Kengor bemoans the fact that so many on the partisan left have invoked Christian themes in their pro-Reform Bill rhetoric, asserting in his view that this bill was God's own bill, affirmed by Christ himself. Kengor contrasts that embrace of Christian rhetoric with the "eight years of outrageous, baseless charges against President George W. Bush on matters of faith" leveled by those same liberals. The left's mobilization of Christian "social justice" rhetoric is all the more galling, continues Kengor, in that it includes provisions for abortion coverage, which Kengor sees as a disqualification for the bill's having anything at all to do with achieving Christlike goals. His piece concludes thus:
I want to make several quick observations here.
It’s a quite radical departure from eight years of scourging George W. Bush every time he confessed he prayed. At long last, there is room for Jesus in the inn, so long as the Savior “supports” a certain agenda. Who says conversions don’t happen?
First, as a left-leaning Christian, I've not been shy about citing my faith as the grounds for my support for the health care reform (i.e., steps toward socialization of health care--and I reemphasize that the bill that just passed is nothing like the full-scale socialization I think ought to happen). I think it's unconscionable that our society makes health care--even and especially life-saving (or quality-of-live-saving) health care--contingent upon a patient's ability to pay for it. My convictions regarding love for the neighbor over love for oneself, the proper ethical treatment of the poor and the sick, the skeptical attitude toward worldly wealth accumulation expressed in the gospels--all of these move me to resist a society where profit for a very few outweighs the good for a great many.
To affirm that my faith inspires me to support this bill, however, is something utterly different than asserting that God personally supports this particular piece of US legislation. I understand God as imposing upon Christians certain ethical guidelines to be applied (in the rich sense of checking in with, thinking deeply about, wrestling with) to life in general. I do not see God or Christ as writing (via verbal inspiration or by proxy) specific laws to be passed. Nor have I ever heard any health care supporter assert anything of the sort. Nor does Kengor cite a single politician, theologian, or social group who asserts anything of the sort.
Kengor charges the liberal left with unfairly castigating George W. Bush with religious fanaticism every time he so much as mentioned his prayer life, even though practically every president before him and Obama after him invoked Christian-religious themes in a variety of circumstances. Now, I believe one can study how and to what extent Bush II mobilized Christian rhetoric (and the kind of Christian rhetoric so mobilized) versus how and to what extent Obama mobilized it and conclude fairly that some stark contrasts separate how each used Christianity and to what ends.
But, insofar as critics decry Bush's (or any politician's) mention of his religious faith in the public sphere as inappropriate, I can agree. I've argued before against the idea that faith is purely private and must remain segregated from public stances. Rather, one's faith (in the broad sense, not just a religious sense) inevitably plays a role in the dynamics of one's positions and arguments. Banning faith from public sphere discourse only drives complicates the democratic process of exchanging ideas and fighting for/against/about different ideals. We need to become more adept at discussing faith-based stances, not less.
Problems arise, however, when faith gets played not as one factor in a decision-making process but as the only factor, a debate-stopper. The battle over abortion provisions in the health care bill,and the related struggles by many faith-based opponents of abortion over whether or not to support the bill illustrates this distinction. For Christians undergoing this struggle, their faith moves them to consider prenatal life as invested with personhood, generally from conception onward (not at all my own conviction, for the record). A bill that refuses to ban abortions in the strongest, most stringent terms, then, is from this perspective, a bill that tolerates medical murder. Yet so much of the rest of the bill moves in directions that do good--that provide coverage for the uninsured, that prevent companies from denying coverage for specious reasons, etc. And proponents of the bill strove mightily to craft policies that limited abortion provisions. The result? Some pro-life advocates ended up supporting the bill; others did not.
This was, I offer, a political struggle in which dynamic conversations about a faith-based conviction played a large role. At the fracture point were people--some people, at least--on both sides who understood and respected the faith convictions of their opponents, even if they disagreed with them.
I detect none of that respect in Kengor's column. For him, the abortion issue in the context of the health care bill isn't a difficult ethical issue that people of good faith--people within the overall Christian pro-life community--can disagree on. Rather, in Kengor's argument Christian faith emerges as a black-and-white stance against abortions (apparently, all abortion, anywhere, at any time, in any conceivable circumstance). Faith doesn't foster debate or conversation; it's instead an end to conversation, a shutting of the books that brooks no nuance or disagreement. Moreover, it wipes away any possible consideration of other things the bill in question might accomplish.
This stance of Kengor's I submit, is as contradictory as the stance he attributes to the liberal left. Faith can and should be part of the public debate, he argues, but apparently only when that faith matches his own exactly. Bush II's faith was fine, for Kengor, and any disagreement with it was just liberal grousing. But Obama's faith, Pelosi's faith, and the faith of other bill supporters (Christian and otherwise, pro-choice and pro-life)--this faith is a fraud. It's illegitimate. Why? Because it isn't his own.
But if you argue, as Kengor does, that faith can and should play a part in the public sphere and in political debates, then you must accept that faith itself--what it is, what it's not; what it enjoins, what it prohibits--becomes an object for debate, a thing contested rather than simply and homogenously affirmed. I suspect that Kengor and other religious right pundits who call for faith in the public sphere don't actually want to talk about faith; rather, they want their own specific faith to end all talk. Because once you start talking about faith, then you have to acknowledge a plurality of faiths, even and especially within your own faith community. This, I submit, has never been a strength of organized Christianity, especially not in its Protestant evangelical iterations.
More later,
JF
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