A week ago, in DeanFest, Day 3, I wrote up the final installment of Demetrius and my experiences at DemocracyFest 2005 in Austin, Texas. This diary is different from the previous ones, in that the focus is not on our experiences and interactions, but on the information that was presented at the "Religion, Democracy, and the Common Good" forum I attended Saturday morning.
From the program for DemocracyFest 2005, here is the description of the forum.
Religion, Democracy, and the Common Good: How the left can reclaim a moral foundation. Panel will include Dr. Davidson Loehr, Unitarian Universalist minister and author of the forthcoming book America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher; Dr. Paul Woodruff, the Darrell K. Royal Professor in Ethics and American Society at the University of Texas and author of Reverence: Renewing A Forgotten Virtue and First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea; Andy Hernández, executive director of the 21st Century Leadership Center at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and co-author of the Almanac of Latino Politics 2002-2004; and scholar and educator Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock, who has spoken and written extensively on feminist theology, Asian American women, and peace and justice issues. Moderated by Glenn Smith, founder of DriveDemocracy.org and author of The Politics of Deceit.
The following comes from the notes I took at the event.
Rita Nakashima Brock was the first to speak, and I think she was the one who resonated the most with me. She was the on I specifically wanted to speak with immediately after the forum, but there were other people talking to her and I did not get the chance. Unfortunately, as since she was first to speak, and I had not yet hit my eventual cruising speed as far as note-taking, I only have a few sketchy statements from her talk.
Brock said that when we avoid faith talk so as not to offend, we end up with a feeling of sameness, which makes us feel unimportant…like cogs in a machine. We then retreat to the spheres of consumerism and small relationships. What’s missing is a sense of agency, and she said that small, local groups are where we can regain our sense of agency, and live out our core values. Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock started her group, Faith Voices, on November 3, 2004, as a vehicle for people of faith who were horrified by the results of the election, so that they could channel those feelings in a positive way rather than giving in to despair.In addition to her acknowledgement of the importance of a sense of agency, another statement that really struck a chord for me was this:
“The secular left needs to see us as partners on the same journey.”
The Rev. Davidson Loehr was the next to speak. He said that in recent decades, liberals have lost the vocabulary of patriotism and nationalism. They also lost a religious vocabulary and God language, which he owes to the fact that we no longer have a “critter”. Critter? I figured out soon enough that Loehr was speaking here of the notion of a personal God, one who intervenes in our lives, with whom we can have a relationship. According to him, it seems, we, as modern liberals are now “over” that notion. I imagined that there were people in the audience for whom such an attitude didn’t sit too well. He went on to say that “God talk is a way of speaking about issues we think are important.” The left had also lost, according to Loehr, the vocabulary of morality and personal responsibility.
He described the “salvation story” of the left in the past. It went like this:
-Pick a group for which to speak
-Shine a spotlight on that group
-Assume they are grateful so they we can feel virtuous
We lost permission to speak for one group after another, women, African Americans, and so forth, because these people did not want to be spoken of as victims. We then invented “token victim groups” to speak for, and this was the political correctness movement.
Wrapping up, he said that in a vacuum, plutocracy, fundamentalism, and a “command and control” government will thrive, which will keep the masses disempowered and disinterested. It is therefore in our interest to avoid such a vacuum, and to do so, liberals are going to need to become more adept at using the language of high moral values and ideals.
The following is from the notes I took when presenter Andrew Hernandez was speaking. According to my page of speaker bios, he is the executive director of the 21st Century Leadership Center at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. He also said in his presentation that he is an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church.
Exit polling indicated that in the 2004 election, 22% of those polled said that they cast their ballots based on “moral values”. But, presented with that same question in 1996, 40% answered “moral values”. In 2004, here are some of the other answers, and the percentage of people who chose them:
Economy 20%
Terrorism 19%
Iraq 15%
Hernandez said that gay marriage and abortion are more cultural values than they are religious and that “precampaign dispositions determined this election”. He also said that “Moral values is code word for the way they were going to vote anyway.”
He also noted that Bush picked up most in white moderate Catholics, Latino Protestants, and Traditional Christians, but that these groups were specifically targeted by the Bush campaign. He concluded, then, that their votes were more a matter of mobilization than people changing their minds.
Hernandez also told us that White males are now a block vote for the Republican party, because they believe it protects their interests. Married White women are also voting Republican, and they view White males as the the group that suffers the most discrimination today.
On another note, Hernandez told us that formation of religious identity and political identity go together. Therefore, we need to get to people before these identities are crystallized.
When speaking to people who identify as Christian, we will be more successful if we use their language. By way of example, he told us that the Bible speaks against rich people 96 times, but against gay people only a handful of times. Hernandez concluded that if we’re not afraid to use that language, we’ll win every time.
The final speaker was Paul Woodruff, an ethicist. He started by discussing the ethical implications of winning and losing elections. Winning can have bad ethical results, he said, making people less likely to make good decisions, since they believe they can do no wrong.
Hubris, according to Woodruff, is one of the greatest moral dangers we face today. The opposite of hubris is not humility, but reverence. He said that reverence is not essentially a religious word. It simply means recognizing thatyou are not a god–you are fallible–and having a sense of awe at the transcendent.
As a Vietnam veteran, Woodruff stated that nationalism and patriotism were painful topics for him–it was painful for him to look at the flag when he came back. He said that we need to make the distinction between this country that we love and the policies and administration that we don’t. But, the ideals which formed this country, we must continue to speak for and stand for.
Morality in principle is not divisive. Justice in a reverent form is not divisive, rather, it brings us together. Justice is not a zero sum game. According to Woodruff, the “haves” are being harmed by their privileges, and would benefit by moving towards greater equality. He also stated that “by the people” is not the same as majority rule. In conclusion, he told us that the only way we can think of ourselves as a people is to cultivate a harmonious way of accomodating our differences.
DemocracyFest was the weekend of June 17 to 19, and I’ve had a bunch of stuff to do since then. Having finally finished writing up our personal experiences of the weekend, I knew that I really should finally write up what I learned in this forum. Originally I had intended to do a more in depth diary as far as including background links and, I don’t know, making the sentences go together a bit more smoothly. But it’s hot, which has me feeling pretty cranky and tired, and at this point, of course, it has been a looong time since I actually sat in that forum and heard those people speak. Since I went to the effort of taking notes, I felt compelled to at least share the information I had so I’m doing the best I can to accurately relay what I got down in my notes. I hope that anyone here reading who was either at that forum, or has read or heard any of the participants, will share your insights here.
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These are my recent, almost entirely non-political diaries, inspired by my daughter’s week of choir camp. As you can see in the second of these diaries, I now have a voice recorder at my disposal, so the next time I attend such an event, my reporting ability will not be limited by my poor note-taking skills.
Communing with the saints
From the sacred to the mundane
What is your point?
The common good is furthered by democracy; democracy is furthered by religion? Does it matter which religion? Most left wingers are partial to eastern religions that don’t have a cosmic male-parent telling them what to do.
Emile Durkheim, french Sociologist, said that the role of religion in society was to get people to obey the law with out having to put policemen on every corner. Historian Ed Gibbon stated famously that in Ancient Rome “[Religions] were regarded by the masses as equally true, the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful.” That’s pretty much how it stands today, 2000 years later.
As to the “truth” of a religion, scientific truths which were thought to be obviously incomatable with religion are still adhered to, while (most) of the religions have changed their tunes. In time, not much of the ancient religions will remain. Even in today’s so called religious climate, most of it centers around the concept of piety rather than the kookburger stuff like Creationism and virgin births. Yeah, there will always be kooks, but most people don’t really believe that stuff anymore.
There are many interesting ideas here, but I’ll just pick one of them…
Hernandez said that religious identity and political identity go together. If so, then the church of love and democrats are caught in a downward spiral, since it is the legalistic churches that are growing. I could accept that people who prefer the sort of church that focuses on long lists of rules would also prefer government intrusion into our personal lives. But this is far removed from a personal experience with God, and in fact the very definition of a miracle is what happens when God breaks the rules, allowing something to happen that just… seems… impossible.
The megachurches are growing, as it turns out, because they have done their homework. They have productized religious experience, and they are running their churches like a business, based on the latest market research. And so they represent the corporate mindset. How can that be holy? It is only replacing a tv show with a live performance. They have to pretend they are not worldly, so they pick a few obvious scapegoats that they think won’t offend most of their audience – e.g. GBLT’s are “safe” to pick on because research shows this only affects 10% of the population directly, and the closeted gays will still join in the chorus of hate speech, perhaps more loudly than most.
But still I have to wonder about this idea of political and religious identity – does it really come down to megachurches picking some issues and pushing them hard? Or is it that the church promotes the voter turnout in such a way that skews towards one party? I do not like the idea of churches telling people they will go to hell (period), yet I think that most people just wander into this mindset, looking for a spiritual experience, but finding an exclusive club instead.
Part of the megachurch experience intentionally includes small groups. They get their members to sign up for interest groups which are usually around a dozen people. This provides the personal touch, and it helps the leaders reinforce the legalism, since the group leaders try to find out what their members really think – then they urge them to accept the church teaching or be excluded from the group. It goes all the way up the chain as a pyramid scheme so there is only one doctrine which is directed by the big cheeses at the top of the church. So the political identity is directed by the megachurch leadership, which is corrupted by the fact that it is designed to be a corporation. Corporations do tend to go Republican.
I think that the wedge issues can be diffused, the progressive church can find its voice, and we can do these things without alienating the secular left. The only difference between the past and now is this: we have been holding our tongues so as not to offend(like Rita Bock said), which allows a large vaccuum to open up (as Rev. Loehr said). Our feelings about right and wrong have not changed at all, and we have everything in common with the secular left on the things that really matter, like the environment, social services, and making life better for the average person (at the expense of rich people). We can’t allow fundamentalists to own words that rightly belong to us, like compassion, social justice, family, and faith.