Here’s a quote for the day from Pope Francis:
When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so. He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment. The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.
None of this is new, of course. Catholics in general do not buy the irrational and anti-intellectual delusions of evangelical Protestants with respect to Creation and the origins of the universe. But what it does is reinforce a very American dimension to the Francis effect in the Catholic church: the church has effectively switched sides on several key issues in the American culture war.
Damon Linker has a typically insightful piece on this question with respect to the core cultural battles over sex, marriage and family that have divided Americans for several decades now. And this helps explain Ross’s adoption of resistance to Francis’ pastoral revolution: a key, legitimizing rampart of the social right in America – the Vatican – has been partly kicked away. If the Pope sees value in some aspects of gay relationships, for example, how does a Catholic remain committed to the party of Rick Santorum and Gary Bauer?
On the question of evolution, the value of gay relationships, the validity of climate change, and the utter impermissibility of torture, Francis has made the life of the conservative Catholic Republican a lot more complicated. The GOP, for example, is dominated by white evangelical Protestants. On evolution, they are regressing, not reforming:
Americans entered 2013 more opposed to evolution than they have been for years, with an amazing 46 percent embracing the notion that “God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so.” This number was up a full 6 percent from the prior poll taken in 2010. According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved. Among Democrats, acceptance of evolution increased by 3 percent, to 67 percent, while among Republicans it decreased from 54 percent to 43 percent.
On climate change, the Pope has been emphatic (and in a way that has commanded far more attention than Benedict’s identical musings) on about our moral responsibility for conserving the earth:
Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude. Safeguard Creation. Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us! Never forget this!
Compare that with the Fox News view that climate change is a massive hoax. On torture, rendition and indefinite detention without trial in Gitmo, the Pope was recently unequivocal:
Francis took aim at practices that have been hotly debated in the U.S, such as the so-called “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects to other countries, which the pope described as the practice of “illegal transportation to detention centers in which torture is practiced.” The pope called out both the nations that use such practices and those who allow it to happen on their territory or allow the use of their air space for other countries to transport detainees.
Notice that the Pope, unlike his predecessor, doesn’t duck the core question of American torture at Gitmo and other black sites. On the death penalty and life imprisonment, he is just as clear:
“All Christians and people of good will are called today to struggle not only for abolition of the death penalty, whether legal or illegal, and in all its forms, but also to improve prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their liberty,” the pope told delegates from the International Association of Penal Law. “And this I connect with life imprisonment,” he continued. “Life imprisonment is a hidden death penalty.”
On prison reform, Francis has, happily, some Republican pols on his side. But when you observe the rhetoric from a man like Senator Pat Roberts on Gitmo and super-max prisons in general, you can see the huge gulf between the Pope and the id of the American right.
Let me be clear here. I’m not now invoking a religious authority to determine a view of secular politics in the US. Francis’s arguments, like anyone else’s, should succeed or fail on purely secular terms. And to claim Francis for the Democrats or the American left would be deeply misleading and pernicious. He remains, to take one obvious example, opposed to the taking of human life at any stage of development; and he does not believe that gay relationships can be described as marriages. All I’m saying is that the social right and Republican base has long counted on the papacy as a natural ally in the vortex of the American culture war. They can count on it no more. Which means that the evangelical-Catholic alliance, entrenched under Benedict XVI, and a key component of the American right’s fixation on abortion, gays and religious freedom as primary public issues, is teetering.
May it soon collapse entirely. It would be good for the right; and good for Catholicism.
(Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty)
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