Judge not, lest ye be judged...and don't fall in love with your refrigerator...

As today is December 1^st, and we are finally in the month of Christmas, I feel like it’s an appropriate time and season to ponder the role of religion in the politics of our secular nation; on the candidates, our legislature, and our various institutions.

 By this time I am certain that no one is surprised by the ornate and elaborate displays of religiosity by the republican candidates.   Conservative dogma since William F Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale ties conservative economic principles to a strict Christian orthodoxy and you rarely see one without the other.   As Carl Bogus wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, “From its origins in 1951, the conservative movement has perceived itself not essentially as an advocate for a more effective political philosophy but as a bulwark against evil”.

As a result we see a continuum of this combination of dogmatic Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism in the candidates.  Michele Bachman combines the idea of the bible as an historical document and instruction manual with a tea party inspired and fueled hatred of government that’s a perversion of Buckley’s idea of small government and individualism.   Her increasingly desperate campaign to win Iowa or die trying has resulted in more and more shrill proclamations of a higher power as her inspiration.  She recently answered audience questions at a campaign stop in Iowa and proposed that it was perfectly reasonable to have the position that gay people have an equal right to get married, but only if they married members of the opposite sex, like good little boys and girls, confusing the high schoolers in the audience momentarily until they remembered that she is bat-shit crazy.  I guess gay folks who marry "normally" can be gay in their hearts…maybe like a lot of people she knows.  One of her spokespersons actually drew the tenuous line from the right of gay marriage to people marrying turtles and inanimate objects like stop signs or that 57 Chevy back in the barn.  I've always had a thing for my dryer; you know, the spin cycle thing and all, so I can see the logic.

Rick Santorum is the other well known crusader among the candidates.   Santorum is a devout catholic and extreme social conservative whose positions are more old testament than Christian and who regularly holds out his religious values as reflective of how he would govern.   His angry tirades against gay marriage, Planned Parenthood, and illegal immigrants belie the truth of this statement he made at a recent debate;  “I think they should pay attention to the candidate's values, what the candidate stands for,” he said. “That's what is at play. And the person's faith--and you look at that faith and what the faith teaches with respect to morals and values that are reflected in that person's belief structure.” 

Sorry, Rick, but your pissed off righteousness doesn’t play well when compared to Jesus’ words, plain and simple.  I pay more attention to stuff like this garbled nonsense on the subject of evolution; “Well maybe the science points to the fact that maybe science doesn't explain all these things. And if it does point to that, then why don't you pursue that? But you can't, because it's not science, but if science is pointing you there how can you say it's not science? It's worth the debate.”

I’m not sure what that means – probably nothing.  All I know is that Rick’s god isn’t my god.

Rick “Hold on a sec; I’m prayin' here” Perry is another extreme social conservative who has a semi-Taliban view of women and has governed Texas with that in mind. There’s also the very Christ-like 4,000 or so executions he has overseen in his two terms as governor or policies that have taken away health care from his jobs-miracle minimum wage workers.  His blatant sucking up to, and snake handling dance with, the christian right puts him squarely in line with the “I have taken Jesus as my savior” brand of hypocritical christian zealots and, with his manly southern accent, brings to mind an earlier marriage of simple minded Christian fanatics with nativist immigrant haters and they wore pointy white hoods and terrified the countryside at night like slimy cowards.  Of course, Perry is such a dumb ass that his 1980’s economic theories shouldn’t surprise us – they were simplistic solutions to complex problems then and are no more relevant and useful now.  But his hero, Ronald Reagan was a simpleton who got elected and so he’s going with that and besides, it doesn’t make his head hurt to think about it.  He’s about winning, not about governing.

Herman Cain is a dead man walking as far as the campaign is concerned so there isn’t much point talking about him, although his travails are rich fertilizer for a book or two and he may be laying in a Marriot somewhere with two thousand dollar hookers, raiding the mini-bar, ordering take-out pizza and laughing his ass off.  Huzzah!  Good for him.

That leaves the big two – the mormon and the professor – and there’s too much to say about them to sum it up in this post so I’ll leave them until tomorrow.  But I was struck by the fact that most of the wear-Jesus-on-my-sleeve types seem to develop their political position, not from reading the bible, but from watching Faux News and other media blowhards and talking heads.  If they read the bible, particularly the new testament, they wouldn’t find their identities shaped by marketing and media campaigns that manufacture a particular intolerant view of the world in order to maximize their own power and profit.  There is nothing christian about this world view other than the artificially created tie between the two for simple expediency.  I don’t think William F. Buckley would approve at all.