The Religious-Political Complex

Digy has a terrific post on the religious right and the religious left and what is happening there now -- or, not so much there as how religion in this country is being used by the power-brokers in Washington to control the discourse. It's mostly excerpts from an interview with Fred Clarkson, and if that's a name you don't know, you should.

He starts off with Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California, and goes on from there. Here's what he says about Warren:

Four years ago, Rick Warren wrote an inflammatory letter about the presidential contest to thousands of evangelical pastors. This letter revealed him to be a fierce partisan, who epitomized the worst aspects of the Religious Right. He declared five issues to be "non-negotiable" and those they "are not even debatable because God's word is clear on these issues.'" These included abortion, same sex marriage, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning and euthanasia. He later said he regretted the letter but that he had not changed his views.

While he is a skilled showman, he is unable to sustain moderation in style or in substance even before a national television audience. His real self leaks out. At the Civic Forum, Warren highlighted the top two litmus tests of the Religious Right — abortion and same sex marriage, and described abortion as a "holocaust." Following this he called on his audience not to "demonize" people with whom they may disagree — having just compared people who have a different view on abortion to the Nazis. In my view, Warren is an emerging leader of the Religious Right in transition, not of evangelical moderation.

I've been uneasy about Warren. I have to confess that at first I thought he might actually be a real alternative to the Dobson Gang, but it seems, from this and from what I've seen myself, that it's sort of like vodka is an alternative to gin -- just sneakier, that's all.

Clarkson goes on to discuss the role of the religious left and how a new, sanitized version is being created by the political honchos. As digby points out:

The real religious left, you see, is quite unabashedly liberal. They care about thing like .... Peace. Equality. Justice. Things that don't go down well with the parochial aristocracy of the Village.

The Religious Right is a creature of the village and now that the conservative movement is on the decline, they've decided to manufacture a "liberal" version for the same purposes. They can't allow the real religious left to have any influence, but they have fetishized religion in politics to such an extent that it's going to be hard to keep them out unless they create a useful substitute.

It's a fascinating and scary post. Read it. Read the interview, too.