The Dish

Here’s part of his interview with David Remnick:

"I think this is the historical moment we’re in ‚Äî we have come to define religion in absolutist, fundamentalist terms. So to be a believer is to be a fundamentalist in some fashion. And I guess what I was trying to describe is a faith that admits doubt, and uncertainty, and mystery. Because, ultimately, I think that’s how most people understand their faith. In fact, it’s not faith if you’re absolutely certain. There’s a leap that we all take, and, when you admit that doubt publicly, it’s a form of testimony.

Then what I think it does is it allows both the secular and the religious to find some sort of common space where we say to each other, Well, I may not believe exactly what you do, what you believe, but I share an experience in wondering what does my life mean, or I understand the desire for a connection to something larger than myself. And that, I think, is in the best of the United States religious tradition."

It’s very close to my own account of the kind of faith I sketch in my book, It’s close to David Kuo’s assessment of his faith. Money quote from "The Conservative Soul:"

As humans, we can merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater coherence than ourselves, but we cannot see it face to face. That is either funny or sad, and humans stagger from one option to the other. Neither beasts nor angels, we live in twilight, and we are unsure whether it is a prelude to morning or a prelude to night.

The 16th century writer Michel de Montaigne lived in a world of religious war, just as we do. And he understood, as we must, that complete religious certainty is, in fact, the real blasphemy… 

In [non-fundamentalist] faith, doubt is not a threat. If we have never doubted, how can we say we have really believed? True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God’s truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

Could Obama lead conservatives of doubt out of the wilderness? Into the Democratic party? I was deeply impressed by his speech on religion and politics back in June – and that address is worth re-reading alongside the Remnick interview.

Or should we we only lead ourselves? I’m open to any possibility that can restore the right order to faith and politics in America. I think a quiet rebellion among moderate and tolerant Christians is taking place. Recapturing humility for Christianity, reunderstanding the centrality of doubt to faith, accepting mystery as faith’s core, making faith alive and integrated into one’s full soul and being: this is our truly difficult path. I make a longer and deeper defense of this kind of Christianity – non-fundamentalist Christianity – in my book.

I’m a believer. In the same God as the fundamentalists. In the same Jesus. But in a slightly different way. I’m glad Obama is open to that approach, because it is, in my view, as essential for Christians to reclaim their faith from extremism, as it is for moderate Muslims to reclaim theirs’. A great deal is at stake in that bettle within religions right now. And Obama seems to understand that. Which is vital in a potential president in this decade.

This reader gets it right:

I took the time to read Klinghoffer’s essay on NRO and I hit this line like a speed bump:

"If everyone were in control of his appetites, there would be no need for the government to be involved in endorsing some sexual relationships while withholding endorsement from others."

I am basically a Red Tory, so perhaps I need it spelled out in slow sentences and small words. Can you please explain to me what in pragmatic, limited-government, conservatism requires government to ‘endorse’ the behavior of consenting adults? I think what animates the anger towards you from The Corner and other, er, corners is that you have hit a point of vulnerability i.e. their claim to be the voice of conservatism.

If you were to integrate the sectarian, infinite-government authoritarianism that seems to be the stance of the National Review these days into a political movement, it would be labeled Christian Socialism or some such. Certainly not Conservatism.

They want to use government to enforce divinely-mandated laws. If the constitution forbids this, they are all too happy to amend the constitution. In a nut-shell, that’s a key part of my argument in the book. Their personal attacks are correlated with their philosophical incoherence.

My readers know everything:

Did you know that Olivia Newton-John‘s grandfather was Max Born, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist who was one of the founder’s of quantum physics in the 1920s?  He left Germany when the Nazis came to power, became a British subject and taught at the University of Edinburgh for 20 years.  He carried on a warm correspondence with Einstein for many years.  Of this correspondence, Bertrand Russell said, "In an age of mediocrity and moral pygmies, their lives shine with an intense beauty. Something of this is reflected in their correspondence and the world is richer for its publication."

I guess Olivia, unlike her grandpa, was of her age.

In three states, the attempt to strip gay couples of legally-defensible rights is faltering, according to several polls. Virginia results here; Colorado here; Arizona here. As with all polls, take under advisement. But there’s no question that this Rove-honed tactic has begun to lose its punch. Whether it will be enough to defeat these initiatives, I don’t yet know. But a few years’ back, it was a no-brainer that they’d pass overwhelmingly. No longer. Please be aware of these initiatives – and those regulating medical marijuana. Freedom is on the ballot tomorrow – your freedom.

Here’s a classic letter to the editor:

An axiom is defined as a statement that is widely recognized as true; a known truth. With today’s Republican Party, all axioms have been smashed.

Their axiom of fiscal responsibility has been smashed. Their commitment to limited government has been abandoned. A sound and prudent foreign policy is a distant memory. The effective and efficient execution of armed conflict is no longer theirs to claim. A strict adherence to constitutional constraints on state power is flotsam and jetsam. The ethical governance and personal responsibility of public officials such as former U.S. Reps. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif.; Bob Ney, R-Ohio; and Tom Delay, R-Texas, has been exposed as mere mythology.

Now, in the wake of the former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., cover-up where it appears Republican House leaders knew something about Foley’s alleged nasty habit of trying to seduce teenage male congressional pages, their axiom of buttressing (pun not intended) traditional morality, a.k.a. family values, has been smashed.

Why reward this in November? Save apple-pie authoritarians and White House adviser Karl Rove’s useful idiots, principled conservatives have no business sanctioning this perfidy. Absolute power corrupts absolutely indeed.

I’ve got my axioms, and I await and welcome the purge with bated breath.

Me too.

You can see it in Haggard and Klinghoffer. I write about it in "The Conservative Soul":

For the fundamentalist, a human being’s internal compass, what he has absorbed simply by being who he is, is always suspect – because the self is sinful, and must always be subject to correction from the outside. And so the fundamentalist learns to distrust himself, to wrest himself from certain habits, to conform what might have been his personality into a persona that is a vessel for something far greater than himself…

This kind of moral life, as we have seen, is often marked by the need to deny when one fails to conform to the ideal, or to punish oneself aggressively for waywardness. It zigs and zags from purity to sin and back again. Its motor is guilt, its achievement is often self-loathing, mitigated only by the faint hope of divine forgiveness. Every now and again, one particular doctrine may stand out as vital, and become an obsession – and this seems to be particularly true of the sins of sexuality, that Dionysian force of nature that seems constantly to push human beings into places they are taught to abhor but internally cannot resist…

In the most extreme cases, certain forms of sexual repression can become a new form of god in themselves, a pivotal criterion by which to judge the entire moral core of a person, a short-cut to assessing her virtue or vice as a whole. And so we lose perspective. And the chaste Christian discovers one day that his obsession with sexual purity has also led him to be callous to his family or mean to his colleagues or self-important among other Christians. Or the natural lawyer, determined that his truth be realized for all mankind, finds himself supporting laws that would send policemen into bedrooms, and doctors into jail. He never meant to be cruel, but his faith demands it. Salvation requires it. Oakeshott again:

"Too often, the excessive pursuit of one ideal leads to the exclusion of others, perhaps all others; in our eagerness to realize justice we come to forget charity, and a passion for righteousness has made many a man hard and merciless. There is, indeed, no ideal the pursuit of which will not lead to disillusion; chagrin waits at the end for all who take this path."

Chagrin indeed. There’s a lot of it going around. My book – analyzing how fundamentalists, both religious and political, cannot cope with reality – can be found online here and here.

The blatant use of God for partisan purposes is wrong whoever is involved. I’ve been tough on Republicans for deploying this tactic – because it taints faith and politics – but I’ve always insisted that it’s also wrong when Democrats use black churches for partisan messages. They have done and they are. Here’s some vile rhetoric from Maryland:

"Everyone who’s your color is not your kind," the Rev. Delman L. Coates told the mostly black congregation at Mount Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton. "All your skinfolk is not your kinfolk."

"On Tuesday, we have to have more on our minds than color," the preacher told the roughly 1,500 parishioners. He rattled off a list of unsympathetic black people, including the slave who alerted the masters to Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 and the black man who shot Malcolm X in 1965.

He drew parallels between the election tomorrow and the biblical account of Jews choosing to free from crucifixion the thief Barabbas instead of Jesus Christ. The minister asked how the crowd that loved Jesus only days earlier was tricked to switch from "Jesuscrats" to "Barabblicans" for that vote.

"Can’t you just see the commercials that were designed to endear Barabbas to the crowd," he said. "I can just see Barabbas well dressed, well groomed [and] holding a puppy."

The race-baiting that Senate candidate Michael Steele has had to put up with is indefensible. Invoking Jesus against him is worse.

This election campaign has revealed a lot, hasn’t it? Whatever happens tomorrow, some people have finally revealed what they really believe. A reader writes:

The terminology of the NRO piece is fascinating:

"Gay advocates reason that because a man has a temptation to homosexuality, he has little moral choice other than to obey it."

"A temptation to homosexuality?" I assume gays are "tempted" by homosexuality in the same way straights are "tempted" by heterosexuality. In other words, homosexuality is as much of a "temptation" as lefthandedness. We’re not talking about temptations; we’re talking about what people are.

The analogies are fascinating, too:

"…another thing that makes a homosexual temptation difficult to resist is that, at least until the advent of AIDS, it produced no physical ravages (as alcoholism and anger do)."

Here, Klinghoffer seems close to an epiphany, but he’s just missing it: homosexuality is different from alcoholism, anger, etc., because homosexuality doesn’t hurt anyone – at least, no more than heterosexuality.  Which is part of why it’s ridiculous to describe sexuality itself as a "temptation."

Ice cream is a temptation. Hunger is a condition. If you think hunger itself is a temptation, you just bought yourself a one-way ticket to an eating disorder.

Keep fighting, my friend.

I will.

"The hard truth ‚Äî and I know people don’t want to hear it ‚Äî is that Rumsfeld is hugely popular among the military," – Mario Loyola, from the curia.

A very strong contender. Olivia Newton-John’s "Physical."

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