As always, conservative argumentation that liberals are the real racists intolerants founders on the definition of tolerance. Tolerance means that you can live your life as you wish, free of state interference and public scorn, so long as you don’t harm others. It doesn’t mean that unearned prestige is automatically conferred upon your position, that people have to like you or take your views seriously, or that you are automatically entitled to preferential treatment in a debate. So this self-pitying piece by a Christianist is thoroughly silly. It hits all the points one might expect: some famous people are hostile to religion, therefore religious people are now an oppressed class, you know the drill. Still, this is one of those “point the way forward” things and the prescription is bizarre:
I believe that religious liberty is meaningless if religious subcultures do not have the right to practise and preach according to their beliefs. These views – for example, on abortion, adoption, divorce, marriage, promiscuity and euthanasia – may be unfashionable. They certainly will strike many liberal-minded outsiders as harsh, impractical, outmoded, and irrelevant.
They do indeed. But, obviously, nobody is particularly interested in stopping people from not having an abortion, or from keeping that plug unpulled to the end. The right not to exercise these rights is not seriously imperiled–they are rights, after all, not duties or legal obligations–so why complain?
Once a dominant force in western culture, religion has been demoted to, at best, an irrelevance; at worst, an offence against the prevailing establishment. For millennia, religion has coloured every aspect of the European landscape. Churches were everywhere – one for every 200 inhabitants in the High Middle Ages – and oversaw every stage of life: “hatch, match and despatch”. Philanthropists, religious orders and communities built and ran schools, orphanages and hospitals. Belief was so crucial to ordinary people that the most destitute did not question paying tithes to their church. The Founding Fathers crossed an ocean to be free to practise their faith.
But, as the British poet Geoffrey Hill has written, the continent is “a place full of memorials but no memory”. Church attendance has slumped to less than 30 per cent. Only in two Greek Orthodox countries, Cyprus and Greece, does the overwhelming majority of the population attend services regularly (98 per cent and 96 per cent respectively). Europeans may walk in the shadow of church spires but biblical literacy is so unusual today that a recent survey found that, of 900 representative respondents, 60 per cent couldn’t name anything about the parable of the Good Samaritan, while only 5 per cent of people could name all the Ten Commandments.
Ah, I see: because religion has lost enormous prestige and power over the past couple centuries. The administrative details of birth, marriage, and death are handled by civil servants now, social safety nets have displaced the church’s advantage on aid to the needy. Religion has been greatly reduced in its social scope over the past couple centuries. And the damning fact is: nothing has really been lost, ultimately. Secularized, post-WWII Europe has not fought any wars against itself, something that, I cannot emphasize enough, really does mark a huge discontinuity with the bulk of European history. Which is not to say that secularization is the only reason for this, correlation not causation, etc., but still. Up until the financial crisis, poverty in most European countries was tiny, civil society was peaceful and liberal, not perfect of course, but pretty damn good considering. Certainly compared to Christian Right paradises like Uganda, say. There simply is no “Crisis of Secularism” to speak of, so the rump of Christianists still left in Europe are trying to create one by implying that underneath the veil of live-and-let-live lies the cancer of bigotry, from which we must be saved by…conservative Christians, of course! But this is simply nonsense. It’s an attempt to create a crisis in order to create a new rationale for their own power and prestige, much like Jimmy Carter’s famed “Crisis of Confidence” (i.e. malaise) speech, which failed for the reason that they lacked confidence in Carter, and with good reason. And all this talk of oppression and vulnerability is silly, as the author is not currently in prison or dead for her beliefs, as many Europeans behind the Iron Curtain found themselves simply for opposing oppression. I can sympathize with her annoyance about having to change venues several times to deliver a speech but Jesus Christ, get a little perspective! Oppression comes in slightly worse forms than a crosstown commute.
But, to be fair, Odone points us to the real victims here:
But that is not the point. Adherents of these beliefs should not face life-ruining disadvantages. [...] They should not lose their jobs, which was the case of the registrar who refused to marry gays.
Ah. There is no “conscience clause” for government officials, if you refuse to follow the law, you’re done. There’s no right to be a bureaucrat, and making this point is equivalent to saying that a soldier who becomes an advocate of nonviolence should not be dismissed when he refuses an order in combat. I didn’t like it when Gavin Newsom did the inverse of this a decade ago, as a bureaucracy undermined by contempt for law leads to chaos. Need we discuss the Bush Jr. Justice Department? Let’s not.
Most fascinating is her comparison to my good old United States of America:
Americans do God in a way that Europeans no longer do: the First Amendment guarantees citizens’ right to the “free exercise of religion” – and they in turn choose to exercise their religion in a host of patriotic rituals. Their currency (“In God we trust”, proclaims the dollar bill), the prayer before the college football game and the national anthem: all invoke God, and pledge faith in His powers. “All-American” is synonymous with church-going, just as “un-American” meant the Godless communists.
Putting aside the content for a moment, what is the focus here? References to the Deity on money, before sports games, in song: in popular culture, essentially.* One can palpably sense her looking longingly over at America’s relative upfront religiosity. But this point is the most easily dismissable in the piece since it seems to be written by someone whose reference point lies in the 1950s: Christianity in America is engaged in the very same death spiral that killed it in Europe. Gallup’s poll has the “none” choice for religion up to 15%, and people saying that religion is “not very important” to their lives up to 22%, both record highs. (The actual numbers of people who fall into this category are undoubtedly much higher, but religion is an area of endless self-delusion in American life: witness the twenty-point discrepancy between people who identify as members of their church, and people who actually attended services last week.) Religion is in bad shape in the USA, though it’s for somewhat different reasons than it was in Europe. Everyone’s heard the argument that having state churches led to European nations losing their religion while America’s lack of one led to more religiosity here, largely because absent an existential threat, powerful institutions will preserve the status quo and their own power, and inevitably succumb to complacency and become out of touch. In the U.S., the lack of this dynamic has historically meant that churches couldn’t get complacent, couldn’t fall out of touch, had to remain relevant to people or die off. Of course, the ascent of mass media and the massive religious right organization have allowed the European dynamic to assert itself here by non-state means: decades ago, Northeasterners could go to liberal Congregationalist churches and Southerners headed to their hard-shell Baptist redoubts, with their own versions of Christianity held definitive to them. Now these changes have flattened the whole landscape. It’s not exactly fair to lump the entirety of Christianity in with the loudest and most extreme practitioners but it’s inevitable after a certain point. The Christian Right is already out of touch, but unmovable in its obsessions. Fair or not, the patterns look eerily familiar.
It is practically an article of faith among conservatives that Europe and America are fundamentally different in terms of values. But if the death spiral does continue for American Christianity–and the trends are unmistakable, though not irrevocable–the unavoidable question is: what if there is no difference? What if the difference was due to a structural fluke that is currently being undone by technology and organization? I suspect the author and others of her milieu would be sobered by this thought. But, increasingly, I wonder if it’s not truer than we think.
* Which is dumb as fuck, really, to say that public symbols are the be-all, end-all here. Italy’s buildings are so replete such religious imagery that even Roy Moore wouldn’t even dare to dream of it, after all.
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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark
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