Faith-Based Foolishness
It's getting hard to keep track of which right-wing ideologues are liars, which are just plain dumb, and which are both. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger comes across as an intelligent, articulate (though thoroughly misguided) person, but his piece today, "Wonder Land," purporting to question why the secular left fears the influence of the religious right, is so witless that one really does have to wonder. Half the piece is an apologia for the normalcy of Southern Christians, and the other is an argument purporting to prove that the Democrats are becoming the party of unbelievers. Sandwitched in between is this little gem:
But recent research suggests that the evangelical Christians' religiosity alone almost entirely explains why the "religious right" remains a phrase of political division.
In other words, the urban secularists can't stand the fact that folks in Texas go to Church on a regular basis. Yep, if only all those hayseeds weren't so darned religious about it, I'm sure we'd all be in agreement about issues like abortion, gay rights, the role of women, support for Israel as the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecy, distrust of internationalism, "faith-based" social programs and taxation of religious institutions. Never mind that there's an increasing overlap between religious viewpoints and political discourse, or that many churches have become all-but-formal auxilliaries to the Republican party. Calling attention to those kinds of details is just one of those urban-cosmopolitan tricks, I guess.
Henninger is just dying to drive wedges wherever he can, using the special place of religion in American discourse as yet another strategy to marginalize "congitive elites" (I love that one!) as somehow out of touch with "mainstream America." This obsession of the Journal's (and other Ivy League-pedigree rightist publications like the Weekly Standard and especially the National Review) would be laughable in its pathological irony, except that it's apparently having some impact on the way Americans increasingly see each other in tribal rather than national terms.
My own view is that the value placed on religion in the “Bible Belt” is a manifestation of a whole series of differences between Northern and Southern culture that have existed since Colonial times. Certain types of fundamentalist religious beliefs reinforce the cultural assumptions of people whose views are already determined by other conditions, primarily family life, day-to-day experience, breadth of social interaction, and economic class.
There is some regional crossover – evangelicals in California, urban sophisticates in Atlanta and Durham – because we’re a country of drifters and the media has helped propagate regional views to find sympathetic audiences everywhere. But in the end, the universal religious differences that Henninger tries so hard to exploit for political purposes are really the same old problems that arise from the unique problems of American geography and history.
The peculiarities of Southern history give this specific problem a uniquely American flavor, but from the beginning of time, rural populations have tended to cling to tradition, while urban ones have been faster to embrace new ideas because of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of city life. In a country that is comprised of large cities and vast rural and suburban areas, there are sure to be differences in viewpoints – in terms of values, economic priorities and religious belief – that work themselves out in the political spectrum. Neither side’s perspective is entirely applicable to the other’s lifestyle, and yet there’s this constant quest for external validation and triumph. Always someone has to be “mainstream” and the other “marginal extremists.” It’s a stupid game, but it never seems to get old.
Henninger, who’s as urban and elite as they come, just loves the idea of vicariously participating in the “authentic conservatism” of the hinterlands. He’s welcome to his enthusiasms, of course. But that this kind of stuff is taken seriously as political analysis just boggles the imagination. I guess I’m just too “cognitive” for his brand of nonsense.
9:54:49 AM 
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