Proving that he is in it to win, the serially-married Newt Gingrich planted his lips on the “X marking the spot” of the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty [sic] University.
In a speech heavy with religious allusions but devoid of hints about his presidential ambitions, Gingrich drew applause from the graduates and their families in the school’s 12,000-seat football stadium when he demanded: “This anti-religious bias must end.”
“In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive,” Gingrich said, deriding what he called the “contorted logic” and “false principles” of advocates of secularism in American society.
“Basic fairness demands that religious beliefs deserve a chance to be heard,” he said during his 26-minute speech. “It is wrong to single out those who believe in God for discrimination. Yet, today, it is impossible to miss the discrimination against religious believers.”
Of course religious belief is divisive. It divides believers from non-believers and believers of different things from each other, both in theory and in practice. The late Jerry Falwell was an expert in division, the “moral majority” against the immoral secular minority, so called. Gingrich was of course engaged in division with this very speech. An A+ pander, of course.
The idea that believers in Protestant Christianity face some sort of discrimination against them is ridiculous. Every President but about 3 or 4 has been a Protestant Christian. Jefferson was a Unitarian and a Deist; Grant was nominally Protestant but a vigorous advocate of separation of church and state; Nixon was a Quaker, which some don’t consider Protestant and of course Kennedy was Roman Catholic. When one member of Congress near retirement dares to announce that he is a non-believer, Phyllis Schlafly loses her mind. It’s the desire of some Christians to run the government as a evangelical Christian oligarchy to “lord it over” us non-Christians that gets us secular-minded people to get up early on a Sunday morning and blog, including those of us whose spouses are teaching Sunday School three miles away in a Baptist church.
If recent anti-religion authors like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett were not commentators or academics but rather officials in the Justice Department or on appellate courts as judges, then the poor victims of discrimination who filled the stadium at Liberty University to hear Newt Gingrich pander could analyze those officials’ conduct and make a case. But non-believers and, to a substantial extent, believers in religions other than conservative evangelical Christianity are the ones with a reasonable expectation of discrimination against them in American society on the basis of religion, not Protestant Christians.
When I learn of a bunch of non-Christians attacking a bunch of evangelical Christians as they walk out of their house of worship on Sunday morning, I will call it discrimination. When 20-25% of American evangelical Christians are living in fear for their safety or of losing their jobs or getting their windows shot out or their church desecrated by vandals because of their religion, then I will agree with Gingrich’s pander and will provide support against such discrimination on this blog. Until then, it’s just Newt’s well-done pander.
The idea that basic religious ideas don’t have a chance to be heard is ridiculous. What Gingrich means is that he wants the government to get heavily involved in the religion instruction business. Gingrich does not take a similar tack towards market economics, interestingly; his apparent embrace of state-administered religious instruction does not reach to an embrace of state-administered economics, wherein hammers and plywood don’t have a chance to get sold unless the government goes into the hammer business. I am glad that Gingrich has a skeptical eye towards government-managed economics; his lack of skepticism about government-managed religion is a disappointment (or evidence of a streetwalker-class pander.)
But I give Newt Gingrich an A+ for a high class pander. Especially since the audience was polite enough not to boo him off the stage for being a serial adulterer. I would not mention Gingrich’s private life except he’s the one bringing religion into the public square, and he was pursuing that adulterous affair while organizing the House impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about an affair. Nice to hear that Liberty University has a lot more forgiveness in their hearts for adulterous Republicans seeking power, which after all is what Liberty’s founder Falwell spent his life seeking and acquiring.
(Cross-posted at Crablaw Maryland Weekly.)
