Faith

We never really could figure out what Christianity has to do with right wing Republican politics. In particular we can’t get our heads around the attacks on “bleeding-heart liberals.” Because the bleeding heart they are talking about is Jesus Christ’s. The heart of Jesus bleeds for the poor, the hungry, the sick and injured, the oppressed, the weakened old and the helpless children. Yet these are the people that the rabid right disdains, and the people who try to help them are the ones they insult with alarming venom, cynicism and hate.

In any case, we don’t believe religious faith should be an issue. Lots of Kerry supporters have strong religious faith. Kerry is apparently one of them. But Kerry talks about faith accompanied by works, which is an emphasis with a long history within the Catholic Church, that has led to many orders of monks and nuns being created, and many saints, as well as activists nearer to our time who may someday be proclaimed as saints. Like that bleeding heart liberal, Mother Theresa.

Of course, religion seems to enter in with issues like gay marriage and abortion. Yet people of faith, people who belong to organized Christian churches and may even be clergy, disagree on the politics of these issues. It’s true that in the history of the West some of the most violent disagreements, leading to individual deaths and even warfare, have been disagreements over doctrinal interpretations or political entanglements, within Christianity.

There is nothing that John Kerry would do that limits the ability of any person to make a moral choice based on their own conscience. There is nothing that John Kerry would do that prevents anyone from living their faith. This reflects a view about faith and the American political system. It also reflects a faith.

But when people talk about faith in this election, they can mean other things. There is the question of whether George Bush himself believes, as do some of his supporters, that he is an instrument of God to bring about the Apocalypse, the Rapture and the Last Judgment. Or if he believes he is a contemporary Crusader, at war with Islam.

There is the further question of whether people are relying too strongly on their faith in George Bush, either for religious reasons, or because they turned to him in a traumatic moment, and they have invested him with a faith that overrides perception of reality.

That question was raised in particular this past week by a study by the Center for Policy Attitudes and Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. It was conducted in September and October of this year, well after the 9-11 report (finding no real connection between Saddam and 9-11 or al Qaeda) and several reports confirming that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq at the time that Bush started the war, nor were there any ongoing or even recent WMD programs.

The survey asked the same questions of people who identified themselves as Bush supporters and Kerry supporters. But the questions weren’t on their opinions; they were on facts.

Here’s what the Bush supporters said:
72% said that Iraq had WMDs
75% that Iraq had given substantial support to al Qaeda
55% that this was the conclusion of the 9-11 commission

Yet 58% said the U.S. should not have gone to war if Iraq had no WMD.

Only 31% realize that the rest of the world was largely against the Iraq invasion.
Just 9% believe that people in other countries favor Kerry in the election. In fact, a widely reported recent survey showed that Kerry is favored in 30 of 35 major countries, and in population total by 2 to 1.

But their faith in Bush went beyond what Bush had claimed was true and isn’t, or didn’t turn out to be. They believed Bush had positions on issues contrary to his actual ones.

69% said Bush supports the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
72% that Bush supports the treaty banning land mines.
57% that Bush supports the Kyoto treaty on global warming
74% that Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements.

Bush is on the record as being against all these. There are a couple of possible conclusions. One is that faith in Bush alone holds sway, and since these voters obviously favor these things themselves (since being Bush supporters they wouldn’t say he had positions they didn’t agree with), they naturally think he feels the same way. Maybe because they just like him, and don’t follow the news, or maybe because they are going on faith.

Another is a little more nuanced: that faith in Bush predisposes them to accept the public relations image the Bush administration has tried hard to project; for example, by naming a law that allows more pollution, Clean Skies, or by holding a White House press conference to announce funds to fight AIDs in Africa that they immediately withdraw, but quietly.

This would also predispose them to believe the untruths and the vicious lies that the Bush administration tells regularly. This in some ways is the most understandable. Because every American would like to have faith in their leaders. It’s the only way that we as a country can solve our common problems, and work towards a better future. But having faith in lies does no one any good, except perhaps the liars. Yet even they have to answer for their souls.

There is also a more cynical possibility: that people don’t care if Bush is telling the truth, as long as he gives them a good feeling. If this is so, it’s not clear just what they have faith in. Unless they believe Bush is sent from God and whatever he does must be right. Otherwise, it becomes a question of whether they have faith in the idea of the truth. This is what scares people about Bush and his supporters: that they aren’t “reality-based.” They don’t care what happens to people in this world, because their faith is fixed on another world, and on the elect, the people who believe exactly what they believe.

People of faith should not let faith become identified with that point of view. We prefer keeping faith with our children and the generations to come, as well as keeping faith with the people we depend on every day, our fellow human beings, and the life of this planet that sustains us, and of which we are a small part. In the end we find religious zealotry and its associated politics repugnant not only for ignoring justice and charity, but for its ungodly pride, its lack of humility.