Religion and Politics are that dysfunctional couple that bicker and argue so constantly in public no one believes they really belong together. But like most couples, their arguments are a matter of differing definitions on keywords and mean nothing above the foundation that holds them together. Really, these guys would be nothing without each other.

 

Jim Wallis argues that without a society without a moral ground leaves us “bereft of meaning and purpose in our social relationships, we lose all sense of the common good and our shared humanity, and the bonds of society themselves become so frayed that each individual feels forced to fend for themselves” (God’s Politics). Essentially, to progress as a society, we need to be led by a set of values, a common morality, a uniting purpose. Finding communities with a common set of values and purpose is pretty easy when joining a religion. The inclusive nature of mainstream religion is part of its appeal.

 

Yet when anyone jumps in the public political arena with a moral agenda and religious buzzwords, people freak out. There is a clear social stigma against religious intervention in politics – and with good reason.

 

 

Religious language is divisive, so the Clerical public intellectual is always viewed by his peers with a raised eyebrow. When it’s argued that abortion should be illegal because life begins at conception, or that shoving taxpayer money into localized welfare programs is “the right thing to do,” it’s easy to dismiss these views because they can easily be categorized as subjective. But when arguing ethical issues that involve morality and ethics, it’s not easy to use neutral scientific evidence to promote them.

 

Hence, clerics resort to using jargon they are comfortable with and end up alluding to vague and abstract concepts whose definitions are best identified to those within their special community. God. Morality. Values. Ethics. Righteousness. Justice. Right. Wrong.

 

Like this guy says:

 

…when terms of identity become the focus of intellectual practice within a religious community they give us tangible evidence of just how “special” our group is—and how unspecial, ungodlike, or un-American everybody else is.

 

After all, who are these sons-of-bitches to define morality for us? No one likes someone who claims to know the high ground in the name of some abstract concept they call “God.” We pretend to understand that religious followers live under a doctrine in which spreading a gospel is mandatory, yet we brush them off because the lack of secular language makes their arguments seem outdated and exclusive.

 

But the rest of us must do our part and understand that some arguments are always going to have allusions to the vague, the mysterious, the indefinable, the frightening. Along with asking others to cut their vocabulary, we must also expand ours to read between the lines of religious jargon and into the deeper, more common philosophies it carries.

 

Case in point: Rick Warren is awesome. He’s just one of the many famous Clerical leaders who understands that faith is a matter of building personal belief and politics is a matter of finding common values. Yet when he tells Larry King or Nightline he could never vote for an atheist president, people go batshit insane: 

 KING: Does a person have to believe in god to be president?

WARREN: I would say so. I couldn’t vote for a person who was an atheist, because I would think — I think the presidency is a job too big for one person. I would think there’s a little arrogance that says, I don’t need anybody else. I could vote for someone of different religions than mine, but I don’t know that I could personally vote for somebody who denies that we need somebody greater than ourselves to help us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rick Warren could not personally vote for somebody who does not believe in a power greater than him or herself. Let’s look into the philosophy of this for a minute. Platonic philosophy indicates that those in power should not be those who simply seek power (a selfish motive) but philosopher kings who seems something greater. The utopia, the ideal, “truth,” whatever, I fell asleep in class. Rick Warren clearly alludes to something similar (though not as articulately), that those in power should seek to serve a greater power, though subjective, like God, other people, truth, justice and so forth.

Yet many refused to intake this interpretation of it, and atheist communities everywhere lost it. For fuck’s sake, even Bill Maher gets it.

 

When looking past the buzzwords, chances are everyone can see a more secular philosophy to contemporary American religious ideas. In addition to asking everyone to seek a common language, the others cannot expect it to happen overnight. We must also learn to listen, because common ground can be found where we least expect it, even between the lines.