literalism

A divided Republican Party tests the conservative faithful

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment
American Bald Eagle

America's symbol seems to be looking for direction

It has become evident that the race for the Republican nominee for President of the United States is completely different from any campaign in history.

Some Republicans have been scratching their heads wondering how the race produced four such disparate candidates. Candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul appear to have very little in common with each other. And you would think that would not be the case with a political party where doctrinal lockstep has been the hallmark of the ruling class for so many years.

You can analyze the cause of the shakeup all you want. The Tea Party. The collapse of the Bush presidency. On and on goes the analysis as to why Republicans are fighting among themselves. But there’s really a simple reason why Republicans have four such strange candidates to choose from: Sooner or later, it had to be this way.

The Republican platform in the last 30 years has relied on four doctrinal pillars that have had to work together to deliver Republican candidates to power. And for a long time, it worked. But now those four doctrines are set apart in stark outline.

Fiscal conservatives are the branch of the party that focuses on monetary policy and prefers to let economic markets determine distribution of wealth. “Less regulation” is their call to action.

Political conservatives contend that the freedoms of democracy (especially as originally outlined in the Constitution) are sufficient to provide opportunity for every citizen to succeed. “Less government” is their mantra.

Social conservatives promote the value of traditional institutions and cultural laws as a foundation for government and society. “Less liberalism” is their war cry.

Religious conservatives bring God, faith and moral values to the cultural and political table. Hewing most closely to fundamentalist approach to the scriptures, their political action plan is “Less God means a weaker country.”

So, do you know which candidates fall into which conservative category by now?

Romney is the most obvious. His background as a venture capitalist is how he became fabulously wealthy. And his statement on the campaign trail that “corporations are people, my friend,” illustrates his worldview. Definitely playing the role of the fiscal conservative.

Next up is political conservative Ron Paul, who would prefer that government be shrunk down to almost nothing. The man with the Libertarian bent occupies a political conservative space so far to the right no one dares to reach out and touch him, for fear of being sucked into an invisible vortex.

Newt Gingrich should be functioning as a political conservative. As the key proponent of the Contract For America in the 1990s he led the Republican charge to distill politics down to a laundry list. With its politically fundamentalist bent, that tactic appealed to political conservatives at the time. But as Gingrich succumbed to his own hubris and drew breach of ethics charges that seemed to have destroyed his reputation as a political conservative, he was forced to abandon that strategy for a political future and came back through a different channel, and he chose that of a social conservative. But first Gingrich had some baggage to unload, so he conveniently joined the Catholic Church, that portal of confessional virtue, and briefly surged as a frontrunner leading up to the Florida primary where social conservatism is so highly valued. But playing the social conservative has been a strange and difficult role for Gingrich, and he has ultimately failed, in part because he walks sideways and talks out of the corner of his mouth about everything, at least figuratively. In  other words, he ultimately wasn’t believable as a straight-talking social conservative. But it was the only card he had to play.

That’s because Rick Santorum had locked up the position of religious conservative well before the campaign even began. Santorum’s views on virtually every subject are so heavily tinged with a conservative brand of Catholicism that many Republican voters early in the race shied away from such a marginal candidate. His recent rise in popularity is a sign of conservative desperation. The label “authentic” is being applied with some pride to Santorum, but what they really mean is “suitably extreme,” and we’ll get to what that means in a minute.

Because you see the electoral process for Republicans worked like a centrifuge this time around. The tightly spinning centrifuge of debates, caucuses and media exposure have slung the substance of Republicanism hard against the walls of the conservatism. And this time around the ideology produced four completely separate candidates, each of them pushed to the extreme limits of the ideology as a means to look convincingly clear about their respective subjects. In fact it has been the extreme failure of Republican policies under Bush that put so much centrifugal force to play upon conservatives in general. Economic policy: Costly Fail. Political and foreign policy: Damaging fail. Social and education policy: F+. Religious policy: Just plain creepy and hypocritical. Republicans tried everything they believed would work in America and got four “F’s” for the effort. So the pressure was on, especially now that President Barack Obama’s policy’s have actually had time to correct some of the mistakes made by conservative legislators the last decade. Obama rescued the automotive industry. Slowly stimulated the economy and didn’t overheat it. Provided intelligent support in foreign policy and military action that led to the death of Osama bin Laden and the fall of several dictators. These actions have got Republican heads spinning. And now the economy is bouncing back as well.

All this centrifugal force has left the formerly unified party to wonder aloud, “What happened?”

The fact is, reality happened. Conservatism as a social movement is, after all, a deeply hypocritical and confused mess. In fact, if you look close enough, it is possible to argue that the ideal we know as conservatism does functionally exist at all.

We’ve seen the effects of literalistic capitalism in America. The less we regulate the more things blow up in our faces. Like a bad chemistry experiment gone awry, the economy definitely needs a set of processes and ground rules and regulation performs that function. So conservatism likes to talk ideologically about the power of the free market to govern itself, but that is an exceptionally Darwinist notion that is not at all acceptable for civil society.

The claim of political conservatives that “less government is always better” is hypocritical by definition. If you don’t believe in the power of government to do good, why run for office?

Social conservatives simply fail to account for the fact that the world is not only changing all the time, but it has to change. Even if something was good in the past, the environment in which it functions is altering daily through technology, science, social progress and globalization. But if social conservatives had their way we would still have slavery, women would not have the right to vote and Jim Crow laws would still exist. Prohibition would still be in force. The list goes on and on. Anachronism is not a force for social good.

The archest forms of religious conservatives want to impose theocracy on America, and the Constitution defies that. Plus the belief system of fundamentalist Christians ignores and distorts the true meaning of the bible in ways that are simply irreconcilable to the natural laws and science upon which modern society depends.

Jam all four of these dysfunctional worldviews together and you have a real mess on your hands. And that’s what we got under 8 years of the Bush II presidency. A near total collapse of our economy, the 9/11 tragedy, illegal wars, torture and flaunting of Constitutional laws like never before, and Bush claimed his actions were the will of God somehow.

The dysfunctions of conservatism as a conglomerate doctrine complicate matters by trying to reconcile ideologies that stand for different truths. These are meant to balance each other out, but instead conservatism tries to pretend the differences don’t exist.

For example, if one truly believes in the literalistic version of market capitalism, then sharing your wealth as Jesus recommends in the bible is a ridiculous and socialistic notion. But in fact the Bible shows Jesus frequently requiring the wealthy give away their riches if they hope to gain entrance into heaven. Recall the parable of the camel going through the eye of the needle?

So based on dichotomies such as these, it was inevitable that the conservative wad of ideology would someday blow apart. We should be surprised it didn’t happen sooner. But people desperate for political power will cling together under the most egregious of banners, and conservatism has served that purpose for many people too many years.

Now we have Romney, Paul, Gingrich and Santorum standing before us like they don’t even want to be in the same room together. They argue and claw at each other furiously, proving forever that the four pillars of conservatism really have little to do with each other. Not if you look closely enough, and we’re getting that chance now. Real Republicans, the kind that understand the art and benefit of political compromise, want to puke. But one of these candidates will either get the nomination or the Republicans will arrive at an ugly conclusion too late and throw the whole lot out in favor of a brokered nominee. We can only hope it is not Jeb Bush.

But it’s quite obvious the Republicans prefer a messy wad of a candidate to the clearly defined truths that divide their party. Republicans have been so busy dismissing the various faults of their highly flawed candidates… even the strident bellows of Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly and Fox News are almost squeezed out with the effort. But like always, they’ll find a way to justify whatever they believe is good for the country, even if it’s not. Based on what we can learn from this year’s electoral race, it is still power that matters to Republicans and conservatives in the end, not principles.

It all seems like art imitating life. The Burt Reynolds character in the original football flick “The Longest Yard” once said, “I’ve had my shit together a long time. It just doesn’t fit in one bucket.”

Truer words could not be said of this year’s Republican nomination race.

The roots of faith in farming and politics

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Seeing a high school friend after 30+ years apart can be awkward sometimes. But usually the years melt away and you find common ground somehow through talk about family and friends.

Such was the case in joining up with a friend whose profile cropped up on LinkedIn. It was a little odd in his mind that he was on the business social network at all. He’s been a successful hog and crop farmer all his life, working land that his family purchased in the 1850s and still works today. But a politically minded mutual friend of ours decided one evening over drinks to create a LinkedIn profile for my farmer friend, and that’s how we connected.

We shared lunch at a restaurant near his place that happened to be on the south side of a small Illinois town to which our family moved from Pennsylvania in 1970. I was headed into 8th grade, knew very little about the world and was simply happy to find friends through sports at the middle school we attended in the middle of windswept cornfields.

In recent years I’d taken up cycling and often pedaled past my friend’s farm 15 miles west of the Chicago suburbs. Once in a while I’d thought about stopping in to say hello.

So it was gratifying in some way to close that loop, share a meal and catch up on his life and mine.

Rumor has it there is now a lot of money in their family, having sold off some of their prime property in a real estate boom a few years ago. But my friend showed no pretentiousness and in fact apologized for smelling like hogs when we sat down for lunch.

I come from farming stock myself with a mother and father who both lived and worked on dairy and crop farms in upstate New York. Our family visited both those farms frequently and as a kid I loved shoveling cow manure into troughs so it could be whisked away by the conveyor belt that took it to the fertilzer spreader.

Later when our family moved to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania there were Amish kids who showed up for class smelling like manure and walking around in bare feet. So farming was no particular mystery to us.

But my uncle who took over my mother’s family farm sold it in the 1960s and took a position as a land assessor. His advice to me at one point was, “Go to work for the government. You make good money and the benefits last you for life.” That uncle was a fabulously fun-loving man, known for driving his cars too fast and carrying on with ribald humor. He often showed off his tanned, muscular body while working around the farm, treating a ride on the tractor as if it were a surfing expedition as we flew down the two-track toward the Susquehanna River.

Trouble was, my uncle rather disliked farm animals. He named his cows after old girls friends so he could smack their asses when sending them into the stalls. Eventually he also developed a pretty bad back from the rigors of farm labor, and not because he was out of shape. In his early years he’d been a good runner and set a course record at his community college cross country course that lasted 25 years. His distance running skills were honed trotting after dairy cattle up the side of the Catskill mountain that formed the dairy pasture.

Nichols Family Farm circa 1958

My grandfather who worked the farm before him was a reportedly liberal thinker who sent most of his children off to college. My mother studied music and became a teacher. Several of the other children also went into scholarly professions. Farming was valued in the family, but not as the sole occupation of the generations.

And so it was that my uncle alsogot out of the farm business. Perhaps a spirit that can grow to love the liberal enterprise of a non-productive activity like distance running cannot adapt to the soul-wrenching difficulty of farming.  At any rate, he left that world and moved to Florida after years of employment as a land assessor and finally died in a car crash at the age of 94. Rumor has it he was driving a little too fast for conditions. In other words, he remained true to his nature, loving speed and excitement over the mundane. The land where our family once farmed is now overgrown. Only memories remain.

My father’s farm also was sold off when no one in the family wanted to continue paying taxes on it in the 1970s. Several families lived on the farm until it was sold to the power company that had always wanted the property. The family barn and house were finally leveled. All that’s left of that legacy is a pile of stone rubble.

With these farm roots nestled firmly in my past, I have always remained curious how “real” farmers think and live. And that was part of my curiosity about my friend.

It turns out that farming is just like any other occupation. There are wins and losses. Ups and downs. Family matters come and go. Some you resolve. Some you retain. Most of all you try to keep an even keel and maintain the family pride through thick and thin. Money doesn’t seem to change things all that much. People still have problems. People still find faith where they can, and when they need it most.

Our conversation turned to faith and my friend shared an interesting observation about his small little church. “We say this thing where we all confess our sins and say how bad we are as people. But I go to church to feel joy. I feel joy seeing people that have known me all my life. Sometimes I wish our church would find ways to do more of that. Find joy as well as speak of sin.”

As discussions of faith are often wont to do, our conversation soon turned to politics. My friend acknowledged that many of his fellow farmers were frustrated with President Barack Obama. “They don’t hate the man,” he shared. “They just hate his policies.”

Not wanting to turn the renewal of a friendship into a political battle, we both steered clear of digging too deeply into the issues of partisan politics. But it is a ready-known fact that many farmers declare themselves Republicans. Credit that to the Republican platform of economic self-reliance, firmly conventional social structures and a strong proclamation of faith-based values. Yet it seemed to disturb my friend that the people who were his friends had become so adamantly opposed to any sort of consideration toward the President. Something about that form of rigidity bothered him.

Perhaps there is no joy in service to such rigid doctrine, which has a confessional effect upon the masses. But there is little room for joy when criticism of the perceived enemy becomes the primary basis for your politics. Because what happens when (not if…) your own party fails you somehow? Then your confessional values, your whole world even, can get turned inside out.

It is not likely that farm politics will shift anytime soon from conservative to liberal. The perceived relationship that Republicans are the primary supporters for farm subsidies may be one facet of that loyalty. But the deeper claim to conservative values is another anchor to the farmer’s penchant to vote Republican.

These instincts can hardly be criticized without tugging at the fabric of American culture itself. Our original and continuing role as an agricultural nation is such a firmly established tradition that our national identity is at stake when one questions the role farmers play in our economy and culture. Even many of the Founding Fathers were farmers.

And so Republicans seem willing to prop up their image of support for farmers at almost any cost. A June, 2011 USA Today story carried this news item; “Republicans have quietly maneuvered to prevent a House spending bill from chipping away at federal farm subsidies, instead forging ahead with much larger cuts to domestic and international food aid. The GOP move will probably prevent up to $167 million in cuts in direct payments to farmers, including some of the nation’s wealthiest. The maneuver, along with the Senate’s refusal to end a $5 Billion annual tax subsidy for ethanol-gasoline blends, illustrates just how difficult it will be for Congress to come up with even a fraction of the trillions in budget savings over the next decade the Republicans have promised. Meanwhile, the annual bill to pay for food and farm programs next year would cut food aid for low-income mothers and children by $685 million, about 10% below this year’s budget.”

It is quite fascinating to realize that the supposed conservative, faith-based values that align farmer with support of Republican politics somehow prefers to subsidize some of the nation’s wealthiest farmers while denying food aid for low-income mothers and children. It absolutely begs the question as to what Jesus would do if he controlled the purse strings in America. Would he engage in the liberal enterprise that government proposes to care for the needy and poor? Or would he vote to continue subsidies to an agricultural economy that has become increasingly commodified, corporatized and wealth-concentrated. And how many of our nation’s farm policies actually do encourage family farmers to make a living? The organic farming industry, often driven by entrepreneurial farmers dedicated to serving smaller markets and local economies is growing in America. But ironically that is a liberal enterprise by definition and by nature. Do Republicans also by nature support organic farming or consider it a cross-market aberration driven by phony liberal instincts? Let’s ask Rush Limbaugh that question sometime soon. Or for that matter, Monsanto?

Perhaps these are questions about the morality of farmers that only God can answer. But let us at least confess that on the surface at least, that the traditional patterns of political support for the political right by the nation’s farmers seems to flow as much from love of mammon as from love of fellow man. In some cases our farming practices may indeed even run counter-productive to the welfare of our society and environment. Again, it is difficult to distinguish fact from dearly held fiction on so many issues. Like the construction of the Noble Savage assuaged guilt over America’s genocide of native peoples, the image of the Noble Farmer may be obscuring the ugly truth in some ways.

And yet my farmer friend seems both a compassionate and faithful man. We can be assured there are many like him among the ranks of American farmers. But if America is to succeed and the nation’s resources are to be sustained, it might be farmers who most need liberal instincts to survive and thrive. Whether conservative Republicans like to admit it or not, free will and the free market do go together, and the Christian notion of self-discipline must be balanced by the liberal notion of charitable acts and goodness. That is the yin and yang of the bible, and the economy.

Both free will and the free market do require some degree of self-discipline and self-governance to be sustainable. God knows America needs a liberal dose of both.

Our vestigial past embodied in theology

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming revision of my book, The Genesis Fix: A Repair Manual for Faith in the Modern Age.

Our Vestigial Past

The basics of biology tell us that whales are mammals that live in the ocean. Though shaped like fish with fins instead of legs, we know from physical evidence inside the bodies of whales that their evolutionary ancestors once walked on land. Hidden inside the body of every modern whale species are vestiges of legs and pelvic bones. These remnant leg and pelvic bones clearly do not help a whale walk on land anymore––so we call them vestigial body parts.

Ironically human beings can provide a wonderful illustration of why whales now use fins instead of legs to swim in the water. When humans swim, we are forced to use arms, hands and feet ill-suited to the process. We rely instead on propulsive motions of arms and legs to move through the water. But if we place rubber flippers on our feet we can swim much faster, dive and turn more quickly. Essentially by using our intellect and adding the instrument of flippers to our feet, we can shortcut the evolutionary process and become better adapted to life in the water. Of course, the feet we use to walk on land are still embedded inside those rubber flippers, but for the moments they are encased inside flippers their original design as instruments for walking are vestigial. Just watch anyone try to walk in swim fins. It truly is like reverse evolution.

Humans can take an evolutionary shortcut however and dispense with flippers to instantly walk on land again. Whales are not so lucky. Their leg and pelvic bones have receded into the body where they no longer interfere with the swimming motion.

There are people who object to the idea that body parts of living things can be vestigial. They call the theory of evolution a false belief, maintaining it is too big a stretch to say that ancestors of whales once walked on land, or that the origins of living things can be explained through the apparently random process we call evolution.

Philosophical resistance to evolution theory is largely founded on religious beliefs, especially the belief system known as creationism that says God created living things in original forms unchanged since the dawn of time. In recent years creationism morphed into a pseudo-science known as Intelligent Design. But really it is better labeled an anti-science because its arguments do little to explain the origins of living things but do provide complicated objections to why evolution could never occur. Proponents of intelligent design have invented scientific-sounding terms such as “irreducible complexity” to explain why some organs and processes in living things are too complex to have evolved on their own. But if we follow the thinking behind intelligent design theory to its conclusion, we find it dead-ends at the point where true human science begins––trying to discover how things works, and why. So intelligent design theory does not work as a science, but it does serve a useful purpose in illustrating how anachronistic worldviews tend to create more confusion than clarity.

Let us consider how intelligent design theory chooses to explain the presence of essentially useless leg and pelvic bones in the body of a whale. The answer given by Intelligent Design is scientifically inconclusive––but also, it turns out–– theologically unsound. Intelligent Design says God put them there by design. It is not for us to know why. But is that really how God designed the world, or more specifically, the human mind?

This rather cynical response wears a disguise of human humility towards God when in fact it is a tremendous arrogance. And here is how we know that to be a fact. If we trace intelligent design theory back through its roots of creationism to the source of religious literalism at its foundation, we encounter a worldview that depends on an aggressive fiction––belief that the scripture is to be followed literally in every respect, including the history of our origins. But literalism as a tradition of faith was rejected by Jesus Christ who chastised the Pharisees as hypocrites (and worse, a brood of vipers!) for turning scripture into religious practices diverting spiritual devotion from God into law. Through literalism, that process is still happens today. We never seem to learn our lesson.

There is of course a reason why people persist in taking scripture literally. It appears to deliver answers in neat little packages. To say that God put useless leg and pelvic bones in a whale seems like a shortcut to truth. Such a belief does not require much thought or analysis to comprehend. There is its principal appeal. But let us turn the paradigm of literalism around for a moment. Aim it straight back at the bible to examine scripture with scripture, as theologians advise us to do. Then we shall see if the strict methodology of literal truth is applied with consistency in our practice of religious faith.

It is readily determined that we do not follow the strict letter of the law or scripture as it is presented in the bible. In fact we ignore as archaic and anachronistic all kinds of religious laws and practices laid out in the bible. Entire books could be written just about the differences between life as an ancient Israelite and life today. So let us choose just one example––the acceptance and practice of slavery––that is the most glaring difference between life in bible times and our culture today.

References and acceptance of slavery occurs with almost casual frequency in the bible. Yet we reject its existence for outright moral reasons today. Yet Leviticus 25: 44 says: “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.” On the issue of slavery Leviticus is far from alone in the bible. Both Old and New Testament texts bear evidence that slavery was not only tolerated but in some cases  advocated as preferable to upsetting the social order.

This is madness, of course. Yet literal belief in the value of slavery persisted well into the last century. Only 60 years ago, noted theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer could not shake his own fixation with biblical dramatics related to slavery when he wrote “The Cost of Discipleship,” an instruction manual on how to live the Christian live. But instead of conceding that society had long since rejected slavery as an acceptable tool for moral instruction, Bonhoeffer went to great lengths justifying the warped perspectives of St. Paul, whom Bonhoeffer quoted liberally on the Christian role of a slave, “No, his real meaning is that to renounce rebellion and revolution is the most appropriate way of expressing our conviction that the Christian hope is not set on this world, but on Christ and his kingdom. And so––let the slave be a slave! It is not reform the world needs, for it is already ripe for destruction. And so––let the slave be a slave!”

Bonhoeffer was later forced to admit that this worldview was dangerously in error when slavery and other forms of social bondage came to evil fruition in his own country through Hitler and Nazi Germany. Bonhoeffer ultimately chose to resist Hitler, thereby rejecting his own advice that one should “let the slave be a slave!” Eventually Bonhoeffer even participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler. That action essentially relegated his advice to “let the slave remain a slave” to the theological dump heap. It became vestigial, in a sense, to a faith focused instead on achieving social justice. That was the faith Bonhoeffer conceived as he was persecuted and imprisoned by the Nazis. His vestigial analysis of scripture was forced to evolve. He no longer adhered to this advice from St. Paul in Romans 13:  “Therefore let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers. The Christian must not be drawn to the bearers of high office: his calling is to stay below.”

There is no question that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a man of convictions. His faith cost him his life. He was hanged by Nazi Germany for resisting another literalistic brand of faith leveraging the supposed racial and cultural superiority of white Christians seeking world domination. Bonhoeffer rightly recognized that the brand of faith espoused by Hitler and the Third Reich was corrupted by lust for power. Some argue that true Christian faith could never produce such an evil, but there is no doubt Nazi Germany used the language and authority of Christianity to recruit people to its cause. Its anti-Semitism led to the execution of millions of Jews. It was a perverse form of biblical literalism that informed this anti-Semitism.

Abolishing slavery is only one of the more dramatic differences in how we manage our affairs today in comparison to people in bible times. Let us state the truth plainly: The bible is full of laws and practices we no longer use. They are now vestigial. Present but harmless. Real but relegated to a function that no longer drives our faith. Most of all, such texts should never be taken literally or used to dictate our actions and lives today. This realization should open our eyes to places in society where religion and especially literalistic forms of Christianity continue their persecutions today.