying is for other kids not theirs. Sorry but the religious right is not the downtrodden they are bullies.
25
Abortion is no more a form of "lethal violence" than forcing an inadvertently poor, young woman to carry a child of rape or incest to term and subsequently - for all practical purposes - abandoning that child to a life of suffering and poverty.
And any discussion of the Catholic Church that conveniently omits the church's complicity in the sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children is tainted by hypocrisy. Spare me the lament over "Anti-Catholicism". By any measure it is well deserved.
361
@walt amses
Thank you Walt.
29
@walt amses
Just before the clergy abuse crisis broke in Boston via the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, the hierarchy continued to try to silence survivors and their families silenced blamed the Globe repeatedly for being "anti-Catholic."
Yet even today. Catholics, or rather the Catholic hierarchy in the USA plays the victim card and Douthat wants us to see it through his point of view. Okay, I read that and it's nothing that the RCC hasn't tried before.
Douthat and the hierarchy are more loyal to the Vatican and Catholic doctrine than to democracy. The hierarchy of the RCC has subverted democracy in numerous countries. Here, too.
Meanwhile the child sexual assaults continue. The Roman Catholic Church has no moral authority, ZERO, until it stops this 'soul murder' of children in its care. I live near where former priest James Porter molested children in the 1980. The 'soul wounds' of survivors and family members are still unhealed.
Michael Rezendez, clergy abuse survivor, says in the "Spotlight" movie, "They knew and they let it happen." The Catholic Church should stop trying to turn ALL women into brood mares, and deal with its wrongdoing. Abortion needs to stay as a legal procedure.
Anyone who suspects a child is being abused should call the police and report it. Let the police investigate it. Pedophilia is a crime and the RCC still deals with it as a 'sin'. This is shameful and wrong.
61
There are many reasons to be down on Catholicism, particularly the sex scandals that have seemingly gone on forever. However, if you look a little deeper you will also see a powerful force for good around the world especially in places no one else wants to go. Charities of all kinds, schools in poor communities, these important contributions to the poor and downtrodden would be sorely missed if they ever stopped operating.
13
The key to this piece comes at the end when it becomes clear that Douthat is fighting against a straw man. Nobody as far as I can see at any scale is dismissing the political goals of the Religious Right because they are "privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before".
Anti-religious sentiment is about failure to respect the establishment clause. People who receive that sentiment often happen to harbor racist and sexist sentiments which are rightfully being called out.
That to me looks like reasonable responses to the positions and activities of the Religious Right as it operates in the political sphere. To be criticized is not to be persecuted, no matter how much you want to feel that way.
20
I don't know if they're privileged or not, but they are definitely perverted. They have taken religion and turned it into a weapon of hate while thinking everyone else should do as they say. These people are one of the most dangerous elements in society today. White supremacists take their cues from them and turn it into violence.
Every time in history that the extreme Right has reared it's ugly head, there has been nothing but death and destruction.
Beware! The entire world paid a terrible price when they went unchallenged in Germany. That is why they must be seriously countered every last time they try to gain momentum. And that includes what is happening NOW.
14
Read a book, Ross. And drop the religious schtick. Your type has already done enough damage to world societies and this planet. This world is burning up; less arable land to support an exploding population; catastrophic weather/climate damage occurring with more and more frequency; ocean acidification leading, potentially, to collapse of aquatic food webs, which leads to more food insecurity for us.... Yada, yada... And you are sitting her contemplating how religion now looks under "liberalism". Jesus, get a grip. Thanks to people like you, human civilization may end in a relatively short period of time. And THIS is what you are griping about? Again, good God, PLEASE come to your senses.
11
Republican party actually carefully groomed it's core vote bank by infusing Christian fundamentalism, white supremacy, & crony capitalism in our education system (with promotion of private/charter religious schools & home schooling) and in public policy. That interference increased significantly after Reagan became US president in 1981.
Trump just exploited and continuing to exploit that asset better than any GOP politician.
On the other hand, Democrats found a stable & reliable vote bank in racial and religious minorities, who are equally, if not more, religious.
All these interference of religion (& race) in US politics is actually brewing a deadly cocktail & propelling USA to become more unstable & ungovernable in not so distant future, if unchecked.
We now know that religious allegiance affect the same part of the brain (front lobe) that's affected by drugs- https://is.gd/Y3Uci1 It impair our sense of truth, ability to think logically, non-task related memory, experience things which is not there at all. Many religious people, irrespective of formal educational degrees & job designation, prefer to live in a make-believe world.
It’s also known that religion needs patronization of the Government/King to flourish, even to survive. Without such state sponsorship influence of religion in the society & religious faith itself may become extinct. That’s why there is no major new religion in modern time- https://is.gd/cmsCpy
6
OMG Ross. This is absolute craziness. Who is this guy you keep quoting? What are you talking about? Take a vacation. Get out more and live life. This column is destroying you. Go back!
9
I have a college education and read this newspaper daily and thoroughly. However, this Douthat opinion is the most obtuse writing I've ever attempted to understand. To appear smart is not the same as being effectively smart.
16
Spread out the victims, thin the mix, point a finger perhaps to some (like me) off-point, and deny/avoid dealing with the present. The alliance of the religious right (by any name) empowers and deals with a threat to our democracy, that mechanism created to attempt to protect us all/
Nice Try, Mr. Douthat. I'll hand you a "C-."
2
Whenever Ross Douthat (or his various fellow Catholic conservatives) asks us to consider the "complicated" history of the Church, he (and his various fellow Catholic conservatives) always manage to omit the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Indulgences, the promiscuous Popes and the never-ending alliances between the Church and just about every Western autocracy of the last several hundred years. Those "complications" don't count.
And, of course, the systemic--and historical--abuse of children by priests is glossed over as a "scandal," as if the clergy had forgotten to shine their shoes before they strode up to the altar.
Ross Douthat, like Rod Dreher, is very good at what he does, but what he does is peddle his version of Christianity as True & Good. He has the right to do that, and the rest of have the right to treat his Truth & Goodness as just another sales pitch to the faithful.
11
Yes. Moving on.
Oh, you want an explanation? Okay. There's a case before the Supreme Court to see if a giant cross is actually an expression of Christianity or not- hint: it is. A law enforcement officer in Tennessee said that police should be able to kill gay people, and he was allowed to resign with full benefits. There is an ongoing conference in Florida where multiple preachers have called for the state-sanctioned execution of gay people; this is the anniversary of the Pulse massacre. The Chino Valley Unified School District in California opens their school board meetings with Christian prayer; they lost the court case, but they pushed it all the way up to the appeals court level because a local church got their members elected to the board. Almost $250,000 wasted that could have gone towards children's education. Christians are allowed to get away with the most appalling ignorance of science because of their faith- climate change denial and young earth creationism are the most egregious but by no means the only incidents. Catholic hospitals are allowed to kill and maim women by providing substandard medical care. Women's health care isn't automatically covered by many insurance policies because Christians decided they didn't want to.
This is literally things that are off the top of my head, that came up THIS WEEK. So yeah, the religious right is privileged.
14
Poor Ross. It's difficult to ignore his whining about his "oppression" as a Catholic in the US. He thinks the Supreme Court, "the least democratic branch" of our government, is at war with his religion because they won't impose a total ban on abortion and stands in the way of gay rights. It's interesting when we consider when we consider that five of the nine Justices are Catholic and a sixth (Gorsuch) was raised Catholic and attended a Jesuit high school. He became an Episcopalian after he married an Anglican woman, and is the only "main-stream Protestant" on the Court. The other three Justices are Jewish. Like the Catholic Church, women have been under-represented 110 male Justices to four women. There has been no known gay Justice.
10
Religion is privileged in the first place. It is subsidized by every taxpayer. Why should they get an exemption from taxes, any of them? We pay for the shortfall. We establish it by this un-Constitutional act. Thank God New York State has passed a law regarding vaccinations for Measles. Yup, simplistic in the grand scheme of things but that is where it all starts.
Religion teaches morality. Read the Ten Commandments --- not the first five, the second five. But that is as far as it goes. And by the way, where are the philosophies of Eastern Religions included in our thoughts?
6
a whole lot of words that say very little.
8
Religious liberty in the eyes of conservative Christians is liberty for conservative Christians. It is not liberty for Muslims, Jews, Hindus, other non-Christians.
10
Mentioning the Communists, Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam is a scare tactic that arouses fear, loathing and violence in white people. These groups were on the fringe and white conservatives used them as examples to further oppress black people.
The government through the FBI setup Cointelpro to destroy minority groups who they felt were subversive. That section in this essay vitiates the argument. Members of the mainstream churches are the government. There are no declared atheists in any branch of government.
Conservatives are more likely to get laws and rulings favorable to them.
8
I'm an evangelical who abandoned the Republican party (and my church) when George Bush invaded Iraq on phony pretenses. Yet I can't get away from some of my core values.... and that's why I'll vote for Elizabeth Warren. But I have one area of serious concern.
I'm pretty much out of touch with evangelicals.... but I think I understand what motivates them: they believe that abortion is America's holocaust. Since the inevitable result, if allowed to go to term, of the union of a human male sperm and female egg, is a human baby, it should, except for compelling reasons, be allowed to make its journey unimpeded. For that reason I respect Clinton's call to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare." I also understand that many believe that just as killing Jews in death camps was the ultimate crime of WW II, so abortion, when there are other options, is a human tragedy.
So evangelicals cannot abandon that issue. They believe that just as our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are divinely given, so the fetus has a right to life.
Do demagogues mislead them? deceive them? Yes. But make no mistake: they are willing to go to the barricades in defense of this issue.
Are Democrats prepared to sacrifice the presidency indefinitely on the issue? apparently so. It breaks my heart, because I see no good way out. Making abortion "Safe, legal, and rare" would be a start.... encouraging adoption instead of abortion would be a compromise....
2
“I want liberals — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before.”
Laboring through Ross Douthat’s apologia pro sua vita was reminiscent of my early days in Catholic school. Quite simply and with sincere respect for the right to practice or not according to one’s conscience, I find it offensive when we hear the same justifications for treating secular beliefs as less deserving, when in reality they tend to be more inclusive.
8
How about we treat religions like any other group and make them pay their taxes. Happy now? I thought not.
What a sham.
10
Let's just start at the obvious starting point. Are White People in America Privileged?
I think we all know the answer to that.
And everything else just falls into line.
4
This one, Brooks, and Bret make me reconsider my need to read this newspaper. What are these reactionaries doing here. What purpose do they serve?
12
For pete's sake, the conservative naval gazing from two weeks ago about whether or not America should be a theocracy is still generating "content"?
Sorry boys. America is not a theocracy. First amendment forbids this. Unless you're planning an all out revolution a la Iran you should really go noodle on something else.
9
Christians, especially Evangelicals, basic belief is that Christ will soon return and form a theological state. We are living in the "End times" and Israel is a sign of the times. Support Israel to bring about the event and not worry about the secular future or health of the planet.
What would the world be like today, if for 7 decades in the mid-East our foreign policy was based on our values of freedom of religion, equality, democracy, etc. instead of religious beliefs and prophesy?
5
Marginalized evangelicals? Oh..please! Try getting elected to anything as an out-and-about atheist.
10
Mr. Douthat belongs to the group of religious extremists who agree with a law that is currently forcing an 11 year girl living in Ohio to give birth to a her rapist's baby. Enough.
10
Enough talking about "privilege." It sounds like something cooked up to explain perpetual victimhood.
2
Wow! "The American creed has no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted." TRANSLATES AS "[T]he religious-conservative coalition just represents the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure within it that they can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression." I say again, Wow! You're so vain you probably think this song is about you.
3
Yes. The religious right is privileged. Next!
PS - and hypocritical ...
PPS - and whiny.
9
Keep in mind that Mr. Douthat's party seeks to have teacher led Christian prayers said in public schools. If that isnt "previlege" I dont know what is.
5
I’d be a lot more impressed by conservative Christianity’s support for the rights of fetuses if it didn’t end at the birth canal. What’s the benefit of being born if it’s only to better appreciate hunger, a lack of decent education, and vicious racism? I was raised Southern Baptist. Christ taught it was important to care for children and the poor. At no time did he say “As long as they’re white. Or try to put their brown feet in your white country. If they do, they should be put in the nearest cage.”
5
I'm sorry Mr. Douthat, but the religious right's (including conservative Catholics) determination to discriminate against women, minorities and the LGBTQ community are not legitimate religious beliefs. And your attempt to show progressive's "occultism" is just sad.
10
I think most thinking readers differentiate between the religious evangelicals and white power structure and that they may overlap does not make them one homogeneous group in a coordinated, singular rebellion against political and demographic changes. Rather, it is the white power structure that has been politically co-opting the religious to support their privilege by stirring up emotions and giving them the appearance of power with a seat at the table (such as with issues like abortion). Indeed, the former as a group, because of their cultural upbringing, can be counted on to reliably rise up against the specter of the black man surpassing them in economic and social power, so that race -- rather, racial differences -- are seen as the defining feature of their anger. It was MLK who pointed out that many in our country, no matter how badly off they may be, are instilled with the belief that they are still better off than the black man. Changing or even merging their respective positions in the pecking order becomes an existential threat, particularly as we live in culture that is defined by competition, in particular, the competition for economic wealth. Either way, it is about change, something with which conservatives are always uncomfortable, and the use of fear, in this case racial fear, as a political tool to manipulate others.
1
Having left Catholicism (and any religion - thank you , Bertrand Russell) at age 14, and now in my 60s. I continue to find the arguments of Catholics (no more than other religions) specious. It seems to me you're afraid of life. Of being good for the sake of being good. Of needing strictures to decide what's right rather than one's own moral and empathetic senses. Of needing "heavenly rewards" for being good. Liberalism is the opposite of what I see conservatism to be: just plain mean.
11
This is hardly an essay about a single paragraph. One claim: ‘It is not really true that... the abolition of chattel slavery, was accomplished by activists working painstakingly within a system of liberal constitutionalism.’ First, the relationship of this claim to
Serwer’s paragraph in the Atlantic is tenuous, and the claim is false in itself. The South left the Union. The House and Senate passed the 13th Amendment in 1864. Several readings of Douhat’s wandering arguments left me wondering how he can continue to defend equality as a tautology- I am equal only to my equals.
3
Abortion is the wedge issue of wedge issues and the elites in the Republican Party and their conservative Christian allies have mastered their play of that card. One has to wonder how conservative Catholics would decide to vote if left to only weigh the "life affirming" value of other social issues such as caring the poor (healthcare, education, and housing), prison reform, gun control, the amassing of huge arsenals of war, and the elimination of capital punishment. And, more theoretically, one has to wonder how conservative Catholics would vote if the issue instead involved the control of men's bodies. I have no idea when life officially begins or, as a man, how a woman actually decides whether or not to abort. However, I do know each of these issues, including abortion, have a profound impact on the lives of the living.
9
"longstanding tendency in modern secular polities — an institutionalized anti-Catholicism that effectively oppresses the church even if it stops short of persecuting it, a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing." You've confused not wanting your churches values imposed on the rest of us as "anti-Catholicism". For example: if you disagree with the idea of abortion, don't have one. For you (particularly as a male) you feel fine calling abortion pro-life, but I don't see you trying to upend the healthcare system that results in thousands of deaths annually. I posit that the anti-abortion discussion is a favorite among males because it is one more instance where a male is legislating to females issues that males will never encounter in your life. Live your values. If you can't become pregnant, defer to the judgement of the women who are. The Catholic church, like most institutions is offering just more misanthropy and misogyny for women.
9
An excellent column as usual, BUT I have two objections:
-I agree with Alex from New Jersey, who stated my position better than I could have, and
- I feel an irritating touch of paranoia in your final paragraphs. Although Catholics and non-Catholics may condemn the institution and those few who try to force their beliefs on society, I see little or no anti-Catholic feeling against those practicing their religion.
1
That the author ignores how the church has and still does support patriarchal social notions that have not only supported the oppression of women, it has ignored and fostered environments where the abuse of children and women has been ignored and even fostered to the obvious and significant detriment of the abused, and society as a whole. That the Southern Baptists have only recently begun to address this horror in their own ranks is telling about how conservative religions in practice still dismiss the full personhood of women and children. And to not discuss how the church largely supported slavery in this country is nearly a sufficient omission as to render all of the authors points on the matter tepid gruel at best.
8
Maybe the footsoldiers, as in the Civil War, have never been personally privileged, but that doesn't mean the movement as a whole is not about defense of privilege. The privileged are good at getting the unprivileged worked up about the rights of the privileged. Most of history is about that.
8
It do not find anti-Catholicism, that is against Catholics or against its value of "love they neighbor. What I find, as a former Catholic, is the contempt of the medieval misogynist institution. It is a man's church.
10
Just because some of the white religious right are poor does not mean that they are not privileged. They are privileged in that they are not stopped by the police for "driving while white" or "being shot at by the police while loitering on street corners". I have not read about white people having the police called because they are having a picnic in a public park, or selling lemonade in front of their own house. These are privileges not universally available to people of color.
16
Immoral Majority
Separation of church and state
I am a believer
2
I am not religious or a Conservative. That said, I always try to read columnists with a Conservative viewpoint so as to better understand viewpoints with which I disagree. I wish the NYT would choose a better writer than Mr. Douthat. No disrespect, but his writing is not clear and, for me, is a lost opportunity to have a meaningful conversation. This is the first time that I am commenting on his articles, but this I have had this sentiment multiple times. Mr. Douthat, I know you have a valuable opinion. Don’t waste that opinion on poor writing and poor examples. By doing so, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
8
The competition between the religious and the secular is essentially one of ideas. If the religious is right, then win the argument in the battleground of ideas. Convince people to convert to your religion and live the way you do. And allow other religions and those of a secular persuasion to do the same. The “true” path should reveal itself over time. And if we all end up on different paths, then maybe there is no “true” path. That’s the essence of the Constitution’s separation of church and state. The government and its laws are secular; the people may choose any religion that suits them or no religion at all.
Why is that so controversial among the Religious Right?
15
It seems to me that Mr. Douthat ignores an important issue - the extent to which religious conservatives should be able to impose their beliefs on the very large number, if not majority, of people in this country who do not share them. I am not aware that "liberals" are trying to force members of the religious right to have abortions, use birth control, or enter into same sex marriages. Instead they seek to protect the right of people who do not share those religious views to do so. Indeed, with respect to abortion, they seek to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies through sex education and wide availability of contraceptives. It is the religious right that seeks to impose their religious beliefs on people who do not share them. They also seek to hinder efforts to reduce unwanted pregnancies through sex education and contraceptives based on their religious views on sex outside of marriage.
380
@Alex
AMEN and AMEN my Brother. Freedom to live your convictions doesn't equal the right to impose your convictions on others. Otherwise, how is this different from the Sharia Law the Christian right abhors? They are two sides of the same coin that don't recognize themselves.
61
If by "religious right" you mean "white male protestants" (which is generally what that phrase means in the United States) Then yes. Yes they are. What else would you term the way that they feel free to flout anti-discrimination and healthcare laws (no cakes for gays! we don't want to provide our employees with health plans that cover birth control), amass vast wealth without having to pay those pesky taxes (looking at you, megachurches), and telling their congregations how to vote (in clear violation of their tax-exempt status). In the United States great privilege and leeway are accorded to those who claim adherence to protestant religions. Especially if they are white.
"Legally, elite liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today, and perhaps colleges and grammar schools tomorrow."
Translation: It is becoming harder and harder for the church to legally discriminate against LGBTQ+ folks and folks who don't share their rigid worldview, and it is also becoming harder and harder for the church to forcible impose their worldview and beliefs on others.
I fail to see how that is a bad thing. In fact, I rather think that is something to be celebrated!
170
@K.P.
In addition, I would ask why it's important or desirable for churches to operate any of those kinds of institutions.
Maybe we're in a state today where we need them due to various gaps and failures of government, but I'd posit it would be healthier to appropriately fund hospitals, societies and agencies in a way that they can serve ALL people.
28
The author omits the current thinking on the religious right, briefed in recent cases that have been before the highest court in the land, is that individuals within the religious right are allowed to do what ever those individuals may chose, as long as they can claim that it is part of their belief system tied to their "religion". No other individual or member of any group can make that claim, in connection with the belief-set of their particular social or political group. The "establishment clause" of the constitution has been tortured by some on the courts to expand it to give members of religions - especially Christian religious sects - such a "right" to do whatever they chose to do to whoever else they chose to do it. This is the very definition of privileged.
16
I grew up as one of three Jewish children in the public schools in my southern town--the other two being my younger siblings. Only when I was in my last year of high school did a couple of other Jewish children join our student body.
Catholics were more privileged than we were and WASPS were the most privileged. Black children did not attend our school in that age of segregation. In fact, they did not live in town, all black homes being gerrymandered outside the city limits.
From this perspective all Christians were more privileged than blacks and we were slightly more privileged than blacks, being white and attending white schools.
But I endured many slights and some outright anti-Semitism during my school years. I was also present when my parents' store was shut down due to Sunday Blue laws, along with the seasonal stores of other Jewish owners. Though the case was dropped, it cost my parents and the others precious earnings during the then-short tourist season.
It's time for the religious right to stop whining about the changes in our demographics. They have as much to gain as everyone else in a more egalitarian society, where education and hard work, not identity, are key to success.
17
You mention that the pro-choice side seems to be hardening into a view that pro-life activism is as un-American as racism.
I predict that, should these extreme anti-abortion bans go into effect, they'll be reframed as a form of slavery. That's an appropriate description of what it means to be stripped of bodily autonomy the moment birth control fails, and compelled by the State to undergo forced pregnancy, forced incubation, and forced childbirth.
The UN deputy high commissioner for human rights recently characterized these extreme laws as "torture."
I can't say with certainty when human life begins. But I can say with certainty that State-compelled pregnancy and childbirth is an abomination.
16
@CL
Essentially, the so-called “Pro-Life” crowd is advocating Socialism: state control of the means of reproduction. I find it curious that Conservative America has conveniently overlooked this socialist boogeyman in their midst. On second thought, It would not surprise me to find that conservatives divide “socialism” into two categories:
Bad Socialism: anything that looks or sounds remotely like “liberalism”; and any policy that helps workers, the poor and disadvantaged, or gives someone a helping hand up when they fall.
Good Socialism: right-wing populist evangelicalism as represented by the Trumpist Republican Party, formerly known as the GOP, and any policy that benefits the donor class at everyone else’s expense.
4
You may be over thinking this. Christianity argues that you should love thy neighbor, wash the feet of the poor, share the wealth, judge not, and other “good” things.
On the other hand, nihilists, who like breaking things like governments, treaties, laws, etc. don’t like what they see when they look around.
The elegant solution is to have the church represent your “good” instincts while the government (which you don’t like anyway) gets rid of the things you don’t like.
2
Just read Tom, from Detroit. He nailed it.
There is a continuum here that is not addressed. On one end are the least open minded and bigoted evangelicals...Mormons, Church of the Nazarene, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and on the other end are the most open minded believers...United Church of Christ, Church of God in Christ, Unitarian Universalist, and African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Catholic's and the Episcopal Church in the middle. Having said there are closed and open minded individuals on certain topics on both ends. But when it comes to white believers wanting to keep the country as they believe it was when they deemed it "great", i.e. white, you won't find many on the liberal end of the spectrum. Those who don't get there way will always feel oppressed and the more hard core in your beliefs, the more you will cry and scream oppression!
4
Ross Douthat writes columns defending Conservative Christianity and the Catholic Church with his eyes and ears tightly closed so he doesn't have to deal with the hypocrisy and evil both groups practice. I firmly believe that if Jesus was to return today, the Catholic Church and Conservative Christians churches would go to war over who gets to crucify Jesus this time.
9
Simple answer, Ross:
Yes—yes they are, and they always have been (at least since around 380 CE [see: Theodosius])...
Until now.
4
The religious right emerged in response to the shambles of the late 60s and the disaster of the Vietnam War. Also in response to the sexual revolution, and to hit back at the counterculture. It was how Ronald Reagan got elected gov. of California, and his platform to the presidency.
Sure they’re privileged
Hey may very well end up in Heaven,
or Hell. !
1
With Ross, quite a lot of the perception of bias against Christianity seems to come down to hospitals and adoption agencies run by churches, and particularly the Catholic church. The "attack" against religion comes in the form of requiring such organizations to operate by the same rules, regardless of whether they are owned by churches, secular non-profits, or for-profit corporations. At its logical extreme, what the "post-liberal" people seem to want is a religious exemption to the rule of law, whether in the operation of church-owned businesses performing non-religious social or commercial functions, or in public officials' decisions as to whether to perform fully the duties of the offices they voluntarily sought. Slopes do not get a lot more slippery than that.
8
Populism is a con, and cons don't tend to work as well on the privileged. So no, the Trumpites aren't privileged. They're getting screwed a-gain by the hollow promises of a demagogue. Why do evangelicals support this? I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with the popularity of apocalyptic thinking. If a giant meteor was on collision-course with the Earth they'd probably support that, too. It means God is coming for us!
That's what Trump is: he's their Armageddon meteor.
7
Ross, you are wrong that liberalism "make[s] it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today." What makes it difficult or impossible is that the church has a problem with obeying the law and respecting people's rights. Freedom of religion means the government can't impose a religion. But the law has always been clear that the government can regulate the behavior of the religious: one can't consume peyote or LSD or cocaine just because its a tenant of their faith.
If a church forgoes a hospital, because the hospital would be forced to provide services the church disagrees with, how is that any different than a petulant child refusing to eat anything (including desert) to avoid eating any broccoli. The Church's position is childish political poppycock, and has no foundation in the law. The church has simply been commandeered by the illiberal - even the Vatican has counseled the US church refocus on doing the work of Jesus, and not republican political masters.
6
Ross - Those pesky rules that you describe, the ones which prevent organizations from imposing their religious convictions upon others? Funny thing, it turns out that they protect Catholics as well. Say, Catholics who want to foster children, but who are turned away by Evangelical CWAs
2
Two things:
"... Its allies in pro-life, pro-family politics include Orthodox Jews, whose history is not exactly one of power; Mormons...."
It's allies in pro-family politics also include same sex couples who cannot become parents by accident. Who must choose it, and in doing so lovingly and conscientiously are therefore "pro-family".
Secondly, the big irony here is that many of the folks being discussed in the article would see the word "liberal" and assume the writer is talking about the Obamas and Warrens of the world and not the non-partisan political philosophy of the Enlightenment upon which our nations was founded.
1
The subsidies for religion are available only to people who profess beliefs that cannot be proven. They encourage delusions and diminish the stature of those who think believing the unprovable is not helpful.
5
Yep all those catholic clergy, what is it, 7-8%, who committed atrocities against the most vulnerable, and the bishops who protected them. Really. Keep drinking that KoolAid! We surely are living in a Trumpian world. That any rational human being can think that there’s anything in Catholicism that’s evolved past paganism is beyond understanding. But please keep drinking that blood and eating that flesh. But try to be honest about things like abortion. Catholic and evangelical notions of the soul, which is not universal, is the only basis upon which these religions oppose abortion. And that violates the establishment clause.
7
Mr. Douthat, as someone who's lapsed from the faith he loved as a younger man your portrayal of the Catholic Church as victim ignores the institution's proclivity for alienating those who could/would stick with it even through rough patches. E.g.:
Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s his holiness John Paul II forbade some clergy from participating in politics; priests and nuns who were adherents of liberation theology in Latin America were sidelined and a member of the Society of Jesus/Law School Dean/Member of Congress was forced to resign from office. In S. America bad guys were emboldened to rape/murder nuns, assassinate a Bishop and murder members of the clergy who advocated for the poor. There's a reason why the Church has lost the fight for souls in Latin America.
Francis's immediate predecessor engaged guys to carry out a hit piece on religious women in America with a final conclusion that orders of nuns had be overrun by "radical feminists". Last I saw, sisters run hospital chains, Catholic charities chapters and inner city parochial schools - you know, they do the Lord's work.
Last example, and I admit this is petty, then - presidential candidate Kerry approached the rail in a Midwest city and the celebrant denied him the host for his view on abortion. Compare that with the priest almost mouth kissing President Trump prior to midnight mass on Christmas, 2016. I guess being a chronic and unrepentant violator of commandments six though ten is no big deal.
6
The article states that Catholicism has been oppressed by civil society but not persecuted. What is the nature of oppression that isn't persecution, other than refusing to allow them to impose their beliefs on others?
3
I don't necessarily agree that the Civil War was extra-constitutional. While it could be perceived that way, it's could also be perceived as a set of rogue actors trying to pervert the Constitution and liberal democracy in general. In other words, (some in) the Southern States started it and every else responded.
What happened at Fort Sumpter? Were they or were they not the first shots of the "civil war"? Was it not the Confederates who fired upon the Union first? QED.
3
I am not a believer in the dogma of any organized religion. I am not convinced that there is any need to imagine that there was a Creator.
Nevertheless, I have no qualms about believers believing. I know what I cannot believe, but I do not presume to know the truth.
But I object to the fact that some members of organized religions pity themselves as being oppressed by the state. Most people take for granted their own advantages to the point where the believe them rights.
Let us not forget that by the consent of the people, religious groups are exempted from real estate taxes as a matter of course, thereby raising taxes on their fellow citizens. A "Bible Believing Church" is being constructed near my home, removing a large tract of land from the tax rolls. The local community is spending a considerable sum rearranging a four lane highway for the new Church's convenience.
All this in a country where many Bible believing pastors are crying out against government persecution.
Why should a hospital receiving support from public funds be allowed to pick and choose among governmentally prescribed procedures?
Why should religious schools be partially funded by the state if they do not conform to the state curriculum?
Just a few thoughts on the persecution of religion by government in the U.S.A.
13
I am always incredibly engaged in reading (and listening to) your opinions, Ross, even if I don't often agree with them.
But, to cut the argument on the crushing supremacy of Christianity in America down to one example: all but two presidents have been openly Christian, and it has been (and largely remains) political suicide to not at least pay lip service to being Christian as a presidential candidate.
This is not just something which just happens to be true; the American voting public has -expected- a candidate who believes in Jesus.
Thankfully, this has started to change. But full stop, how can you explain away the privilege that reflects?
5
Ross Doughthat clearly hasn't accepted the fact that, in lying about and covering up and failing to address the sexual abuse of children by priests and the systemic abuse and neglect of children in Catholic orphanages and enslavement of women in "Magdalene laundries," the Catholic Church has lost all credibility as a moral authority. Add to that the Church's "Ethical and Religious Directives" that require Catholic hospitals to administer pregnancy tests to rape victims who present at their emergency rooms, often without telling the victim why, and to ask questions about the victim's menstrual cycle so the ER STAFF can determine if there's a possibility conception might have taken place or might still take place and withhold any treatment to prevent that from happening, as if stopping a pregnancy resulting from a rape from occurring would somehow subvert God's will. That inhumane and extremely presumptuous practice--the Church presumes to make a series of choices for a rape victim without informing her of those decisions or allowing her to make them for herself--tells you what Douthat's real issue is: He doesn't like separation of Church and state when it comes to abortion, reproductive choices and other issues, such as homosexuality, and he wants the law of the land to follow the teachings of his church. I'm 63, and I remember when the Christian cultural norms Douthat favors dominated American culture. Let's not go back.
10
It baffles me. We’re not the early Christians who worked to undermine the authority of state religions and the communities they sustained liberal individualists who put the salvation of their unique and individual souls ahead of the preservation of community? Were not early Christians dissenters working by non-violent means to undermine community? In its essence is not Christianity a liberal religion, perhaps even the foundation of liberal individualism, as Charles Taylor would argue in that Augustine launched the inward turn which culminated in liberal individualism?
1
It's not just about abortion (though I strongly support everyone's right to exercise control over his or her own body), but about a myriad of other issues.
My older brother and I were born at St. Peter and Paul's Hospital in Dallas, but when my sister was born, the doctor strongly recommended that my mother not have a fourth child, and that she have a procedure to ensure that she wouldn't. Consequently, my sister was born at Parkland, the Dallas public hospital. What would she have done, had she lived in a town with only a Catholic hospital?
When a doctor, nurse, orderly or billing clerk is working at a hospital, should the hospital be able to determine whether that person's insurance covers contraception? Should the hospital be able to determine whether that person's insurance should cover a spouse of the same sex? Should the hospital be able to deny any procedures that a woman (or man) and her doctor agree is medically indicated?
The old formulation of "your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins" still seems appropriate. If you don't want to have an abortion, perform an abortion, perform a sterilization procedure, use contraception or marry someone of the same sex, simply don't do any of those things. If you want to control whether I do any of those things, then mind your own business.
Is it a privilege to be able to deny someone else's autonomy? Absolutely. Is it an inappropriate privilege ? Again, absolutely.
10
You lost me at "progressive politics is also nurturing a fashionable occultism"
As a long time atheist, born into and raised in the Baptist church, occultism is a mere distraction. The number of practicing occultists is outweighed by the shear number of PTA members across this land. Atheists are the silent members across all income groups. And we don't necessarily feel put upon, but it is much easier if we keep our faith to ourselves.
The mere mention of occultism belies the overarching weakness of the rest of the argument.
8
I'm not sure that the writer has a good grasp of Catholicism's history. Convince me that the church's stance against (Catholics) having abortions is not about having more children who will grow up to be Catholic, and likewise with their own children, and so on, compounded, increasing its influence and wealth over time.
Show me that the church's stance on celibacy was not based on the principal that a priest with no family will leave his estate to the church rather than to his family.
Show me that the church did not continue to encourage the Conquistadors with the certainty its treasury would multiply.
Convince me that the Inquisition was effected on Christian precepts rather than for confiscation of property and protection of church power facing the emerging Reformation.
Righteous justification is available for ever so much. That said, Catholicism has experienced historic prejudice against it as have the Mormons and most other religions.
Nor is the Mormon history quite so simple. It was a cult who were nearly so intolerant as were the Pilgrims. For example, early juries of Mormons in the midwest tended not to convict Mormons of crimes against non-Mormons.
I see the trouble from religious fundamentalism as arising from two characteristic traits: intolerance and anti-intellectualism.
If a group chooses its rules as against our Constitution, then that is civil disobedience, with its usual risks and penalties.
5
So many Christian religions with so many interpretations of the same foundational texts that emanated from the same God. These variations are are a product of the time of their inception. In an irony not lost on God, the faithful have divided themselves up into camps based on their belief that their version of God is the one and only true God. Religions are welcome to fight (peacefully) about the nature of God. The problem is many wars of have been fought mainly on that premise. Keep your faith at home, with your family and your congregation. When it is used as a wedge by government officials to divide people, your kidding yourself if you believe you are doing it in the name of God.
7
Seems to me that Serwer's paragraph contains a whole lot of truth, maybe more than Ross Douthat can digest easily. Serwer is right that those who have taken our democratic rights most for granted (because their exercise of those rights had not historically been abridged) now are the people showing authoritarian and theocratic leanings.
I've watched this evolution over the decades. When I was a child more than five decades ago, America was far less diverse, both racially and religiously, than it is today. Assertions of Christian dominance (from school prayers to open proselytizing by teachers) offended the First Amendment then as now; the difference was that Jews, Hindus and secularists were more likely to tolerate this offense and less likely to assert their rights and risk rocking the boat. LGBTQ people were denied their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection, but in the 1960s they were mostly closeted and reluctant to assert their rights.
The principles in our Constitution did not change, but our culture did. It became less religious in general and less Christian in particular. As the culture changed, religious minorities and nonbelievers were less accepting of casually theocratic trappings that had always been unconstitutional but had not been constitutionally challenged. Now, people like Douthat want to take us back to the days when birth control was illegal and gays were silenced, and they're willing to use the power of government to reimpose the old culture.
14
"....abortion, a form of lethal violence that the church opposes for the same reasons it opposes infanticide ..." A lethal violence is forcing a woman in dire straits to have a baby. The Roe decision was rendered to protect the right of choice, which has nothing to do with religion.
15
Oh no, poor Ross. Are they trying to steal "christmas" too?
In the 1930s, the evangelical movement gained power. And how did they demonstrate that they were 'people of faith'?
Prohibition. Incarceration, punishments, more jails...such deep understanding and compassion.
And now, the propaganda of Fox 'news' and hate radio have stirred the evangelical dooms-day machine into action again.
And 'god' warriors are on the march again.
Unfortunately Ross, there never really was a 'war on christmas'. It was just a propaganda tool used to stir up the 'base'. And boy those southern white evangelical zealots got fired up, ready to burn down the library.
As is clear now, the 'base' is but a dooms-day cult of evangelical zealots, on a march to the rapture.
But lies and slander are not the tools of God.
And Ross, there is nothing more anti-American than self-imposed ignorance mixed with religious resentment.
Being stubborn is not being faithful. Being intransigent is not being devoted. And deliberately choosing to be ignorant is the very definition of stupidity.
God did not give us the gift of Reasoned Thought as a cruel joke.
Making things up, never was divine.
21
@Fred Armstrong
Wonderfully expressed. Bravo!
3
I think Mr. Douthat is very much correct that Catholics have endured systematic persecution in this country, but I think he is very much wrong that they are anything other than completely privileged today. Catholics are by-and-large wealthy and powerful; control the Supreme Court (literally); and their congregations are holding relatively stable while mainline Protestant churches are essentially going out of business. Today, conservative Catholics are engaged in political payback on the old WASP guard. The WASPs lost their "P" and now they are just "WAS". They can't form any kind of coherent moral resistance, because they've lost their meeting places (literally), and don't believe in anything that hangs together other than vague notions of liberalism and a nostalgic longing for... something. Meanwhile, Catholics hold the levers of power along with their Evangelical allies, and while the Pro-Life movement gets all the press, the judicial, legislative, and social push is a broader return to pre-modern notions of gender roles, sexuality, and tolerance for diversity.
1
Religious faith is, or ought be, a private matter between a believer and his/her God. Except when the believer's faith makes him/her a proselytizer.
Any religion that proselytizes, considers its Way the only Way, its Truth the only Truth and that its duty to God is to impose that Way and Truth on Others can not be considered reasonable, reasoning or reassuring.
Nor can that religion's adherents.
4
The illiberal direction of the courts is for the purpose of making the religious right more privileged than everyone else. It is taking the notion of 'religious freedom' and bending it to mean that the followers of conservative Christianity have the right to control other people's lives -- based on religious objections which should remain on the personal level.
If you object to anything, at all (to include birth control, transsexualism, abortion), then you should not be empowered to affect others who do not hold your views. Your right of conscience ends at the borders of your own person, however, there are those who want to alter this long-held American value.The religious right is trying to shape legislation that affects those who disagree with them. At the same time, they're stacking the courts via McConnell for this purpose.
An attack on liberal democracy? Yes, they hope to create a theocracy (in practice, if not by name). If Christians are concerned about integralism -- they should consider not overstepping the bounds of mutual respect of all groups afforded by our society's secular liberalism. They'll find they'll be better accepted as a member of 'the team' instead of an internal force bent on sabotaging the promise of justice and equality for all.
5
I think the key sentence in this opinion is:
"a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing"
In a secular society, a religion does not flourish. Faith is understood as a personal choice and not a social one.
And religious moral does not (should not) impact people that did not make the choice of this religion.
You should be free to follow your faith but you should also be prevented to impose it to others.
9
As a lifelong Catholic, I see the Catholic conservatives as a legacy of two very conservative, dogmatic popes, John Paul II & Benedict XVI. If John XXIII had been followed by someone braver than Paul VI, who was intimidated by Joseph Ratzinger into denying Catholic women birth control, we may have seen a very different church. The sisters in my Catholic all-girls school were social justice warriors & disgusted with Paul VI’s decision. They still taught us all about birth control. Pope Francis is s fresh face that is making the church more open to less dogmatic ideas.
Also, the idea that the European church suffered from unfair anti-clericalism is laughable. The church caused so many wars & heartache they deserved what they got.
5
Sayeth Douthat: " it is a place where the most oppressed and disfavored people need never despair of their future, need never abandon the promise of the founding, because the arc of our national story can always, with enough activist zeal and procedural perseverance, be bent toward justice."
Tell that to the people seeking asylum, who this horrible man that far too many Americans think is doing a great job as President, wants to "remove". And tell that to whoever is next on his list of "unpersons."
Also: Whitesplaining the black experience in this country is not exactly a good look for a white conservative.
10
@Jill C.
lol "whitesplaining"—I love you. rock on, sister.
2
So the problem is "a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing"?
Sorry, but your religion proseltyzes, which means it can only "flourish" by crushing my religion (or lack of religion). Sure, it's not as bad as during the Spanish Inquisition, just ask the residents of Fort Caroline, but it is the reason the founders prohibited a Government-established religion.
There are legitimate comparisons of the religious issues in the abortion and slavery conflicts in America, such as the debate over whether a fetus (now) or an African-American (in the 1850s) was a person.
But the essence of the religious conservative fight against abortion (and increasingly birth control) is to impose a church's teachings on the broader society. Ironically, it was the pro-slavery advocates who pursued this strategy, first by the expansion of slavery into the western territories, and then by forcing Northern states to obey Southern laws (Fugitive Slave Act and Dred Scott decision).
Sadly that dispute had to be resolved by Civil War. Hopefully true religious tolerance can resolve the current disputes.
5
The Catholic view is that freedom of religion means freedom to impose their views on others.
Isn't that exactly what the Pilgrims fled to America to avoid?
7
@Adam
"Isn't that exactly what the Pilgrims fled to America to avoid?"
Not really. See Connecticut, Rhode Island, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson...
Douthat is wrong to set the Catholic Church against liberalism.
In a critical era, the Catholic Church was pressing European and American capitalism to be more liberal. Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical on it, 15 May,1891, "New Things" [Rerum novarum] defining the relationship between capital and labor in ways to protect labor. It is a classic of the Catholic answer to both capitalist and communist ideas.
There is nothing essential to the Catholic Church that requires the sort of conservatism that Douthat assigns it in this column. Quite the contrary, the current Pope no more supports it than did the Pope of the late 19th Century.
So when Douthat writes here, "for serious Papists, especially, the longer arc of liberalism has to look a bit dubious at the moment," he is setting himself against the Popes of the present and the best of the past. That isn't a "serious Papist," it is just promoting his own ideas as if they were the whole meaning of the Church.
5
@Mark Thomason
Agree. Now that Opus Dei has seized the Catholic Church, its members/associates/affiliates/cooperators/etc., etc., etc. regard every Catholic who is NOT part of the Escriva cult as less than serious.
If only the NYT would do some SERIOUS digging into Opus Dei. Describe its influence over the SCOTUS; offer a SERIOUS look at its history, its recruiting methods; examine its methods of consolidating power. Rip off its mask.
4
Just one observation about the U.S.'s history of anti-Catholicism: it coincided with a period when the overwhelming majority of Catholics in this country were recent immigrants on the low rungs of the socio-economic ladder: Poles, Irish and Italians. Once these populations integrated into the nation's fabric the anti-Catholicism faded away. The current wave of Latin American immigrants has triggered a backlash which has not yet revived anti-Catholicism but might do so. If so, just as before, it will be a case of ethnic hostility rather than religious hostility.
As so many other commenters have already said, Ross' religious obsession blinds him.
4
@Flaminia
Agree. Opus Dei's success with hornswoggling people like Ross, John Allen, Chris Matthews, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Rick Santorum, et al. should be investigated fearlessly and relentlessly.
2
The faulty argument is typically of the form, "God's law is above man's law." Therefore, if I cloak myself in religiosity, I get to do whatever I want and ignore whichever laws I choose.
Nothing in liberalism prohibits the Church from running hospitals or adoption agencies. But let's face it, most "Catholic" hospitals are money-losing donations from the church to the poor. They are not staffed by mendicant monks and unpaid nuns. They hire secular medical staff, charge large sums for care, and make plenty of money. If those hospitals and adoption agencies want to get paid by taxpayer dollars, then they need to follow taxpayer rules. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
7
"Vice President Mike Pence and other evangelicals have promoted religious freedom as 'our first freedom' and argued that human rights are becoming politicized and conflated with economic and social goals, such as equal rights for workers, women and gays." (NYTimes, 18June2019) I.e. they want freedom to discriminate and forcefully proselytize. E.g. here in Texas, evangelicals get elected to the State Board of Education, then push for creationism (or its code name "intelligent design") in the public science classroom. Also, non-religious civic meetings begin invariably with a Christian prayer, and if you protest, "you can leave". And tax-free churches are routinely used for financial gain, such as Joel Osteen's megachurch/prosperity gospel (he owns a couple of many million dollar mansions - as Ray Stevens sings on YouTube "Would Jesus Wear A Rolex?"). The US is a secular country, but they seem to consider this "fake news".
9
Given that the current occupant of the White House has zero understanding of the causes of the Civil War & what occurred is the reason why his statements on it are met with derision. Just like his belief that Fredrick Douglas is alive & able to meet with him. It is the commitment of the Evangelicals to one so willfully ignorant who acts solely on a transactional basis & so repeatedly issues statements demonstrably false that is at the root of much of today's conflicts
As to the remainder of your column & the point it attempts to make, you are merely repeating the "Black Swan" theory. Which is that Europeans had only seen white swans until they reached Australia so Europeans could not conceive of Black Swans. Unfortunately many members of communities of faith attempt to exist within that community & so react with "disbelief" to what "outsiders" may believe & how they wish to live their lives
Take the religious cake bakers who refuse to bake for gay couples because of their religious beliefs. I can remember when the exact same arguments were made as to serving those of African origin in places of public accommodation based upon the Bible we use today. There is no principled difference between the two and, in my opinion, our nation is a much better place today because those arguments have been rejected. Yet we have members of the Supreme Court giving deference to the same vile sentiments that disadvantaged many claiming the Court is protecting religious beliefs.
6
The last 600 years of Western history has taught us that when the church (whichever denomination) becomes synonymous with the state, devastating problems arise. The Catholic church should know this (ahem, the Inquisition, the St Bartholomew's Massacre, Ireland until recently - I could go on). But, Catholics don't have a monopoly on atrocities - look at what American theocracy produced: the Salem Witch trials. Churches do better (the temptation for corruption and power overwhelms - look at all the history of the popes!) and nations do better (none of this "God-told-me-to-go-to-war-and-kill-them" nonsense) when the two are separated. I'm a person of faith and I go to church, but I am also a student of history, and I want all religions to stay out of politics. I don't want to be ruled by anyone else's interpretation of religion or a religious text. I don't want state-sponsored bigotry imposed in the name of the G-d I worship. The intersection of politics and religion has been the catalyst for enormous suffering in the West for all of modern history. We are right to be wary. And, Ross, the very existence of the great array of Christian denominations and sects, by itself, is evidence that the Bible is subject to interpretations that are not all the same - there are even different orders, sects, and philosophies within Catholicism. I don't want some guy on a yard sign meting out his personal theory of divine justice in the state legislature, thank you.
7
There is a lot here that goes beyond Mr. Douthat's usual annoying approach of simply putting ideological labels on things. I am going to re-read. What stuck me at first glance was the comment on secular liberalism as " a peculiar post-Protestant extension of the old WASP ascendancy... to impose the current doctrines of Episcopalians on the Baptists and the Papists." My thought: "right, that's exactly what we need." If you follow Doonesbury, you know that long dead Lacey Davenport showed up as a "figment" recently to decry the sad state of conservatism. In the comic strip world, she was the last good Republican, much like G. H. W. Bush in real life. If the rich WASP class had kept control of the Republican Party after 1964, we would be in much better shape today. Much of our trouble began when Republicans used race to flip the South after 1960 and then went on to use one bigotry after another to assemble their base. The religious right has to be viewed in that context. Not sure what to say about the Catholics, but we sure don't want them running things. The Episcopal Church has been called "Christianity in its mildest form" and that is the form of religion that works in our politics. Let's get with their program.
3
Mr. Douthat offers an articulate description of the 19th century Confederate as displaying "paranoia, ambition and vainglory". The phrase might aptly describe twenty-first century Christian conservatives as well. With their persecution complexes, their drive to shape the rules of society to their interpretation of Christianity, and their absolute belief that God "Himself" has chosen them to execute "His" commands, they exhibit the same traits.
3
Ending slavery in the US did in fact come as civil war. However, that it did so does not mean it had to be so, that the event was the only possible outcome.
Cuba and Puerto Rico ended slavery in another way, and Abraham Lincoln himself had proposed for the US a faster and more just to the slaves version of what they had done.
It both protected the economy of which they'd been a part from wiping out all of its capital, and protected the ex-slaves from being thrown out of their old lives with no place to go but whatever their old slave owners created to recapture control of them.
Gen. Sherman's "40 acres and a mule" was an idea for slaves that was taken away from them in the US as events unfolded, while the Southern economy including their own immediate future was ruined. Clearly events as they happened were not best for ex-slaves, nor the only possible.
1
In the midst of telling us that Catholics have not always gotten their way, Mr. Douthat once again shares with us his belief that what the Catholic Church thinks about abortion ought to be embedded in American law. A majority of Americans disagree -- support for Adam Serwer's main point that the religious right is turning toward authoritarianism rather than learning to live within the strictures of democracy. As Mr. Serwer put it, "The indignity of fighting for one’s rights within a democratic framework is fine for others, but it is beneath them."
6
Douthat writes: "Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary...a constitutional right to abortion..."
I don't agree with this spin. I would argue that liberalism has (so far) protected us from attempts by the Catholic Church to impose its doctrine and strictures on all.
Today, with the majority of (5/9) of Supreme Court justices having been raised as Catholics, Catholicism seems to be more ascendant than under attack. Ditto evangelism, with the power prayer group at the White House.
I'd like to see the government stay secular. Right now, it seems to be lurching in the other direction.
12
Was thinking that so many of Ross's pieces look like thesis proposals (tons to connect, unpack) when I noticed he has a book forthcoming.
One element Ross slights here is that just because many evangelicals are of lower income and social status, that does not negate their fear of loss. Indeed their culture would be particularly important. Cynical pols *could* play to that social anxiety. Resentment, real or imagined persecution, has often fed the fires of political fires.
Out of 535 politicians representing the American people in the current Congress right now there is only ONE (sic!) lone senator Kyrsten Sinema who dares openly not to follow a religion! Which represents by far the biggest difference between the public of which 23 % is religiously unaffiliated and the 0.2% share they have in the Congress.
But I guess it's still very hard to draw a conclusion wether religious privilege is real or not in this country...
5
Please inform Mr. Douthat that the rest of us not living under the dictat of the Catholic church is not oppression. Yes, secular law ALLOWS Catholics and non-Catholics, alike, to have abortions, but nothing in secular society requires them to engage in that activity, nor any other religiously proscribed activity.
The statements about the church's opposition to abortion for the same reason that it opposes infanticide is specious, coming from the church that gave the world the 30 years war, the St Bartholomew's day massacre and the holy inquisition. The loss of the ability to control others is not oppression. It's justice.
5
@John Vesper
"Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion, a form of lethal violence that the church opposes for the same reasons it opposes infanticide." Yeah, I noticed this equivalence between abortion and infanticide, too. He neglects to mention that the Catholic Church effectively views birth control as infanticide, as well. Increasingly, evangelical religions are also condemning as abortifacients hormonal birth control, IUDs and other LARCs (in short, anything that is effective). Maybe we don't want these religions "flourishing," at least when they're running hospitals and schools.
3
One of the ways to assess privilege is to examine political representation and the influence of religious groups. As an atheist, I have no representation on the Supreme Court, none in this administration, and little to none in Congress.
Is the religious right privileged? Absolutely, particularly when denying women the right to life during pregnancy.
5
I thought this was a great article. It's easy to forget that the old WASP society of the northeast never really disappeared, it just morphed into modern northeastern liberalism. From that viewpoint, that we're all just acting out our devotion to our "religious" identities, everything we're dealing with makes so much more sense. Trump supporters are really just "Catholics" and "Baptists" who've calculated that he's the better devil than the liberals who hate them. As a "Baptist" myself, I always saw Trump for what he was, which made such a calculus untenable for me, but then I have always been more of an independent thinker. But I imagine that if the experiences of my life during the last decade were just a little different, I might have been a Trump supporter too.
3
The issue does not seem to hit a basic truism of religious people--especially conservative Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Moslems--they tend to lives modest, chaste lives. This is not universal, of course, as evidenced by notable hypocrites.
But common religious people tend to eschew drunkenness, drug use, gambling, and promiscuity that leads so many people into a downward spiral of poverty and disease. They work hard, save for the future, and are generous to those in need.
They are alarmed by a secular society that denigrates their faith and values--that legalizes marijuana and decriminalizes magic mushrooms, legalizes prostitution (sex workers), and teaches the mechanics of homosexual sex in middle school health classes.
It is not that the religious are privileged. It's that the society that their personal sacrifices built is being attacked and changed in ways they think are bad.
4
You may be surprised to find out that most people, including atheists, are not alcoholics, do not gamble (no church bingo), do not lie, cheat, or steal, and are kind and giving people. We go to work and we look out for family, friends, neighbors, and community.
3
The real story is not in the writings of Adam Serwer, or other thought leaders. It's in the weekly sermons across the land, in which the bible is routinely misinterpreted, which beg fealty to a so-called higher power, which encourage adherence to the standard social conservative grab bag of issues, which sell the prosperity gospel, and which vilify the liberal political order as anathema to god's true word. These people don't believe in the separation of church and state, and would implement a theocracy if they had their way. Is the religious right privileged? It most certainly is. They can freely worship at their alters, and they still have an outsized impact on our communities.
6
@JS-" It's in the weekly sermons across the land, in which the bible is routinely misinterpreted, which beg fealty to a so-called higher power, which encourage adherence to the standard social conservative grab bag of issues, which sell the prosperity gospel, and which vilify the liberal political order as anathema to god's true word"-you can always find fair numbers of people who distort the gospel in various ways, but you are ignoring the fair numbers of people and churches who are preaching a sound message.
As to the assertion that Christians would Institute a theocracy if they could, you can say that but as a person who has consumed a pretty great amount of Christian media over the last 20 years, I would say that is not true.
The Crusades, the Inquisition, Mountain Meadows Massacre, continued sexual depredation by and protestant pastors and Catholic priests, Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland and company, and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr., the two primary evangelical apologists for Trump. Ain't religion grand?
4
@K. Norris-at the risk of repeating my reply above, you are cherrypicking who will represent "religion". You can come up with negative examples from any demographic group.
Dear Mr. Douthat,
When you equate pro-choicism with anti-Catholicism, you also equate Catholicism with mysogyny. A correct insight, worthwhile propounding in your next book.
Sincerely,
Andrash Lazar
5
Ross, your embrace of religion has caused you to become blind. Even as you end this long-winded diatribe with:
"...I want liberals...to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before."
why don't you try opening your own mind?
Religion is one of the most, if not THE most, destructive forces invented by mankind. For all the good that it might have done, it has caused much more suffering and destruction. And yet you try to defend it. It is truly "the opiate of the masses", and you are clearly addicted. Despite your clear intellectual abilities, you subjugate them to anti-intellectual dogma, whose primary purpose is to control and manipulate people so they can be controlled by a handful of "holy" ones (primarily men). Even our Founders recognized the danger of religion which is why they ensured that it would hold no place of power.
The "persecution" you speak of is simply a form of victimhood, used by religionists to justify their complaint that they aren't allowed state sanction to control others the way they control their congregations. In truth, they've been given far more control and influence than the Founders ever would've condoned, and they should be prohibited from political influence of any kind, let alone deciding who should sit on the SCOTUS.
Simply put, you ask open-mindedness while supporting institutions who suppress it.
6
Secularism isn't anti-religion the same way pro-choice isn't anti-life. Why do conservatives get hung up on this over and over again? Probably because in practice the rise of liberalism has result in a reciprocal questioning and devaluation of conservative ideals. Perhaps they should consider that the fundamental problem isn't liberalism.
4
Keep your church off my government Ross. Is that clear enough for you?
6
Thank you for being willing to espouse a different facet for consideration. It’s thought provoking yet conveniently framed idealistically. One need look no further than every Trump rally where the fear of immigrants is fuel for the manic call to build the wall, or evangelical ministers who conveniently deride and dehumanize LGBTQIA folks but don’t come close to being critical of an openly unrepentant president, taking a “ the end justifies the means” approach. What else explains the embrace if not an entitlement that this land and all its benefits are mine first, then others’. Or the mentality that there isn’t enough to go around so I must get mine no matter what and screw whatever happens to anyone who doesn’t think, believe, act like me and my tribe? Entitlement is very much at the heart of it and a fear of losing that entitlement. For even the poorest of the poor evangelical white of this country until the last 50 years was considered a more reliable witness in court, never had to avoid certain parts of town due to skin color, could vote without fear, in other words be seen as human in this country whereas most marginalized groups have had to fight for it inch by inch.
2
It should perhaps be noted that Nancy Reagan was known to have consulted an astrologer. After a very brief kerfuffle the bulwarks of civilization still held.
The religious right is antithetical to liberal constitutionalism. The Puritans sailed to these shores to set up a theocracy. Mormons wandered into the desert to do the same. Orthodox Jews are precluded from doing so on this side of the Atlantic due to their relatively small size, but are doing a bang up job of undermining liberal democracy in Israel. The long-term history of the Catholic Church shows few instances of giving unto Caesar, unless their chosen Caesar forwarded their theocratic view of the world. The genius of America has been to allow individuals to pursue their spiritual desires while tamping down the establishment of a state religion. To the extent that the religious right want to impose prayer in public schools, outlaw abortion without considering ways to lessen the number of unwanted pregnancies, grant religious "exemptions" to civil rights laws, it is diametrically opposed to liberal constitutionalism. In many ways the religious right in America is not much different from the religious right in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other enlightened corners of the world. They may wrap themselves in the cloak of a different deity, but deep down what is the difference?
5
@bob re " to lessen the number of unwanted pregnancies"-well one could always try responsible use of birth control, which I am sure nearly everyone is aware of
Amen!
But, Mr Douthit although historically it may be “wider and more complicated than a partisan story a wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before”; BUT to most who are heralding the call of ‘religious freedom’ white privilege and racism is the core perspective.
..or conservative Catholics and others on the "religious right"could stop whining about their lack of ability to dictate how other people live their lives. Don't like abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of same-sex marriage? don't marry someone of the same gender. It's very simple. There is literally zero support on the left for restricting a person's ability to follow their own religious practices (something that cannot be said of the "religious right"!). As a former Catholic, all I can say is that the church has left me, not the other way around.
2
@Tim m-well, plural marriage not legal in any state despite the fact that some Mormons practiced it.
Ross makes the religious Right seem good. He covers up their hypocrisy and evil well. It's magic.
Maybe Ross never waits longer than a minute to transfer trains in the subway. That's magic we all wish for, but it hardly ever happens. It's as rare as altruism by the Right.
2
In my all white Evangelical rural Evangelical community there is a church on nearly every corner. There are no less than 20 Christian tv stations. Our newspaper has Right to Life business as the lede, preachers editorials in section B and a tiny little blurb about state and national news in the back called "Second front/nation." Every year we have public celebrations.. Blessings of the bikers, the blessings of the hunters...heck, Jesus is just blessing us every time we get an opportunity to cash in on some tourist dollars.
If you write anything contrary to the political/religious right or heaven forbid merely express it, you will be met with vicious hate mail, you may lose your business, be ostracized from your classmates or fired from your job. We don't have just closet gays here, we have closet Democrats.
And if I'm not mistaken, bathroom laws, LGBTQ discrimination laws including adoption, abortion laws are Religious laws that are forbidden by our constitution. They aren't supported by a broad swath of Americans. There are intended to force Fundamentalist morality on everyone.
Republicans/Evangelicals act as though if you disagree with them, your'e disagreeing with God himself. If only history wasn't littered with corrupt ideologues embracing divinity to justify cruelty.
4
Christians are indeed privileged in some areas of this country and are probably disliked in other parts of this country. It depends on location, location, location.
2
Ross: In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.
What this says is as long as that lower rung occupied by these White people is higher than the rung of the non-White, these White people will side with the policy that keeps the non-white down. Just accept that, Ross.
1
My impression is that liberals are taking religious liberties much more seriously than conservatives, because the left acknowledges Muslims, Jews, new age occultists, atheists, etc. and Christians alike should have equal treatment under the law. Any liberties or limits we take on in the public sphere, we have to be able to live with them across the board in a pluralistic society. It's why I'm a lifelong ACLU supporter.
Personally, I think a guarded approach against religious expression can go too far (as in France, where wearing 'excessive' religious symbols in public is banned - and this is largely seen as biased against non-Christians, too). But I don't see the right promoting an alternative vision of "flourishing" beliefs coexisting with tolerance. Instead, the right vilifies Muslims, spikes hate crimes, and goes out of its way to make alternative health care choices impossible. I can't get over the scares about "Sharia Law" while demanding the 10 Commandments are carved into the courthouse out of the other side of the mouth.
As long as it's all about Christians, with different treatment for everyone else, you're not going to convince me the right's cause is really religious liberty.
1
The contortions that conservative Christians go through to legitimize their punitive world view and un-Christian politics is truly astounding. Nobody embodies this more than Douthat.
How is this even a question in American life? Let me say it this way Mr. Douthat:
White Conservative Christians are the only group of Americans who have never been denied access to America's promise because of their beliefs. The only one.
Do you understand? They are the only one.
No one has ever shot up a church full of white Christians just because they were white Christians. How has that never occurred to Mr. Douthat? If anything seems to define the Christian Right, it is an extreme lack of self-awareness. How else could they be so hypocritical?
2
Is the religious right? No, they're wrong, and delusional, and want all the rest of us to be just like them.
1
Privileged white Christians (Ross Douthat, for example) would have their feelings hurt by criticism less frequently if they stopped imposing their religion on non-believers. The whining about losing their privileged status (or more often, fear of losing their status) is obnoxious, but not the real problem.
"Populism" has come to mean that illiberal rage exploited by Trump, as described in this column.
However, it did not originally mean that, and Democrats have lost something by allowing the wholesale capture of the ideas of populism.
Originally, Populism was a variant on Progressive. It was the Prairie Populism of the Midwestern farm country, which proposed liberal ideas, and sought to enable the collective self-help among farmers of the Grange Movement supported by government at all levels. Canadian farming in its middle regions still has many of these ideas operating, to the great benefit of both farmers and consumers, stabilizing farm income, and food prices and availability.
Progressives should not give up that mass of voters, nor those interests. They are not incompatible. They are ill served by Republicans, and ripe for the taking. Just listen to them, and offer what they so clearly need.
True, some big donors don't want that, but they are monopolist monsters who ought to be targets of Progressives, not donors to them.
Populism can be salvaged from Republican twisting, and the Prairie Populists revived. That is what those voters actually want.
There's a lot to unpack, but I think Ross' history lesson is pretty good. And, though I disagree with much, I'm happy to support Ross' ability to freely live his beliefs.
But here is the disagreement. I think Ross owes me the same respect. As does the Catholic Church.
Is it a hospital, or is it a church? If it's a church, practice your religion, but get out of the business of restricting healthcare access. Including restricting choices re end of life and family planning options.
If it's a hospital, stop proselytizing, and do your patient's bidding re physical healthcare. Saving souls is next door - save bodies here.
My priest uncle belonged to an order that, in the 50's and 60's, established and ran the only hospital that would serve the black community in Selma AL. He lived at the center of all that , and ran the hospital. In that time, it was all about the healthcare - no preaching with your tetanus shot.
But Catholic and Baptist hospitals have decided that the mission isn't just health care - it's now apostolic.
Pick one - church or hospital. It's not both. The "accept our doctrine if you want health care" choice is immoral when your effective local healthcare monopoly makes a religiously run hospital the only reasonable choice.
4
Douthat is ignoring that the religious right endlessly imposes its beliefs on all of us. The anti-choice position, opposition to gay marriage and even creches on public property are examples of how the religious are shoving their 2000 your old fables down the throats of a modern Americans.
And why do federal funds pay for medical care that is carried out in institutions that are adorned in Christian symbols?
I don’t care if they don’t want to have abortions; I don’t care if they want to go to church every Sunday or every day;I don’t care if they don’t want to marry within their gender. Just please keep your Christianity to yourselves. It offends many of us.
3
"a constitutional right to abortion, a form of lethal violence that the church opposes for the same reasons it opposes infanticide — and after 50 years of small-d democratic activism by pro-lifers, the pro-choice side seems to be hardening into a view that such activism is as un-American as racism" Is the right of a woman to decide if she shall become a mother, a sin of "lethal violence?" To whom did nature give this right to? An elite set of men deciding what is sin, or to a woman? Ross is feeling deeply a loss of an ability to decide what is right or wrong in others. His deepest drive is to expose what is sin. Is that a religious impulse? He surely believes it is. But what he does not know is that Augustine, a founding Father of his system, saw sin as absurd under an all loving God, and that time, the driver we think of much of life, makes no sense under the idea of the Eternal. So Ross and crew are suffering under an illusion of their private power, much like progressives, Trump, and Trump's base.
2
Douthat essentially demonstrates the phenomenon he argues against. He wishes to illustrate that Catholics specifically, and the religious right generally, are not privileged, but to the contrary, are actually oppressed by secular liberalism. He states "liberalism has imposed via the judiciary... a constitutional right to abortion". This is supposed to be an example of how secular society oppresses Catholics.
But abortion rights merely permit those who so choose to have an abortion. They do not force anyone, much less any Catholic or religious conservative, to have an abortion if they are is opposed to it. Douthat seems to be arguing that allowing non-religious people the freedom of choice on the issue of abortion somehow oppresses religious people whose choices are not restricted in any way.
The religious right maintains the freedom, the same as all other individuals, to have an abortion or not, to participate in abortion or not. But this freedom is apparently not enough for Douthat. He wants more. He wants control of others' choices. To Douthat failing to give Catholics control over other people's choices, is oppressive to them, even though Catholics themselves maintain their freedom to practice their religious beliefs.
This is the very definition of privilege: to believe that you are oppressed if you are not given power over others. Douthat is so blind to this demonstration of privilege he doesn't even realize he is advocating for it. Privilege at its finest.
10
Go to Books on the Common; buy Siedentop's "Inventing the Individual." You seem to be unaware of, because you never contend with, its thesis. Some passages from the epilogue ("Christianity and Secularism") must suffice:
"[In antiquity,] the family, tribe and city were each a kind of church. Each had its own rites. 'Faith and purity of intention counted for little, and the religion consisted entirely in the minute practice of innumerable rules...' The distinctive thing about Greek and Roman antiquity is what might be called 'moral enclosure', in which the limits of personal identity were established by the limits of physical association and inherited, unequal social roles.
"The Christian conception of God provided an ontological foundation for the individual. 'The interiority of Christian belief -- its insistence that the quality of personal intentions is more important than any fixed social rules -- was a reflection of this. Rule following was downgraded in favor of action governed by conscience. ... Christian moral beliefs emerge as the source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.
"Properly understood, secularism [is] Europe's noblest achievement, the achievement which should be its primary contribution to the creation of a world order, while different religious beliefs continue to contend for followers. Secularism is Christianity's gift to the world, ideas and practices which have often been turned against 'excesses' of the Christian church itself."
1
I don't know what kind of Catholicism Ross Douthat practices in his private life, but as the child of a working-class Catholic family and the product of 16 years of Catholic education, I can say that the "conservative Catholicism" he espouses is nothing more than elitism sacrilegiously wrapped in Catholic garb. The Catholic religion that I grew up with emphasized—every day, and in every way—our common cause with the poor, the outcast, the hated. It was, and is, a religion of love, compassion, tolerance, and equality in the eyes of God. Matters of conscience like divorce, birth control, and abortion did not define our day-to-day religious life in the way that it appears to have captured the mind of the so-called "Conservative Catholic." The continuous attacks from within against Pope Francis illustrate to me what "Conservative Catholicism" is really all about: a movement by elites to distort Catholic doctrine and religious practice for the purpose of holding and accumulating power. Adam Serwer's critique of conservative Christianity as a form of illiberal rage is proven every day in Catholic Conservatism movement.
6
I could not disagree more. Your experience and understanding of "conservative Catholicism" (arguably a meaningless term, as there is but one Catholicism by clear and absolute definition; excuse the digression) is the polar opposite of mine.
It is not anti-religion or illiberal to deny conservative religions their 'right' to use the police powers of government to control women, their bodies, and their sexuality. It is these very religions which are totally male dominated and teach that women are under the control of their fathers and then husbands, must not be placed in authority over men, and may not preach. It is not simply that these conservative religious denominations want to strictly control women's access to abortion -- they also want to control access to contraception and even to quality sex education. They are certainly defending their (male) privilege to make decisions for their families which their wives must accept and abide by.
Alabama has gone so far as to not only pass a law prohibiting abortion In instances of rape and incest, but also grants parental rights to rapists, if their victim is unable to obtain an abortion.
4
Ross Douthat has a "privilege" to personally practice his Roman Catholic beliefs as he wishes, however they may differ from that of other Roman Catholics, their parents, their children, and their clergy. Other people, with different religious beliefs and practices or no religious beliefs at all are also entitled to the same privileges.
However, no one has the right or privilege to deny anyone else their religious or areligious beliefs and practices. We must respect others if we want them to respect us.
When engaged in religious practice those rights do not extend to deny others goods, services, access to health care to preserve their own lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness.
Religious intolerance has led to countless wars, deaths, torture, exiles, expulsions, discrimination, and theft of properties.
The Jewish diaspora, Jewish exterminations, expulsion of Jews from England, Jews and Moors from Spain, Thirty Years' War, the Spanish Inquisition, Shia vs. Sunni, Hindu vs. Muslim, Serbs vs. Croats vs. Bosnians, Muslims vs. Animists,
Separation of church and state is the foundation principle of religious liberty for everyone. It is a better idea.
3
Ross writes thoughtfully as a conservative Catholic, but the current challenge to our understanding isn't coming from conservative Catholics, whose views about Trump vary widely. It's from evangelicals, whose lock-step Trump approval after decades of pronouncements about the moral turpitude of liberal politicians and their supporters is undaunted by lies, porn-stars, and all the other behavior they would never tolerate in their own children. It isn't explained fully just by abortion and judicial appointments. The evangelicals I know are no more one-dimensional or hypocritical than the rest of us. They weigh issues of sin and salvation more seriously than most of the rest of us. Something deeper has to be at play for so many people to abandon the standards they have advocated for so long.
It's far from universal, but there is a strong (and openly expressed) current of support for Trump as God's imperfect messenger who will lead us to greatness. The core of evangelical belief is acceptance of a higher authority that is decidedly un-democratic. No one mistakes Trump for our savior, but he seems to have tapped into an appeal that may be more visceral than can be explained on the basis of policy positions, and that may be reinforced, not negated, by assertions of unilateral authority that the rest of us only assess in terms of our secular constitution.
4
Conservative right-wing of American 'Christians' believe they are on the losing end of a disagreement as old as humanity itself: how ‘control’ should be exercised over individuals who comprise society. Religion is one mechanism, comprised of persons who accept that control voluntarily (minor children excepted). Governments of ALL types are another. Democracy is control dispersed-offering equality, & apportionment of praise and blame.
The problem is that those of us who choose not to be ruled by the strictures of this particularly American 'Christianity' are being forced to be so ruled by the promulgation & affirming of laws, regulations, & requirements that appear to be designed SPECIFICALLY to appease the sensibilities of adherents of this particularly American 'Christianity'. That type of government is a theocracy. It is emphatically NOT what a large portion of our citizenry are willing to accept. This is not the first time this has occurred. The “original sin” of America was committed by the folks we call the Puritans. Unbearably oppressed in their native England, many departed for more welcoming shores in Holland. They found themselves surrounded by people insufficiently like themselves religiously. They sailed further away, to the U.S.A.-& promptly began unbearably oppressing everyone who did not believe EXACTLY as they, the Puritans, believed. A part of our nation BEGAN as a theocracy-& we the people grew out of it. Let’s try and remember that, shall we?
2
"I think that stalemate and stagnation are more powerful forces in our era than the slippery slope or the anti-Catholic ratchet,"
How about the existence of an increasingly literate and educated populous and the evolution of science? These are the true enemies of the fantastical tenets of fundamentalist religions.
This is why it's important to the denizens of these superstitions to insist on "educating" their children outside the influence of scientific enlightenment.
They isolate them from reality to indoctrinate them into their faith based fantasies. This is essentially a form of legal child-abuse, but in a liberal society, impossible to correct through government action.
6
The Civil War and abolition weren't extra-Constitutional, the Secession and the Confederacy were. Lincoln wasn't Garrison. The South seceded because Lincoln's presidency was explicitly a threat of liberal abolitionism. Douthat's history is wrong.
2
Serwer was florid and too clever, but Douthat is plodding and obvious. He tries to litigate the patriotism of African-Americans without sounding reactionary. It sounds like he's keeping racial animosity smoldering, for someone harsher to reignite. A sorry strategy to introduce his real idea, that evangelicals are poor whites. That has some truth, and speaks to a bigger issue - the divide and conquer strategy that pits working class whites against blacks.
But the real victim, according to D, is big C Catholicism. It's harder for the church to open hospitals and orphanages. There was a time when it took a church to start a hospital. That time has passed. Now, it's the religious who block patients from medical services.
The Catholic church should inspire awe - in business schools. It's succeeded by changing when it had to. Expanding in Africa, it was blocked by people's needs to use contraception in the face of AIDs. So it did a 180, and permits them to. The church will abandon priest celibacy, too. It only started a thousand years after the church started - a thousand years ago. The church will survive whether democracy does or not.
I don't expect religious conservatives will have my back in any battle for liberal democracy. They didn't back up people in the 20th c. Remember Charles Coughlin?
3
sometimes baffling debate on the right about the relationship between religious conservatives and libertarianism … There is no relationship, the correct word is polarization.
What was not stated is whether a particular religious group , particularly the right or conservative factions, are privileged or under attack or both, but that the common thread is religion itself. Religion as it is widely practiced around the world is largely based on having a belief system that a particular choice is the one true way. Given all the choices, what can be truly determined is that all but one is wrong: but which one? A devout individual has no doubt that his or her is that one.
It is that key word, belief, that hits the trip wire, especially among evangelical Christians and conservative religions. It's pretty much the template for creating "others." We cannot build bridges across the belief gulf that separates us, not only for the ideas but for the language of discussing them.
It might be a good follow up column to look at how America has long proclaimed relies freedom but in practice insists on religious adherence in one form or another. While we have berated theocracies when their core is not Christian, we don't look in the mirror at ourselves.
3
Other commenters have done an excellent job of explaining to Douthat that refusing to allow him to impose the practice of his religion on me is not oppression of him. Let me take on another flaw.
Douthat argues that the Civil War was unnecessary, that abolitionists could have backed off and not offended the South. Abolitionists did wish to end slavery, but the political issue was not abolition but expansion of slavery. The war was, indeed, avoidable. The South could have refrained from firing on Fort Sumter. The South could have refrained from seceding. The South could have waited for Lincoln to take action against slavery in the existing slave states, which he had no intention of doing.
The South, the conservatives, forced the war, Douthat. And they ended up being crushed. Perhaps this is the lesson the religious right should look at.
7
“And because I would prefer that political liberalism turn away from the trajectory that is inspiring both integralism and Trumpism, I want liberals...to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before.”
Mr. Douthat’s point about the need to embrace a wider historical perspective couldn’t be more apt, given the collective fugue state that so many of us seem to be walking around in.
America is a fairly new contender on the world stage, despite the fact that we’ve got a bunch of religious zealots who believe that our psychopathic history of using atomic bombs somehow corresponds to God’s will.
It’s not “Adam and Eve,” it’s ‘Atom and Void’.
4
Other readers are responding with vigor to Mr. Douthat’s opinions; therefore, I will focus on just one partial sentence.
“Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion . . .”
Imposed? Neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court forces any member of your family to have an abortion, Mr. Douthat. What they do, thankfully, is protect my family, and many others, from your desire for all Americans to conform to your religious beliefs.
Are you among those who think rape can come with a “silver lining” (a pregnancy)? Never mind what physical and psychological trauma a woman or young girl endured that will be compounded by carrying the pregnancy to term. No matter her age, to you, she is now a vessel; her life, meaningless.
It is nothing to you that her small body may be unable to give birth without suffering permanent damage, so she will undergo a Cesarean section leaving physical scars that will remind her every day of what was done to her.
Thanks to the Constitution and the Supreme Court, you have the right to live as strictly and conservatively as you want, Mr. Douthat, but, please, do not think for a moment that you have the right to impose your patriarchal lifestyle on others.
11
@Nancy Northcutt well said.
The rising secularism among Millennials and younger generations is driven not only by extreme disgust at the shenanigans, incompetence and prevarication that Evangelicals in the Trump administration (SHS, DeVos, etc.) have displayed.
It's also become apparent that no religion or religious system is big enough to incorporate the complexity and immensity of our universe as we know it today - and that body of knowledge continues to grow daily through scientific research, experimentation, and search for little truths that add up to bigger ones.
Evangelicalism will die within the next few generations, and with whimper, not a (big) bang.
5
Sigh.
Among the problems with Douthat’s argument.
1. With the possible exception of Odinists, no religious group in America loathes Catholics more than your basic right-wing evangelical. It would seem that they “aren’t Christians,” and “don’t read the Bible,” for openers. See also the Klan’s founding as anti-Catholic and anti-Jews, as well as anti-black folks. Or to put this another way, yeah, sure, Ross, everybody welcomed the Irish and Italians with open arms.
2. That “progressive occultism,” bit is just plain nuts. Worse than that, it’s a lazy rehash of attacks on “godless commies,” from over a century ago. I might add that people who caper about sure that they are surrounded by a cloud of angels devoted to their every moment, or who join churches where they pray for money and Gulfstream jets, or who believe that praying for strangers cures their cancer, or who sell little paxkets of holy water, are about as occultist as it gets.
3. And finally. Let’s see a list of us lib’ruls and progressives who’ve blown up buildings that house day care centers, or shoot docs and firebomb clinics, or who stomp into church basements and synagogues and mosques with guns and open fire, or who give sermons about hanging gay people with three Republican presidential candidates in close attendance, or help crown Sun Myung Moon King of the World.
Or who festoon themselves with crosses and Trump slogans.
8
This column hardly discusses the points made in the paragraph. The paragraph is about minorities' belief in our system, and about evangelicals' misguided belief that the system is against them.
Douhat goes off on tangents about how the Civil War was resolved (and other topics), which has little to do with the subject at hand.
From my perspective, Adam Serwer's paragraph hits its mark. Ross Douhat should live among small town Texans for a time to see if the privileged think the government is against them. They do.
They might be right, but it's because Republicans have ran the state of Texas since 1994 and have systematically destroyed the school system, benefits for everyday working people, and messed up the tax system to hurt the middle class. Mind you, Texas voters did that to themselves, but they blame Democrats and the federal government for what they wrought.
Here in Texas at least, prosperous white conservatives are the sheltered children of American history. They think the whole society is against them, when the truth is their attempts to maintain their control over other segments of society appear to be failing.
These other people who scare white Texans only want what white Americans have had all this time, but it seems awfully aggressive and scary to the privileged.
4
I’m no scholar, however, it seems to me after 55 years of observation that any conservative, orthodox, or fundamentalist religious practice does more to oppress and subjugate individuals than provide salvation. The more political power these groups amass, the more death and war follows.
5
The religious right is absolutely privileged. It's mostly white, and its loudest advocates are male. That's what privilege looks like in this country. I also note that a majority of the Supreme Court is Roman Catholic, all but one of them (a woman) of the conservative variety, so trying to assert a lack of access to the corridors of power is a non-starter. There's nothing wrong with attempting to introduce some nuance, but the effect of this column is more to underline Serwer's conclusions than to refute them. Let's be clear. Roman Catholicism has its own state. It is one of the largest and most powerful religious groups worldwide. There are some elements of the religious right that have more modest origins, but the Roman Catholic branch had best take care not to cry persecution in the current climate.
There is nothing remotely approaching religious persecution of the right, Roman Catholic or otherwise, in this country today. It's true that many find the religious right's political positions odious, but I would argue that the contempt expressed for those positions by those on the other side is heightened by the privilege that this column tries to argue doesn't exist. Is the religious right privileged? Is it white? Are its public proponents mostly male? Yes to all.
You want the reader to embrace a historic perspective that is wider and more complicated than a story about privileged white Christians whining. I'd like privileged white Christians to stop whining.
7
“In the world as it was, slavery was abolished only because of the interaction between Southern paranoia, ambition and vainglory and Northern abolitionists who regarded the constitutional order as a “compact with hell” — an interaction that led first to political violence, then a breakdown of the constitutional order and then a civil war in which a cautious campaign to save the union became a providentialist war to crush the South.” This is a distortion of history. Has Douthat heard of Frederick Douglas,a great abolitionist who also supported the constitution and for African Americans to fight for the union? Does he realize that the Civil War was not caused by zealots on both sides, as he seems to suggest, but by the South’a insistence on expanding the scope of slavery and it’s refusal to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln? Douthat should just acknowledge that he has been out-argued and move on.
7
Dude needs an editor. Or to live in the reality a bit.
For a conservative who praises individuality it’s astounding how much of his arguments depend upon classing large sets of people together using terms like”black America” - what is that really? - and relying upon flawed social science to make larger statements about philosophical truths he believes are the best. At any rate - think you’d be better off on a word limit or the like.
7
How is continuing to have Ross Dothat on staff advancing the aims of an op-ed section, namely to showcase a wide variety of views? He has just one view, and he states it over and over and over. For over a decade, he has mounted his religious soapbox twice a week to let loose jeremiad after jeremiad about—boo hoo hoo—what he perceives as the woes of a society no longer completely under the thumb of Christian fundamentalists. Enough already!
8
All’s I can say is, I’m glad I got vaccinated against nutbar religious guff as a child. Thanks, Robert A. Heinlein...reading, “If This Goes On,” and “Revolt in 2100,” turned out to come in real handy these days.
3
Uruguay is a Catholic country. And ground zero for that Catholicism is the Plaza Matriz (Matriz = Womb) in the womb of Old Montevideo, the Ciudad Vieja.
An formal alliance existed in the 1970s between the church, the privileged oligarchy, and the army. Their goal: to consolidate their power through social control, repression, torture, murder, kidnapping, rape, abduction of children...a reign of terror.
And what animated all this perceived need for social control? An anti-clerical, rational, post-Enlightenment revolutionary movement whose goal was secular liberalism, social justice, and ridding the country of a pernicious influence operating behind the scenes: a great foreign power, the United States of America, in the form of the CIA.
To me, Trump does not appear to be a religious man, a principled man, a man of faith. He has a similar strategy to the military junta in my country -- to advance social and economic control over the liberal majority in the United States that resists this cabal - this triumvirate of power between the religious right, vulture capitalists, and the armed forces. Resists it vehemently!
4
White Christians are Trump supporters. Trump is a racist. Could it be that their “victimhood” results from them being called out as racists?
5
Liberalism is inspiring both integralism and Trumpism? You are confused. Integralism is the exact issue that Mr. Serwer is addressing. And Trumpism is the snake-handlers and mouth breathers that have always been there, ascendant. As a "conservative Catholic" what exactly are you conserving? And how are you doing it? With illiberal levers of power. Like Mr. Serwer addresses. And - ineradicably. Are you serious?
4
You might want to broaden your vision of the modern Catholic Church. The one with two mothers - Mother Angelica and Dorothy Day.
2
"I want liberals — liberals like Serwer, perhaps liberals like you, reader — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before." Ross, your sophisticated, somewhat historically-intriguing article makes a few good points, but its ivory-tower analysis is superficial. During the civil war the WASP hegemony woke up to the beauty of Catholicism while witnessing how Catholic nuns working in hospitals treated EVERY victim with loving care. While Steven Douglas was actively making money off of dying Confederate soldiers in a Civil war internment camp in Chicago's south loop, Catholic nuns were busy wrapping bandages, cleaning and dressing wounds and wiping up excrement. Ross, Catholics are not all about winning and losing, remaining in power or systematically denying others access to wealth, but rather we are fundamentally rooted in MERCY. Being kind and merciful is the only way to restore Catholicism to its rightful place in secular America.
1
Oh, the tedium. Oh, the whinging. Mr. Douthat’s endless recitations from his privileged bully pulpit, that he and his fellow travelers can’t get their way on everything anymore and they are being cowed into silence—the irony of his position seemingly invisible to him. Also seemingly invisible to him is that his freedom to practice his religion does not include the privilege of forcing his belief system on everyone else. Mr. Douthat’s logic is always a bit like an Escher drawing—it doubles back on itself and ends up returning to his feelings of persecution. In the Twilight Zone, Mr. Douthat’s consciousness would spend a few days in the body of a 10 year old girl trying to escape rape and abuse in Honduras, ending up in a cage along the Rio Grande. At least in the show, it would give him a different perspective on freedom and persecution.
7
It looks like Adam Serwer owned the conservos, and Ross Douthat knows it.
3
"Anti-clericism" was a reaction to abuse and Catholic-led persecution: think the Inquisition, think Galilleo, think Pius IX, think Pius XII and Germany's "enabling act" the Vatican "ratline".
Human Vitae condemns abortion. But, Genesis 38, which Paul VI uses to argue that God hates birth control (which is not abortion but which the encyclical would like to ban for everyone), describes a god indifferent to the burning of a clearly pregnant woman for "whoring".
Cardinal Octavianni said it best: "Only the Truth has rights". Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors" condemns our entire Bill of Rights, and asserts the right of the Church to run all the schools as propaganda organs (think Ireland).
The Church is run by and for the hierarchy, which is addicted to using intellectually dishonest arguments to maintain its power and cover up its sins.
What's not to like, all you bigoted illiberal anti-Catholics?
3
As a former Catholic I’m not sure you really want people to look at the history of the Catholic Church prior to the last 50 years. The Catholic Church has been an oppressive institution since it was founded by Constantine. The Albigensian Crusade, the Crusades in the Levant, the persecution of Jews throughout it’s history, collaboration with the Nazis, the child sex abuse scandal to name just a few. Respectfully, your “Conservative” Catholic beliefs with regard to abortion and other religiously conservative issues are just the latest manifestation of this oppression.
4
Thank you for the warning. I did not read all of your blabbermouth article (oh, excuse me, intellectual dissertation.
No time. Already been to college. This is the real world. It's fast paced. Gotta state your thing and get out of the way.
1
You began to lose me when you belittled the "activists working painstakingly within a system of liberal constitutionalism." The slaveholders wrote a constitution that they thought would protect their "peculiar institution" and they watched with horror as it just didn't work out that way - see, for example, Congressman Preston Brooks taking a cane to Senator Charles Sumner (and nearly killing him) because he insulted Brooks's uncle Senator Andrew Butler by comparing him to Don Quixote in service of the harlot Slavery. If there are not echoes of this in Charlottesville, Then, of course, after your little speech about how African Americans are not a political monolith ("good people on both sides," even though the Coates side is MUCH more numerous than the Thomas side), you get to religion. As for religion losing power, have you read any of Molly Worthen's op-ed pieces in this newspaper? She's worried that this is going on. Your discussion of how Orthodox Jews and Mormons were persecuted (here we are in the Oppression Olympics again) or appeals to 18th and 19th century anti-Catholicism is simply a red herring. This IS a partisan story about privileged white (and mostly Protestant) Christians, and you would do well not to forget that even though you don't belong to the branch of conservative Christianity that's driving this.
4
Ross, Where are women in the RCC--- the pedestal (BVM), the nuns (handmaidens), the moms (breeders/caretakers), single women (an occasion of sin). Once women have full representation and a full voice we can have this discussion.
5
The Catholic Church is one of the world's last monarchies. Of course they fight democracy. Get real Ross.
6
Now is not the time for doubt. The Progressive movement wants to destroy Christianity, pure and simple. Protestants and Catholics must put aside old grievances and unite against the common enemy. Progressive intolerance of Christianity must be utterly routed and put to shame.
2
Wow. A call for violence from the cultists. The new crusades. Just more of the same.
"...I want liberals — liberals like Serwer, perhaps liberals like you, reader — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before."
Perhaps Serwer's point is more about non-white minority resilience than white Christian whining. And, ironically, the sentence above is another case of a white Christian whining that his party and his people are just misunderstood -- after all they struggled in the prairies.
Perhaps the above whining packaged in political slight-of-hand with fancy, esoteric words like post-liberal and iliberalism just throws GOP sand in our eyes, as usual. It takes the focus off current injustice and sends us to a political science/history class that pits the Constitution's effects against activist's power in the trenches. I'll take activists in the trenches on that one. And, perhaps, it's activists in the trenches that need to work on amendments to our imperfect, now catering to kings Constitution.
If anything, the arc of history has shown that government dogmas and creeds need to evolve. The internet, assault rifles, Trump's abuse of the Executive office all point to our outdated blessed Constitution needing an upgrade.
2
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Conservatives use religion to tyrannize women, and in the past, to justify slavery because they want to raise Christianity above all other beliefs and above the rights of all. Like the Second Amendment wherein the Conservatives delete “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” leaving only “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”they want to establish “religion”, specifically Christian religion, as the law of the land.
Liberals do not evoke and support racism and racist candidates, misogynists, white male supremacy, inequality, and xenophobia. Conservatives gave cover to racists and used racism to attack and obstruct Obama fo 8 years and persist even today. Conservatives have embraced xenophobia and the cruel treatment of refugees. Conservatives have established the beliefs of Catholics and Evangelicals to disenfranchise women and reduce them to chattel on the basis of religious superstitions about ensoulment. The Conservatives in office favor and are primarily privileged white Christians....who use cruelty toward women, immigrants and their children, deny healthcare, food, shelter to those in need and extol selfishness ala Ayn Rand.
4
I see why you want to pull a single paragraph from that excellent article and nitpick it to death. That way, you don’t have to deal with the context the argument was made in. That context is this:
The luminaries of the right - its “intellectuals” and your bros - have called on the right to abandon democracy and liberalism, seize power, and exterminate their perceived enemies. So I guess when the crowd you hang with is rah-rahing a fascist coup and mass executions, you might want to turn the topic to the finer points of Civil War history, at least in front of your normal-people friends, when they ask about it.
3
Just like Judas betrayed Jesus by identifying him with a kiss for a bribe of “thirty pieces of silver;” 80% of religious rights and other fanatics voted for Trump ignoring his disrespectful ways with women; unscrupulous business deals and fabricated lies to get the “votes.” They voted for Trump; an impostor with no faith to have a “voice in politics.”
Religious rights embraced a man totally unqualified to serve as our Commander in Chief. They Ignored his inability to govern and the way in which he’s been dividing this country here and abroad. Undoubtedly, it should be questionable his excessive admiration for cruel and oppressive foreign rulers A narcissistic man that unless you’ve “pure Anglo, blood," you don’t belong here.
To represent Christ you must follow the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew 5:3-12.
3
Looks like they aren't so much authentically religious, as single mindedly opportunistic. There's a lot of money in religion, you know. Can make for a very lucrative career path. And, there are suckers everywhere.
4
Abortion is such an easy box for the righteous to check. You don't have to love the women or the children or be responsible for anything to get credit. "for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones".
5
Serwer: "...populism in all its forms, but maybe religious conservatism especially, is best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged, the longtime white-male-Christian winners of our history, at discovering that under conditions of equality they don’t get to be the rulers anymore."
You: "...the idea that the religious-conservative coalition just represents the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure within it that they can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression, is … not really an accurate description."
Ross, You can't be serious. Your statement is wrong and you know it, or at least should know it. Serwer isn't saying that ALL religious conservatives are all-powerful big winners. He's saying that within every strata of society, white-male-Christians are on top. This should be obvious to anyone who thinks. You either are ignorant or are being purposefully stupid. Either way your column is a disgrace.
2
The designation, "no religious affiliation," is expanding faster than the Universe. And your hanging on to Bronze Aged Sky Gods? Better check the data before they print your next bestseller.
1
“Northern abolitionists...regarded the constitutional order as a “compact with hell” — an interaction that led first to political violence, then a breakdown of the constitutional order and then a civil war.
In The Fiery Trial, Eric Foner tells us that the abolitionists were small in number and largely confined to a few northern states. Their influence did not seriously come into play until after the start of the Civil War. Opposition to slavery before the war was largely grounded in the economic concerns that slaves would take jobs from white workers which is why Lincoln and many others believed that freed slaves should be repatriated.
In any case, the suggestion that abolitionists opposed the entire constitutional order because they opposed slavery on moral grounds makes as much sense as the argument that those of us who currently oppose the 2nd amendment oppose the constitution in its entirety.
What really struck me though was Douthat’s leap from the Civil War to the Marxism of the Black Panther Party. I guess he’d argue he was constrained by word count, but it is surely convenient to skip over the decades of reconstruction, Jim Crow, lynchings, the KKK, voter suppression, school segregation, etc. By doing so, Douthat’s reference to the Black Panthers - another small regional cadre with even less power than the abolitionists - tailors his argument to show that African Americans did indeed abandon the constitutional order. Nice try, Ross, but no sale.
3
Overall, this is magisterial. The generous inclusion of a long excerpt from Adam Serwer’s writing demands and justifies a sympathetic reading of Douthat’s reservations (“complications” and “challenges”).
The basic point of rejoinder is that nothing about liberalism prevents anybody (including those who call themselves liberals even if they have much skin and thought into defending and advancing its tenets) from thinking or acting illiberally. BUT that is not a problems with liberalism per se, it’s actually the primary urgent justification for liberalism itself with liberalism being a full fledged support for the rule of law that prevents the abuses of tyranny AND democracy.
The current threat to rule of law is NOT from democracy. It is from the tyranny of corporate power owned and controlled by a tiny (0.1%) idiot elite. The major threat to religion is in how that same irresponsible elite is exploiting it for selfish and destructive reasons. This is parallel to how the most primitive forms of the democratic impulse can be perverted by mercenary manipulators to give “populism” such a bad name.
As for Catholic hospitals etc, that is indeed a thorny problem. But if the Holy Mother Church is truly interested in preventing the mass slaughter of abortion, it should work harder to build the type of society where every child is wanted and protected instead of allying with the likes of trimp and the ghastly ghouls of the oligarchyridden GOP.
1
When you construct a theology aimed at marginalizing people of color, women, and the very notion of rights beyond the ones you like, and when this theology attracts almost exclusively white adherents, your facile protestations ring hollow. Wither Jesus Christ? Like Bobby Jones quipped about Jack Nicklaus after watching him win 1965 Masters, "he play(s) a game with which I am not familiar." Even the Ten Commandments your ilk would chisel in stone do not proscribe sex outside marriage, they tell you not to commit adultery and not to covet your neighbor's wife (mentioned in the same breath as his ox or slave), i.e., do not interfere with your neighbor's property rights. No, it's all about privilege and protecting it as the ordering principle of the ancient society you would, in your fevered zeal, impose upon the rest of us.
2
Is the Religious Right Privileged ? Of course they are, and have been since they got here in 1620 and accused the Native people as godless savages, so it was alright to kill them and take their land. Religious fanaticism has always been a part of the USA. right along with White Supremacy.
All you have to do is read the real history of the Americas to know that.
5
When you read that liberals are nurturing “progressive occultism,” then you know the author’s tank is not only empty, the author is going to have to hitch a very long ride into town to find some fuel for his vehicle.
4
DUDE...We can all see that you are a scholar but we are simply intelligent readers that could use less jargon and verbalism. We really don't need all the ISMS as Farris Bueler once said during his day off.
1
A tangle. Boy, is that the operative word.
It has become fashionable to blame the hot-'n'-saucy 1960's for a lot of our ills.
I would agree with that. To wit--
--the notion of individual freedom, always part and parcel of American thought--
--really took off in the 1960's.
I am talking--of course, what else?--about "sexual morality."
Oh I know. There's always been adultery going on in the good old USA. Ditto fornication. Ditto gay sex.
But in the 1960's, it was different. We now had people standing up and--with a glint in the eye, a jut to the jaw--declaring, "This is my God-given inherent RIGHT. To do with some other consenting adult whatever I want. Whatever takes my fancy. Deny it, you cranks and curmudgeons! Deny it!"
Whether Protestant--or Catholic--or Orthodox--or orthodox Jew--or Mormon--or Muslim--or virtually any other religious group--
--straightaway there's gonna be a problem. A profound disconnect. A heavy dark line. A chasm between "religious" people and "non-religious" people.
Hence the growing unpopularity of "religion" in American life. "You're telling me I CAN'T do this? You're endeavoring to inhibit or annul my God-given RIGHTS?"
Yes. Yes, we are.
The alliance between conservative Christianity and modern ECONOMIC libertarianism--
--tragic. I do think some people have got a deal of repenting to do.
But I'm running out of space.
Thanks, Mr. Douthat. Good article.
A little difficult, yes.
But good.
Actually, when I distill this word salad into a simple theme it is essentially "a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining."
Two days ago I visited John Brown's grave in the Adirondacks. In his preserved farm house sits a small shaving bowl that was carved out of the scaffold on which Brown was executed.
That image speaks with more eloquence than this quasi-intellectual muddle.
3
Of Course! As Usual, Progressives must be "understanding and have empathy for" those Poor privileges White Snowflakes, even though they have wrecked havoc on this Nation with their united support of tRump, and even though they still have absolutely no self awareness and introspection on how they have been the beneficiary of White privilege and White Affirmative action since they arrived 500 years ago. Sorry, Roos, your White Christian Right are the one's that need to look inward and gain enlightenment. The Progressives and Liberals are waiting with open arms when you all are ready to join the rest of the Human race.
3
The biggest mistake Lincoln made was fighting the Civil War. He should let those states secede and form their own nation. Just as those states today are supported by the blue states, they would have been dependent on the US. They would be a destitute nation always looking for handouts, much as they do today. But at least they wouldn't be holding us back and infecting our politics.
2
All religion is privileged. For evidence, look no further than the interactions of religious elites and secular justice, and you will find that religion is given pass after pass after pass: non-reporting, non-prosecution, light sentences -- it goes on and on. In Utah at this moment, a Mormon missionary training official assaulted and perhaps raped a student, confessed, kept his job for many years, and only now are inquiries being made. His defense includes an item of church doctrine which essentially says "boys will be boys."
I've lived around the world in Christian, Orthodox, Islamic and Buddhist cultures, and it's no different anywhere. So-called divinity gives one a special exemption from responsibility and forgiveness. It's exactly the same as being rich and/or powerful -- part of the collective human dark side. Atheism is the only righteous alternative, one that more and more good people are choosing.
4
In an essay on Charles Dickens, George Orwell surveyed a society, not much different than our present-day one, as depicted in Dickens’ novels and wrote, “There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?”
1
It's where politics and religion try and inhabit the same space at the same time that causes the frictions. All the world's Spiritual traditions are guilty, people stoked on a combination of both political and religious fervor bring out the very worst in our inhumanity toward each other. The lessons are simple in their profundity and seemingly impossible to manifest:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind and soul. And thy neighbor as thyself." "Render unto Caesar, the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." That's all we really need, a separation of church and state, and love and respect for each other. Even for the atheist or agnostic, change "God" to "one's highest aspirations for good" if that works better. All the rest are constructs that keep us from reaching our full potential. They are the illusions we make, the lies we believe. The biggest being that we are all different. In one sense as individuals, yes, but as a common humanity we are all the same.
3
Whether practiced by rich or poor, all religion is uniquely privileged in that it does not derive from an examination of the natural world or from the exercise of reason, but is the application of received wisdom through authority. Religion is authoritarian by nature, whether it is manifested by the powerful or those yearning for power.
3
Honestly, I find religious conservatives the scariest conservatives of all. Great again conservatives, economic conservatives and plutocrats know what they are arguing about. I don’t agree with them, but except for the anti-science part of their arguments (climate change anyone), they aren’t scary. With religious conservatives, we have so much history of misogyny and social control to look back on going back thousands of years. They often do not seem to know what they are arguing about. They think it is God but it is a whole host of shadow worries. Freedom is often part of the creed of other types of conservatives, not Religious conservatives.
Sorry, I do not want religious institutions to have more power. Every time it has happened in the past it has resulted in a variety of oppressions. The constitution explicitly forbids it. The founding father’s didn’t get slavery right but they did get religious liberty right. Let’s stay with a winning formula.
6
Live and let live is still my credo, and the problem I have always had with the "religious" right is that they want to live but they don't want to let live. As for the "political" right, they have been opportunists, happy to get the votes from evangelicals but not particularly interested in giving them any more than they have to in order to get those votes. In the long run, does it matter why this is the case? I think Mr. Douthat's arguments are too theoretical, too "ivory tower," for me. In any case, I've always admired and agreed with Mr. Serwer more than I have with Mr. Douthat.
2
Mr. Douthat would do well to remind conservative Catholics that (a) they don't speak for all Catholics, and (b) religion was not the "victim" of non-democratic legal decisions in the U.S.. The Supreme Court decisions establishing individual rights during the 1954-1977 period were correcting generations of narrow and oppressive thinking largely sanctioned by the major religions. Many of these decisions were actually consistent with Catholic thinking of the time, as evidenced by the principles of Vatican II, and it was the subsequent alliance of social and economic conservatives that supports Serwar's eloquent and wholly accurate argument.
2
The moral authority underpinning the Abolitionist Movement was grounded in Christianity. Abolitionists routinely challenged Christians, especially those in the South, to examine their religious faith when considering the question of slavery.
Today's Religious Right is a horse of a different color. Its support for Trump is at odds with its professed Christian values which has convinced me and others that those values have never been anything more than political bargaining chips.
3
A constitution that allows white, conservative Christians to have such a disproportionate influence in the Senate where small, rural states like Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, etc. get to have equal representation with states like California and New York gives the Religious Right an inarguable position of undeserved privilege.
5
For an intelligent read on the "Religious Right" there is a fine book by Randall Balmer:
"Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith
and Threatens America - an Evangelical's Lament."
2
Religion has no legitimate role in governance. Whatever your beliefs are, keep them to yourselves.
9
"...an institutionalized anti-Catholicism that effectively oppresses the church..."? Ross, you have it backwards. And I, like you, was raised Catholic but endured far greater restrictions on my behavior than you and your generation ever did. This essay was long and, at first, I didn't exactly comprehend what you were trying to argue and debate. For me, however, the final analysis lies with your belief of Catholicism, the tentacles of which seem to reach beyond just this one man-made, patriarchal religion. Whether it be evangelicalism, Orthodox Judaism, Islam, or our conservative Catholicism, these institutions have done a woeful disservice - past and present - to our dignity and rights as living, breathing human beings. Sir, the distance between a universal moral code and true spiritualism and the religious Right is vast. For me, I will live by the former.
5
Religion isn't a private hobby; it includes how we deal with each other. Love your neighbor as yourself, or send millions to the Gulag to die. The Gulag worldview was a worldview that imposed itself very hard on unbelievers, answering (wrongly) the questions religions answer, even if it was secular.
So even if the government has to guarantee a cake for every wedding, as long as some baker is willing the government has no interest in making any particular baker bake for any particular wedding.
Not like the bad old days when "separate" meant halfway across the country and "equal" meant nothing.
And not like Facebook hassling conservatives; easier to find another baker than another Facebook. (Let Facebook post disclaimers on offensive content, and let people it censors argue with real people; make the appeals rules clear, if not the algorithms.)
What would Puritans at our best (which we're often not at) do with power? Well, since Jesus Christ is rather libertarian as far as government goes, we'd made social peace more by letting people do their own thing within wide limits--no flying airplanes into buildings--rather than try by government force to impose every obnoxious detail of our worldview on every resident. Just keep them from killing, robbing, or raping each other, for starts.
Puritans would certainly not espouse the beliefs you are attributing to them!
2
The fact that a religion stands for the respect of basic human values is not illiberal. One can honestly differ on what constitutes infanticide but how can one not respect the Church’s strong condemnation of The US war’s of ‘national liberation’ that kill and injure large numbers of innocents for reasons that have nothing to do with liberation but rather ,for instance,oil in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Brings to mind Voltaire’ quote and I paraphrase.
Murder is condemned in all civilisations and does not go unpunished unless it it is done with the accompaniment of patriotic drums and flutes of a heroic national army.
1
Your right Ross I understand it is not a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining about the lost of something. It's the old story of the white Christian rubs that didn't know they were being treated as pawns. What they lost was the notion that they were better than the pawns of color, simply because of the color of their skin. That useful lie can only go on so long and they desperately want it back. In their moral view of the world it was the only thing they got.
2
Ross, I grant that, of all the anti-abortion proponents, Catholics tend to have the most moral consistency--in that many also embrace a social gospel that values human life post-birth.
The huge problem with conservative Catholicism is that it continues to embrace the dark vein of misogyny and demonization of sex tied up with the religious belief that Eve's seduction of Adam was the root of humanity's Original Sin. With women's sexuality seen as intrinsically evil, Catholics have shunned sex, with a grudging exception for procreative sex.
Similarly, conservative Catholics still cling to the dogma that the spiritual authority of priesthood should belong exclusively to celibate males. Women are spiritually suspect; their primary function in society is procreation--necessarily tied up with the evils of sex. The natural extension of these beliefs is that the life of the mother is seen as expendable relative to the life of the embryo, and it is entirely appropriate that women be required to bear entire burden of responsibility for a sex act that results in pregnancy--Eve's punishment--with not one word about the father's participation.
There are plenty of Christians, AS DEVOUT AS ANY CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC, who do NOT believe that the soul enters the body at conception and therefore abortion is the moral equivalent of infanticide.
Conservative Catholics' beliefs are just that--BELIEFS--NOT REALITY. Unfortunately, these beliefs are TOXIC for women's well-being in today's world.
4
For my entire childhood, as a practicing Catholic, I did not eat meat on Friday. No problem if my non-Catholic friends wanted to eat there hamburger on Friday, it wasn't an insult to my religious beliefs. A constitutional right to make your own personal decisions, whether to eat meat on Friday, abortion or, who you marry, in no way infringes on your religious beliefs. You conduct yourself in a manner consistent with your beliefs.
That isn't being liberal, it is living in a constitutional democracy.
You practice your religion in your home or church. If you want to bring your religion into open society then it is with the understanding that all are equal and should be treated as such.
4
I got lost in some of the nuances of this article, so perhaps that my not speak well of my commentary, but I would like to share a few thoughts.
(1) The Catholic church has maintained some seriousness (bible centeredness to it's faith)
(2) The mainline protestant faith has decided it does not care at all about the bible and has been taken over by social justice causes that consider abortion a sacrament and the only remaining sin to tweet something a jury decides is racist
(3) The growing racial tension in America is related to the growing secularism among white in America -- the only force that has ever aided in improving racial tension is the church
(4) There is engineered schism in the church as described in protocol 17
Religious and political conservatives are constantly trying to find ways to force others who don't share their views to behave the way religions conservatives think they should. Religious and secular liberals are constantly trying to find ways to prevent conservatives from forcing others to behave the way they want them to. These two activities are not equivalent and pretending that they are is intellectually dishonest. One is bullying and the other is liberating.
3
LGBT equality is one of the primary issues motivating the religious right politically and driving it into worlds of pity. Not much angst over massive income inequality, climate change and environmental destruction,and lack of opportunity for millions of Americans, especially those of color. It's been 50 years since Stonewall and religious extremists are still calling for the death of gay people,while others ascribe all sorts of natural calamities and personal misfortune to same-sex marriage. The expression that is often used is to describe their oppression is having the "gay agenda forced down our throats". Gays acting like straights, with wedding pictures tacked to the walls of their office cubicles or smooching on the Kiss-cam at a ball game seem to trigger visceral reactions of disgust. What is harmed when gay people are out and proud, is the primacy of their own biases and beliefs and the ability to pass those on to their children. Americans as a whole and especially young people, who are leaving organized religion, have are not buying what the religious right is selling regarding LGBT rights. . Practice what they want in their church and in their homes, but unless they treat LGBT individuals with respect and value in the public space, they should stay home or check into a monastery.
2
Mr. Douthat writes, "Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion."
"Imposed"? Imposed on whom? On men? Women? On Roman Catholics? Protestant Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews? The last time I heard, no one is forced to have an abortion.
Writing about judicial rulings as "impositions," instead of legitimate arbiters of the law of the land as expressed in the Constitution, reveals Mr. Douthat not-so-secretcly has a disdain for our whole Constitutional system and its liberal framework.
That's OK--it's a free country. But I sure would appreciate it if he'd just come out and say he wishes we had a theocracy.
4
Ross, once again you choose to pretend you are a deep thinker-- a philosopher who refers to "integralism" without definition and whose prose style is heavy with lengthy wordy sentences. Your readers know you're smart. Some of us also know you're a biased show-off. Catholicism and conservative Christian sects have discriminated against women and people of color and imposed their ideas and beliefs through the political process. Religious Right Christians and Catholics continue to propose policies and pass laws to limit the vote and ban abortion. They do not believe that women, people of color, and folks unaffiliated from formal religious groups are capable of making moral decisions or caring about the less fortunate among us. At this moment, it is the liberals as evidenced by the Democratic presidential candidates who are offering plans and solutions to heal our nation-- healthcare, economic justice, climate repair etc.
1
Churches are communities of largely like minded people, bound by history myth and ritual, organized specifically to create unity and safety within the group. It had and does created strong borders with “others” who are almost always seen as inferior humans and very often actual enemies. All kinds of negative stereotypes are created and strong emotions create allegiance to the us versus them description. No matter the faith this often leads to hatred, atrocity, and sometimes murder. The author’s catholic faith is just one example. There are no exceptions.
Anti Catholicism, anti protestantism, anti Islam, anti semitic, anti black, anti everything else is the inevitable result. Us versus them. We have the truth. All others are pure evil. The community and tradition are valued way above individual autonomy. No way to close the gap
But it is not going away. The still best solution is separation of church snd state. The US has probably done the worst job of separation in the West. Closer to India than to France. Actually becoming more like India
A mess the majority has chosen, armed now by an extremist Supreme Court made of six Catholic school educated and three Jewish educated judges. We are going backwards with the president leading the charge towards anointed kingship
1
The problem with the religious right...whether Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Catholics, or Radical Islam...is that it always creates a hierarchy where some group is considered less worthy.
For most of the religions it is women...you can't be a rabbi, priest, or in most sects an imam...and men also make the decisions about controlling your bodies.
The most cynical and despicable of the hierarchies is White Evangelicals disdain for people of color, particularly African-Americans. A lot of this is rooted in evangelicals Southern heritage and the diaspora that went to the lower Midwest and Great Plains. There's just a lot of hate involved.
Any discrimination these groups encounter is honestly earned.
2
This column is just another mask for the disturbing truth about the religious right. Your colleague Thomas Edsall wrote a piece in the run-up to the 2016 election about the conflict of the religious right and Trump's disgraceful moral character. In the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush years, the religious right could claim moral superiority and faith in Christ as their priorities in casting their vote. Trump has exposed that it was never about morality or faith. And the only thing left when you toss those aside is racial superiority. Unless you're one of the richest 1% of evangelicals (who can claim tax policy as their priority), it's about racism plain and simple.
2
Please, The attack by southerners on the Supreme Court on the rights of northern states to enforce laws related to chattel slavery and the commissioning of slave catchers to kidnap African citizens of the north was the illiberal provocation for the Civil War. The South seceded in a fit of pique after its demands for universal slavery were not met.
1
I used to have a "live and let live" attitude to religion, but since it has not been reciprocated I find my back is up against the wall. Particularly when Catholics and/or evangelicals want to go after members of my family which just so happens to include:
LBGTQ folks
People who had abortions
People who might need abortions
Black and brown people.
Immigrants
People who depend on contraception
In othe words, the typical American family. Come after me and mine, what the heck do you think I'm going to do? Turn the other cheek?
2
@Thomas
Well stated, and I would add
People who might prefer to refuse heroic medical treatment
People who might wish aid in dying
Ross has obviously never been to my native North Carolina, where evangelicals kept liquor-by-the-drink unavailable until a comparatively late 1978, where blue laws once held sway, where the odious HB2 (bathroom bill) ran off so much bidness that evangelicals were finally forced to construct a fig leaf of repeal.
And evangelicals are getting stronger throughout Georgia, Tennessee and other southern states.
Cul-de-sac Christians, all.
1
As long as all people ,rich or poor, conservative or liberal,
Continue to be tied to myth those in charge at the moment
Will oppress another segment .If you continue to believe
A God of any kind would sanction the punishment of his children,
You’re wrong, when it’s the structure of the religions causing
The problems.Those at the top ,
Pointing fingers and screaming sinner to others and refusing to look at themselves.We have to increase knowledge of mental illness and availability of therapy, for those in need.
Maybe a religious institution that enabled pedophilia and other sex crimes should be oppresssed?
1
Mr. Douthat overlooks what liberal secularists share with the religious conservatives they so often despise: their triumphalism, the conviction that the arc of history, if not God him- or herself, is on their side. Americans are probably unique in taking an epic view of their history. That holds true whether we lean left or right, whether we view that history as the struggle of oppressed minorities for their dignity, or of freedom-loving individuals against the encroachments of state power or militant secularism. Others, like the French, may get high on moments of national glory (shame -- not so much), but they’re not given weaving these moments into some grand narrative. In the shaping of the American saga, Jonathan Edwards and Julia Ward Howe have gone Hollywood.
Some conflicts are truly zero/sum. The Civil War could probably not have been averted by compromise, nor could there have been an accommodation with Jim Crow a century later. Fascism could not have permanently coexisted with free societies. But should all our ideological conflicts be shoe-horned into this all-or-nothing model? I’m skeptical whether those who believe, as I do, in a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy can reach any accommodation with those who believe that abortion is murder, but I also know that there is little chance of one side prevailing over the other. A stand-off may be the best we can hope for. When the triumphalism of the left collides with that of the right, Trumpism is the result.
Recently I attended a family picnic in rural Pennsylvania. I realized all that my 80-year-old uncle, an ardent Catholic, had to do this last election was to vote for Trump, and his vote counted, and his candidate won, as his candidates have often won at local and national levels. As for me, a devoted liberal and antiracist who grew up and who lives in NYC, my candidates of choice have rarely won, my vote hardly counts, and I feel I am on an endless cycle of writing letters, making phone calls, attending community meetings, and attending marches and protests to ensure the barest of political representation. From making sure my son's public school is funded, to having my needs heard in local plans for flood control, to keeping public transportation accessible and safe, to addressing police brutality and injustice, it's starting to feel like a monumental struggle just to keep things sane in my civic life. So you'll excuse me if I'm not completely convinced by your argument about who and who does not have power in this country.
1
Is the religious right privileged? They sure are now.
172
@Cary Fleisher, thank you. A much needed good laugh with the element of honest truth in your comment.
10
Equality for all is like love. Loving your second child does not take love from your first you can love them both. The same with Equality, giving it to everyone does not take it from those who have it now, and how do some have Equality if not all have it, isn't that the definition of privilege. That's what church's and esp white men are afraid of, is losing their privilege. It's like the stupid argument of why did poor white southerners fight they didn't own slaves. It was because they were privileged, they had freedom, it was the only thing separating them from slaves, so of course they fought to keep,slavery, they didn't want to be equal with Blacks but above them with freedom. Same is true today they don't want equality with voting rights or equality with women on reproductive rights men are above women, can buy contraception in Wal-Mart,they don't need a Drs visit and prescription. It's all about holding on to some sort of privilege, holding power over someone else, feeling superior. Men esp are afraid if they give women equal rights then women will treat them as badly as men treated women, same with people of color, whites can't let go of power, they are afraid of revenge. The church is not a victim, it never has been it is a killer of millions, controlling govts. It uses fear mongering to keep its power, privilege. Such as, why can't women be priests? Jesus never said only male priests, why are women such a threat to the church? Power over women.
1
The Catholic Church. which I understand is not the core subject of this commentary, prefers to keep women in their place, second class citizens. It protects its male clergy at the literal expense of children. All those men in charge let sexual abuse continue rather than have their mythical power and money be challenged. It is the same for virtually all conservative religions. They suppress women, abuse children and collect money. Male dominated religions have nothing to do with god or even moral standards. They are an immense private club keeping women out because we would not accept their hypocrisy nor allow our children to be their victims.
3
The religious right is a bunch of elitists. They rail against the liberal intellectual elite, but are themselves literally holier than thou moral elitists. Modern day Pharisees.
1
They certainly believe they are privileged. They live is a very bizarre bubble. I would just call it a sense of arrogant entitlement, and superiority. Although, they are neither of those things, entitled nor superior.
What does the Catholic Church have to be proud of based on decades of sexual abuse of children and nuns and not one bishop or priest stood up for morals or humanity. The Catholic Church has been privileged for centuries.
1
Elite liberalism isn’t fighting to “make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today, and perhaps colleges and grammar schools tomorrow” but, instead, fighting to make it impossible to continue discriminating against LGBT people among others.
1
All you to do is travel through the South and see the lavish megachurches to see how ridiculous Douthat’s premise that Evangelicals are somehow poor and downtrodden. Not to mention the lavish lifestyles lived by so many Evangelical preachers.
1
Other than your pretending that Orthodox Jews and Mormons are the face of the evangelical right, the crux of your argument is in this quote, "...a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing. I don't know how easily the word "flourishing" came to you, but what you surely mean is 'privilege'. You protest too much sir. Your essay is a great example for the power of Serwer's blunt truths.
1
I tire of Mr. Douthat's efforts to normalize Trump loving Christians. When safety experts analyze an accident they often look for places where workers have normalized deviance, meaning they judged, actually misjudged, abnormal signals that an accident might occur as normal ones.
Mr. Douthat normalizes deviancy throughout his opinion piece, making right-wing Christians out to be "imperfect" for being racists, claiming their human imperfection was only a "past attraction" for racial separation. The Catholic Church's horrific lengthy history of child molestation is called a "scandal" and not something out of De Sade, days of Sodom and Gomorrah, which it is.
I'd add to this list of normalized deviancies, our Christian's continued love and support of a truly lewd, boorish, vile, lying, sinner, President Trump.
2
Mr. Douthat focuses on the historical relationship between conservative Catholics and African-Americans. Why? It’s a small matter in a broad, passionate national conversation.
(Side note: many blacks living in the South are committed church members, not Uppity Pushy Liberals. For a fuller discussion of the regional diversity of African-Americans, see the article by Charles Blow, titled “the Complexities of the Black Vote,”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/pete-buttigieg-black-vote.html)
So, let’s expand this argument. and consider other reasons why voters who tend to be liberal resist and distrust patriarchal conservative Christianity.
It is, in part, because conservative religious
authorities so often demean and seek to control LGBT citizens and women generally.
The Liberals whom Mr. Douthat obviously opposes recognize that conservative Christian institutions preach homosexuality is a terrible sin and that women were formed by God to lie back, keep quiet, and take it when their husbands decide to have sex, and then give birth readily to many children ... and bake some cakes for the church sale.
And no, the Liberal Order does not focus on the relationship between American blacks and Catholicism. We liberals are tired of your Catholic traditions, and evangelical traditions, that flourish when men hold power, that demand gays stay locked in their closets, and that women buy lots of aprons. And diapers.
Enough said.
2
Douthat - "I want liberals — liberals like Serwer, perhaps liberals like you, reader — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before."
Since , you have thrown down the gauntlet Mr. Douthat, let me return the favor. Please read Willie James Jennings, "The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race," (Yale University Press, 2010). You cannot begin to comprehend racism and white priveledge until you grasp the history and impact of neocolonialism on Christianity and how they are now intertwined. It levels the playing field, cutting through all the political categories being played off of in your review of Serwer. What we are seeing today at the base of this country's administration is the defense of white priveledge (racism). And, as Jennings shows, you cannot separate this white priveledge from the fundamentalist and authoritarian papal claims of conservative Catholics from its' roots in neocolonialism. To be aware of its' hallmarks and to stand on the side of the oppressed is to depart from the religion of white priveledge and to discover the Gospel.
3
The religious European American white person has always been more powerful and privileged than the religious African American black person.
John Brown was the greatest religious white European American left-wing liberal progressive ever.
While Jefferson Davis was the greatest religious white European American right-wing conservative regressive ever.
1
Ross, a nice man, continues his brainless crusade for oligarchs who hoard America's wealth and hide behind religion using the usual defense, that they are not "perfect", as if.
A real Christian doesn't need to tell you.
When someone has to tell me, I back up slowly and watch my back.
3
As a secular person I live in growing fear of theocratic rule in this nation by far right fascist loving Christians.
I note how you conveniently forget that a significant amount of historical religious persecution came in forms like the nefarious Catholic Priest Father Coughlin. At his peak in 1941 he enjoyed a radio audience of millions who listened to his anti-semitic diatribes.
Why not mention the large scale marches by the KKK in a number of cities that were aimed at Catholics as well as African Americans.
Yet, no one seems able to cite proven examples of Secularists attacking religion. All we want is not to be made subject to any one book, group or person as the soul source of truth.
This feigned aggrievment, especially by the religious right is nothing more than a ploy to stir up resentment and seek special privileges at the expense of freethinking Americans.
3
Haven’t we all had enough writing by white men (like Ross and me) trying to explain perspectives and social movements of non-white, non-male, LBGTQ , etc., yet?
1
History of religion is the history of HOODWINKING & HYPOCRISY and acquiring of wealth by the guys on top. Nothing has changed.
1
“Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion...the pro-choice side seems to be hardening into a view that such activism is as un-American as racism. Legally, elite liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies...”
You mean in the same way elite Christianity has made it difficult or impossible for reproductive health clinics to operate? Christians don’t get to impose their views on the rest of us. Over which part of “separation of church and state” are you still agonizing?
As an atheist, I don’t share your “abortion is violence” belief, yet you bemoan the fact the state can no longer force me into religious-based reproductive slavery. The best solution is a cease-fire in the culture wars, as in LEAVE ME ALONE, but it’s only the Christian side that refuses to relinquish control over women’s bodies. And yes, state control of women’s bodies IS akin to racism. Men who divorce, eat pork, wear mixed fibers telling women “God said no abortions?” Pfft, please, as if white men could tell black men “God said there’s no right to self-determination”.
As for the “least democratic branch”, again, the general population doesn’t get to determine individual constitutional rights. They’re not up for democratic determination. Was marriage equality? Voting rights? Abolition of slavery? Thank goddess for Roe v Wade!
4
I now have to go reread Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" as a palate-cleanser.
It's disheartening to see that, more than 70 years after it was published, people like Mr. Douthat are still being paid good money to commit most of the offenses described therein.
1
And there it is: "Religiously, liberal individualism has become a solvent for the faith, in the United States as well as Europe. Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion ...." Etcetera.
If your complaint is that liberalism is a "solvent" for THE "faith", then you need to go elsewhere, and start your own theocracy. Of course, that's been tried before, as the history of western civilization attests. Modern day theocracies also exist and are as oppressive as yours were.
To your abortion grievance we can add contraception and same sex marriage. What these -- and much else -- have in common is your desire to impose, via the state, your personal religious beliefs on everybody. To control what unwilling other people do.
If your wish were merely to practice your own religion in peace, and leave others to do likewise, we would have no problem. If that were your desire, you are in EXACTLY the right place, because THIS place was founded with such personal freedom as part of the design. But your vision for society doesn't actually abide such freedom.
I could comfortably tolerate your superstitions if only you'd leave the rest of us alone. But you can't.
3
Always disappointing to me that Stephens writes so well and thinks so poorly. A good portion of white conservatives are indeed as disadvantaged as one could imagine. See “Heartland” or “Hillbilly Elegy” or “400 Years of White Trash History”. Their resentment is indeed against the same power structure that oppresses Blacks in America but not in the ways that Stephens talks about it here. A good portion are not and continue to exert outsized influence over the American right and enjoy considerable privilege. As to the oppression of Catholics by conservative white Christians I have three letters - KKK. As to whether Catholicism does good or ill the record is very mixed. Massive charity efforts, the Inquisition, outreach to the poor and landless, the Magdalene Laundries, humble priests working for the common good, cardinals holding bacchanals.
Stephens aspires to a nuanced view but rarely achieves it.
1
Right about what, exactly?
How, then, do you explain white supremacy, white nationalism, and white terrorism?
Just as you won’t lump Orthodox Jews, Mormons and others into a white nationalist group (because, you claim, it is too simple to make such a grouping), neither do you recognize the strong forces of white supremacy trying to hold on to authority that is increasingly being taken away, if nothing else, by mere demographics.
1
The Muslim religious right, the Hindu religious right, the Jewish religious right , the Buddhist religious and other religious people are not privileged . Rather they are somewhat oppressed. Only the Christian Rights are too much privileged and they abuse their power in every other religious people's lives. Their leaders are greedy, corrupt, phony, fraud and are against the teachings of Jesus and the Bible. They are really Hippocrates. They make judgment about other people which they have no right to do so. They are out of control.
Maybe the Catholic Church shouldn't be running schools and hospitals and orphanages. Instead of trying to brainwash the young and propagandize the ill and weak, they should just focus on preaching.
2
Defeating people committing treason and preserving the Union has never been stated as such a selfish goal.
1
Douthat always tries his best to defend the kind of Catholicism which was very supportive of Fascism in Bavaria, Spain, Italy and Austria in the past. His attack on liberalism for its anti-Catholicism is accurate but he doesn't understand the liberal abhorrence of the Catholic Church, a very justified abhorrence.
1
Fellow liberals: live long and prosper. Stay alert as you have, for this rhetoric is dull opiate dished by Serwer, and cleverly subversive.
Post-liberalism is construct with no real world analog because as long as religion exists, and organized religion is possible, no one is liberated. If not for the liberals, who will prevent slavery, bondage, misogyny and other gleeful, sinful pursuits of organized religion?
If elite liberalism is making it difficult for religious institutions to operate hospitals, schools and colleges, please know that religion, particularly organized religion, has made it impossible for people to live and breathe free, or live without fear since the beginning of time.
Who but the liberal tames the meth, jet-planes, and money addiction of the religious right leaders? Is inseparability of jihad from Islam or Aryan brotherhood from Christianity no longer of concern - that we should engage in rhetoric about post-liberalism?
I count on liberals - even those who believe - to hold religion as a deeply suspicious, eventually infinitely harmful as organized practice to other humans and the environment.
Ironic that Blacks and Hispanics have not abandoned the American creed. God bless them all. Caucasians - as evident from the rock star status of Trump and the wild support for Republicans in America who are destroying the republic lest a browning nation and a globalized environment makes them redundant - clearly have.
1
You can serve God, or you can serve man. The Republican Party is man.
Mr. Douthat,
Lester Maddox made similar arguments. I’m sure you feel for him too.
I suggest you start handing out “Pickrick Drumsticks” i.e. Axe Handles to help hammer home your points. Just a suggestion.
Douthat wants liberals to "embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before." One reader commented that America is a "secular" republic. And there is the crux of the issue. Most Christians (and I am a Christian), have always believed this is a Christian nation, and it is a privilege to live here under that banner even though they acknowledge the separation of church and state. But now that privilege appears to them to be "under attack " (or persecuted, which is an egregious statement compared to Christians in Africa) by secular forces, even though the law of separation of church and state has not changed. And the whining is happening, Douthat, because this is something they feel they've never lost...a Christian nation.
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The very fact of the Catholic Church's continued existence given the duration and depth of the scandals which embroil it undermine Mr. Douthat's argument. Any other organization would have long since been disbanded. And yet somehow he can muster the chutzpah to claim that the Church is "persecuted," when the proper response should be prosecution, followed by dissolution.
I am also surprised at how Douhat did not mention the mostly successful liberal attempt to economically strangle religious schools by denying them any taxpayer money even for secular education.
The liberal war against religious education, starting in the 19th Century's Blaine Amendments through the whole 20th century and up to today, has been a crusade to deny religious schools even a cent of public money, even when the laws to do that have been democratically passed.
Since states themselves have passed many laws allowing limited public money for private schools (including ones with religious affiliations), the liberal campaign against this subsidy has been as anti-democratic as it has been anti-clerical.
Douhat might have also mentioned Mexico as an example of liberal anti-Catholicism. Mexico's 1917 Constitution is so anti-Catholic that it is illegal there for Catholics to even pray out of doors and to have church schools. Churches also have to pay taxes, unlike other non-profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Mexico
@In NJ The public funds public education, and even as an attendee of parochial schools, I understood the need, purpose and correctness of that stand: "Congress shall make no law respecting an institution of religion."
It might surprise you to know that some small religious schools actually have argued against public funding for privates. Why? Because they wish to guard against the creeping imposition of outside requirements: "they who hold the gold, make the rules."
This may be a bit of a shock, so hang on tight.
The Constitution essentially forbids using taxpayer money and government support to advance the cause of ANY religion.
I’m sorry you feel that tax exemptions and a pass on open political activity (which again, government is NOT spozed to be sponsoring), plus all the other goodies you guys get from the rest of us, isn’t enough.
@Robert @solar power
You are entitled to your opinion on public funding for schools with religious affiliations. You are entitled to vote for politicians who share your belief too.
However, you should not be surprised that other people disagree with you, that they vote for politicians who share their beliefs, and they resent people like you and the judges you would appoint to rule over them.
The bad-faith readings of this article expressed in the comments (as with comments on anything Douthat writes) are astounding to me, though perhaps they shouldn't be.
Everyone seems to be very excited to argue with the author that his vision of history is just plain wrong or is somehow morally perverse, without giving credit to him for doing something that is particularly unique in the pages of the NY Times: elucidating a conservative perspective that lurks beneath the surface, deep in the subconscious of a little of half of the country.
The groupthink grand-standing in these comments reveals only that many NYT readers disagree with Ross Douthat politically; we knew that already. The column itself is a window into the mind of people who believe what Ross believes but who are less self-aware about it; perhaps they feel this way but have never put it into these words. For those of us baffled by religious conservatism's apparent hypocrisies, this perspective is crucial.
@Logan
I see it more as an expression of self-agency, defense of individualism and lack of agreement to tolerate "sacred cows" in modern statehood. The group thinking (and lack of any critical thinking of your own) would be more typical for the religious milieu.
Mr. Douhat's stance is always clear and always the same: we (religions) are losing our privileged position in modern democracies. This is oppression. Please reverse this tendency so we can regain our privileged status.
Mr Douhat asks us to embrace a historical perspective that is more complicated than "Christians whining because they've never lost anything before".
Well, I read the whole rambling column and after talking about Jim Crow, the AIDS crisis, etc. the only examples of anti-religious bias he could find were the pro-choice movement, and the church having difficulty operating hospitals and adoption agencies.
And he wants us to believe he's not whining?
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A slight reminder that although the Catholic Church is anti abortion, it is not anti war or anti death penalty. Many Catholics, myself included, feel you cannot have it both ways.
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Recent popes have often spoken out against war. "No more war, never again war," Pope Paul said. And popes since have inveighed against specific conflicts.
Regrettably, even the current pope is not prepared to take a firm stand against clerical sexual abuse by insisting that ALL allegations of sexual abuse be first––and immediately––reported to secular police agencies which have the skills and inclination to investigate them for prosecution. In this light, the Vatican more often has acted to impede the law than to pursue justice.
With regards to the death penalty, has directed church authorities to teach that the death penalty is "inadmissible." This is one position of potential alignment with contemporary liberal thought. Bitter experience has proven that governments err, and capital punishment renders such errors permanent. So, even if one considers capital punishment acceptable in principle, its uneven application renders it repugnant in all cases.
@Solar Power Meant to write "Francis has directed..."
You know, Ross, the state doesn't force anyone (including Catholics) to have an abortion. But the state does forcibly murder and brutalize its own citizens (through our oxymoronically labelled criminal justice system) and the innocents of other nations (through our never-ending wars). Yet, tellingly, not a word about those from you.
Nor do I hear much from you (as, for example, we often hear from Arthur Brooks) about loving thy neighbor (including, omg, thine enemy) or ministering to the poor or healing the sick or comforting the aggrieved.
Perhaps you're correct that the religious white right are not as privileged as others would argue but I'd have a lot more sympathy for them if they, especially their intellectual and theological leaders, weren't quite so sanctimonious and self-serving.
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If America’s religious institutions want to participate in politics, like everyone else, then they should pay for the privilege, like everyone else. By that I mean, pay taxes.
I am a Quebecer. I was born in a very conservative religious society that believed in catholic virtues and is now 50 years into a quiet revolution that saw secularism become our religion.
We believe in abortion rights, LGBT equality, racial justice, science and female equality. We are however anything but liberal. We are extremely conservative. That is why Obama, Clinton and Kennedy are heroes and radicals like Reagan and Trump are villains.
John Ralston Saul called neoconservatives right wing Bolsheviks because of their commitment to radical anti American ideals. Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Disraeli were conservatives. Today's American conservatives are fascists with a sanitized appellation. They seek not the America of its first two hundred years but an America of an entrenched hierarchy and the social organization of feudal Europe.
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@Montreal Moe
John Ralston Saul said neoconservative is the opposite of conservative. I don't need to say that neoliberal is neither new nor liberal. Maybe it is time to reclaim the words that have been stolen by practitioners of Newspeak. American conservative are not conservative they are the exact opposite they are radical and better called neoliberals. Those the conservatives and media call liberals are the conservatives that oversaw the first 190 years of American evolution. There is nothing more persistent in America's DNA than the conservatism in the slow gradual evolution of the USA than the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The pretense that The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was anything less than the triumph of America's real conservatism is simply Orwellian.
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How can Americans face the day? I'm thankful that I live in a secular Canada.
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@Terence Yes, it's hard. But so is any fight worth having. Thanks for your support.
1
What stuns me sir, is the inference, if not "almost" declaration from you, that secular disagreements, and verbal "attacks" against the Religious Right from secular anti-mythologists (see life-at-conception-faith-based-mythology), somehow conflated and in the same arena of injustices, of which rape, murder and torture exalt that list of accounting; that these "religious" right-conservative-faith-based "white" people perpetrated upon our fellow black American human beings throughout our American story.
I am a 65 year old white man, and I am, sir, an unharmed, but incesned person at this writing.
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Wrong! The civil war did not begin as a "providentialist war to crush the South." The first shots fired in anger were in treason against basically defenseless, under-supplied United States troops stationed at Fort Sumter, a fortification intended to protect a harbor from foreign attack, not to be shelled by its own people from its own land. This phrase reeks of post facto "lost cause" equivocation. The civil war was initiated in the defense of slavery and a plain reading of every single secessionist state's constitution will confirm that. In the North, Abraham Lincoln had made it equally clear from his earliest campaigning days that while he abhorred slavery, his foremost priority was to preserve the Union.
1
It's always clear what Douthat opposes - not so much what 'liberalism' is, but more what it might do or has done - but what is he for, really. The primacy of the Church in daily life? Gregorian chants? - As for whether white Christians have ever been losers, that's beside the point; the point is they've never perceived themselves to be losers. You'd have to have lost to feel the distinction.
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"Rather, they threaten the return of longstanding tendency in modern secular polities — an institutionalized anti-Catholicism that effectively oppresses the church even if it stops short of persecuting it, a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing."
Seriously? Get off the cross Ross....
All religions need to do is stay out of politics and our government. They have no place there. Our Constitution makes this very clear. What you are seeing is a reaction to religious institutions garnering and protecting their power.
Yours and all religion's need to look inward to see why they are not "flourishing"....
Blaming liberals sounds like snow flake whining.
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Let's start with your assertion that these groups come from marginalization. The mormons yes were marginalized by other protestants but they were ruthless oppressors of native Americans and indeed non-whites.
Catholicism has two thousands year history of power and in America also some very dark expressions of power, particularly of the native population.
This idea that evangelism is limited to poor whites is just laughable. Evangelical christianity is common in the south for elites and the poor alike. So too in those parts of the midwest where it has spread.
Orthodox Judaism is the only one which may consider itself marginalized but they are societies within themselves and so I don't think play into this at all.
And this does not even start on these religions interactions with women. Which is awful. It is clear that these are religions of people well used to power not powerlessness.
1
Certainly I assert a "form of liberalism that is (if you will) is integrally opposed to [your] religion’s flourishing." I must, for your religion insists without compromise that a woman has no more rights over her most intimate and personal decisions than a Petri dish. (In fact, in the Cartholic Church's view, the Petri dish has more rights than she does.) If imposing such Neanderthalism in law is what you call "flourishing," you bet I will oppose it, and do, and I assure you my opposition has abdolutely nothing to do with the ridiculous and contemptible anti-Catholicism of Billy and Franklin Graham, who completely agree with you on abortion but who object to the fundamentals of your theology, about which I could not care less.
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Ross Douthat writes interesting comments but he avoids the truth about conservatism and Catholicism as much as possible. The Civil War happened because the Slave States truly believed that Slavery as a God-Given right. The southern states still claim that the Civil War was about "State's Rights" and not slavery. When asked what these "State's Rights" the the Federal Government was threatening they get a blank look on their faces because they don't want to admit the only right they were fighting for was slavery.
He is also blind about "Conservative Catholicism" That creed is quick to deny the priestly sexual assaults for- women, children and some men. It is sad that an intelligent ant articulate person like Mr. Douthat is so blind.
2
Sure, you’ll mention “fashionable occultism”, but not one word about the rise of atheism which is not that. The snobbery of every religion seems to me the dismissal of atheism as just not relevant, or being witchy, or that it cannot be a real thing.
1
What a slog. When you finally get through Douthat’s verbal labyrinth, you realize he is simply “whining” once again about religious persecution – institutionalized oppression of his Catholicism in particular – and could have summed it up in a single sentence. It’s not as if it will make a difference whether we buy into the position that it’s about disappointed white privilege, or into Douthat’s position that it’s more complicated than that – except, apparently, it’s not complicated at all; it’s just the same old persistent anti-religious bias.
The point is: who cares? Who cares about the torrent of historical nuances that Douthat rolls out like some mind-numbing explication of abstruse Catholic theological doctrine? Whether the current state of conservative religion is the result of A or B changes nothing. The real concern is that we are still left with a disgruntled, fanatical minority who insists on imposing its belief system on the rest of us by infiltrating our political system. They are not content with the freedom to worship as often as they like, in whatever manner they like (but no more rattlesnakes), in their own houses of worship – and be tax-exempt to boot!
The problem for the wider collective is that religious conservatives have sold their souls and made a pact with the devil. The rest of us get to deal with the fallout.
2
"Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion, a form of lethal violence that the church opposes for the same reasons it opposes infanticide"
First, abortion is not infanticide, since infanticide is defined by both law and common sense as the killing of an infant, not the termination of a fertilized egg or a fetus that is two inches long (which is the size of a fetus by the time the vast majority of abortions are performed). You must really appreciate when you order roast chicken at a restaurant, and the wait staff bring you a fried egg and tell you it's the same thing.
Second, the judiciary has "imposed" nothing on any Catholic regarding abortion, Ross. If abortion offends your beliefs, please don't have one. What the judiciary has done is allow others who don't believe as you do to do as they wish. The fact that you are not allowed to impose your beliefs on everyone else is not a problem, but a blessing provided by the First Amendment. And something, as a Catholic in a majority Protestant culture, that you should be thankful for.
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He just wants what they all want from that privileged bunch, religion of their choosing, not yours by the way, imposed by the force of the state. That happens to be illegal, but believe me, they and their supreme court are working on it.
1
Mr. Douthat suggests that Americans of color, and especially black Americans, should move away from liberalism, or what he terms “the liberal order.” Ahem. And he also condemns extreme black activists, Louis Farrakhan, for instance, as “odious. It is clear Mr. Douthat is no advocate of revolution or violence. So, according to his argument, black Americans should be critical of the Democratic Party that represents the pluralistic side of politics in the US but not be participants in that ideology. Which leaves black Americans nowhere to be. Ergo, while Mr. Douthat wants to instill discontent with progressive values the African American population, he offers no alternative. How very sanctimonious to pin the tail of idealism on the Democratic donkey, when it is the Republican Party that has been promising pie in the sky.
1
Mr. Douthat seems to be upset that Catholic adoption agencies are required to comply with anti-discrimination laws and to place some children with same-sex couples.
I propose a deal: right-wing religious adoption agencies can refuse to place children with same-sex couples if left-wingers can start adoption agencies that refuse to place children with couples that practice anti-gay religions. Same deal for bakeries: right-wing bakers can refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings; left-wing bakers can refuse to bake cakes for weddings solemnized in anti-gay houses of worship.
What do you say, Mr. Douthat? Do we have a deal?
2
Are Jews privileged? Are Muslims privileged? Are Buddhists privileged? You could ask this of any religion and get a variety of responses.
As a Christian, I have never been privileged and have worked for everything I have obtained in life. I would guess my fellow Christians would agree with me on this point. We have not always found following the Christian message to be an easy one but have reaped many benefits from plodding along the Christian path. We will just continue to carry on as before.
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@KMW That is not the privilege Douthat talks about. The privilege mentioned here is that of having the dominance and power over the others, the ability to get your way and impose your values onto others. Basically, you are the best and more superior.
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@KMW. You seem to have entirely missed the point regarding ‘privilege.’
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@KMW
‘Christian’ according to whose interpretation of scripture? And which translation of said scripture? And according to whose transliteration of ancient dialects into modern vernacular?
Are we including the Apocryphal Texts? That could be important.
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Oh gosh, the question of religion. This is at the heart of the Establishment clause, as I understand it. Our founders were concerned about the power of religion to spark wars. Europe saw a lot of that in the old days. Our founders set up a system they hoped could allow for religion, but short circuit the ills associated with it. Liberalism as I understand it regards religion or spirituality as a part of human nature but it is a matter of personal conscience formed in the cradle of community. As I understand conservatism, religion is a description of reality that is considered to be beyond human comprehension. Its rules were developed and dictated to populations by male clergy who stand between God and the rest of us. This makes for uneasy bedfellows in US culture. How do we form a community life when some of us believe others don’t have the right to live as they choose, to have healthcare, or a seat at our country’s tables of power? As for abortion, even the Bible states a child is a human when they draw their first breath. Science shows fetuses are not viable, not separable from their mothers, until well after 20 weeks of gestation. Science also shows that females are the template of the human race (genetically), while most religions claim females are sub-human and males are the template set by God. How do we reconcile these two very different points of view on the crux of human life: the relative value of the sexes, much less anything else associated with religion?
4
Ross says that the Civil War was "a good and necessary thing" back then. Necessary it possibly was in the sense of historically inevitable, if tragic. Good is was not. Six hundred thousand soldiers died which would equal six million in today's population. And five hundred thousand civilians died, which would make five million today. There was vast property damage. Hatred was sown that endures today. It was not intentionally about ending slavery although it did end slavery. It was about that dream of manifest destiny, building a coast-to-coast behemoth of a country. That is, it was about nationalism, power, expanding markets, and profits. This is why all those people died violently. Can Ross really say this was good?
2
This opinion piece is almost wonky, but leaves out an acknowledgement that the Catholic Church as well as many Protestant denominations are simply shrinking due to lack of people engaging in religious life. In driving around the country, one observes numerous empty and abandoned small church buildings as well as numerous church buildings reconfigured for other purposes. Church affiliation offered a sense of community for people that can be found in other ways. Spirituality, ethics, and altruism are available through thousands of grass roots local organizations, some environmental, some around serving the disadvantaged...etc. These sorts of modern organizations offer people a sense of purpose and meaning without the necessity for complex religious doctrine and intermediaries between people and their spiritual paths, who are subsidized by their adherents.
2
The problem with conservativism of virtually any sort is that capitalism destroys both traditions and any sense of collective.
It is also not true that the North's move toward the Civil War was led by the Abolitionists. The Free Labor Party and the Republican Party were prepared to allow slavery to continue in the states but not in the new territories. The South could not and would not abide that. The Civil War started because on Lincoln's election South Carolina fired on government property.
3
If Douthat thinks Serwer has over simplied "privileged white Christians whining", then he should reflect more on his assertion that abortion is a "form of lethal violence" equivalent to infanticide. Does he really think it's so simple, some cruel women out to inflict "violence" on their unwanted pregnancy?
Instead of being patronizing and judgmental, perhaps Douthat can have the humility to consider how human race have yet to reconcile the conflict between our ability for sexual pleasure and that of procreation, in particular for girls and women; and how these two impulses weave through all other aspects of our lives, and differently for the two sexes. It takes two to make a baby. How about the sin of the fathers?
That aside, there might be instances where Catholics or conservative religious people were resisted or even persecuted, but on the whole, are they not the dominant "race"? From where were women liberated, to work, vote and worth equal to men? From where were interracial marriage, homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders, female priests liberated to exist?
Even if it is true some historical loss suffered by Christians are over looked, it matters very much that they, presently, support and provide cover for a demagoguery president.
In this imperfect world, our government, politicians and citizens will be imperfect. But I hope we have enough wisdom to see the larger evil, and not end up sinking our collective boat, our democracy, for the sake of our own little corner.
2
@Doodle, You are right , the Church's view on abortion is simply an extension of its policy on birth control specifically and its population control on behalf of the ruling elites it served. It has been gussied up a bit as "love of life" but is still just social policy disguised as religious dogma the Church uses to control people's lives. Douthat's real grievance is the Church is now less successful in cramming his religion down our throats. Exactly what he denies wanting to do.
Mr. Douthat,
Thomas Jefferson is out of fashion these days because of his exploitation of slaves, but some of his greatest hits are worth remembering. Here is an excerpt from his letter to Mordecai Noah, a prominent Jewish American:
"Thank you for the Discourse on the consecration of the Synagogue in your city, with which you have been pleased to favor me. I have read it with pleasure and instruction, having learnt from it some valuable facts in Jewish history which I did not know before. Your sect by its suffering has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance, inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble, and practiced by all when in power. Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our, civil rights, by putting all on an equal footing."
Notice Jefferson doesn't say, "Only Christians are bad," or "Jews are always good." ALL religions are prone to practice intolerance when they are in power, and for that reason, our constitution bars them from holding such state power.
Just saying.
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@Andrew Winton-"ALL religions are prone to practice intolerance when they are in power, "-all PEOPLE or groups are prone to practice intolerance when they are in power-see the great atheist paradoxes like Soviet Russia, Communist China, North Korea.
1
The problem is not that religious groups like Catholics and Evangelicals are being marginalized by liberals. The real problems is that they haven't be marginalized sufficiently. Our founders intended this to be a country with a secular government where people were free to practice any religion they chose. But, religious people DO NOT have a right to impose their religious doctrine on people who do not want it. There is oppression of these groups. Liberals vehemently oppose religious groups imposing their dogma on others and using our legal system to do so.
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Society is not trying to prevent your religion from flourishing. What it is trying to do is ensure that as the religion flourishes, it does not harm or discriminate against women, LGBTQ folk, or other people who have been historically harmed.
If, in certain fields, Catholics would have to follow rules that go against their beliefs, then they need not to enter those fields. I face the same situation as a Buddhist: my religion demands that I engage in right livelihood which excludes certain professions.
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How nice to be a NYT columnist and have the opportunity to write a whole article as essentially a comment on someone else’s OpEd.
I’ll be more brief. You claim that current trends would aim to keep Catholicism from flourishing, citing challenges to hospitals and adoption agencies, and then claiming a “slippery slope” to schools and universities. The crucial difference is that we have a well-established network of public schools and universities so that no community is left with ONLY a catholic school. However, Catholic hospitals are often the ONLY hospital in an area and when they fail to provide basic and necessary services, communities are left underserved and with no options. I wholly reject the argument that placing restrictions on Catholic hospitals will keep your religion from flourishing. Your religion can flourish in churches (and yes, in schools, they are not threatened) and leave healthcare and adoption services to others who would not deny services based on gender or identity. I urge you to read the horrific stories of women’s interactions with Catholic hospitals, where they can be denied abortions even when the fetus is already dead and the mother’s life is in imminent danger. And then think how is non-Catholics feel knowing that 1 in 6 hospitals is Catholic and they continue to expand.
Speaking of numbers and oppression, how many Catholic Supreme Court justices is enough? They’re up to 6....hard for me to feel this oppression you try to claim.
17
So why haven't other hospitals been built? Don't blame the only hospital available on the Catholics. There would not be a hospital, if some order (probably of nuns) had not built it. What services would be available then?
Douthat, like most religious conservatives, just can't stop characterizing as "oppression" of or discrimination against their particular brand of Christianity (and their very particular positions on how it should apply to issues like abortion and gay marriage) the insistence of secular liberals as well as quite a few progressive Christians like me that "separation of church and state" means what it says. Catholics, Protestant evangelicals, Southern Baptists, or my own Methodists shouldn't get to have their far-from-universally-shared positions on issues of secular import privileged by the government. If your church doesn't want to host gay marriages that's your business. But don't try to get the legislature to stop mine from celebrating them. Don't approve of birth control? Don't use it. But stop trying to impose your views about it on your employees through appeals to "religious freedom." If modern liberalism sometimes appears hostile to religion, maybe it's because religious conservatives insist on having their brand of it enshrined as the only version worthy of state sanction.
17
This is (yet another) long dissertation by Mr. Douthat on how religion is "oppressed" within a modern statehood.
But the problem can be distilled to one simple statement: in the eyes of Mr. Douthat the "oppression" is defined as the state of no longer being privileged or enjoying special status, which is, of course, a false premise. This is not what oppression is. Oppression is having less than the norm would guarantee / protect. Being pulled down from a privileged position to the level of norm is not oppression. Many religious entities have a problem distinguishing between the two.
6
And like every great concept, and certainly the America concept is one, it will and must be tested: its success depends on it.
America is currently suffering through the Trump test and all the decent caring people have as their best weapon, the vote. We all know where it goes from there.
2
Re hospitals—should they be easy to operate? If hospitals are open to the public, and benefit from preferential tax status, should they not be licensed an inspected and regulated by a government which represents the public? One can quibble as Douthat does about details, but operating a hospital ought not to be “easy,” that’s a recipe for abuse. And Serwer’s paragraph dealt with black soldiers in the two world wars, Douthat addressed what Serwer actually wrote only obliquely and selectively.
2
I disagree with Mr. Douthat's depiction of anti-abortion activism as small-d democratic. Doubtless this is true of some, but I've personally witnessed intimidation of women at abortion clinics near where I lived at the time, with weapons occasionally wielded, and the movement has at times veered into flat-out terrorism using bombings and assassinations. I see it more as an attempt to shove one's choice of religion down the throats of people who believe differently, with a jackboot if necessary. I'm all for choice of religion and choice for women. By the way, those choices for women need to be made by women, not by men claiming to act on their behalf or on God's behalf.
12
Mr. Douthat posits that an established (aka state) religion and all structures of governance MUST be intertwined in deference to that religious law. Arguing that secular liberals must adopt “… a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before…” misses an inconvenient truth, It seems they are whining for a lost position of power and control. Roman Catholicism (and its descendants) has been THE RELIGION of Western Civilization for the larger part of that recorded history, displacing animism, multi-theism, and any other variant. That displacement was rarely if ever non-violent.
Integralism has always been destructive. While some may find comfort in its practice, what degree of freedom is left to those who do not? The secular state allows for a variety of beliefs that integralism detests. I was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition; I find it does not satisfy my needs for order and meaning in my life. That said, I would not deny your choice in the matter. Your argument seems to deny mine.
3
No matter how you slice it religious belief is and should be a personal issue. We have a choice now: the world is melting so we can find common ground and work together for ALL or we can fight to the dirty end, killing and taking, and letting the strong crawl over the weak.
There is not a religious, contemplative nor spiritual bone in Mr. Trump's body but he serves as the master to the right.
Instead of making our country smaller, meaner and more exclusive we would all be happier, healthier and kinder if we were honest about our history, our military industrial complex and the aid we have been supplying monsters for decades.
I am a Christian by birth and I was shaped by the belief Christ was a good, fair and radical believer of equality but I was one of the lucky ones. Many religious leaders swing religion around like a sword. We do not have to be at war my friends we do have other choices.
2
Is the long arc here the final dissolution of organized religion? Religion has served its purpose both good and bad. A more enlightened population may see things post-religion. A world where people's relationships with others is as or more important than with a figure bestowed on them by an organized group or individual from centuries ago. A component of religion was/is to keep people in line and ensure the procreation of the species. Also, to ensure men were not out there spreading their seed indiscriminately. Holding on to the past is a sure road to nowhere.
2
If "God" is the ultimate lawgiver, then the laws of a secular democratic polity, whether "liberal" or "conservative" are of secondary consequence. In this context, "Americans," whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, who hold the belief that their "god" is the final guide and arbiter in human affairs is acting against the Constitution of the United States and against all citizens who hold contrary beliefs.
If people believe that upholding the Constitution is treason against a non-existent entity (a character in works of fiction), they are placing loyalty to that "entity" above that to their alleged homeland - their country. In other words, they are committing treason against the United States. Moreover, in the context of basic human relations, they are creating barriers against any concept of an effective sharing community, thereby eroding the very basis of national unity.
In its misguided notion of providing space for all opinions, to incorporate all views, the NYT risks lowering the bar by accepting content of dubious merit. Free speech is not an apparently useful criterion for publishing as judgement is expected to be exercised by the publisher.
Pro-choice state laws passed by elected legislators were signed by elected governors in several states, most notably New York, prior to Roe V. Wade. And as Catholic hospitals have displaced secular ones in many communities, it's not just abortions they refuse to perform, but a number of medical procedures not particularly controversial otherwise. To object is hardly to be anti-Catholic; it's to be in favor of health care provided by medical professionals, not religious ideologues.
8
The historical perspective that I embrace is that Christianity (the religion) sees itself as born in persecution (by the Jews, though in reality it was the Romans), is overly fascinated with (mostly mythical) martyrdom, and that ever since it took power under Constantine and Theodosius it has viewed any opposition or resistance as both persecution and heresy. It is the institutional loss of dictatorial power, far more than the loss of personal privilege, that drives the current "whining" of the religious right.
The claim, to take just one example, that accepting gay marriage is "persecution" illuminates this perfectly.
7
@Dan Kohanski-"The claim, to take just one example, that accepting gay marriage is "persecution" illuminates this perfectly"-you are stating this inaccurately. It is not that failure to accept gay marriage is viewed as persecution, it is that having your business severely financially assaulted or even destroyed because you won't serve a gay marriage, though you are happy to serve gay people in other contexts, that is viewed as persecution.
Though a wordy column, it seems to me that you are equating persecution of religious institutions with liberal movements fighting against those institutions’ ability to dictate and control the lives, trough policy and law, of the non-religious. That to me says that these religious sects have wielded far too much power throughout our nation’s history. And what these folks are experiencing, even as you deny it, is some level of discomfort with an ongoing and overdue correction of power. Nobody is saying that they can’t believe what they want, as long as they keep it in their homes and churches, and away from laws that can affect me and mine.
11
Last week was the 80th anniversary of Quebec's Padlock Laws which denied basic rights to Quebec's religious and political minorities that were unprotected constitutionally. For those of us in our 70s know what a conservative Catholic society looks like. As a Jew I understand, "Thank God I am not a woman" and all that it entails. I also saw 50 years of "liberal democracy" after the quiet revolution.
It was a little over 100 years ago that Twain wrote his Mysterious Stranger. The mysterious stranger said there is nothing so good that someone doesn't suffer and nothing so bad that someone doesn't suffer.
Conservative and liberal are not antonyms the opposite of liberal is authoritarian and the opposite of conservative is progressive.
Fifty years ago Quebec was an ultra conservative Catholic Society today we are an ultra conservative liberal democracy on the verge of banning outward displays religious preferences and banning religion from all public places.
When Buckley Jr changed fascist into conservative he corrupted a political language that had sustained America for almost two hundred years and saw America evolve from a distant colony to the world's greatest nation.
The Catholic and Protestant hierarchies that ran Quebec 50 years ago and the "radical feminists" , "authoritarian atheists," and "sexual libertarians" who demand we believe what they believe. They both prey on our human frailties and tell us what we are, what we need to believe and who we should be.
4
I'm not a Catholic but I am a student of religion and my outlook does indeed stretch beyond the past 50 years -- back to 1848 and the beginning of a long crouch of defensive reaction by the Catholic Church from the mid-century revolutions and demands that the Papacy give up its temporal power through diehard opposition to Vatican 2.
It also stretches back to 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia which brought an end to the Thirty Years War. Christian Europe, exhausted by the bloodshed and theological wrangling, called for equality of rights between Protestants and Catholics despite what the sovereigns might think. And when the Pope of the moment, Innocent X, declared the Treaty to be null and void and without effect, Europe reacted with a resounding "So what?". If the disenfranchisement of the powerful had a start, it was at this point. It was then a short step toward the Enlightenment.
So it can be argued that the disenfranchisement grumbled about by the formerly powerful had its beginning at this point. Or you could look at the 16th century and the repeated excommunications of Martin Luther in the face of the Protestant Reformation. Either way, Catholicism has shown itself as obtuse to current changes as they were to past ones. And that's all on them.
11
@Daniel J. Drazen There's been room for strands of liberalism and freedom of conscience within both the Protestant and Roman churches. Also the reverse. Michael Servetus, forerunner of today's Unitarian Universalist church, was burned at the stake under Calvin.
Modern scandals of the Roman church have highlighted the risks of hierarchical clericalism without checks, but it was the same congregations which always welcomed people of all nations and were forthright in defense of the American civil rights movement. In my own experience, I can recall when my north Portland parochial school's first grade was 20 percent African American––more than integrated––at a time when our community as a whole was perhaps 2 percent African-American. When I left those dear friends for the public school several years later, I found a far whiter school––about a year or two behind us in most subjects.
Remarkably, in 1922 the Oregon legislature tried to abolish Catholic schools under the influence of the KKK, which in the '20s conducted rallies in cities big and small throughout America. In Medford, Oregon, with virtually no blacks or recent immigrants at that time, they satisfied their nativistic urges by marching round Sacred Heart School at lunch time when children were on the playground.
You can be sure many of the faces under the dunce caps at that time were Protestant and "pillars of the community." Times change. Thank goodness they do.
And Ross says the civil war was "a cautious campaign to save the union became a providentialist war to crush the South."
The punishment for rebellion in the American constitution is death.
No confederate soldiers were punished for their rebellion by death. The were allowed to keep their personal weapons and horses and return to their farms. This is hardly "crushing the south".
The south fired on Fort Sumter. It was in a state of rebellion. Robert E. Lee renounced his commission in the U.S. Army and became a confederate general
Lee stood at the gallows of John Brown and watched his execution. Lee allowed his soldiers to engage in the massacres of Black Union soldiers
Lee was not executed for doing far worse than what Brown did. This is typical Ross with massive omissions and distortions of historical facts.
The south then implemented a repression of Black Americans and implemented segregation, the KKK, Black Laws and it implemented a post civil war system of economic slavery
This repression did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1965. We see it eroded with the smirking smiles of Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and "Beer Man" Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Voter suppression, redistricting, gerrymandering in their most extreme forms to insure a repressive republican minority in Congress.
Conservatism is slavery by a new name backed by the religious right.
Vietnam Vet
31
@Michael One might also add that the Southern Baptist church split of today dates back to slavery, the "conservative" strand basically represents the pastors, who agreed that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, and thus obtained the favor of the rich planters who dragged the South into rebellion and ruin. By the '60s, that strand had mutated into promotion of "religious" schools intended to sustain segregation in the face of Federal support for civil rights. Religion is not necessarily an anti-liberal force, but when it becomes so, its evils become all the more obdurate to change.
2
@Solar Power
I fully agree. 1500 characters!
You might look at the book Democracy in Chains to see the role of the Koch brothers in funding "conservative" repression and the destruction of the American democracy. 75 pages of footnotes as documentation.
We see "fundamentalists" rummaging around the bible and finding phrase the promotes "submission" in women, obedience in women to male "authority" and anything else you can come up with.
1
The problem is Christians wish to control the narrative of America, that destroys the true good of the "melting pot" concept. I truly resent Christians trying to shove their ideology unto all people. The "do unto others" is to respect another's viewpoint. Without this respect, we are a very dangerous nation.
Religion was invented by man because they had no control over famines, plagues, fires, droughts, and floods. Religion also is a nod to tribalism, my tribe is better than your tribe. Although we no longer throw virgins into the flames or slay our firstborn sons, nothing has changed. We still lack control over these elements. Religion is what is bad with America.
Sadly in regard to fires, droughts, and floods we have learned much about Climate change and can change the trajectory, but we are paralyzed to do so.
10
And... the more tribal we become the easier it is to poke your finger at someone else.
As a person who grew up in 1950s small town Pennsylvania, where 80% of the population was Catholic I can say there is nothing more satisfying here in the last part of my life, than to see the Catholic church brought to its knees.
Priests commonly repeated the Jesuit formula to us, that 'error has no rights' . The board of the public library was dominated by priests. Books were censored.
The movie theaters up and down the valley were all owned by one company, owned by a catholic family. Movies were censored.
In Pennsylvania in the 1950s, a woman could not buy a diaphram, the only form of birth control for women at the time, without her HUSBAND's signature. A single woman had no business practicing birth control.
A man could not buy a condom unless he was married. And they were sold behind the counter. The pharmacies in town were staffed by people who knew everybody. No single man could easily obtain a condom.
Men in my blue collar town often beat their wives and children with impunity. People gossiped about it and I personally witnessed it many times. The police never intervened in 'domestic affairs'. The Irish clergy preached against 'disobedience' and that was the 'sin' we were urged to confess most at age 7 for our first communion.
judges remanded delinquent teens to daily visits to the catholic monsignor, who doled out physical abuse at will.
I could go on with much more.
I thank the gods every day this corrupt, rotten institution is finally collapsing.
35
@Bobby "Error has no rights." This is the first time I've heard that, but if this is indeed a frequent saying of the Jesuits then I would have expected them to hand over any priests credibly accused of abuse to secular authorities immediately, rather than covering up for them for so many years. But apparently that rule, like so many others, was to be selectively applied.
1
Ya wanna play politics? Pay taxes. Tax-exempt status for religious organizations should be abolished. Then maybe we can talk.
16
I appreciate that readers are passionate, but really - perhaps read the column before decrying it in the comments?
2
Reading this column, and then reading the last 15 minutes of responses here, leaves me with one certainty at least: Clear, precise and reasoned writing is alive and as pleasurable as ever!! Thank you all.
10
It seems as though he likes to use a lot of big words to say so little. I was a conservative Catholic, wanted to be a martyr at 9yrs, attended Catholic school from k- college degree. I was arrested at operation rescue , summer of mercy at Tiller's clinic, however, I was pregnant and single at that time and life opened up to me, my blinders were removed over time. I learned abortion is not an easy decision for anyone, even though I was taught women would have lots of sex then get lots of abortions, that's not how life works. A priest told me my son was a mistake, wow, definitely anti abortion but not pro child. the Catholic church loves to make its members feel like victims. Life's not up to us but to God, if we do good it's because of him,not our hard work, sacrifice. If we fail it's because we are bad people. I had to realize even Jesus did not want to die, he wouldn't want his followers dying for him but the church idolizes martyrs, why? They encourage victim mentality. The Catholic church alone has killed millions over its history, but its a victim? The church is powerful,rich,not a victim. White, Christian males are the most dangerous people in America right now, killing Muslims, Jews, Blacks. Christians conveniently like to pick and choose from the old testament to justify hate but Jesus said he is the new covenant, to erase the old covenant. Christians need to decide to be followers of Jesus, the new testament or be Orthodox Jews who follow that old covenant.
8
Yes- they are very privileged. And the majority of them do not practice what they preach.
6
I had a guy a few weeks ago driving his truck (across the parking lines) in the lot of my grocery store to anyone he saw walking from their car. He came up, honked about 2 feet away, smiled and handed out a small crucifix. I told him I'm an atheist, and tried to hand it back. He swore a blue streak at me, so I started walking into the store and chucked the cross into the back of his truck. He yelled more, honked his horn continuously, and burned rubber out of the lot.
I don't think I would call him meek.
8
Women being totally left out of this opinion piece is striking. Access to medical care and science-based decision making for half the population is being undermined.
You bet I do not think the Catholic Church should own hospitals unless they stop denying full care to female citizens whose freedom of and from religion must be honored. Why should conservative Roman Catholics impose their questionable beliefs on the rest of us? Many have not choice of other hospitals.
We need that Equal Rights Amendment. And it needs to be applied to healthcare separated from religion.
511
@poslug
Exactly my first response. If Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism did not tell women that God wants them under the control of men, Mr. Douthat would have at least one leg to stand on.
But they do, and he doesn't.
68
@poslug. Doctors should have the right to be doctors that limit their practices. No, a podiatrist should not have the right to limit whose feet they want to treat. If they feel uncomfortable removing a toe from anyone, they should be required to make a referral to a surgeon who will. What is wrong with any doctor limiting their practice to procedures they feel comfortable with? Should doctors be required to perform executions because the law says they’re legal? How about euthanizing a person because a state says it is legal? It is just as bad if government controls personal decisions for doctors, or women for that matter.
7
@poslug
What about my tax dollars going to the suffering and death of many innocent people in the ‘regime change’
endeavours that my government has been involved with in the 50 years or so.
26
You say, “Politically, liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion...” My belief is liberalism has ‘imposed’ a right to privacy and equal protection of it. I do not understand how my choices, made in the privacy of my home, are your business (or the government’s.) I may not agree with your view, but neither do I impose mine on you. I deserve, and I am entitled, to the same.
9
I am trying to remember Jews who forced Catholics to convert to Judaism in late 19th century Eastern Europe, (and I personally know of 2 families hose history was Jewish until forced conversions to Catholicism in Eastern Europe) or Southern Baptists who were forced into slavery picking cotton for 200+ years until the Civil War. I have no problem with anyone's religion as long as 1) you don't expect me to adopt it and 2) you don't expect to have special privileges to practice it.
There are inordinate things that people wish to do that require enormous sacrifice. If you want to become a doctor you can plan on studying 70+ hours per week as an undergraduate and perhaps 100 hours weekly while in medical school. You will likely be saddled with 200k in debt and probably will not be able to afford a house and if you have children before your early 30's, not have the time to be a part of their lives until they are of school age.
About the only sacrifice we should ask of the religious right is to let everyone else live as they please, and given decisions such as the Colorado baker, they are getting far more than that.
6
Ross Douthat should check his privilege.
There. I said it.
The issue that he and his fellow travelers continue to duck is that Christian supremacy hasn't exactly been good to religious minorities and atheists. And yes, in the past few decades we've finally seen a modest retrenchment against Christian supremacists, spurred on by the religious bigotry of conservative Christians in the aftermath of 9/11.
Fix that, Mr. Douthat, and get back to us.
8
I don't find the argument compelling.
Trump's slogan: Make America Great Again, was not a statement of fighting against oppression that white people face. Instead, it was a movement supported by Evangelical Christians and other white people (look at the make-up of his rallies) to regain a lost position of being on "top."
Whether they actually were ever on "top" or not is irrelevant, and whether some subgroups faced some difficulties because of liberalism is also mostly irrelevant.
What matters is they thought of themselves that way--as morally superior. That was the "Great" that was in Make America Great Again.
8
People who claim to know what God thinks simply project their own narcissism onto the whole universe to make their demands non-negotiable. I trust nobody who does this.
10
This long-winded column simply ignores the most basic fact that should (but doesn't) dominate Mr. Douthat's discussion of religion and its issues with the state.
That fact is: America is a secular republic with a Constitution that specifically states that no one religion may be established in our politics, and that every religion should be accorded freedom to practice it.
Because of separation of church and state, the religious right's intrusion into our courts, seeking always special protections for said religion within our laws is just plain wrong.
Ross, I'm a Catholic and don't recognize anything in your discussion that hints at my oppression within the state. As for abortion, again, we have to remember this country is secular, not religious, and abortion is at heart a a religious argument (with a heavy dose of misogny I might add).
Practice religion in church and in your personal life but maintain laws that are neutral and respectful to every American religious persuasion, even those who have no religion at all.
1092
@ChristineMcM In the American Constitutional principle of separation of Church and State I see a reflection of Jesus's admonition to "Render unto Caeser that which is Caeser's, render unto God that which is God's" and claim that His Kingdom is not temporal.
Even up here in Canada, which does not have full separation of Chuch and State for historical reasons, and whose constitutional derives from God *and* the Rule of Law, we've managed to do better at keeping religion from being forced on unwilling recipients in the public sphere (although Quebec, I dare say, just went too far in the other direction)
49
@ChristineMcM The prominent fallacy in Ross' opinion piece is that religious people are persecuted in this society. I ask, where? Many accusations are made with no proof to support them.
Ross says things like: "the liberal order has often tended to define itself against the Catholic Church, and in the European context to answer ancien-régime cruelties with anti-Catholic persecutions, expropriations and terrors all its own."
Examples? None given.
And, "liberalism has imposed via the judiciary... a constitutional right to abortion, a form of lethal violence that the church opposes for the same reasons it opposes infanticide."
However Ross omits that liberalism does not force any religious person to have an abortion. They are free not to have one. Unfortunately religious people continually try to prevent others from doing so.
And, "liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today.."
But Ross does not say how. He ignores the fact that society has decided to help organized religions by making them tax exempt.
And, "progressive politics is also nurturing a fashionable occultism,... whose anti-Catholicism seems quite sincere."
Anti Catholicism, how? Examples not given.
Finally, "longstanding tendency in modern secular polities — an institutionalized anti-Catholicism that effectively oppresses the church.."
Really, how is the church oppressed?
192
@ChristineMcM Thanks Christine. You saved me time by saying what I would have said. It is constantly stated that religion is under attack but never backed up with proof. The Catholic church and the Evangelicals seem to believe that if they can't convert everyone, they are under attack.
157
I would direct Douthat’s attention to Steven Waldman’s recently published book, ‘Sacred Liberty’ for an interesting read about the ways religious freedom and liberty have often resulted in often bloody conflicts. Methinks that those who feel that liberalism is at war with religion are more concerned with how it affects THEIR religious beliefs rather than religious beliefs in general.
4
Douthat, how wonderful to have you with us. It is always heartening to see a fellow Catholic argue that the Gospel is inherently counter-cultural. It is also univocal, so I am not quite sure what a "conservative Catholic" or a "serious Papist" is - but I quibble. I look forward to your future columns advocating for migrants, against arms sales and jingoistic military adventurism, a smaller defense budget, the unconstitutionality of the death penalty and universal access to healthcare and housing.
16
So many of your statements seem unfounded or ill-conceived that I have no desire to address them all. I'll pass over the vast distance from your lamentable analysis of the causes of the Civil War to your reference to "the anti-Catholic ratchet" and merely touch on your discussion of abortion.
It may (or might not) have been Augustus Hand of the NY Court of Appeals who wrote words to the effect that a civil right will be created when our society persistently demands such right.
Abortion has been around since time immemorial and has been practiced widely whether lawfully or unlawfully.
Abortion will survive as a right unless democracy itself fails, which is possible.
4
I find it interesting that all,if not mostly all of the comments are in opposition to Mr. Douthot. I always perceive his columns as those written by an aggrieved Catholic, of which I am, catholic that is but not aggrieved , but I do not share his grievances. I agree with several of the commenters that if anything it is the evangelicals and conservative Catholics who would like to see their religious views imposed on the rest of our country. I don’t believe that’s what our founding fathers had in mind.
14
I happen to be part Irish and part Polish, both of which were not treated at all well when they first came here. In fact, some of the first Irish were in the Second and Third trips of the Mayflower, and they were Slaves, although their egos and later generations called it Indentured Servitude For Debts, sometimes it was other crimes, many times the crimes were false: a way to take the Irish Farmer's Land (which is part of why North Ireland is a wee bit of a problem to the rest). The Irish were used in Lumber Camps, Mining and in factories where they never saw the light of day.
Some of us older white men know just how far we have come, and exactly how much we share with our Brothers the Black and Other Colored Folks. Irish were 'Too Fair, freckled and tending towards red hair' but were strong and diligent workers without much education, and thus ripe prey for the predators on thrones who needed slaves, and extra lands, Now.
So, while a whole lot of the land has forgotten this chapter in shame, there are a number of us who keep the information alive. Our Youth need to be educated that Slavery can happen to ANYONE, plain and simple, and they have no clue how easy it is to get locked into a low paying job that they can 'barely' get by on, and then the powers that be wonder why there is angst and occasional violence in the chronically poverty stricken areas, which seem to only be spreading.
And that is true for people of all colors, like life is better with money for any color.
12
As a believer, I can't think of any more effective force in contemporary America that drives people away from Christianity than the moral minority that call themselves "religious conservatives." They have fully embraced the godlessness of Libertarianism, social Darwinism and moral relativity. Their current hero is the complete antithesis of Christian values, and their best argument for their unconditional support is literally "the ends justifies the means." The most damaging aspect of this hero worship to the survival of the faith is the question, "if they can be so easily swayed by an overt con-man, a wolf who doesn't even don sheep's clothing, what other lies, demagoguery and false prophets have they bought? How thin must be their belief system if it rests on people who put political power over values!"
34
Ross. Boil it down please. What are you saying in plain-speak? I really would like to know. I need to understand what you mean by the "historical perspective" that I should embrace and a bit more specifics on what is meant by those who have never lost anything.. Did you have a colleague read this before going to print? Honestly, I would like to understand your points here so that I can agree or not agree with your logic. Please. Thank you.
7
@Geo Olson
Here it is: WASPs were oppressed when they escaped to New England, but now as liberals they’re the oppressors.
Mormons were oppressed when they first started their religion, and now as conservatives they’re still oppressed.
Don’t worry, it didn’t make sense to me, either.
American history is not a history the true American story of the wealth of America is through slavery, brought by the Dutch for timber clearing in upstate New York to cotton instead of coin for the first dollar bill, tools, the food industry to the fashion world and to music. To much attention is placed on the Civil war which lasted around 4 and a half year but the war against the American Indian lasted over centuries. Walking on the backs of many was just for the few, back then same now.
4
I slogged through this writing. It seems like each sentence Mr. Douthat was writing had asides and qualifiers to try and get a point across, it was distracting and mind numbing to understand. What it seems to be saying is please try to understand us from a historical standpoint and please don’t judge us. Honestly I don’t really understand what Ross is trying to say to liberals. It is not liberals who are making laws that are discriminatory it is the religious right in power in legislatures that are hellbent in forcing the rest of the country to follow their beliefs and teachings. It is why I abhor religion in politics, the use of the Bible as a means to cram their ideology on everyone. Personally I just want the religious right, evangelicals, Catholics, to leave me to my own morals and beliefs, if and when I should need you I’ll come find you but until then stop telling us how to live our lives. And yes Christians are the whiniest bunch of white people I encounter daily; they, themselves are not helping their mission.
19
Clever lumping of white folk into one group. I live in Kentucky where a huge percentage of non-religious whites firmly believe that white privilege is a myth. There are also large elements of religious whites who are openly racist. These are the whites that liberals find unacceptable because of their ignorance, not because of their religious affiliation.
I know you love your church Ross, I love mine too, but not every issue should be defined through that prism. Work to change your church for the better, then let's talk.
257
@Johnny As a white person who finds racism profoundly upsetting, I disagree that I dislike religious white bigots because they hide behind ignorance. I dislike them for their close mindedness. I dislike them for invoking the inclusivity of religion when they are not inclusive. I dislike them because they claim to be Christian, but actively deny Christian values. My church too.
28
@Johnny Douthat is angered that the culture doesn't universally endorse his faith. He would prefer that we live under a state that would impose his religious views as the inquisition did in Spain and Rome. I just wonder, how long are we going to subscribe to a newspaper that employs a columnist who would force us to accept convictions that he doesnt even try to argue for? It's just his form of Jihad.
11
I am a spectacularly failed catholic. Delightfully so! I bear those of faith no malice, but I do object to their demands for special treatment. If you are a person of faith and take comfort from it then live it. Do not push it into my face in the name of god and demand that I accede to your demands of faith. Leave me alone and stay out of my life. How does that go? Oh, yeah, "Don't Tread on ME"
18
The support for Donald Trump among the religious right, and their embrace of truly horrendous social positions means the religious right is neither religious nor right.
When rape victims are denied abortion and have to give their rapists child visitation rights and other privileges, when so-called Christians applaud ripping children away from their parents and locking them up in cages, when they close their eyes to open corruption and constant lying on the part of the administration...
There is nothing Godly in their faith. It is a cult based on fear, anger, and power for the sake of power. It is sanctimony on steroids.
17
The religious right are neither religious nor right. Ad that is the tangle, sir.
8
@Maridee Very much as the earlier 'Moral Majority' was neither 'Moral' nor a 'Majority'. All the yard signs about "I Found It," (Religion in the Repub Party), to which the counter-yard sign was "I found it, Now my finger stinks"
Pretty well Still sums up that situation! They Found their Candidate and 'president', our Great Yellow Snowflake in the Oval Office. And when he starts his daily meltdowns, the aroma is plain caustic.
Your religion has been the bane of human existence at least since Constantine--almost 1700 years. It was burning and flaying "heretics" alive as recently as the 18th Century. It now controls the U.S. Supreme Court, and appears determined to tell everyone how they have to live their lives. It dominates all of America south of the Rio Grande, and you have openly, defiantly stated that you would like to extend that to include the U.S. and Canada ("so there!"). We, too, could be Venezuela, or Nicaragua or Honduras.
It is time to end the privileged status of religions such as Catholicism.
16
@Andy Beckenbach It IS sorta funny how the Catholic Church has been the King over all the other Kings, and that is through the shared guilt of cannibalism, even though it is just ritualized symbolically. THE Original Sin, The one real major taboo in our human life is the eating of the flesh of another human being, yet celebrating Mass is the consumption of the 'flesh and blood of the Christed one'.
And it is the 'Collective Guilt' of the act that gives the Church an unconscious lever of guilt, that and the Confessions, shows they use common Guilt to control not only the poor, but kings and nobles as well, and threaten them with hellfire if they do not comply with the Wishes of The Church.
Talk about twisting the words of the man they say they emulate, they seem to be everything but, and none of the other churches have really addressed these same issues. Christianity as it is now is a death cult and piety as a 'Get out of Hell Free' card.
At least that is sure what it looks like to a Religiously Educated individual from a fairly agnostic point of view. And that goes along with the history of of these organizations: Churches are local power-people-places where the Right People are allowed to go to the Right Churches, while others are required to go to a different church. Economic displacements by religious institutional division and preference on the basis of who tithe the most. They do their confession and then go back out to sin as badly again and again, rinse and repeat.
2
All this tortured blather, to outlaw abortion and contraception, deregulate American polluters and lower his own taxes.
Life is so much simpler for right-wingers who freely admit to their vices.
13
I don’t know where you live, but outside the deep blue states, liberals are a bit more worried about fighting theocracy than overstepping their liberal bounds on freedom of conscience. No, really.
Biblical literalism is a pox. But so too is the selective way we Catholics decide which doctrine we are going to fight over on a given day with society at large. The debacle of whether an ACA-compliant insurance carrier can offer a FREE rider-policy for an employee to buy the same birth control that 99 percent of Catholic women use daily was preposterous and dishonest.
Medicare for all may eliminate private religious hospitals, I assume in some versions. But I find that unlikely, and using that unlikely event as a cudgel to prevent universal healthcare in any form would be dishonest.
Just be mindful that the leverage you are identifying works both ways.
8
I found the comments that The Catholic Church opposes abortion, because abortion is comparable to infanticide, a bit curious. I think the Church and anti-abortion activists refuse to consider the plethora of circumstances in which having an abortion is a reasonable decision, whereas infanticide is murder, as currently legally defined.
7
Conservative Christians deny 20th Century science and 21st Century progress towards the acceptance of gradations of sexual identity.
The denial of science, alone, condemns Conservative Christians as ignorant and unable to function in modern society.
The denial of the right of individuals to define themselves and to then have their identities recognized by society, condemns them as lacking in compassion.
Ignorance and intolerance are not acceptable.
11
Serwer is not suggesting that southern Evangelicals have never lost; he's suggesting that they are bad losers.
White, marginalized southerners were more than happy to join forces with the kkk against other poor farmers in order to maintain a social hierarchy of racial oppression. Many would have had far more to gain working along side of freedmen, but that would have required a suspension of slave culture often perpetrated by the church.
Southern Preacher called Abraham Lincoln an "oriental despot" (sounds vaguely like Kenyan terrorist to me) and assured his followers that slavery would come out of the Civil War stronger than it went in. When this didn't happen Black Codes replaced Slave Codes and Jim Crow crept in with the support of Evangelical churches.
12
What liberal individualists dislike about religious groups is that at their core just about all religious groups have a limit as to how far they will go in tolerating the beliefs, or lack thereof, of those who are not religious, and have no right to impose their religious values on others. What religious groups dislike about liberal individualists is that the basic attitude of most of them is that those who are religious are basically backwards and unenlightened. Unless we all learn to truly live and let live and respect each other, this conflict will go on.
A great book on this subject is 'One Nation Under God' by Kruse. It tells the history of the modern Evangelical movement as one born out of a Neo-Confederate, corporate propaganda movement effort to destroy the New Deal.
GM and J. Walter Thompson came up with much of the rhetoric you hear on the Right to this day. "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps", for example.
Trumpism is the culmination of this decades long corporate Christian, fascist propaganda movement that would never exist if not for huge corporate money and massive lobbying efforts being poured into it by corporate plutocrats who rule over us today.
259
EXCELLENT Comment. Thanks.
10
@Tom
Thanks for the book recommendation.
10
@Tom
I'm ordering the book.
7
Nothing is more un American than the evangelical movement, but on the other hand nothing is more American than the evangelical movement. They’ve been on the wrong side of history from slavery to prohibition to Jim Crow to marriage equality to anti- choice. It’s their self righteous hypocrisy that has no limits. Now they want to institutionalize their movement despite separation of church and state. Quite simply, they will stop at nothing. They’ve anointed themselves the entitled ones.
12
Anyone who takes a "specific exception" to a Douthat suggestion or idea is probably on the right track.
3
Mr. Douthat has the key to these arguments in his statement "from the perspective of conservative Catholicism — which I do not ask you to share, only to inhabit for a moment"
The problem is that he frequently, and the rest of the anti-abortion, pro-church crows fails to follow his own libertarian advise.
I don't mind that you are Catholic. I do mind that the Catholic Church, that I am forced to support via the tax code, is aiding and abetting priests that rape nuns and altar boys. I also mind very much that that same Church wants to enact laws that takes away my opportunity to choose for myself.
12
What if a Protestant refuses to hire Catholics due to “deeply held religious beliefs”? Or the reverse? Isn’t this the power of the state used to impose one person’s religious beliefs upon another?
Ross Douthat seeks to bring back bigotry by calling it “religious freedom.” Telling folks that in the public sphere, they cannot use their religious beliefs to violate anti-discrimination laws is not protecting religious freedom - it is government-protected bigotry.
What’s the next step, Ross? Allowing anti-blasphemy laws in the name of religious freedom?
8
Contemporary evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and the modern GOP remind me much of the Saducees of the 1st century AD. What had begun as a political and religious movement to throw off the yoke of oppressive Seleucid hellenizers morphed into the party of the privileged who were determined to protect a system that benefitted them to the exclusion of the poor, marginalized, and basic tenets of social justice.
7
Classic bait-and-switch from Douthat, with some misdirection thrown in for good measure, but I'll grant it's very sophisticated whataboutism.
Douthat has at least three huge holes in his argument.
First, he is wrong about legalizing abortion, which was also being promoted by legislatures and laws, and not just the judiciary. It does no harm to the Catholic Church, nor Catholics. Opposing abortion is a religious belief, and, as such, should not have the force of law behind it. If Catholics or anyone doesn't believe abortion is right, they don't have to have one. And as many religions approve of abortion, Catholics shouldn't have the right to impose their beliefs on others.
Second, there is a whole host of political/economic/social issues that the Catholic Church promotes, not just abortion. Somehow, Douthat is telling us that the only issue that matters to Catholics is abortion. That's an absurd reduction of an entire faith to just a single issue.
Third, even if he didn't have complexities of the first amendment and Catholic beliefs on other issues, he'd also have to explain away the fact that most Catholics believe abortion should be legal.
It kind of looks like Douthat is trying to justify white Christian whining by contorting reality to fit his narrative.
12
I also see the Catholic Church but from a lot longer perspective than Douthat both from the inside and now from the outside.
Let us for a moment ignore the debate about abortion and pedophilia and homophobia and take up a more simple example of the church's attitude toward sex and women. I am writing about contraception.
The pope went against simple biology, sociology and psychology when he ruled that every sexual act must have the possibility of conception or it is a sin.
In some creatures sex does have that as its sole purpose. Females only accept males when they are fertile. But in most primates including Sapiens sex has a positive social and psychological function. Primate females accept intercourse when they are not fertile for those reasons. Couple who are same sex have sex without the possibility of conception as do older couples in which the female does not ovulate. According to the rules they are all sinners.
Why make such a rule that goes against both biology and human nature? Why did an all male ruling class and patriarchy condemn women to the risk of pregnancy with every sexual act?
It is simple. The church is terrified of female sexuality and secondly sees women as brood mares whose primary function is to increase the numbers of people in the pews.
The rule against contraception was almost universally ignored in the Western world and that was the beginning of the weakening of the moral authority of the church.
The other sins of the church came later.
4
What unites the religious right, their common bond whether Protestant , catholic, ultra Orthodox Judaism, radical Islam, even intolerant Buddhism, is bigotry, whether it’s born of fear, disdain, xenophobia, or zealotry. The Christian Right has been coddled and promoted in our country for centuries and is probably the reason other religions are radicalizing. Where is the religious left and center in all this?
5
Until the religious right rises up to expunge the racist, bigoted, greedy and authoritarian elements it presently harbors I will remain of the opinion that my interests, as an aspirational secular American, will be hostile to the wielders of influence among the bible-belters, papists and others special interests bent on ecclesiastical oppression. Just as Catholicism was criminally slow to turn over its pedophiles, evangelicals continue to hide the worst elements of their faith from the harsh light of public judgement. Who could read this as anything but the kind of Trumpist power grab the right wing religious community craves? The cost can be borne by them because history tells them that conservatism is better for their self-interest than a liberal order that attempts to promote equality of opportunity, among its other and obvious virtues. God is nowhere in this debate. If Jesus returned to an America ruled by the religious right he would be excommunicated and re-attached to his cross.
6
Yes, equating religious conservatives with dispossessed whites is a stretch. As is his wont, Ross argues a small flaw and ignores the spirit of the argument to pick at the flaw.
Let's stipulate that those who so believe that what they have been taught in their churches and Sunday schools that they value their beliefs above U.S. law are not fighting for former economic berths but rather would reinterpret the Constitution because it invalidates their former right to impose Sunday school ideas on others. Sort of like Iran in 1979.
Ross, you might believe that abortion is murder, and that stopping abortions ranks above curbing the slaughter in Yemen, where lives should matter too. However, the Supreme Court of the U.S., the same one that no doubt pleased you when it mistook massive corporations for "people," ruled almost 50 years ago that women had the right to terminate pregnancies. It's the law, Ross, and like all laws it can be challenged, but in the meantime "moral" people in your camp have figured out how to circumvent that law, with minimal pushback from law enforcement.
Were these people Quakers, and were they to strive to stop the U.S. war machine with the same fervor that they attack vulnerable women and sanction the murder of doctors, they would be walking the walk. However, this is less about principle and more about control. Religion craves control, and liberal democracy denies it.
If religion is infallible, how should it react when thwarted? I give you Exhibit A.
6
Honestly, it's hard to view the religious right in the same light as the struggle of women, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and even LGBTQ citizens. The religious right is the naive muscle of its wealthy paymasters. For decades, the racism, misogyny, and homophobia of the religious right have brought about policies that, frankly, only benefit the wealthy.
Meanwhile, the religious right's public leaders seem to be raking in the cash, becoming the corporate elites themselves.
There's nothing really libertarian about any of this. The wealthy elite keep dangling things the religious right wants (anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-immigration), so the wealthy can line their pockets with tax money, government-sponsored projects, and defense spending. Meanwhile, the religious right continues to align themselves with the Republican party in a way that ensures they are increasingly dismissed by a young and diverse America.
Strangely enough, Trump is a great metaphor for all this. A man who clearly lacks any spiritual sense and is focused on his own enrichment somehow becomes the leader of this warped form of Christianity. They sold their souls for so little.
12
Ah, yes. The same usual woe-is-me religious right conservatism. If you really think you’re being singled out and persecuted, let me remind you that your holiest day is enshrined in law as a paid holiday across the country. Good Friday is also frequently a paid company holiday across the Bible Belt. I and many other non-Christian Americans have to use vacation time for our holy days and explain each year why we’re taking off a single random day in the middle of the week and won’t be reachable by phone, text, or email. Please get some perspective and pull yourself out of your persecution complex.
9
I rarely read Ross’s columns because they are usually a mystifying excuses for why conservatives are right/innocent or should have more respect from the liberals who just want to give away everyone’s tax dollars to the undeserving poor. I would argue that Trump has brought out the worst behavior in today’s white evangelicals, along with all those televangelists who preach that God wants you to be rich so you can then feel good about giving a pittance of your money to help the poor you took advantage of to amass your riches. That behavior is most evident in the recent red state laws, driven by white evangelicals, that criminalize abortion under any circumstances—such as life-threatening illnesses of the mother, rape, or incest. I respect the right of evangelicals to not have abortions; that is the choice our Constitution gives them. I do not respect their right to take away the choices of other women solely based on their religious belief that I do not support and that is not protected in the US Constitution. Prohibiting abortion is the establishment of a specific religious belief that the federal government is barred by the Constitution from doing.
4
When a small number of fanatical religiously motivated people capture the levers of government and pass laws to force others to follow their religious dictates, the position of that religion goes far beyond privilege into theocracy. Religion has become a cudgel in this country with Christians and some others being able to avoid taxes, enjoy exemption from generally applicable laws and force the rest of us to support their churches and related buildings and enterprises through public grants it has gone far beyond privilege. It’s religious tyranny. I for one am sick of it.
6
I was a conservative Catholic in college (graduated from Stuebenville) and young adulthood and became more liberal as I grew up.
The difference here is that traditionalist Catholics are free to live their lives under the liberal democratic order. All those homeschool families in Steubenville and Ave Maria are free to go to mass everyday, have their 8 kids, and raise them however they choose. They are free to go to "Pro-Life" doctors who put a fetal heartbeat before the health and life of the mother at all costs. They are free to have 6 C-sections and then brag about their scars as being like the "wounds of Christ" at a Steubenville Conference. They are free to teach their children that gay and lesbian relationships are "disordered". They are free to live their "Benedict Option."
The opposite is not true.
Those of us who want nothing to do with that world will not be free under their rule.
Those of us who do not believe an 8 week old fetus is a "person" who comes before the wellbeing of a woman, or those of us who do not think our parents or spouse should be kept on a feeding tube forever will not be free to act upon our own beliefs in a complex medical situation. Gay and lesbian couples would not be free to marry or adopt children.
Every nation where conservative religious groups have been given political power has resulted in very real, very personal, oppression of those who do not conform.
The reverse is not true of the liberal order.
15
Christian churches in America are first about what people and groups will we exclude (shun), and who will we try to convert, by coercion if necessary.
Then they come to me and want dispensation (tolerance) to refuse to serve gays or perhaps even African Americans. That's pretty rich, the hypocrisy of wanting to exclude others but demanding tolerance and acceptance from me.
When they anointed Trump, I stopped being generous with my tolerance. Now they have me looking for lions.
5
I suspect that minorities getting closer and closer to having an equal seat at the table (rather than being the servant) as epitomized by the election of the first black President has led many white conservatives to conclude they need to raze the house in order to save it.
3
Aside from Mr. Douthat's theorizing, I think the issues are more easily seen as practical matters. Religious conservatives and liberals may not subscribe to each other’s beliefs. The problem is that the conservatives seek to impose them. If you do not believe in abortion, or you believe homosexuality is a sin, don’t indulge in them. But do not force others to change their behavior because of what you believe. Go ahead, make that wedding cake for the gay couple. Be kind. No one is forcing you to be gay. True, the Protestant WASP may have looked down socially or pushed back politically on Mormons or Evangelicals, but have they tried to bend an entire country to their will for religious beliefs? Outlawing polygamy maybe?
2
Imagine, as John Lennon once said, no religion.
While there seems to be a human need to believe there is some deity in loose control of this minor planet, humanity would arguably, and even really, better off without any religious beliefs at all. Throughout human history, adherence to religion has had very little positive benefits to our species.
2
When I read the bigotry and prejudice against conservative Christians, it makes me afraid for my children's' future. I grew up supporting the Democratic party on many positions including social policy, health care and gun control. When I look at the positions of the Democratic candidates in 2020, I still agree with them on these issues, but they make no room for social conservatives. Instead, they want to instill fear in us by attacking innocents in court like the bakery in Oregon or Colorado because they would not sell a cake that had a message that they found morally reprehensible. Once the Democrats were the party to keep the government out of our lives. Now they are the ones who want to bring in the government to force their social ideas on morality down our throats. The papist and the dissenters have a history of surviving, and they will survive this round too. Lastly, the African-American community is easily one of the most religious communities. They should be a natural ally of white conservative Christians. The liberal establish understands how powerful this alliance would be and has every incentive to exacerbate this divide as much as possible by developing ill feelings on both sides. If both black and white social conservative sides concentrated on how much they agree on, real change would be possible beyond the token affirmative action support that equates to the never fulfilled promise of "40 acres and a mule".
1
@Pat
"[Democrats] are the ones who want to bring in the government to force their social ideas on morality down our throats."
I'm finding myself struck with a very odd sense of irony here. :)
1
"...I want liberals — liberals like Serwer, perhaps liberals like you, reader — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before."
It's not that complicated. I have lived all my life (six decades) in the South, and I can tell you that the rise of Trump and the explosion of ultra-right television, radio, and internet propagandists exist because privileged, white Christians are terrified they are going to lose their "rightful" places as defacto, if not titular, rulers of everything American. Even poor and working-class whites fear the loss of control of power they've never actually had, but expect to win and secure any day now that Trump has arrived to give them what they think they are due.
Their desire for power and control is as misguided as their whining belief that their connection to God gives them the right and duty to decide "God's will" for all Americans. Sadly, nothing about them is likely to change in the forseeable future. If Trump is defeated in 2020 they will only dig in their heels and look for another Trump to lead and protect them--and one will indeed crawl out from under the muck to sink to the challenge.
6
Another great article by Douthat with historical perspective that make a basic mistake of conflating conservative Catholicism with white Christianity as it exists today in the US and how it has existed for the entirety of my not short life.
2
I am a religious person and probably go to church at least as much as Mr. Douthat. The difference between us is that I don’t expect the specific interpretations of my denomination to be enforced upon him, as he evidently expects his to be enforced upon me. Don’t approve of drinking? Don’t drink. Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of birth control? Have your 17 kids and kill two or three deluded wives in childbirth, but don’t expect the rest of us to comply. My personal perspective is that there is more honor in following the rules of one’s faith voluntarily, without the force of secular law behind them.
4
it is only in the past century that Catholic doctrine regarding when life begins has been defined as conception. historically in Catholic doctrine life began at "quickening" which is fetus moving in womb to the extent that it could be felt.
On the other hand, it is always ironic what the faithful hold most dear versus what they ignore. Death penalty is ok? Turning refugees away from border, separating families. Not exactly model WWJD behavior.
5
The Inquisition is one of greatest examples of how the Catholic Church practiced brutal authoritarianism. In some villages, after the Inquisitors left, not a single female--infant, child, adult--remained alive--although the Inquisition swept up men, it attacked women far more viciously; it is not an overstatement to say that the Inquisition turned on the female half of humans. And the Catholic Church aided Nazis and stayed supine throughout another mass murder - a mass murder that included Jews, gays and lesbians, gypsies, Communists, and physically or mentally disabled people.
You cannot talk about the Church and authoritarianism without discussing these facts. If the Church was a bastion of freedom, it would use persuasion, not bludgeons or finances, to achieve its goals.
4
Perhaps if we stipulate to the absurdity of the supernatural, human progress will flourish unencumbered by charlatans of faith.
Humanity has to choose: religion or freedom. Superstition or Reason. Can't have both at the same time.
3
Ok, let’s back up and start at the beginning: calling those on the political right “conservatives” is an absolute misnomer. They are far from conservative...fiscally, morally, environmentally, religiously, educationally...maybe on immigration.
So to start this whole analysis and call them conservatives...we’ll, it taints the whole analysis.
I have no sympathy for religious extremists defined as those who, when in power, would oppress others not having their views.
The catholic church has its inquisition. It shares with various protestant faiths the witch burnings. Scratch a right-wing evangelical and find a congregation willing to look aside at if not actually endorsing the murder of GLBT people. And don't get me started on how prosperity gospel cult blames the victim of poverty for their plight.
It will be much fun when medicare, medicaid and social security are defunded. Their suffering will be deemed deserved for some slight of the magnificence of the almighty.
2
Mr. Douthat ignores the truth of what Serwer is saying. It's called white privilege, and all the poor fools out there who are daily betrayed by Trump's phony populism survive on their perception of that privilege. Forget that they are almost as victimized as poor black folk have historically been in this country by the people they consistently vote for, they are convinced that it's their right to feel superior. That's how the Republican party keeps its base.
Douthat finds all kinds of inoperative nuance that doesn't alter Serwer's main point. Bodes poorly for Douthat's planned book.
2
OK, you are Catholic and believe that abortion is murder, that all murders should be prohibited. Believing this, you believe that you have a right (perhaps even a duty) to take action to prevent these murders.
Let's imagine for a moment that a Muslim wants to impose his views of right and wrong on his society. Women should be always accompanied by a man outside the home.
Men may marry four women and may divorce at will. Blasphemy is punishable by death. Etc.
Is it your worldview that this devout Muslim has a right to take action so as to impose his beliefs on the rest of his society? If not, why not?
To come at this from a different angle, what does it mean to you that we are a secular republic? That fellow citizens do not hold your worldviews, such as that abortion is murder?
That fellow citizens (e.g., Jews) do not regard Jesus as a deity or Christian or Catholic teachings as authoritative?
Why should your worldviews take precedence over those of your fellow citizens?
4
All of this anti-abortion fervor, this desire to control women's bodies, this passion for "innocent children," and this wailing that Roman Catholic clergy may not be able to operate schools and hospitals in the future -- squares exactly with the Roman Catholic church's systemic abuse of women and children, whether that's through rape, murder, neglect, shame, kidnapping, or torture. Where will future victims come from, and where will they be groomed for service, if the hospitals and church schools are not taxpayer funded?
1
It all boils down to the fact that religious conservatives cannot stop passing moral judgement on citizens who refuse to join them in belief systems that have negative consequences for every citizens who does not believe as religious conservatives do. Instead of inclusive humanness their religious belief is more politically and stubbornly Fascist in an us versus them fashion than liberalism.
2
The KKK wrapped itself in Christianity. It unleashed domestic terrorism with a flaming cross, not a sword or any other secular symbol.
Douthat worries that pro choice is becoming intolerant, with an overtone of anti-Catholicism.
The pro-choice hardening comes from an unrelenting, and stronger push by the pro life forces. Hearbeat legislation, sidewalk shouting, the elimination of the rape and incest exception, doctored video tapes of Planned Parenthood conversations, bogus licensing requirements -- these are the tactics that have caused the pro choice movement to be hypervigilent.
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot.
Imagine if the pro life tactics were applied to the church sex abuse scandal --- suppose chanting, sign carrying crowds paraded before every Mass warning parents that abuse might lie within those doors; suppose we made parents watch videos of sexually abused children before allowing their children to be alter boys and girls; suppose we imposed a license requirement that every church have full medical staff on hand to deal with sex abuse before being allowed to
have a mass that children attend; suppose we denied funding to church affiliated schools, universities, hospitals and charities until every last Vatican file on sex abuse was made public?
4
2019 Mr. Douthat, not 1819 or 1719. Or 1619, which was a great year for the Theatre!
But not for Commoners or women, but robed men of little faith and much dispensation for sins if you had enough money.
We heading back that way sir? Sounds like your kinda fun!
Seriously, we have worldly big problems, like survival. A bunch of religious people praying to be saved while they mess their own bed (climate change, nuclear war) and tell us how virtuous it is to kill the brown and yellow people.
I am in awe of the world I live in which is godly enough to make me honour and treasure the planet. Not find rationale for destruction and control.
These comments consistently include hateful remarks toward the religious right. If directed at other minorities, such remarks would be banned as inappropriate. The justification for the double standard is that the religious right are empowered and their attitudes are an abuse of power. But if they a poor and shunned minority, they should be protected against prejudice. And all those who vehemently attack them are akin to racists, the anti-LGBT, and misogynists.
@michjas
"But if they a poor and shunned minority, they should be protected against prejudice." -- Not if they firmly grip the reins of power at the time. Which they obviously do, & wish to *continue* doing.
1
Where to begin with all the dubious arguments that Mr Douthat puts forth? Just a couple of examples.
“Today’s evangelicalism is a complicated mix, but it is heavily descended from Bible Belt, prairie and Sun Belt folkways that were often poor and marginalized and rarely close to the corridors of power.”
Are you saying that these groups didn’t align themselves consistently with power so as to feel superior to other even less advantaged groups and were likewise cultivated culturally (even if just to get their votes) by the ancient-regime? You yourself use the word “alliance”. Is this not still the case today?
"... liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion..." "is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today, and perhaps colleges and grammar schools tomorrow. "... is also nurturing a fashionable occultism, ... whose anti-Catholicism seems quite sincere.”
Wow! The judiciary is not anti-democratic but part of our Constitutional order. They haven’t imposed abortion on anyone, they just allow for choice. Not allowing Catholic hospitals or adoption agencies to function? No, just keeping these extra-church institutions serving not just Catholics but the wider society (with gov’t subsidies?) under secular guidelines. Banning Catholic schools or universities? Anti-Catholic occultism? Just the usual fearmongering.
And so forth.
A clear, well written,“caveat” which notes much analyzed information, ranging in factuality and “truthiness,” presented in a style of certitude, but not adequately stimulating a range of necessary questions, and their inherent quests and uncoverings, so critical to creating types, levels and qualities of useable understanding. By a range of individual and systemic-agendaed-stakeholders.Ranges of diverse “ismated”- groups are listed; dimensionalized and presented as constrained “either/or” homogeneous ones. We, as readers, are not helped to consider what the implications might be, for implications and outcomes, if some, or ALL, of these labeled groups ( self created or externally tagged), of whatever valence and direction, represented and operated as ranges and continua of...We, as readers, are not helped to become aware of the necessary conditions, internal and external, temporary or more permanent ones, when the semantically-created groups behave as barriers- successful or not- to selected, targeted objectives, or as viable, inviting, passable -bridges.We, as readers, are not adequately helped to consider the challenges confronted by each of these labeled entities when faced with the daily FACT of policy-underpinned traumatizing of “separated” children, who, in a sense, are being “kidnapped” by strangers.Whose salary comes from citizen’s taxes. In a WE-THEY culture. Which enables daily violating, by words and deeds, created, selected, targeted a homogenized “ the other!”
The essence of this unnecessarily dense obfuscation is to suggest that we feel sorry for the poor misunderstood members of the religious right and forgive them for their cruel and un-Christian bigotry and hypocrisy. My argument goes in the opposite direction. The more you feel oppressed and misunderstood, the more understanding and empathy and brotherhood you should show towards others, particularly those who have been marginalized.
1
You don’t have to intellectually roam far or deep to answer the title of this article’s question:
‘Is the Religious Right Privileged?”
As long as they don’t pay taxes on their real estate holdings or incomes, the answer is yes, they are privileged. And in the case of the “oppression” that hospitals or schools might have to endure, as long as they take ANY government or insurance money, there is no oppression, rather they are morally obligated to act in a secular way.
4
This is a very interesting piece. I’d even say that Ross is right to alert to attacks against Catholic conservatism across American history.
But maybe what he misses is that there is no justification for using the existence of certain belief structures as a political cudgel to empower the taking of rights (even newly enshrined ones like the autonomy of women’s reproductive choices) from those of us committed to a vision of America as a nation of progressive change. It is really pretty simple. Either you believe in a nation capable of being dedicated to answering the clarion call of the Declaration of Independence, or you dedicate your life to taking the errors of the Constitution as scripture. And by God, I hope most folks can figure that one out.
2
These institutions who claim to have the last word were founded by men and written for the well being of men.
You will know them by their pronouns.
Those of us who are not men or white have been and will continue to struggle to gain an even playing field while others write dissertations on the righteousness or their institutions and positions.
233
@Elaine Donovan
Amen and there is nothing more to say. We live in the world and we understand exactly how it is run and who is running it.
6
@Elaine Donovan Those of us who _are_ male and white hold the same truths as self-evident. We tend to be atheists....
5
@Elaine Donovan
Brilliant! Thank you.
2
Of course the religious right is privileged. They've passed laws to make themselves so.
Every single Religious Freedom Restoration [sic] Act (RFRA), at the federal level, and now at many state levels, has been passed in the last 25 years to give the devout a right, under certain circumstances, to violate generally applicable, religiously neutral laws---especially those prohibiting discrimination against protected classes---that the non-religious still have to obey.
The only difference between the two similarly situated groups is that one group, the devout, has a different set of ideas inside their heads.
The whole point of the first Amendment's various provisions is to keep the government out of any business of rewarding or punishing ideas and beliefs.
Jefferson is no doubt rolling in his grave.
RFRAs are divisive and invidious in the extreme, and ultimately unconstitutional.
They are theocracy lite.
6
I think, Ross, that you are confusing what 'white privilege' is or what it means. You assume privilege means economic privilege. Remember, there was a time when even the poorest white southerner was king compared to blacks down south, and in the north due to de facto segregation, whites would get jobs that blacks could not get. Too, you not surprisingly leave out the privilege that White Christians had, especially conservative ones, in that the government often reflect their beliefs over the rights of others, to have your beliefs ensconced as law is a privilege. So if you were heterosexual and white, you got the full benefits of marriage, whereas until a few years ago gays could not, and if you were black, your marriage often didn't come with the full rights of marriage, companies for example routinely denied marital benefits like health insurance to black married workers they would extent automatically to whites. The other thing to keep in mind that the biggest supporters of Jim Crow were the poor whites who also were evangelical Christians, using their faith to justify Jim Crow. One of the reasons that the white hoi polloi in the bible belt and elsewhere are fighting for religious freedom is not about freedom, they want to be able to apply a new version of Jim Crow, this time based on 'religious belief', whether it is the right not to treat an LGBT person based on their faith, to not allowing LGBT people access to public facilities.
4
I don't know where to start with all the false assumptions RD makes or how to list them.
1) The RCC is not solely a bastion of Conservatism. Many Catholics, have been invested in liberal concepts since WWII. I grew up a non-religious Jew in a town with myriad churches and lots of Catholics. The churches were heavily involved in civic "liberal" programs. My mom worked very closely with a nunnery to help underprivileged girls, and with all the churches to create low-cost LIVABLE housing. Yet many local Catholics were also reactionary, racist and anti-Semitic as well--I have the scars to show for it.
2) Many minorities were attracted to the American Communist Party in the 20's & 30's because it was the ONLY party openly stated its opposition to all forms of racism, especially Jim Crow laws. In that sense it was an extension of Liberalism.
3) Somehow, it's ignored that the South, and now the rightist evangelicals have been, and are still "anti-Papist". Their hatred of Catholics goes back well into the Ante-Bellum.
4) Liberalism isn't "court dictated". That's one of the basest canards RD. Most Liberal actions happened through legislation. Court decisions are only "activist" when we don't like them. As a Progressive, I see "Citizens United" as activist. Reactionary RD sees abortion that way. Your activist judge is my Constitutionalist.
5) The cited article's next to last sentence is so badly written it's impossible to parse. Evangelicals claim to be persecuted, a lie.
3
Let’s remember, 25% of Americans are Catholic. And as a previous writer noted, many on the Supreme Court are as well. So I am at a loss to understand how America now threatens those who practice this religion. And those who want bakers to treat all customers without regard to their sexual preferences and all employers to afford their employees the benefits of Obamacare, including access to contraception, are not attacking anyone’s religion.
6
Douthat's interpretation of history merely reinforces what he apparently already believes. Religion, at one time, stood astride the Western world with unmatched power. It could, and did, dispose of mere human lives at its whim. Not anymore, though, and it's slow destruction has been at its own hands, not those of a crafty and vicious liberal cabal. Both the Church and the church, Catholic and Protestant, are ripping themselves apart, and far fewer of us care than before.
6
Wow. You have to hand it to Douthat -- no one can serve up tortured logic with so straight a face. Where does one start? Of course conservative Christians feel aggrieved -- that's part of the brand. Even those at the bottom of the white food chain were taught that, how ever bad they had it, at least they were white and better than people who weren't. Nowadays, conservative ideology consists entirely of the conviction that the problems of the middle class originate not with those at the top, but by those brown people at the bottom. Swerer's point is proven by the faith of conservative Christians that, as the only Real Americans, they have every right to trash the Constitution and impose their political views on the majority by force. Douthat makes this point himself by trying to pretend that laws that violate conservative Catholic sensitivities somehow amount to oppressing the church. Today's evangelicals, by supporting a president who is the living repudiation of everything their faith teaches, no longer have the right to call themselves religious at all. They are merely a tribe, one dedicated to nothing other than the maintenance of white superiority.
8
It is not the case that the religious conservatives seek only to preserve their right to exercise their beliefs, but that they insist on imposing their beliefs on others.
Religion brings out both the best and the worst in people. Looking at world history, the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, the Inquisition, and the Irish Troubles all exemplify what can result from religious passions originating within the Christian community. And today we see religious conservatives on the rise worldwide, in Myanmar, Israel, and much of the Moslem world.
The principle of liberalism is simple - I can follow my own religion (or lack of religion) and you can follow yours. Anything else is theocracy. And, seeing the above examples, we know where that leads.
330
@John Graybeard
You wrote:
"The principle of liberalism is simple - I can follow my own religion (or lack of religion) and you can follow yours. Anything else is theocracy. And, seeing the above examples, we know where that leads."
True enough, but religious self-righteousness backed by political power must feel so good, so ... divine.
14
@John Graybeard: We sent gunboats up the Yangtze to protect Christian missionaries in China and advisors to protect Christian missionaries in Vietnam.
4
@John Graybeard:
And if my religion involves human sacrifice (like the cult practiced at Jonestown), are you OK with that?
3
Douthat may be correct that most US Catholics are not elites and that the policies of some Catholic institutions are under attack (although they are also supported by the President and the current Supreme Court), but he doesn't address the reactionary stance of the Catholic Church hierarchy in the 20th century detailed in A Twentieth Century Crusade: The Vatican's Battle to Remake Christian Europe (see the review below)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-endless-crusade
2
Ross, when you characterize harassing abortion patients, bombing abortion clinics, and murdering people, including George Tiller while he was at church constitutes "small-d democratic activism by pro-lifers" you've pretty much destroyed your own argument.
We'll see what happens in a couple of years, if, as the State Department's suggests, it redefines Human Rights to be determined by Roman Catholic orthodoxy.
4
Far from challenging Serwer, Douthat confirms that the religious right views liberal democracy as a threat to its power. What Douthat deems “institutionalized anti-Catholicism” – including the right to choose an abortion and other healthcare services, and to determine the structure of our families, without religious interference – doesn’t stop Catholics from practicing their faith. It merely prevents Catholics from forcing their faith on others. Douthat can’t see the difference.
5
Douthat spends most of his energy attacking Serwer for something he didn’t say. Serwer didn’t say religious groups were whining about loss of privilege. He said they weren’t reliable friends of liberalism and took their protection under it for granted.
That’s definitely true. Every time I hear support for public prayer — as the Supreme Court case in Buffalo a few years ago — I try to imagine the reaction it the prayer in question were to Allah. Somehow, I don’t know why, I suspect the Chief Justice would have decided differently had that been the case.
As for looking back more than 50 years, I ask Douthat: on which social advance has the Catholic Church been on the vanguard? Ever?
Oppressing rights and speaking power to truth, that they have down. For all the mistaken tears over abortion, though, where is the concern for the 50,000 full-fledge human beings who die every year at the callous hands of our so-called system? Where is the church on exclusionary zoning that drives up costs and degrades opportunity? Where on arms trading? On the rights of prisoners to vote?
Liberalism doesn’t define itself in opposition to Catholicism. It defines itself instead of Catholicism: different purpose, different virtue, different view of rights and obligations. And it, not the church, over the last few centuries has remade the arc of history bend toward justice.
5
Your point about the drastic breakdown and resurrection experience of the Civil War is a sound one. Your observations about the alternative agitation of the civil rights era are valuable although these were largely on the fringes. Your "institutionalized anti-Catholicism" is just off the rails. The Church is entitled to its definition of the sanctity of the human body, but so is the state. The state must include all of us and all of us get a say. That is not a mechanism of oppression unless you are convinced your own "Higher Good" just has to trump everybody else's. Sorry, no.
6
On one side--when you're used to being top of the heap, equality seems like oppression.
On the other side--this piece that doesn't really examine the psychological effects of the above.
8
Can I just point out that in many states in America, religious conservatives have succeeded in passing laws that force doctors to recite unscientific nonsense to patients seeking abortions, but at the same time have the gall to cry foul when the state wants to force the clergy to report sexual abuse of minors.
If religious conservatives want us to respect their consciences, they could try reciprocating.
445
@D.A.
And in Alabama women seeking an abortion must go through a second, and totally unnecessary vaginal exam. This harassment of doctors, who have to, in effect, commit a sexual assault on their patients, is perverse and despicable.
The religious and political right have the bit between their teeth and grow ever more obsessed and monomaniacal about punishing women and depriving women of their rights. They have and are overreaching in the extreme. They are due for a fall.
25
@D.A.
Its about time doctors and nurses either stand up or move out of those states. They are not medical professionals if they are hurting patients in the long run They are killing there patients and I don't want to hear how noble they are. Just like the Trump administration we stay to monitor the damage the con man is doing. It just doesn't cut it.
Religious right is just a bunch of white racist who wouldn't know Jesus if he was begging on the street in front of their holy churches of hate..
13
@D.A. I try as I might to respect the consciences of religious conservatives but I have found it virtually impossible to find that they have any. The religious right sold its soul to that incarnation of Satan in the Oval Office and their souls are now in his possession. Maybe that's why they remain so devoted to him in hopes of getting them back but con men never return what they have purloined.
22
In Georgia, we hear of Evangelicals who see the beneficial promise of the apocalypse in the global climate changes brought by human-caused air pollution. In Texas we hear of Evangelicals who believe with every fiber that God calls us to care for Creation. How can these people both identify as Evangelical ?
I think the author fails to include the institutional power of church leaders. If all politics is local, as the truism goes, the surely the same goes for religion. Evangelicals listen to their local pastors and act accordingly. This fact suggests that there is a difference in motivation between church leaders and followers. To wit, we see corruption rife within these institutions, untethered to those devout believers, and accountable to no higher purpose than self-aggrandizement.
We must think the best about people, but we must be suspicious of those who garner power. How does one distance oneself from a mendacious leader who is described as “Holy”? How would I do so without causing an internal demoralizing conflict? These are the questions of faith that cause the faithful to align themselves with political allies they think will follow the righteous path.
And then they get Trump.
5
I was really trying to do as Ross asks and to see from this perspective—because I'm really trying not to be a pitchfork-carrying tribalist who won't rest until every single person who disagrees with my tribe is burned at the stake.
However.
Remind me again of how many members of the US Supreme Court are Catholic?
And how does that go with the supposed control of liberalism over "the judiciary, the least democratic branch"?
It's impossible to conclude that Ross knows what he means or wants.
22
I’m a little confused – Douthat says that Serwer is stating “with particular force” that religious conservatism is “best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged”, who “don’t get to be the rulers anymore”. But Serwer doesn’t say that. He says “The American creed has…no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken [its promises] for granted”. It seems obvious to me that Serwer is saying that religious conservatives are continuing to do what they always have done and always will do: accept a home within a democracy that protects their religious rights, and then start trying to turn that democracy, more or less, into a theocracy.
30
The defensive argument that something is "complicated" is too often an excuse for not doing what is right when doing right is difficult. The defensive argument that something is "complicated" is a fig-leaf to power and a justification of power continuing to act in its own interests. The Religious Right in the United States (in all its capitalized and lower case iterations) has always been about political power. The fact that many adherents in various locations are not served by that political power does not, in any way, absolve the politically powered of their conduct and decisions. Quit using the poor, the ill-informed, the mis-led and the powerless individuals to justify a church's failure to do what is right for its adherents.
10
I am pro choice but like most people I have some problems with late term abortions--some of which I find indefensible. I am also anti death penalty but again like most people I think there are people who's crimes are beyond defending.
I am trying to take Mr Douhat opinions serious because I think he is trying to make a serious point but it is hard when he finds it ok to explain that the church opposes infanticide. Great, is there a point to there that is not meant to offensive.
Does he know anyone that isn't opposed to infanticide?
Does he believe that if someone thinks everyone has a right to control there own body they probably don't know infanticide is wrong.
Does he honestly think...
11
There is a bit of historical irony in Ross talking about conservative Catholics and the often anti Catholic bias Catholics have faced in this country. The more liberal Catholics, the ones who are like 70% of the total, who reject the orthodox party line, understand something Conservative Catholics refuse often to see. In the 1950's, a Catholic Brother wrote a brilliant analysis of the Catholic Church in the US, and he argued that the concept of separation of church and state that many conservative Christians deny was what allowed Catholics to flourish in the US..and for his pains the Vatican, that at the time still thought religion and state were one, silenced him. The point being that the very liberal notion of the separation of church and state allowed the Catholics to flourish, that by NOT granting 'religious liberty' to the dominant protestants, most of whom looked at Catholics as inferior or an evil, that Catholics were able to come here and flourish.Conservative Christians look at and bemoan the liberalization of the law, removing one moral law after another as civic law (Lawrence Decision, Same sex marriage, Griswold), yet don't see how it benefitted them and in fact gave them their place in this country.
9
Ross:
You are correct that the religious conservatives include a broad spectrum of our society. But that general observation ignores the fact that it is indeed the former big winners of American history who use religion as a sword to tear apart what that don't like and also deploy it as a shield to protect and preserve their archaic thinking and traditions. Two clear examples exist: the evangelical's embrace of Trump and the Catholic Church's blatant protection of pedophiles.
Religion is fine as a personal spiritual matter and a means of fellowship, but when it becomes political, it ruins more than it heals. The failure of religious conservatives to evolve in their thinking will continue to feed the conflicts you describe.
18
The dominant religion in the United States has always been some form of Christianity. Douthat is correct to point out that some Americans have been attacked for their religious beliefs but, in the end, religion, unlike ethnicity, or sexual orientation, is a choice.
The Bible was used to justify slavery and segregation in this country and now it is being used to justify discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. People should be free to choose in any religion, or none at all, but what should never be allowed is for those people to use that belief to discriminate against others.
22
Mr. Douthat seems to be contorting himself into all kinds of strange positions to try to justify the illiberal stances of fellow religious conservatives and protect them from criticism. Note that he doesn't deny that there are illiberal tendencies expressed among his fellow religious conservatives, although he claims not to share such views. He admits that racism and sex scandals have made the position of religious conservatives less palatable to the public at large. Along the way he somehow ignores the ongoing anti-gay stance of many religious conservatives, evidently not wanting to take a public position on that sticky issue or show too clearly the wild contortions he's executing to make his argument work. In the end, he simply wants to say that the illiberal tendencies exhibited by religious conservatives are understandable given the circumstances—namely, abortion. OK. But what he doesn't successfully explain is why he feels that people shouldn't be roundly criticized when they express illiberal views. The way the marketplace of ideas works is that bad ideas get swatted down by those who eloquently and convincingly explain why those ideas are bad. I think Mr. Douthat just feels sorry for his friends who are being criticized and wants to come to their defense—but without fouling his own nest in the process. As Julia Child would say, he lacks the courage of his convictions.
13
The central fallacy of Douthat's piece is the comparison between oppression based on race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation -- characteristics that are not inherently hostile to a liberal society -- and oppression based on religion -- which, as an irrational ideology stands in inherent tension to liberal values. One of the great blessings of a liberal society is its protecting the questioning of all beliefs. Ideologues or all shades, whether political or religious, tend to very much dislike this aspect of liberal societies and to view the questioning of their core beliefs as "oppression." In other words, the racial makeup of a society doesn't influence one way or another its inclination to accept liberal values. On the other hand, it's hard to find a theocracy that protects freedom of speech -- at least when it comes to the state religion.
15
I respect Mr. Douthat's efforts to state a case for conservative Catholicism at a time when making a case for religion seems increasingly under attack. But I do take issue with his claim that "liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today." What he does not acknowledge is that too often certain religious practices interfere with the fundamental freedoms of others, e.g., a woman's right to control her own body, a gay couple's right to start a family. We do not expect the government to force a Muslim woman to wear a burqa because Conservative Islam requires it. I would be the last person to deny the solace of religion or minimize the depth of individual religious convictions. But we have to accept that the exercise of religious rights sometimes interferes with the liberties of others. Where do we draw the line?
13
This is not terribly convincing. It amounts to saying that Serwer misjudges the religious right because he failed to see that it, too, earnestly believes itself to have been a persecuted minority and might possibly in the future become one as well. Sure. Dig deep enough and everyone's been dumped upon once or twice. Douthat also asks that we accept the explicit illiberalism being expressed these days on the right as a mere paroxysm, rather than, say, the forthright expression of something we can easily diagnose as having existed in American culture and politics for a long time. Ultimately, perhaps inevitably, Douthat ends up in that theological territory of abortion, where the religious doctrine imbues the fetus with the personhood, at which point all discussion is moot and all bets are off. If you see infanticide, yes, you will also go to extremes. To his credit, before Trump was elected, Douthat said he was not willing to throw his support for Trump just because he promised conservative judges that might challenge Roe v Wade because he saw the cost as too high, especially given the recent trend toward lower numbers of abortion, among other trends. But I will still never shake the feeling that Douthat would be happiest in a Taliban-type theocratic state, and if something like it were to come to pass during his lifetime in the US, I'm pretty sure he'd sit by and offer mild criticism of its extremes while also tsk-tsk'ing resisters for their uncouth and illiberal tactics.
9
The core argument is whether or not people with conservative religious beliefs are able to enforce those beliefs on the majority who do not share their religion. The areas that are getting the most attention from the press are abortion and gay rights.
Most Americans do not believe that a fetus is the same as a living person. No woman seeking an abortion believes that she is committing murder, but that is the view of conservative religions. Thus, the religious wish to enforce their view of the world through politics and law.
Conservative religions often believe that sexuality outside of a man-woman marriage is sinful and prohibited by God. Liberalism's equal accommodations strictures, originally meant to end racist appartitide, says that gays, lesbians, and others are entitled to service at businesses open to the public. The religious argue that God has told them that gays and lesbians are sinful and therefore discrimination against them is God's will. During the Civil Rights Era similar arguments were made against serving African-Americans in restaurants.
Douthat Trumpian argument is that liberals are targeting conservative Catholics, but it is the other way around. The conservative religious are targeting the beliefs and morals of the non-believers.
23
Contemporary liberals "at war with fundamentalists"? A few maybe. But for the most part liberals seek to preserve traditional freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. The sense of being embattled or under siege in spiritual matters is much stronger among fundamentalists in my experience. The only things liberals are "at war" with is the creeping violations of the Establishment clause of the constitution.
32
Douthat is playing defense here because the fact is that WHITE CHRISTIANS have been privileged- white protestants specifically. There has been persecution of other white religious denominations but since that persecution was by white protestants it is sort of irrelevant to the overall argument. It isn't all that complicated. America was founded as a country biased toward the white protestant normative view and white protestants have taken that for granted.
Now they are confronted with an existential threat. Previously disenfranchised minority groups- African-Americans, the gay community, non-Christian religious adherents, non-white immigrants and yes, since American Protestantism is a patriarchal institution- women (not a minority- just disenfranchised) are calling in the debt. It threatens what "made America great" i.e. white protestant dominance of power and the right to set the norms-and even the source of those norms.
A lot of words for Douthat to sneak in his real point- his belief that abortion is "murder". He can't seem to understand that others define "murder" as the killing of a sentient person. He isn't able to accept that some don't understand the "sin" of murder as having anything to do with a "soul" and everything to do with how much unnecessary suffering is inflicted on a conscious life.
18
@greg If Douthat is really That Religious, then does he think God would be so cruel as to allot a soul to a fetus if God knows will not be allowed to come to term?
I Personally do not think God so obnoxiously and needlessly cruel as to do such.
God gave us the ABILITY to be able to choose control over our own bodies. Sometimes a child too early in life would destroy the parents chances at advancement, sometimes the woman's health is in danger, sometimes the woman carries genes she does not want passed down and yet cannot afford the sterilization operation, sometimes the fetus is badly deformed. There are many reasons since Biology works randomly to a large degree, but when it comes to Souls, I do not think God to be so wickedly cruel as the right wing bible-thumping types make her out to be.
God herself has decided great changes were needed (See: Noah's Flood, Dinosaur Asteroid Impact, Species Extinction etc) and so sometimes stops whole lines of life.
The BIG thing is that is is a heart-string tug issue that the Politicians against will still get an abortion for their kid if it is from a 'Wrong Family' or Too Young, even if they have to go to a different state. We have SEEN this.
"Conservatives" want Govt out of their lives, yet they want to specifically intrude in the sexual and reproductive lives of others.
They should stick to their own knitting. If they do not want abortions then how about REAL Sex Education, prevention, removing the stigma around a medical issue.
1
Perhaps. But I grew up in a big D Democratic Catholic household in southern Indiana that found the loathsome Richard Nixon an affront to society and the obligation to extend an open hand to all in need. Since that time, the Catholic vote has led us to Ronald Reagan's assault on the middle class, a war in the middle east that has destabilized and will continue to destabilize the world for decades, and most recently the administration of Donald Trump. Ross seems completely unable to sort this out. Conservative Christians need to figure out who their friends are. The voting patterns of conservative Christians in the last 50 years seem to show that is still a work in progress.
27
Like Southerners before the Civil War, the only answer today’s Conservative Christians will accept is “do whatever you want to us.” Prior to 1860 the North tried numerous compromises to keep slavery contained in the hope that it would just eventually die out. With each compromise, the South saw an opportunity to expand slavery or at least enshrine it into American law.
Conservative Christians have used American laws and customs to accumulate power. It’s a deeply cynical ploy that the majority of Americans recognize but often feel conflicted about stopping because they actually do believe in the rights of all citizens. Trump and McConnell, Christian darlings both, are two egregious examples of right wingers grabbing the mile when offered an inch.
Today’s Conservative Christians aren’t whining because they’ve lost power. They’re whining because they can’t get more power over the lives of Americans who don’t wish to be under their yoke.
61
@M-"Conservative Christians have used American laws and customs to accumulate power. "-and so has everyone else. Should conservative Christians be the only ones not allowed to accumulate and exercise political power?
@M
AMEN!
@Dan
Given the First Amendment, yes, they should not be allowed to accumulate and exercise political power — not if it involves inflicting their religious beliefs on those who do not share them.
2
Evolve or perish.
The freedom of association (one of the best developments in human history) and the "liberal arc" of history mean that we do not have to follow the religious traditions of our ancestors if we choose. The fracturing and faltering of religious attendance may be the result and to address this, one would do what? Compel religious attendance? (No). Perhaps the Church needs to continue to evolve to cast a wider net? Ross is firmly against the latter. So old ideas die and new ideas are born.
I sat at a wedding two weeks ago where the priest mentioned the bride and groom were already living together. He was smart enough to realize that rather than refuse to marry them or shame them publicly, that he should celebrate their marriage choice and that they chose to do so in his institution with his blessing, rather than cast them out. That kind of thinking may lead to a few more children being christened and baptized if they choose to have children (gasp, they might be using birth control!). If instead he insisted on human perfection, they may have never returned to that church, or any... no chance to preach gospel if no one is there.
And as far as judicial activism, if a national referendum were held today on abortion, the status quo would likely prevail (the status quo that has been "undemocratically decided"). No heartbeat laws, or 6 week limits. So be careful what you wish for Ross, unless you are advocating for theocracy, which you seem wont to do.
28
@CB
A national referendum on abortion would also most likely prohibit late term abortions absent compelling reasons. A far cry from the Democrats stance today.
@John
Since the general public seems to want to insert its snout into medical decisions, it should 1) receive an explanation of the many medical emergencies that necessitate termination of a pregnancy after 20 weeks (mother's failing heart, septic infection after miscarriage, etc.)
Then we have the issue that most fetal defects can't be detected before the 20 week limit. Some of these include danger to the mother and would therefore all within group 1 above.
Other fetal defects could potentially result in a full term birth but the child would be very seriously handicapped. I'll call this 'group 2'. Defects due to Zika are one example.
If abortions after 20 weeks for this second group are banned, unintended consequences may result. The first that comes to mind is an even lower birth rate especially among the well educated. Who would want to undertake this huge risk?
1
Ross,
On the individual level-across America, the fight IS between the have and have nots. Religious privelege and expectation is part of it. From early life opportunity or lack of opportunity due to birth, nurtured in a cultural soil of neighborhoods, faith, connections, and proximity to the success of their own group, America is a place of dreams and nightmares. For most Americans, the mechanisms of the American Dream worked well until the last 50 years. The two versions of the American Nightmare is a study of extremes. The first is one of lifelong struggle, discrimination, and often failure. The second is exteme consumption, excess, and detachment from reality. Religion is a useful tool and weapon in our American Nightmares, but no longer working to control the American Dream of most Americans. Are you right that much time has passed since our last extra-constitutional fight occurred? Not as extreme as the Civil War, but what of the Great Depression and the Roosevelt Era, Vietnam and our society, the 1960's successes and failures? In these fights, those who were winning, raged about their losses to bigger government caring for the common man, the rise of a counter culture, and recognition that all races in America are worthy of equality. You wrote about "the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure...can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression", IS really an accurate description.
5
Mr. Douthat, I read your "opinions" because they are often metaphysical in nature and challenging to wade through. That said, it seems to me once the marriage of religion and politics is boiled down, the decline in our Nation's politics is a story almost as old as humankind — the struggle for control of a people using religion and fear of some unseeable god to acquire power and wealth.
Bringing my comments back to the focus of your opinion, the decline in our Nation's politics appears to be correlated with the rise in power of crazy Christians and Jews seeking special treatment for Israel. Let me be clear, most Christian and Jews do not fall into the crazy category; most practice the core principles of their religions and add to our nation's values and rich diversity.
The tangle of liberalism results from the failed implementation, not the words of the our Constitution; this failure is the result of people seeking to protect or advance their interests using the tenets of religion and the human condition that seeks to separate "us" from "them".
22
I respect Ross Douthat, but I find his critics much more compelling on this issue, historically and morally. I would like Ross in a follow-up column to engage with his critics -- for instance the observations that white evangelicals in the South had a superior position (even if they were ridiculed by intellectuals) and that poor whites in the South, though oppressed economically, were even more desperate to assert their superiority over blacks. I find it fascinating that two religious-national groups that had true grievances, the Irish Catholics in Ireland and the French Catholics in Quebec, have for the most part renounced clerical autocratic guidance in favor of a secular liberalism.
30
@Historian
Thank you,
Here in Quebec we are in the midst of a quiet revolution but I am afraid that secular liberalism you extol is rapidly becoming a secular conservatism. We are militantly secular our secularism is anything but liberal. We are conservative in the extreme and deviation from accepted truth is heresy.
Despite an extensive report on religious accommodation written by two leading public intellectuals, politically we have little if any tolerance for those who choose to believe that religion is anything but ignorant superstition. We are as zealous in our secular humanism as any "conservative" evangelical.
We believe in abortion rights, equal rights, LGBT rights, and we go as far as not believing in marriage as anything but a civil contract. We will not countenance a god in our civic discourse and we are as adamant in our beliefs as any Southern Yahoo.
We don't believe in religion or god and we believe that is the way it should be and should always be. We are CONSERVATIVE to the extreme. It is just our conservatism is post the Age of Reason not in a pre-American Revolution past.
3
Why complicate a simple issue with all this Douthat babble. Our constitution separates church and state and gives us the liberty to be religious or not. Therefore, those who want to practice the teachings of their religion, be it Catholic, Baptist, evangelical, Protestant, Methodist, Unitarian, Jewish, Muslim, Mayan or Animist, are welcome to do so. Those who don't also have every right not to. And none of us have the right to force our views or beliefs on others, neither by law, government decree or supreme court rulings. Among other things, that means women should be allowed to do with their bodies whatever they wish without interference from church or state.
68
Again Ross fixates on his personal feelings of injustice and expounds upon them but in his whining we can glean the deeper problem.
At this moment it is painfully obvious that there are two forces which are at its core and substance undemocratic because it places the individual above all. These are greed and a sense of righteousness. Ross is obviously in the throes of righteousness, backed by his conservative Catholicism, feeling noble in his belief that women should be forced to have a child they do not want, among other things. Such is the hard and lonely path of the righteous bearing the cross, persecuted and demeaned, though he personally doesn't suffer for actions others take in their lives. But Ross' God suffers and so he must fight to protect his God as if a Supreme Being would need Ross to fight His battles.
Today the righteous and the greedy work in unison, unifying the disaffected religious conservatives to support and vote for what the righteous and greedy believe in which satifies their need to feel superior. It doesn't matter that these policies harm the majority or that the majority doesn't want these policies or that these policies violate the Constitution or the very basis of democracy, the greedy and righteous are getting what they want.
You can fabricate all sorts of elaborate scenarios which explain the end of liberal order but it is nothing more than the few taking advantage of the many in order to maintain their personal sense of the world.
35
@Lucas Lynch According to some God will always be on the side of the rich and powerful AS IF they ever needed an invisible being to do their bidding for them. After all, in order to be rich and powerful they must be smarter than everyone else even if their wealth and power was derived from criminal behavior in the first place. I guess it's suggesting somehow that God will always be on the side of crime, theft and greed above all else. God certainly seems to be missing out on the rights of the poor and dispossessed.
3
Mr Douthat, it is not that people like me seek "to impose the current doctrines of Episcopalians on the Baptists and the Papists."
Rather, see how you framed abortion: "liberalism has imposed via the judiciary, the least democratic branch, a constitutional right to abortion, a form of lethal violence that the church opposes for the same reasons it opposes infanticide."
What the Catholic Church and other religious institutions opposed to abortion seek is to impose upon the rest of us their religious beliefs about when the soul enters the body. You and they seem to firmly believe that a soul enters a single cell at fertilization and thus forms a human being with unalienable rights. But that belief is an article of religious faith about which many others disagree. The Founding Fathers saw the civil discord that comes from using the State to empower a particular theology and drew a Constitutional line accordingly.
No, Mr Douthat, what we are trying to do is to prevent Catholics, Baptists, and others from imposing their religious beliefs on the rest of us.
293
@EdM Thank you for this eloquent expression of the position of many.
55
@EdM I would argue that the view that the soul enters the body at fertilization is untenable, for two reasons. First, Christians never used to believe that: what new knowledge caused them to change their opinion? Secondly, a significant plurality of fertilized eggs either fail to implant of spontaneously abort, which would make God the world's biggest abortionist.
Furthermore, I am mystified by how certain Christians cherry-pick which sins they wish to make illegal, and which they do not. I mean, there are specific commandments against adultery and lying, but not abortion.
49
@EdM It is true that several religious denominations are against abortion , but it is wrong to imply that the only opposition to abortion is religious. The Hippocratic oath - five hundred years before Christ - forbade doctors to teach women how to abort. And it is not just a cell we are talking about, but a fully formed miniature human being who feels pain. Forget about the medioeval discussions about souls and look at the ultrasound of a 3 month old fetus
2
I am white, female, southern and born Catholic. I remember the Catholic faith of the 1950s, before Pope John XXIII pried open the medieval gates of the Vatican and for a few short years the winds of Jesus' teachings tried to sweep out centuries of false pride. Then the gates were nailed shut and a quiet purge was begun.
This is what religious conservatism is to me. The complete denial of rights to any who even question the superiority of white, male and Christian.
Christian hatred of Jews stewed in Europe for centuries until it climaxed in the Holocaust. Christian hatred of Muslims started with the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and has yet found no end. Christian hatred of "heathens" has resulted in enslavement and annihilation of Africans, Native Americans, Polynesians, Aborigines and countless other native groups.
Mr. Douthat has the right to any religious belief he wishes to hold. But he has no right to impose that belief on any other person. And that seems to be what conservative Christians will not accept.
179
@Maureen Steffek
You have cited the history that Mr. Douthat and the religious right conveniently ignore. Your two paragraphs provide an eloquent statement of why the separation of church and state is explicit and therefore must be enforced and protected.
21
@Maureen Steffek
Sounds like you were alive in 1650 not 1950.
@Pat
To the Pope and his minions, it is the very bloody same.
1
This is an interesting essay, but Douthat dances around the issue Serwer brings up. Douthat mentions Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and Catholics, but he barely discusses white evangelical Protestants, which is who Serwer was talking about. When Douthat does actually mention them, he seems to agree with Serwer: "some of the stances religious conservatives take in their struggle with secular liberalism are clearly influenced for the worse by the racism that has pervaded every white religious tradition in America."
So he seems not so much to disagree with Serwer on that point.
8
There is no doubt that progressive politics have been polluted by anti-Trumpism to the point where it labels all opposition to progressive politics as being guilty by association with all the bad aspects of Trumpism. There is also frustration in my middle of the road situation with the anti-abortion movements desire to ignore the nuances that differentiate every woman's decision as to whether to have a child or an abortion: rape, incest, a terrible choice in a fit of passion while having poor income prospects, personal medical issues, unfortunate genealogy in the fetus. One can certainly debate the merits of each, but failure to show compassion for the pro-choice view by the pro-life side is one reason the pro-life side gets no respect by the pro-choice side.
30
@Tom White The Religious Right thought they were triumphant in their victory over the heathen left and would reign forever. Remember Christian Dominionism? That was going to usher in 1,000 years of Jesus Law, enforceable by death, or some such nonsense. Now, not so much, so Douthat is squirming and bleating that we should be "nicer" to them and show them "respect". How about they get all the respect they deserve.
2
The problem with Ross Douthat and conservative catholics is that they believe ignorant and harmful things. Some of the best examples include the ongoing horrible treatment of the LGBT+ community by the catholic church, or of the catholic church's continued efforts to prevent communities from accessing much needed birth control or contraceptives. I think it is indeed a positive thing that the catholic church has been losing members and power as more and more sexual abuse cases and their cover-ups become uncovered. And if the future includes fewer catholic schools attempting to harm or brainwash children, then I am all for that future.
41
"In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy."
Well, the terms "religious right" and "social hierarchy" are both so vague that this sentence cannot be judged either wrong or right.
But I will say that right-wing churches are tax exempt, in contrast to left-wing secular organizations. So in this hierarchy, the right wing comes out on top.
36
I personally could care less what any religious order chooses to believe. in fact, as a liberal minded American believing in free choice, I prefer that each of us does choose for themself to believe what they choose. however, when ANY group acts to impose their beliefs on any others, that is an act of authoritarianism that has no place in our American way of life. go ahead and believe what ever unverified, un factual, sentimental idea you want, but you can't insist I or anyone else go along with it. THAT individual choice is why we fought the revolutionary war and is exactly what the founders intended to protect.
49
I believe the distrustful sentiment about white men raging against losing privilege is not just about having occupied the halls of power but also that even when poor being white conferred advantages that are feared lost. I'm not promoting or opposing that idea, just suggesting that the point is missing in this article.
20
@Brendan McCarthy Exactly. It's about recognizing the privilege the color of their skin has afforded them, a guarantee under Jim Crow that even the poorest white would always be above a black man in the social hierarchy, and fear of said privilege being taken away. It has nothing to do with obvious money and power...just a guarantee that they are not at the bottom of the social order. They will do everything they can to hold onto that. That is what the religious right and Trump are giving them, so yeah, he could shoot someone on 5th Ave. and they would still support him because they are so afraid of the multi-racial, multi-culturalism that is becoming the new American landscape. Let's also not forget that women, through all religions, have historically been no more than their fathers or husbands property and through the pro-birth movement they are still trying to control us any way they can. Women have been inducing miscarriages since the beginning of time, putting their own lives on the line at times, attempting to control their choice as to whether to bring a child into the world. These religious right, of any orthodoxy, have never like that and will fight to the end against a woman's ownership of her life and her body.
2
The problem with evangelicals is that is that they have gone beyond religious beliefs and have become a political party. Catholicism had that role in Europe for many centuries. The founders of this country tried to move beyond religious government. Evangelicals are doing their best to overturn those constitutional safeguards.
76
What is the difference between a religion and a philosophy?
One difference is that a religion postulates an omnipotent omnipresent god or gods who are infallible.
Another is that a religion requires faith, belief that may or may not be supported by facts or logic and, indeed, may contradict facts or logic.
Finally many religion require their adherents to proselytize, to persuade others that their beliefs are the ONLY correct ones.
These differences make a group like religious conservatives in the US different than the other groups mentioned in Serwer's paragraph.
And they have acted differently and should not be surprised they are treated differently by others.
"Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."
11
Mr. Douthat is right that religious conservatism isn't "best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged, the longtime white-male-Christian winners of our history." It's best understood, I think, as a clinging to prejudices about race, gender, and homosexuality, all defended as religious principles. Abortion, an aspect of gender prejudice, is the most morally complicated issue, perhaps; but the religious right, as evidenced by recent state legislation, views a pregnant woman as a mere biological vessel whose circumstances and feelings are of no significance. The moral harm of this Mr. Douthat does not acknowledge. The culture doesn't lose when prejudices are overcome; quite the opposite. And arguably, the overcoming is in line with the deepest Christian themes of love and compassion. Also, none my liberal acquaintances have ever mentioned any sort of "occultism," and my impression is that they are as ignorant of it as I am. In a discussion of conservatism vs progressivism, this is a straw man.
26
As someone old enough to be the columnist's father, and both a Catholic and a Republican (until recently) I suggest that the writer knows little about how abortion became a means for cynical Republicans to create an issue that heretofore was not an issue at all. And yes, the Catholic Church was always against abortion, but it was also against birth control. But had Republicans not used exaggerated claims about abortion to draw in folks from rural areas, the issue of abortion would have been just something folks disagreed about (similar to how folks disagree about capital punishment and war).
By focusing on abortion, the Republican Party created a single issue and a party base of rural backward people. And by the way, it is the norm in most civilizations for the cities to move forward and for the countryside to remain behind.
All things considered, it term of political power, the rural right (with its religion included) are privileged. They have power far beyond their numbers. Yes, they remain poorer, less educated, and befuddled by the way things have changed. Too bad for them and too bad for all of us.
56
Mormons were harried westward because they were state agitators seeking to form an independent religious state. They were, and sometimes still are, Zionists. That doesn't go over very well in a liberal democracy. The governmental intervention was a direct response to these territorial ambitions. Not to mention the polygamy.
Mormons explicitly lobbied for an autonomous nation built in the mold of Texas. Larger though. Basically the entire inter-mountain west and parts of California. The US Army was required to intervene. That is what's known as the State of Deseret. Hence the local conservative news paper, the Deseret News which still exists today.
What is largely viewed in history as persecution was in many ways self-preservation. Mormons weren't persecuted so much as chased out. They did plenty of their own chasing too after securing a place in the Utah territory. And anyway, it's not like Mormons were getting fed to lions or packed into gas chambers. Let's keep things in perspective.
26
Of course the religious right is privileged, with Catholicism at the forefront. Five of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic and a sixth, Gorsuch, was raised Catholic before joining the Episcopal Church.
Despite billions of dollars of holdings and millions in income, churches pay no taxes. The amassing of extraordinary wealth permits these religious organizations to fund ever-increasing influence and has led them to the clamoring edge of the Johnson Amendment which prohibits them from endorsing or opposing political candidates - prohibitions they are ignoring while demanding their tax-exemptions.
Religion in general, and the conservative ones in particular, have almost uniformly oppressed women while relying on them to spread and support religious culture. Strictures on female behavior are antithetical to an egalitarian society yet they have been ruthlessly enforced even as male transgressions are ignored. The sexual predators and their enablers in the Catholic and Southern Baptist churches are wriggling to escape a requirement that their crimes be subject to civil law even as they refuse to accept women on boards creating policies or reviewing offenses.
Religious conservatives regard a world that does not accept their rules as "corrupt", while adamantly denying their own internal corruption, prejudice and privilege. They demand exemption from civil law yet seek to twist it to protect their own status and belief system.
82
Beware the author who asks for a historic relativism. A coherent and reasonable argument to a point, but, why do we insist on retaining privilege of the shared benefits of a shared political culture and tax basis and insist on separate but more than equal basis for our belief systems?
The tax exemption and the right to discriminate based on an employees legal personal pursuits, lifestyle, Facebook postings?The loud and proud declarations that divine right exists to purge the unclean is an anathema to a Jeffersonian model.
7
I think Ross Douthat has some good points to make on the history of anti-Catholicism in the US. But it is simply not true that evangelicals were marginalized in the South. I grew up there. If you were a white person who wasn't a member of the local Southern Baptist church, or a few other "approved" conservative denominations, you were seen with suspicious. In small and medium towns in the South, white power was completely intertwined with the conservative Protestant churches. Membership in one of them was (and in many towns still is) a requirement if you want to be a business or local political leader.
38
@Kevin In the 19th century, the Southern Baptist church split from the northern Baptists over slavery. They were completely part of the power structure of the slave holding South. And by 1875 they had over a million members. Yes, there were poor and marginalized Southern Baptists back then but there were also plenty of wealthy and powerful Southern Baptists. This was not a persecuted church.
3
@csgirl
Plain & simple fact, beyond contestation. It was (& in many areas still is) an absolutely de rigueur "block-check" for being a co-equal on the playing field.
1
Hard to see principles as a woman when the religious want to impose their views on me by law. Even harder to see as valid when the hypocrisy is so blatant. One example: a pro-life legislator was unconcerned about fertilized embryos in a clinic.....why? Because they are not in a woman. (Then he would have to figure out how to raise those embryos w/o the satisfaction of forcing a woman to?)
If life begins at conception he is stating that that particular “life” is not valuable if unaccompanied by a controlled woman. Further, if life is sacred, the lack of support for women caring for children wanted or unwanted in the US is appalling. The same groups that wish to force women into untenable decisions out of an unexpressed desire to punish them (for a severely handicapped fetus? for a rational judgement that they cannot care for another child without hurting their present children? for a birth control failure? for being raped?). If all life is sacred an equally valid path would be to go after the men who are equally responsible for every conception.....but then it is men making the decisions and that cuts too close to home for them.
53
Just to clear a few things up :
1. There is SUPPOSED to be clear separation of church and state, but the state is still entangled with the church in a myriad of ways - namely the tax exemption of religious entities that are subsidized by all, regardless if they are vehemently opposed.
2. Secularism is not born or expressed specifically on any point of the political spectrum. It is just a belief separate from believing in a specific higher power. This does not conflict with anyone having any religious belief within themselves.
3. If you are subjugated, discriminated against, or out and out threatened (especially to your liberty or freedom), then you are going to try doubly hard to preserve the rights to not only yourself, but to all.
I am fascinated how some are continuing to try and box in people according to their political beliefs, their religious beliefs (or if they have none), or just who they are.
The greatest country on earth was created with one of the greatest documents in the history of humans. It not only allowed anyone to worship to whomever they wished (again, or not), but allowed people to be whatever they wished in the process.
Not only did this document and core set of principles lay down a blueprint for freedom, but it allowed itself to change, grow and function at a higher level than was even intended. The people could come back and change what needed to be, while more and more adhering to anyone's rights.
There is no need to box all of that in.
22
@FunkyIrishman What secularism does do is take off the table the ability to use religious belief to justify any desired or opposed practice.
1
If secular liberals (classical or otherwise) had a true “sense of Catholicism’s history,” there would be MORE alarm and unease with the influence conservative Christian groups wield.
The haphazard and short lived persecutions of the Roman Empire notwithstanding, Catholicism has spent most of it’s history violently enforcing dogma, and brutalizing those who stand in its way.
I hold no ill will towards contemporary Catholics (I love my family!), they are not responsible for the church’s many misdeeds of the past.
What I DO find disconcerting is the readiness of Religious conservatives to pass legislation that limits the freedom of others based solely on faith.
I think secular liberals would be eager to listen and engage with them on their ideas concerning abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, and more IF they were willing to further their arguments on the basis of facts and evidence.
Unfortunately, they rarely do. And as secular opponents not share their faith, both sides end up talking past each other.
A recipe for a thriving and free pluralistic democracy that is not.
16
Perhaps we can only truly know our own bogeyman. For myself, it is the authoritarian figure currently best embodied by the Gilead regime of Margaret Attwood - the ones who appear to think that they have the absolute right to impose their views on society and an inherent right to power. [Maybe I should have used 'Right' just to emphasise the point] In my view, the bogeyman of my bogeyman (if you like) is 'everybody who is not of my class (in all senses of the word)'. And therein lies the rub - how can I truly know what any individual is thinking, let alone what are the collective fears of an ephemeral population? In the end, I wonder if the current focus on a 'white evangelical christian' bogeyman does not need to be an historically correct reality, but represents simply a growing number of people worrying that the political pendulum has drifted too far from the centre. That a reactionary politcal mass is developing to fight this bogeyman. But maybe that is just wishful thinking!
4
Organized religions without exception stumble into stony territory whenever they venture into earthly politics, which cannot help them maintain ideals, but almost certainly leads to corruption. That's why Jesus tried to separate them when he said give to Caesar what is Caeser's, and give to God what is God's. Buddha concurred by letting us know that there are right occupations that can lead to Nirvana, but seeking power, wealth or fame for its own sake would not get one to Nirvana. I think the evangelical right is afraid, and they are attempting to rig politics, so without consensus or a majority, they might still retain some power and dominance. Their time as moral leaders is over and they feel it, but are willing to fight just as the Southern planters were willing to fight, hoping their time was not over. Such perverse obstinance leads to civil wars. Let us pray this does not happen.
12
I do embrace your description, I think, or am trying to, so thanks for the insight. TBH, I’ve never understood how Catholics can stay Catholic, and maybe I’ve never understood American illiberalism either on the same grounds. I don’t mean that derogatorily at all. I mean that I’ve never seen the appeal of inflexibility simply because it is tradition
Full disclosure, both my parents are Episcopalian priests. My mother, especially, delights in facilitating same-sex weddings, so much so that she’s had stern talkings-to, and institutional limitations enforced, by illiberal forces in the Episcopalian hierarchy (forces who may secretly wish they were Catholic?) So, I get it when Ross describes WASPish sentiments, those irreverent Episcopalians who allow (steal?) all that Catholic tradition without adhering to the...inflexibility. So I’m primed to not get it, though. I get that, at least. Still, I don’t get it, never have. Social inflexibility to me just looks like authoritarianism. The closest I’ve come to understanding Catholic adherence was when a friend said they were loath to leave because they understood it to be the only true Christianity, the faith that has kept the faith, if you will. Nice idea, if historically dubious.
6
@Aaron. I don't think the Catholic Church is any less dogmatic than the Episcopal Church is. The dogma in the U.S. Episcopal church just dovetails with certain strains of the urban liberal ethos more easily.
Catholics stay Catholic because it brings comfort and peace. I have a nickname for us, "secular" Catholics. I stole it from the "secular" Jews; the Jewish people who are so by their DNA and not by belief. Obviously being Catholic has nothing to do with heredity in the physical sense. Some of the staunchest Catholics I know are converts. But for so many of us, it is absolutely our heritage. Our families have been in this country from the beginning, defending their Catholicism. Our communities are built on the milestones: baptism, first communion, confirmation. We sit in our pews each week, ( or when it's convenient, not really worried about skipping mass) sharing a moment with our friends and family, thinking in our heads that really, all the lay people do the work anyway so why can't women be priest and/or priest marry? Glad I'm using birth control. The Church needs to pay for protecting pedophiles.
Obviously this isn't all Catholics but it is a sizable portion. They want to raise their children in their traditions and make sure they have this community with basic tenets and rituals to help them navigate life. Most all of them have somewhere they don't necessarily believe, live, or follow the teachings of the church but they don't have the time or energy to challenge. They're also pretty comfortable with their morality in most aspects that they're not too worried about their eternal soul. Just my opinion, anyway.
1
@Aaron Part is cultural. My Irish ancestors were starved, killed and tortured by English Anglicans (Episcopalian priests and their "woke" followers) for centuries. Giddy celebrations of same-sex weddings nonwithstanding, centuries of bloody oppression don't wash off hands so quickly.
Worldwide orthodox Christians (mostly Catholic, Coptic or Orthodox) are persecuted and killed at a startling rate, far beyond that of any other religions. The stunning lack of sympathy for these people is a hallmark of the modern left.
This may explain why some Catholics cling to their "inflexible" faith.
Interesting that Ross Douthat writes about American anticlericalism and says nothing about the use of restrictive immigration as a tool to enforce it. Other than perhaps the Chinese, ethnic Catholics were the main focus of such early 20th Century laws. The prejudice expressed then against Italians, Irish and other ethnic groups is reinforced by Trump policies today against Mexicans and Central Americans.
8
This country was founded by men of faith, but today, I see society lacking in faith. Perhaps it is because there is so much money, people feel they no longer need God with the fall back position, "If there is a God, He is all merciful so we will still be OK." What everyone forgets is the other part: "He is all just." Think about the ramifications of that sentence as you live your, "whatever I wish to do" life.
2
@Mark - Most of the founders were Deists who believed, essentially, in "Nature's god," an entity that set the world into motion but bowed out after that. They were highly suspicious of and opposed to insertion of religion into politics.
6
We come back to the same place and argument based on perspective. The religious right thinks it has a victim card to play. Those of us, both religious (main stream protestant) and non religious, have the view that the religious right has worked incessantly to put their particular moral viewpoint into secular law and that is the source of the problem.
18
I see the primary objective of religion to be the compulsion of others. It is merely another (and perhaps it was the first) political structure to provide one group with leverage over the actions of others. In my perfect world, people could organize to worship whatever they like, but they would not try to impose those beliefs on me or anyone else. I do believe this was the intent of the founding fathers. At this point, I would much prefer a well educated society to a religious one. Religious movements are easily swayed by demagogues with financial/political motivations and lame arguments.
23
A lot depends on whether religion is how you govern yourself versus how you govern others. The latter is world history.
The founders knew all about state control of religion, thus making sure in this nation the state could not control individual exercise of faith. Once we weaken that, allow the state to define what religion (or not) you can practice that way history's tyranny lies.
Hard to understand why religious conservatives struggle to understand that using the state to require others to follow their beliefs will INEVITABLY lead to the state requiring them to follow others' beliefs.
15
Oppression knows no discrimination.
Power can still be oppressively wielded by those who only have partial ability to do so, whose scope is limited by political access or sheer numbers, and who themselves often have been oppressed. And there is an unfortunate tendency that whenever that scope expands, the newly empowered group recycles all the worst practices of their historical oppressors--think Israel, or the People's Republic, or Shi'a/Sunni.
Given our overwhelmingly tribal tendencies, it's a wonder that any group resists the urge, when their power expands, to whack down their former oppressors, and anyone else that seems "different", twice as hard as they were whacked. This doesn't happen often--Ross mentions a few examples, and South Africa comes to mind as another, though even these examples are imperfect and far from pure.
In this sense religions are just another tribal group cycling through being oppressed and then having the ability to oppress. At some places and times the Christian right will have the power to oppress; at others it will be the object of oppression (it's not doing very well in most places in Asia right now). But this has much less to do with any philosophical stance that Ross, or Adam Serwer, might choose to argue, and a lot more with the relative success various groups have at gaming their political systems, or at the least, overpopulating them in relative terms.
8
Mr. Douthat,
It amazes me that you cannot see the fingerprints of free market capitalism in any of the issues you discuss. A strong positive effect of this system (in my opinion) is that it benefits from inclusion of all genders (and gender identities), races and creeds to participate as workers and consumers. Not so with the antebellum southern economic system. And it thrives on scientific progress, not superstition. Technology, technology, technology. Consider that the ontogeny of development from zygote to embryo to fetus to infant revealed by science may be what is shaking the foundations of your religious belief in the placement of an undetectable soul in the zygote. And that the capitalist market system's dynamic to favor the scientific evidence as well as inclusion of women in the workforce is the true source of conflict with your beliefs about allowing restricted termination of pregnancies.
Just watch a few TV commercials and you will see individualism, entitlement and immediate gratification exalted repeatedly. You might say this is liberalism but its source and origin is actually free market capitalism.
Can you not see it?
I am not at all claiming that the capitalist free market system is ideal. No, it must be governed, regulated to avoid its excesses and perverse tendencies, as well. But its influence is pervasive. Surely you see that?
8
“Legally, elite liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today.”
Regarding adoption agencies, I’m assuming you mean denying them the ability to discriminate against lesbian and gay couples because of Catholic teaching.
So you’d be fine with Protestant adoption agencies denying services to Catholics? Or businesses refusing to bake a cake or supply flowers to a Catholic wedding? Or rent an apartment to them? After all, a person can change their religion but not their sexual orientation.
63
I like the idea that the Catholic Church is the center from which we must measure all rebellions, the door to nail my thesis. Those days are history.
Perhaps the paragraph needs context, but the sentiment it expresses is simply that people who struggle to join a group may appreciate and defend that group more strongly than those who were members by default (especially when the group’s definition is its ideology). A clear point rendered opaque in an excursion into Mr Douthat’s frenetic brain.
6
This might be the most personally revealing column Mr. Douthat has ever written, and maybe the most disturbing. Whether he admits to it, or not, it's a justification for using state power to impose his personal moral and cultural values, wrapped in a claim of victimization.
And, on a side note, I would never have gone down the Civil War rabbit hole the way he did. Read those paragraphs carefully, "a breakdown of the constitutional order and then a civil war in which a cautious campaign to save the union became a providentialist war to crush the South" and you can hear echos of "I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” —Jefferson Davis, July 1864 "
97
Almost none of the labels presented in this article are relevant.
I tried mightily to get through this article, for I loved a recent podcast by Ross, but after three tries I gave up the attempt.
No, it isn't anywhere as complicated as Ross presents.
We are enmeshed in competing power circles, men who just love money and power and use religion as a tribal talisman, belong or else.
To be inside conservative Catholicism is to be inside the Whale, and from the outside one does have to wonder why those inside are so devoted to being deceived and tossed about.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
29
In this essay, Douthat conflates two very different groups: conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals. There are places where the beliefs of the two groups overlap, especially on issues of family, marriage, reproductive choice, and sexuality. But Catholicism is a religion of collectivism, often in a good way, and evangelical Protestantism is a religion of individualism, often in the worst way. For all its faults, Catholicism does centre its belief system on Christian charity—believing that salvation comes from good works, from putting others before yourself, from giving and sacrificing for the benefit of others. Redemption in Catholicism comes not merely from repentance but from the good works that follow repentance. And Catholicism does not divide people between sinners and the saved. We are all both and our salvation is in our works.
Evangelical Protestantism, on the other hand, revolves not around works, but around individual acceptance of Christ. Increasingly evangelism preaches the prosperity gospel. By accepting Christ, by being born again, the individual will be granted prosperity. The lack of prosperity is therefore a sign of sinfulness. The division between sinner and saved is absolute, and sinners are to be condemned unless and until they accept Christ and become saved. While evangelicals give lip service to charity, what they mostly do is evangelize, as the individual's acceptance of Christ is far more important than the individual's good works.
47
I totally agree with your description of the two faiths. Every evangelical church I've ever been in (due to a "born again" mother) preached endlessly about the futility of good works and that the only path to salvation was accepting Christ. The only works they endorse are sending missionaries to scare 3rd world "heathens" into converting.
Evangelicals today care more about gaining political power than about what Jesus teaches. Why else would they support an immoral, lying demagogue as president, as far from Jesus as anyone who's ever been in that office. TV preachers like Graham and the rest visibly rub their hands in glee every time they get to meet Trump and get close to power.
And their cries (and lawsuits) about religious freedom only mean the freedom to discriminate against others. After all, it wasn't until 1996 that the Southern Baptist Convention admitted it had sinned against God with its long-standing support for black slavery and Jim Crow. It's no wonder so many of their members still believe that blacks are inferior to whites. Not to mention their hatred of anything that allows gays to be treated as fully human.
This stink of corruption at the heart of evangelical ideology is what's turning so many people, both young and old, against organized religion. Until they clean up their own houses, I don't want them in mine.
12
@617to416
White Catholics and white evangelicals are basically alike these days. They both strongly supported trump (62% and 80% respectively).
Also, Catholic voters are not a monolithic group: 70% of Latinos/non-white Catholics voted for Hillary.
1
Clearly this is your Catholic perspective on what Evangelical Protestantism is. You have pointed out the positive aspects of Catholics, but failed to recognize that those positive aspects apply to all Christians. Critical thinking would recognize the negatives of both as well.
1
Conservative Catholics & Appalachian snake-handlers have nothing in common but their exploitation by Republican politicians. When the GOP walked over the ideological cliff in the 60’s/70’s, they found that turning government over to financial & corporate interests could make you rich, but it couldn’t get you votes. And so they began reversing positions on monetarily unimportant “hot button” issues to cobble together a coalition: Civil Rights, Abortion, Gun Control, etc. Pandering & pouring money into those issues grew & solidified them. No one notices or cares that GOP “values” contradict the party’s everything-for-sale / pro-corruption platform. They’re like tobacco salesman marketing cigarettes for their health benefits. Or swamp creatures offering to drain the swamp.
Converting the economic frustration caused by right-wing economics into cultural anger (anti-immigration, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-“liberal”) is now the basis of both party’s support. As Democrats sold out to the neoliberal corruption of government for sale, they also became dependent on GOP cultural extremism, substituting identity politics for economic justice. But as economic & political inequality worsen, the anger has to be ratcheted up on both sides, which gives us Elmer Gantry figures like Trump & Cruz to worship or despise. It can only get worse, unless we go after the money, instead of after each other.
23
Great points, but I think you’re making a false equivalence between democratic neoliberalism and republican corporatism/kleptocracy. Recall that dems we’re losing elections repeatedly by running against neoliberalism (and for the welfare state). That the American population was duped by voodoo economics does not mean that democrats wanted to embrace such ideology; rather, it meant they had to adjust policies to win elections. I’ll take a pro-capitalist Democrat over a theocratic Republican any day. And let’s not diminish the fact that the democratic party’s goal of helping the oppressed has never just been lip service. Fighting for equal rights is as intrinsic to the Democrat’s platform as fighting for the rich is to the GOPs.
6
@Eric
Republican attacks on the Democrats work not because the Democrats are leftist, but because they aren’t. After Medicare & the Great Society programs the Democrats shifted to marginal tinkering on the neoliberal project. I applaud them for standing up for civil rights, but they use civil rights as a substitute for economic rights, & at this point in history, the latter is much more determinative in real life than the former. Are the 2 parties equivalent? Both depend on the sheer craziness of the GOP to get elected, & neither party’s voters get much concrete in return. The big difference is that there are Democrats who can critique the situation (Warren, Sanders, Brown, etc); but there is no Republican critique because without cultural politics they have nothing that people want.
1
"America was born imperfect..."
Indeed! Would that Douthat relate this notion to his fellow conservative, especially those on the Supreme Court, many of whom bestow god-like perfection on the founding "fathers" to the degree that citizens must be compelled to adhere to the founders' infallible notions of personal liberty and civic responsibility.
Some of the same people use religion in a similar manner.
That is the problem this progressive liberal has with many of the pious; be they Catholic, Evangelical, or Zoroastrian.
11
@Ralph Averill "born imperfect" is an understatement that is, at a minimum, disingenuous, when we consider that most African Americans did not have the legal rights of persons themselves, but were each counted as 3/5 of a person for the rights of the States they resided in.
3
The religious conservatives fight to be exempt from any law they don't like while seeking to impose their laws on others.
In a nutshell.
182
As a Catholic, I see it, and faith in general, being split by two opposing forces:
1. Love: help those around you.
2. Dogma: follow the rules.
In today’s complicated world, love and dogma are having quite the battle.
20
@Jane
Excellent point! I was just thinking on my drive home yesterday how different things might be if we each asked ourselves, “if we could only choose one (love or dogma), which would it be?”
5
@Doug Williams Here in Canada we have a quite notable public intellectual, Michael Coren, who, as an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, was one of Conservative Christianity's most prominent, ardent, and (as someone who disagreed with him, I must concede) compelling and effective proponents.
He chose love over dogma, specifically on the issue of same-sex marriage, and has largely been deplatformed for his apostasy. I'm currently enjoying reading his memoir "Epiphany" on his spiritual journey.
1
@Jane, not really. Human nature and God's Word are having 'quite the battle', as they have from antiquity.
I'm happier "following the rules" of God's commandment to love those around me. It's NOT complicated. It never was. Our greed, envy and hate vs. the love of God.
Every organized entity abuses power when it gets powerful. Unions, presidents, dictators....This is universally true, but American Christians have yet to realize that in this case, it's them. "We are a Christian nation" has been perverted in America so that we're supposed to now accept our new (very narrow) religious Sharia federal laws.
This is why Jesus warns about the love of money. It stimulates greed and blinds humility. You'd think Christians would shun political power, but they hunger for it so much that trump --- trump! -- is the new golden calf.
5
This article is conflating two things. Yes, some conservative religious groups like Mormons, and to a lesser extent Catholics and Orthodox Jews, have been persecuted in US history, and these groups lean Republican and have conservative views today. However, these groups are not the ones that are leading support for Trumpism or post-liberal right-wing populism. To the contrary, Mormons at least were notably opposed to Trump. The religious groups that lent the most support for Trump have been evangelical Protestants, who (although some might be poor) have never been politically persecuted in the US. Sarver is right—truly powerless minorities tend to be more liberal, because a key tenet of liberalism is that all individuals have equal rights that should be defended from the government, even if they belong to unpopular groups.
34
@Aoy Mormons did better than Evangelical Christians in voting their faith by supporting Evan McMullan. It'll be interesting to see what they do in 2020, although I don't think the Presidency will turn on how Utah votes (it's too small a state, Electoral College-wise).
@Aoy
70% of Mormons voted for trump, only white evangelicals supported him more strongly at 81%.
Just like Mitt Romney, they might criticize trump’s style but they’ll still vote for him.
1
If I’m understanding the crux of your argument, it’s this: conservative Catholics and evangelicals are upset with the secularization of society because it means that their ability to dictate, either through law or societal norms, how other people live. Conservatives profess to be about freedoms, but really dislike it when people exercise those freedoms in ways that conservatives disapprove of.
Since you brought it up, Ross, let’s talk about abortion: no one on the pro-choice side is advocating FOR abortion, no one is forcing anyone who doesn’t want one to obtain one, and pro-choice advocates, likely to a woman (and man), insist on the availability of low-cost, readily available effective contraception as its own prophylactic to abortion. Anti-choice advocates have had an absolutist approach that has made it a forced birth movement, attempting to impose upon society its own religious-based belief that a six-week old fetus, which lacks a brain, heart or any ability to survive outside a woman’s body, is a fully formed human in its own right.
Catholic and Christian-run hospitals and adoption agencies should be free to conduct business as they see fit; however, they should not receive one dollar of taxpayer money to discriminate against their LGBTQ citizens. (And Catholics hospitals should never have a monopoly on a geographical area, a whole other topic altogether.)
211
@EWood "Since you brought it up, Ross, let’s talk about abortion: no one on the pro-choice side is advocating FOR abortion, no one is forcing anyone who doesn’t want one to obtain one, "
Oh please. If I were to say, "let's legalize murder", and a bill were passed doing so, we wouldn't forcing anyone to commit murder, either.
Pro-lifers believe abortion is murder and they want it not to happen to anyone.
6
@MA
Pro-lifers may believe abortion is murder but not everyone shares your belief. I've been pregnant four times. I gave birth to two wonderful children, whom I love very much. However, I also had an abortion when I was a college student and my IUD failed, and I had an ectopic pregnancy which almost killed me. There is little similarity between the two babies who were born, and the two embryos which did not survive. The embryos were tiny masses of cells which had no cognizance, and I do not mourn them because they were not people, they were processes within my own body. Sure, one of them, if left alone, would probably have grown into a baby but the other one could not have and I don't think anyone would begrudge me the choice of having an operation to save my own life. To extend "rights" to an embryo makes no sense, because it is not a person. Grown women are people and your religious beliefs should not determine my decisions - MY religious beliefs determine my decisions about MY body.
70
@MA If anti-abortionists sincerely believe abortion is murder, why aren't they demanding laws making having an abortion a crime on par with murder?
The most likely explanation is that they don't believe it is murder, they know human life does not begin at conception. The laws passed and promulgated to date ignore eggs fertilized in vitro, and the empirical reality is that a significant plurality of fertilized eggs spontaneously aborts, ectopic pregnancies don't lead to live births and threaten the health of the mother, and many babies are still-born or are incapable of surviving after delivery.
25
I believe in religious freedom, the right to believe in a god, or gods, to worship (or not) where and how you please. I believe in the right to live your faith that is unless your right to live your faith comes into conflict with another person's right to live his or her faith.
The problem is that religious conservatives want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to live in and interact with the outside world but to not compromise on their beliefs.
It is one thing for the Catholic Church to say that using birth control is a sin. It is quite another thing for a Catholic institutions to refuse to provide certain services because they prevent pregnancy--even to people who are not Catholics. It is one thing for Evangelical Christians to believe that the Creation story in Genesis is literally true. It is quite another for them to insist that this story be taught as fact in public schools. It is one thing for Ultra-Orthodox Jews to say that men and women should be segregated at swimming pools or for Muslim's to say that women must wear the hijab--or the burka. It is quite another for t hem to insist that people who are not members of those faiths do the same.
Yes, many of these groups have suffered persecution in the past, but I for one don't see how imposing your religious beliefs on people of other faiths or on non-believers can be a positive thing in a pluralistic society.
Separation of Church and State is a good thing.
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@Brooklyncowgirl History reveals abuse the religious heap on a society; the Catholics being the most exceptional abuser ever! If the world has learned anything, it is that the religious lust for power over their fellow man is strong and willing to the point of murder. Just like governments, religion has always been a struggle for power, money and sex because those institutions know they can't convert through inspirition but rather force instead. I also see where history has taught us that the religious are eager to hitch up to greater evils to further their agenda (ie: Constantine; Luther; Henry the 8th, Brigham Young, et al), and therefore it is bet we have laws inforced to keep them out of the civic dialog altogether. It's the only way.
6
Religion, and mainly Christianity came to these shores on the heels of war. All that happened over there between Catholic and Protestant, between Christian and Muslim, defined so much of what happened over here. America is a culture that began with PTSD that religious violence created. That is why so many pioneers were damaged goods and ill equipped for empathy. To my view even people like Farrakhan are part of the same damaged and confused history. His embrace of the patriarchal slaver religion feels so self-defeating. American Christians for their part have to wrestle with the fact that while wondrously eloquent, many of their forbears were traumatized and possibly bonkers. Centuries of destruction and brutality were imported over here and dropped on the heads of the indigenous peoples. Nowadays, America pays for the psychoses of our ancestors born in the name of God. Which in larger part happens to be the story of religion in America and why it finds itself so challenged today. I would add that Blacks, and Mexicans and Native Americans having chosen to do right by some vision of a promised land speaks more to their character than a cynical play just to avoid wrath.
20
With all due respect, it's not time to pump the brakes on any secularist momentum in the American body politic. It's not like atheists, secular humanists, and the like have ever had their message fully heard from the stage of electoral politics. If anything, we should be looking at how secularists are marginalized in American politics today. I don't think we need to spend a lot of time concerning ourselves with the historical plight of the Catholic Church in the United States and Europe.
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In my personal experience having both Roman Catholics and rabid Evangelicals in my close family, I cannot see any point where either one side or the other does not feel the other side is absolutely wrong over most issues.
As an atheist and liberal, I am appalled at both sides intent to show how they believe the world should be when the only commonality I can discern between them is their desire to make everyone else see the world as they see it and behave as they behave.
81
I have another theory. Religious conservatives are compelled to fight vehemently to preserve their religious culture not because of fear of losing power but because of fear of being forced to accept reality. It is becoming increasingly difficult to accept the mythological tenets that form the basis of Christianity- virgin birth, resurrection, ascendance into heaven, raising the dead, healing the grievously infirm and the second coming. If God exists how has he permitted the horrors that are part of life, and, more importantly, how does he permit conduct that the religious right believes to be base and evil? For many, it is impossible to accept the fact that they have fashioned every aspect of their very existence on blind adherence to a myth. To do so would not cause a loss of power but the complete loss of the only thing that has provided their lives with meaning.
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@Disillusioned
I agree. That non-believers, like myself, can lead lives of meaning, compassion, grace and community with no need of reassurance of a belief system or afterlife is disturbing to my evangelical relatives.
They have staked their lives on a belief that their religion is the one true path and they are special for having followed it. The mere existence of alternatives is perceived as threatening.
5
@Disillusioned I agree wholeheartedly with this theory. I remember very well an argument I had many years ago with my mother, an extremely devout Catholic, over what whether I would be permitted to go to a movie with my friends. She had to check the instructions in the weekly diocesan newspaper to see if it was "condemned" for my age group or not. At the height of our disagreement over this question she said to me what was probably the most honest statement to ever come out of her mouth: I have to believe everything they tell me. I can't cope with living in a world where the things I believe aren't all true. I just can't do it.
7
@Disillusioned In a way, this does explain the popularity of Trump among the Evangelicals and other religious and biblical absolutists. For as long as they have been exposed to that mindset, or either from birth or through conversion, they have been taught that they must believe things that utterly defy logic and check their IQ at the door, or they will be cast out of church, their society, and/or Heaven. They don't read the Bible and think of the stories therein as metaphors, symbols, historical propaganda, or fairy tales that convey some deeper meaning because that would require them to use the brains that God gave them, especially if their minister or priest has assured them that thinking is a sin. It is far easier for them to swallow the pablum that they are fed and be assured of their place in Heaven. Therefore, having believed in fiction all of their lives, they are primed to believe fiction with regards to Trump.
The churches, and their adherents, are continually seeking to impose their private religious beliefs on the US people. Is the faith so weak that it cannot spread on its own merits, but rather needs the power of the state to enforce it?
Perceived anti-Catholicism in America is virtually a myth. I don't see evidence of the oppression of the church or congregants. I do see religions trying to oppress people who don't follow their particular brand of bias, and who work to impose their view of moral order and laws on the American people. Their Bible is not above our Constitution.
If an atheist baker wants to deny selling a cake to a gay couple, can he base that denial on something other than "sincerely held religious belief"? Or do those religious bigots have a monopoly on discrimination?
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@Kami Kata-"Their Bible is not above our Constitution". This sentence made me laugh. All morality has its source on God. Much of the morality enshrined in our Constution and in the progressivism is straight from the Christian worldview.
@Kami Kata If the U.S. is so anti-Catholic, how come a majorityof the U.S. Supreme Court are Catholic or were raised Catholic (I write as a raised Catholic) ? Roberts, Thomas, Kavanagh (ha!), Alito, Sotomayor, and Gorsuch.
Mr. Douthat doesn't really address one of Serwer's main points, which is that religion in general doesn't possess the cultural cache necessary to reimpose its vision of society, so it's hoping to ride the coattails of an ascendant nationalism.
But theologically speaking, nationalism is idolatry. I was born in 1980, and for my entire life Christianity in America has been morphing away from a universal, humanistic creed into an adjunct of the Republican Party. Though raised Catholic, and educated by Jesuits, I left the Church and organized religion entirely once it became apparent that the ultimate concern of contemporary Christians is not Truth, but merely their Tribe.
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The French philosopher Henri Bergson described two kinds of societies. The first, a 'closed' society is based on natural law and the need for obedience of its members to create a stable order: the roots of organised religion. The second is what he described as 'open'. Open societies call for a love of all humanity based on the truth that we are animated by the same 'elan' vital, or life force. Christianity, in its ideal form, based on the substance of the Gospels, represented a movement towards an open society, one where religious differences would no longer provide fodder for persecutions and wars. Our world is a mix of closed and open societies, but the possibility of an open society still exists.
The Catholic church, and all religious orders for that matter, are mostly closed societies. They are static and hierarchical and in opposition to other forms of human organisation and living.
How it could ever be otherwise, as suggested by this article, is impossible to fathom.
19
@Kyle what's going to be tricky in coming days is separating the two strains of Natural Law ["Never cross the beams, Ray!"], the one Bergson applied, derived from Aquinas's biblical metaphysics, and the other, based on pure reason, beloved of the Founding Fathers and Enlightenment Thinkers (though started by the Ancient Greeks)
1
@Michael5MacKay
Good morning, Michael,
I absolutely delight in your very apt Ghost Busters reference! Superb wit!
I agree there is a struggle developing around the idea of ‘Natural Law’, but it won’t be easy to persuade others about its claimed legitimacy by appearing to use logical argumentation.
Advocates of Natural Law seek to establish its legitimacy within a logical framework; but if so, then their fantastic superstitious claims must be held to rigorous logical scrutiny. So far that hasn’t worked. As skeptics say: “Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Evidence”. Advocates of ‘Natural Law’ don’t like that level of scrutiny, as they know their superstition is just that — arbitrary, fantastic, just-so declarations of how the world should work. This is why we see them combine Sophistry with emotional manipulation (including fear-mongering, demonization, and imagined grievance) to pull people in.
Ultimately, ‘Natural Law’ is neither. It is dressed-up in pseudo-logic, a gambit for credibility the way animals use Adaptive Mimicry to evade close scrutiny. Like those who would convince us they know the internal thought processes of our Founding Fathers (Originalism), ‘Natural Law’ is simply another instance of ‘revealed truth’ meant to justify the status quo.
Who benefits here?
It is simply an imagining dreamt-up by those who wish to maintain White, Christian, Male, Heterosexual supremacy. That is their ‘revealed truth’.
2
Another seemingly intellectual evaluation of the religious right. Which of course eventually circles around to the erosion of white male power in this country. I agree with the author about absolutism. The Christian Right has always struggled with its self righteous believe that they are the way. They are emboldened by an unwavering belief that without being saved you cannot find God. But I also find it ironic if you talk to. Or listen to progressives. They are equally convinced that they are right and if you don't "believe " as they "believe" you also cannot be saved in this world and should either convert to their "believe" or be forced to accept those beliefs. You see the word religion takes many forms. Both in the spiritual and in secular. Beware of both. They are equally as dangerous.
5
@Tony Zbrzezny I find it odd that you describe what the Christian Right does literally and what progressives do metaphorically. You're literally trying to make an equivalence out of things that are the opposite. Vis: (1) what does "saved in this world" even mean; (2) wanting someone to agree with you is not anywhere near converting you to their belief; and (3) what in your estimation constitutes being "forced to accept those beliefs" that progressives actually do? Small-l liberal democracy, with respect for differences of opinion and recognition of limited inalienable rights (to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority) is, IMHO, beyond any meaningful definition of "religion" and not nearly as dangerous as a theocracy.
9
Thank you for proving my point. I appreciate the absolute conviction of your beliefs.
Virtually every religion is based on the fundamental belief that it has the superior path to universal truth, and that non-believers are therefore inferior, at least in their beliefs – and that inferiority is usually extended to diminish their core humanity and right to exist. Religions are essentially political systems created and maintained to defend the power of its leading adherents. Like virtually all political systems, when they sense they are losing power they defend themselves by bemoaning the supposed injustices they are experiencing, while ratcheting up their blatant efforts to marginalize others, all in the name of the omnipotence of their particular version of an imaginary god.
49
Ross, when will you and your fellow travelers on the religious right begin to comprehend that freedom of religion requires freedom from religion - and that without the latter guarantee, the former becomes impossible.
What the Protestant / Catholic Right in America actually seeks is a right to deny spiritual self-determination to nonconforming women, not to mention spiritual freethinkers of various persuasions (including those 'fashionable occultists', in whose circles I sometimes travel, but to which I do not belong), and a return to its relatively recent hegemony.
I type "relatively recent" inasmuch as an intellectually honest examination of the Founding era reveals the presence of a wide variety of spiritual freethinkers at the very center of our revolution - namely, Deists, Freemasons, and Quakers. FYI, the first astrological chart of the United States was erected in 1776 not by a "witch" but by a Freemason in London by the name of Sibly.
Furthermore, I would strongly argue that even the most anti-clerical elements of the left are not hostile to the core of Jesus' actual message, only to attempts to impose the trappings of a hypocritical patriarchal style of religion on everyone else.
America today is a multicultural community - in every sense of the word. Religious chauvinism can have no place in a multicultural community. If it seriously hopes to rise to meet the immense challenges of the 21st century, it will surely need every shed of wisdom it can muster.
122
@Matthew Carnicelli "shred" not "shed", but I knew what you meant. I recommended your comment for its content, not your typing.
Ross's argument requires him to hand-wave away a substantial plurality, if not the numerical majority of American Christians, mainstream Protestants, a decent percentage of Catholics, pretty much all African American Christians (none of whom, obviously, are hostile to the core of Jesus's message), let alone most American Jews, Anabaptists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, et al. who all find their religious beliefs compatible with liberalism, and don't require their fellow Americans to worship as they do.
5
@Matthew Carnicelli-"
What the Protestant / Catholic Right in America actually seeks is a right to deny spiritual self-determination to nonconforming women"-do not understand what you mean by this-in what way is the Protestant/Catholic Right denying spiritual self-determination to nonconforming women?
1
@Dan
The right to not be at risk of childbirth every time they have sex, either inside or outside of marriage.
The right to choose not to be a mother, either at a specific time in life or ever.
The right to define what their relationship with the cosmos is, independent of some male-dominated clergy or any other group of men seeking to define it for them.
7
I grew up in the Middle Ages, yes, as a conservative Catholic which I have rejected in my adult life. One possibility this piece seems to avoid is that liberalism, in all of its glory and with all of its faults, is still aspirational, still a tough thing to get all the way to. When you reject letting other people and their dogmas think for you and make life decisions about yourself, you become free, but only then. It takes guts and effort to be liberal, things that our pampered society eschews.
73
@Denis-"It takes guts and effort to be liberal"-do not understand this statement-a large portion of this country is liberal.
I would remind Mr. Douthat that African Americans, women, LGBT people, the handicapped, the aged, etc., have suffered from laws that discriminate against them based on immutable characteristics in ways unrelated to those characteristics. The struggle for equality is definitely not a struggle to “flourish” – an offensively misleading word in this context. Religion, on the other hand, was given special protection at the beginning our country because the founders knew that religion often competed with the government for fealty from its citizens, and our new country had to contend with several major religions within its borders. How else could this fledgling country even begin as a union without the wall of separation? Religion was not given this protection because it is an immutable characteristic of religious adherents. In fact, as Mr. Douthat reminds us with his own experience, religion is not an immutable characteristic at all. Our government has an obligation to avoid aiding the “flourishing” of any particular religions. And, comparison to civil rights struggles is, to be generous, spurious.
38
It’s a myth that white supremacy perpetuates itself. It has dominated for 500 years because each generation has its own workforce to keep it fresh. As the white way of thinking is now being frequently challenged, more and more obfuscation is required. Mr. Douthat occupies a high place within that division of the white supremacy workforce. What’s obscured in this column is this: Christianity is the official religion of white supremacy and has been from the beginning. All of it. That includes all of the factions of Catholicism and all of the factions of Protestantism. It’s true that Protestantism has played a bigger role in what is now called the Untied States. And it’s true that each religion has had some dissenters along the way. But those are topics for another conversation.
15
Mr. Douthat, there are six Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nobody's persecuting them. And then you say the judiciary is the least democratic part of the American political system. Hmmm. As for being a conservative Catholic, that is a contradiction in terms. A Catholic by definition has a universal point of view, as in "catholic tastes." Catholicism is always broadening its views, i.e. the Church has been all about abandoning the narrow views it inherits from its societal context, hence the eventual condemnations of slavery, the view of women as chattel, the death penalty et al.
15
@Snip Catholicism might always be broadening its views, but it sure takes its time doing so. Perhaps the best known example of this involves Galileo, who was convicted of heresy in 1633. The Catholic church finally got around to admitting they were wrong in 1991. A powerful institution that moves this slowly is clearly more interested in preserving its power and authority than it is in recognizing the truth.
4
@Snip Not to overly-belabor, but the entire history of the Church since Vatican I has been one of retreat and accomodation. It takes a stand, only to fall back with "one last" admission that it's all based on nothing but mind control over gullible humans. I don't dislike individual Catholics at all, but I despise the pompous charlatans, holy and lay, who continue working to keep them mentally enslaved and self-tortured. The heirarchy will be the last to understand this, but the whole lousy structure is being demolished from the inside and if they don't call for Vatican III right now (I can think of 15 points to address, call me), it will all fly apart in our lifetimes.
5
@George From your mouth to God's ear! ;)
1
But, white Christians are privileged for the most part. To make sense of Serwer's commentary we should not take history back to the 19th Century, because voters are not voting based on that experience. The electorate makes decisions based on its current situation for the most part. When it sees a chance for its tax dollars to support something it doesn't like, it votes against it. When it sees a population that it doesn't like getting advantages it votes against it. White Catholics and Evangelicals are voting to keep the current US the way they want it to be. Their ballots do not reflect bygone eras. Their ballots reflect the need for a current advantage.
19
There is a difference between the real and perceived religious persecution. In China, they are afraid to worship in public for fear of censorship. The persecution is more real in China than the USA. But yes there is a history of American religious persecution, it is no longer as bad as imagined. America today can not understand modern China because of a respect for worship that extends to Muslims and Jews, minorities. The future of China will undoubtedly be one of religious freedom. The question is how. In addition the ethnic minorities of China will need the support of regular Chinese to earn freedom.
1
What religious conservatives fear is loss of access to federal and state money to fund their hospitals and colleges, and they remember that funding was denied to their grammar schools in the 1970s, which gave rise to the Moral Majority. No liberal wants to deny First Amendment freedoms of religion; some do question the access to federal and state dollars for institutions that overtly discriminate against other American citizens and taxpayers. These liberals make the same argument against the religious right as the religious right makes against Planned Parenthood: that tax dollars ought not to go to organizations that morally offend them. It is the use of public dollars for sectarian ends that Dothan ignores in this too-abstract opinion piece.
124
The paragraph this essay discusses reflects the desperation of outcast groups to gain acceptance in the US.
Religion is authoritarianism of the rawest kind, based entirely on inarguable decrees of imaginary authorities.
144
It's the embrace of ignorance that causes the damage from the religious right = deny science & let the world warm, among many other ramifications. Taken to its absurdist extremes (as it often is) that self-righteous stance damages everything it touches.
But still, it moves.
47
Abortion and the social gospel are not mutually exclusive.
Most red state voters vote against their own personal interests as the "heart" rejects the "head".
Emphasize that Social Security and Medicare do God's work..
12
Fundamentalism comes in many guises, including members of the Christian Right. All forms share in common an inflexible, unshakeable belief that only they are in possession of the truth, not to mention a direct line to a higher authority. This creates a sense of entitlement of the worst sort: the conviction that they, though mere mortals, are uniquely qualified to determine societal rules. That is privilege writ large.
264
@1 Woman
Succinct and strong
5
While I did find Serwer's essay very compelling overall (especially the last paragraph highlighted here), the fact that it completely failed to mention abortion - simultaneously the most important issue to many on the religious right and the one which they have not been "winning" (at least not at the highest levels) - was an omission that very much diminished it.
1
By origin I am a Southerner, and what Douthat tells us about the history of evangelicalism isn't true of the South. He says: "Today's evangelicalism [descends from folk who] were often poor and marginalized and rarely close to the corridors of power." In the South, the evangelicals were always on top. They held places of honor and power in their communities and their states, and they still do. In the past they had limited power in Washington, but their power at home was near absolute.
Moreover Southern evangelicals did acquire national power. Their national ascendancy began under Nixon, continued to climb under Reagan and Bush, and reached its zenith under Trump. These folks do absolutely fear the dissolution of their power.
646
@Franklin Thank you! I came here to say exactly this. Anyone born in the South in the last 50 years knows exactly who has been in power, evangelicals.
54
@Franklin Douthat relies on a number of willful mistatements and misconceptions, including his glaring omission that it was nearly unthinkable in American society until around the 1970s to profess anything but a belief in the Judeo-Christian God. He does, however, prove that, in his version of faith, the truth is relative.
35
I also went to school in the south, near Lynchburg, VA, a bastion of evangelicalism. You just said ore that was true in your few paragraphs than Ross did in his many.
42
The Founders were still close enough to those hundreds of years of nonstop religion fueled wars that ravaged Europe and the known world, they made the separation of church from state part of the FIRST amendment to our Constitution.
It's still in that document.
Period.
391
@Entera
The Founders became of age during the era of Enlightenment.
Yet when I moved to these shore some three decades ago from oh-so-socialist Europe, I learned soon that the vast majority of the oh-so-pious Evangelicals picked and chose not only from the Constitution, but also from their Old and New Book, whatever fit into their pre-Enlightenment world view.
54
While I am impressed with Mr. Douthat's exhaustive knowledge on the subject, what he's missing altogether is the element of hypocrisy contained within the boundaries of organized religion, and its own intolerance of lifestyles and belief systems that might
conflict with its own sensibilities. Proselytizing, often used as a method to swell the ranks of various religions, only makes matters worse.
But it is the near constant attempt to impose the religious right's standards on the rest of society that leaves me ice cold, and it's hypocritical when the very same people oppose it in other cultures. Beyond being something akin to a "do as I say, not as I do" mentality, it is the notion that non-believers are in some way inferior to believers, even to the point of being pitied and prayer-worthy, or worse, that gives rise to a sense of moral superiority.
Does that make the religious right privileged? Certainly, in some circles, it does. When one's boss, as was the case with me at what was until recently a Fortune 20 company that for many years hawked the notion that it brought good things to life, tells job applicants that "we are a Christian company," it is not simply a matter of being privileged. It is a matter of being just plain wrong, and abusing in a secular context the privilege of authority that has no place in the workplace.
It is the intermingling of religion with other forms of authority, too numerous to mention, that creates privilege. And it's real.
357
@Quoth The Raven
The boss you mentioned saying "we are a Christian company" seems to be a mirror image of Hobby Lobby which was allowed to deny women contraceptive healthcare according to their oh-so-biblical beliefs that no sperm should be wasted, mentioned in the "Old Book" they integrated.
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@Quoth The Raven-don't see what's wrong with your boss saying it's a Christian company. Companies are not government entities, if the owners desire to have a Christian company that is their right
@Dan
...not if it's a publicly-owned company with shareholders of many faiths and no faith.
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"But the idea that the religious-conservative coalition just represents the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure within it that they can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression, is … not really an accurate description."
Have you forgotten: "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruit. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."
A tree is known by its fruit, sir. and what fruit has the tree of religious conservatism produced since the presidency of Ronald Reagan?
The message of the one whose name you claim as your own spoke clearly: "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire."
He was given the death penalty by his government for that message and, now, you and those like you serve as apologists for the "false prophets" he warned us about.
For many of us, religious conservatism wedded with politics, violating the necessary separation of church and state, is a tree that should be "cast into the fire."
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@Didier-this post embodies a fundamental error I see all the time from the left. In a democracy, secularists are free to support policies based on their non-religiously oriented convictions, but religious people retain that same freedom even if their convictions are motivated by their religious beliefs. This is not "imposing religion" on others, any more than secularists are imposing secularism.
The constitution set up a system to untwine religion and government. A wall between cHurch and state to prevent religion being imposed on nonbelievers. You mention catholic hospitals and adoptions. Supposed goods. This is where it gets tricky. The Catholic Church wants to benefit from my tax dollars while imposing its religious tenants on those it is serving. Money is speech don’t forget, so my money is saying things I’m against. The Church should start paying its taxes and depend on donations from believers to run its hospitals and agencies. Instead they want it both ways, my money and the ability to impose their beliefs on others.
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@Sharon: The means of separation are explicitly defined in the first amendment. No faith based belief may be enacted into law, and the practice of religion cannot be coerced.
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@Sharon Douthat ignores the intolerance found in the Religious Right. That intolerance is manifest in history of the Southern Baptist and other southern evangelical denominations. The Ku Klux Klan did not recruit pagans and atheists. The KKK may be history but the intolerance lives on in the single-party political system in Texas, North Carolina, Georgia and other southern states that continue to suppress the black vote.
Intolerance is also alive and among the Roman Catholics. Divorced women find that the church that welcomed them during their marriage shuns them after their divorce. LGBT men and women are not accepted. Catholic schools, hospitals and other social service institutions supported by the church routinely fire LGBT employees who are outed or who have outed themselves.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the religious right is its single-minded determination to impose its dogma on our society at any expense. They embraced Mitch McConnell after he refused to take up the nomination of Merrrick Garland and Donald Trump, the most authoritarian presidential candidate since Huey Long.
The history of intolerance and hypocrisy is too long to be ignored cavalierly as Douthat does.
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Would your objections to religious institutions apply to Say Mt Sinai or Baptist Medical Centers? @Sharon
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