After this week's news of Cardinal Dolan's role at the Republican convention (and, subsequently, the Democrats'), one wonders when religion began to feature so prominently at the events. Robin Varghese recently unearthed V.S. Naipaul's 1984 visit to the Republican convention, where he heard a sermon delivered by a Dr. W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas. Sound familiar?
Dallas was air-conditioned—hotels, shops, houses, cars. … Yet in this city created by high science Dr. Criswell preached of hellfire and was a figure. And the message of convention week was that there was no contradiction, that American endeavor and success were contained within old American faith and pieties. Karl Marx and homosexuality were on the other side of these pieties and could be lumped together.
The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self.
Richard Lawson found this year's Christianism simmering just below the surface:
There have been allusions to marriage and abortion and various other social matters throughout this convention, but they have not been talked about head-on, it's all been on the side, little dog-whistle references for those paying attention. Paul Ryan sneaked it in […] during his mostly economy-concerned speech, saying "The man who will accept your nomination tomorrow is prayerful and faithful and honorable. Not only a defender of marriage, he offers an example of marriage at its best." Just like that. "Defender of marriage" communicating a whole anti-gay platform. Mike Huckabee was a bit more direct, but even he, the Evangelical, didn't go full tilt. He devoted about a minute to the social policies that are at the foundation of his politics, saying Obama "tells people of faith that they have to bow their knees to the God of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls, health care." And of course we have to consider Ann Romney's blaring invocation of her "real marriage" on Tuesday night, that "real" landing hard and sticky, the crowd losing it at the righteousness of it all. The audience seems to enjoy the secret language, they have fun with the "non-PC" whispering that insists they are simply better, morally pure, the socially anointed. These are built-in rallying cries that you can try to dismiss as cynical appeals to a hardcore base, but are still received loud and clear by those who genuinely believe in the message. They telegraph a monolithic sameness of moral convicion that this crowd relishes in as if in religious ecstasy.
(Image above from Christian Piatt's round-up of church signs.)
The Dish 