“Bernie Sanders And The God Factor”: Less A Matter Of Sanders’s Own Behavior Than That Of His Most Avid Supporters
The “S-word” — socialist — hangs over Bernie Sanders’s campaign like a spectral question mark. His self-identification as a “democratic socialist” is a matter of indifference to most supporters — especially the young — and even to many conservatives who assume all Democrats are socialist these days (remember the weird effort at the RNC a few years back to insist on labeling the opposition the “Democrat Socialist Party”?). But it’s certainly a new thing historically in a country where socialism never really caught on as a mainstream ideological tradition.
While Sanders is asked about the S-word regularly, another first he would represent has not really come into focus: his religious identity. He would definitely be the first Jewish president (or major-party presidential nominee), using the standard ethnic definition of that term. But he might also be the least religious president. Are either of these a real problem for his candidacy?
That question was posed in the Washington Post on Wednesday in an extensive article that quotes Sanders as confessing a rather vague belief in some sort of deity but no connection to organized religion. During his upbringing in Brooklyn by parents who immigrated from Poland, his Jewishness was “just as uncontested as saying you’re an American,” according to his older brother, who also recalls himself and Bernie listening to World Series games outside a synagogue where his father was attending Yom Kippur services. His first wife was from a similar background, while his second was raised Catholic.
According to public-opinion research, Sanders’s Jewish background shouldn’t be much of an issue. According to a Gallup survey in 2012, 91 percent of Americans (up from 46 percent when Gallup first asked this question in 1937) say they would vote for a Jewish president. Only 54 percent would vote for an atheist, however. So for Christians and Jews, at least (Muslims are another matter), having a religious affiliation is better than spurning God altogether.
That’s a good example of American exceptionalism. Just as center-left parties and leaders in Europe have no problem calling themselves “socialists,” the religious affiliation of politicians is not terribly significant. Last year Ed Miliband led the British Labour Party into a general election. That he was a professed atheist (like many if not most Labour politicians) from a Jewish background wasn’t an issue. In sharp contrast to American standards, Tony Blair’s religiosity was something of an oddity in the U.K.
So it could be that Sanders’s Jewish-socialist background and nonreligious identity represents a combo platter of associations that just don’t seem terribly American, at least to older swing voters (it is assumed that conservatives would reject Sanders on so many separate grounds that religion would hardly stand out).
Sanders is probably dealing with it as best he can by expressing sympathy with religious motives for political action, and most of all by not exhibiting that allergy to religion that besets a lot of highly secular people, including the kind of activists who are heavily represented in his base of support. That was probably the real value of his startling appearance at Liberty University last year. He didn’t make many conversions to his brand of politics. But he showed he did not consider himself as coming from a different moral universe from people with an entirely religious frame of reference. And interestingly, a new Pew survey shows that Sanders is perceived as more religious than the Republican candidate currently leading among conservative Evangelicals, Donald Trump, and roughly equal in this respect to the pious Methodist Hillary Clinton.
There may be a temptation in the Sanders camp to compare him to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, who were great presidents not identified with any organized religious group (the former claim is a bit off since Jefferson, for all his heterodoxy, was an Anglican vestryman). But that could be a false analogy, since Jefferson was strongly interested in religious speculation and polemics (with his own highly expurgated version of the New Testament), while Lincoln’s rhetoric and thinking were saturated in a sort of nondenominational folk piety.
Perhaps the smartest tactic for Sanders is to remain authentic and more generally stress his distinctively American credentials. Every time he says with great frustration that he wants this country to “join the rest of the world” in providing health care as a right or in offering some other commonsense benefit, he simply reinforces the impression that his values are exotic and perhaps even suspect.
For the kind of Americans who administer religious litmus tests, there’s nothing Sanders can or should do. Many conservative Evangelicals and some traditionalist Catholics, after all, deny Barack Obama’s Christianity, and some deny fellowship with liberal Christians generally. It’s not an honest standard, as was made evident in 2004 when the occasional churchgoer George W. Bush inspired great passion among conservative Evangelicals via various verbal tics and dog whistles, while the very regular Mass-goer John Kerry was regarded as a bloodless, faithless liberal elitist.
But for people of faith who do want to find common ground with Bernie Sanders and the movement he represents, it’s important that he doesn’t view religious motivations for social action as cheap imitations of the real thing or silly superstitions that real grown-ups have overcome. This may be less a matter of Sanders’s own behavior than that of his most avid supporters, who sometimes strike others as a mite superior. While God may rightly have no formal place in Bernie Sanders’s world, he needs to find a place for God’s followers among his own.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 27, 2016
“Trump’s Conversation With God”: I’m A Great, Great Christian. Got A Bible And Everything!
An absolutely true news item: In an interview with CNN, Donald Trump said, “I have a very great relationship with God.”
God responds: What relationship? I haven’t heard from you in, like, 40 years.
Trump: Look, I’ve been busy becoming fabulously successful. Making business deals, banking billions of dollars, hosting my top-rated reality show, buying and selling beauty pageants, marrying and divorcing amazingly gorgeous women.
My life’s fantastic, almost as good as Yours!
God: And now you’re running for president of the United States.
Trump: That’s right, and I’m totally killing it in the polls! Everybody loves me, especially the evangelicals.
God: You have got to be kidding.
Trump: Don’t act so shocked. Who else could these people vote for? Huckabee’s a total zero, Cruz is a nasty Canadian, Jeb is a low-energy loser, and Rubio’s a punk.
They’re pathetic, and I say that with all due respect.
God: And this is how you think a devout Christian talks?
Trump: Hey, I’m a great, great Christian. Got a Bible and everything!
God: Yeah, I heard. The one your mother supposedly gave you.
Trump: I carry it everywhere. Actually, somebody on my staff carries it for me. But it’s an unbelievably great, great Bible. I spend all my spare time on the jet reading it.
God: I saw the YouTube clip from Liberty University. ‘Two Corinthians’? Really?
Trump: Two Corinthians, Second Corinthians, what’s the big deal? Those kids knew what I meant.
God: They were laughing, Donald.
Trump: Sure, because they love me. Everybody loves me. Have you seen the crowds at my rallies? Unbelievable! Ten thousand people showed up in Pensacola!
God: Ten thousand white people. I was there.
Trump: Look, we ran out of tickets for the others. It happens.
That doesn’t mean African-Americans don’t love me. Hispanics love me, too. Even Muslims love me, and by that I mean the good Muslims, which I assume some of them are.
God: I’m just curious. Are you remotely familiar with the concept of tolerance? Compassion? Humility?
Trump: That’s the problem.
We’re too nice. Why do you think America is such a disaster? We’ve gotta stop being so nice. The rest of the world thinks we’re weak.
Your son Jesus, with all due respect — he was way too nice.
God: Excuse me?
Trump: In one of those gospel blogs, I forget which, they quote Jesus saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Seriously? Because, frankly, my neighbors in Palm Beach are a pain in the a–. And, even if they weren’t, I couldn’t love anybody as much as I love myself.
God: That was Matthew, FYI.
Trump: McConaughey? Where? He’s amazing. Did you see “The Dallas Buyer’s Club?”
God: No, I’m talking about the disciple Matthew. That’s the gospel you were citing. He was one of the original evangelicals.
Trump: I knew that. Everybody knows that. Matthew was a great, great disciple. He would have been absolutely fantastic on The Apprentice.
God: Know what? We’re done here.
Trump: What I was saying before? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge, huge fan of Jesus. An incredible guy, and a helluva carpenter.
If he ever comes back, I’d hire him in a heartbeat. Tell him I said so.
God: I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.
Trump: But, frankly, all that stuff he preached about turning the other cheek, not hating your enemies — it didn’t work out so great for him, did it?
That’s my point. Being nice doesn’t cut it. Being nice gets you crucified.
God: Do me a favor, Donald — quit dropping my name in your speeches and interviews. Just knock it off.
Trump: I will, I will. Right after the South Carolina primary.
God: No, stop it right now.
Trump: But what about Iowa? And New Hampshire? Please, Lord — can I call you Lord? — I really need that Christian vote.
God: I still can’t believe they’re buying this lame act.
Trump: Oh, they’re totally eating it up. Amazing, right?
God: The Bible’s not supposed to be a political prop. Put it away.
Trump: Oh, come on. You know how long it took my staff to even find that thing? How many of my warehouses they had to search?
I’ll make you a deal. If You let me keep using the Bible in my campaign appearances, just for a few more weeks, I promise not to quote from it.
No more Corinthians. No more McConaugheys.
God (sighing): See you in church, Donald. You can Google the directions.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 25, 2016
“Episcopals Now Second Class Christians”: Anglicans Demote Episcopalians As Global Christianity Gets More Polarized
The Anglican Communion effectively banished its American branch, the Episcopal Church, for three years last week because of disputes about same-sex marriage. That rift is just the surface of a much deeper division, reflecting the polarization of Christian life in the 21st century.
The Anglican Communion, which began as the Church of England under Henry VIII, is now a global network spanning 165 countries. There are about 85 million Anglicans in the world, including about 2 million Episcopalians mostly in the U.S. As of this week, however, those Episcopalians are second-class Anglicans: Members cannot vote in any Anglican Communion decisions on church doctrine and cannot represent the communion in any interfaith bodies. Essentially, for three years, Episcopalians are Anglicans without any standing in their own church.
The suspension took place at a meeting of “Primates,” the archbishops and other leaders representing the 44 constituent Churches of the Anglican Communion. The reason for suspension came last June when the Episcopal Church removed doctrinal language defining marriage as between a man and a woman, and authorized marriage rites for same-sex couples. While it’s still up to individual churches whether to solemnize same-sex unions, but the vote formally allowed them to do so.
According to the Primates, these actions were improper because the Episcopal Church acted on its own. “Such unilateral actions,” the Primates said in their official statement, are “a departure from the mutual accountability and interdependence implied through being in relationship with each other in the Anglican Communion.”
According to some Episcopal leaders, that is bunk. National church bodies routinely make doctrinal decisions on their own. (Some Anglican Churches still do not ordain women, for example.) What this is really about is homosexuality—and what that is really about is what kind of church the Anglican Communion is today.
The answer, for decades now, is a divided one.
Until the 19th century, the Anglican Church was—as the name implies—basically British, and headed officially by the British monarch. With the spread of the British Empire, however, came the spread of Anglicanism to all corners of the world. By the end of the century, the contemporary Anglican Communion came into being, including not only the Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland, but also the Episcopal Church and churches in “provinces” across the world.
Two major developments created the schism facing the church today: the liberalization of the Episcopal Church, and the growth in power and numbers of African, Asian, and South American ones.
George Washington was an Episcopalian. So were Madison, Monroe, FDR, and seven other presidents—11 in total. And in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Episcopal Church was perhaps the leading Christian denomination in America.
During this time, Episcopalianism embodied American propriety and upper-class values—conservative but reasonable. J.P. Morgan, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush. Prim church services, without the Catholic “smells and bells” but with the decorum and hierarchy. V-neck sweaters, pearls, and country clubs.
That began to change in the civil rights era. African American parishes had been around since the 1850s, but often separate but (un-)equal. In 1958, the Episcopal Church’s General Convention passed a resolution affirming “the natural dignity and value of every man, of whatever color or race, as created in the image of God.” Over the objections of Southern leaders, the church began to take sides in the civil rights struggles of the time.
The change was gradual and uneven, but by the end of 1970s, liberals had the upper hand, and conservatives had mostly left, often to join the newly minted Christian Right, made up largely of evangelicals, Baptists and Catholics. Women were ordained as priests in 1976, and as bishops in 1989. Prim church services started to loosen up. By the 1990s, the Episcopal Church had changed from the starchy denomination of Rockefeller Republicans to a smaller denomination of (mostly) liberals.
At the same time, the rest of the Anglican Communion was changing radically, with adherents in the Global South coming to outnumber those in Europe and North America. The churches in British Commonwealth countries emerged in different social contexts, with different values, and different (often hostile) relationships to liberalism. Moreover, they found themselves competing with evangelical inroads, conservative (until two years ago) Catholicism, and Islam, with the most pious-seeming religious tradition often “winning.” For all these reasons and more, the emergent Anglicanism of the Global South was a far more conservative Anglicanism even than the old Episcopalianism, let alone the new one.
The watershed moment came at an important Anglican conference in 1998, when theological conservatives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America defeated the liberals on a key vote: homosexuality.
Arguably, the split we saw last week is just a later stage of the process begun 18 years ago. Homosexuality is the catalyst but not the only contentious issue. To liberals, the Episcopal Church is moving into the 21st century, setting aside Biblical fundamentalism and responding to how people actually live their lives. But to Anglican conservatives, the Episcopal Church has lost its way, moving toward a mushy universalism that downplays Christian exclusivity in favor of pluralism, and takes liberal positions on abortion, LGBT equality, and other hot-button issues.
Perhaps the great open question in American religion is whether liberal denominations like Episcopalianism have a future or not. (As Jack Jenkins at ThinkProgress noted, Presbyterianism—Donald Trump’s denomination—is even more liberal than the Episcopal Church, and Presbyterian leaders have frequently criticized Trump’s positions on immigration and Islam.) American Christianity in general is in a period of steep decline, and mainline Protestant denominations—plus white, non-Hispanic Catholics—are declining the most.
We are moving toward a religiously polarized America. Thirty percent of Americans between the ages of 18-29 profess “none” as their religious affiliation, while at the other extreme, around 35 percent of Americans subscribe to a resurgent ultra-fundamentalist evangelicalism. (77 percent of those evangelicals believe we’re living in the End Times.) Mainline Protestants, once the dominant religious group in America, are now just 18 percent of the population. Episcopalians are less than 1 percent.
To the extent religion continues to provide a source of inspiration, community, purpose, and ethical motivation in people’s lives, liberal Christianity should have a lot to offer, seeing as it provides those things without preposterous beliefs, divisive social mores, or fire-breathing sermons. And it does, to many. But even though 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God, they seem uninterested in expressing that belief in moderate, reasonable churches.
The American religious landscape, then, resembles the Anglican Communion as a whole. On one end, a shrinking number of religious liberals, and at the other, a fierce religious conservatism. In coming apart at the seams, the Anglican Church looks a lot like us.
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, January 17, 2016
“Another ‘Trump’s In Trouble’ Story”: Even Trump’s Former Campaign Aide Doesn’t Think He’ll Win The Nomination
The end of the year brings another entry into the Trump won’t win oeuvre (of which I am not only a connoisseur but also contributor). The interesting twist is that the latest warning storms ahead for the tyrant of Trump Tower come from a (possibly disgruntled) former campaign aide.
Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg, who started consulting with Trump in 2011, joined him full time in 2014 and got sacked shortly after Trump got into the race because of a series of racist Facebook posts, shared his concerns about the Trump trajectory with The Daily Beast’s Tim Mak.
Falling poll numbers in the first key states, a lack so far of reserved advertising, a low net favorability and underperformance in the college-educated voting bloc that dominates the early presidential contests – all these contribute to a darkening forecast for the Trump campaign, Nunberg argued.
The way Nunberg sees it, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will cruise in Iowa and the long-heralded (including here) coalescing of the establishment behind Marco Rubio will occur in time for the Florida senator to win that primary.
If Trump loses Iowa and New Hampshire, he’ll stumble into South Carolina. “Once Cruz wins Iowa, and if he beats Trump in New Hampshire, which he very well could, Cruz would win South Carolina, from a momentum perspective,” Nunberg predicted.
If this scenario plays out, Nunberg doesn’t “see a pathway to the nomination – he certainly wouldn’t be the frontrunner anymore, and his numbers will start to fall.”
It’s an intriguing scenario. Certainly the conventional wisdom – and polling – have lined up behind the idea of a Cruz Iowa victory. The New Hampshire case isn’t quite so strong given that Trump still has a comfortable lead there. Of course the caveat is that even now, a little more than a month before the first ballots are cast, polls are not necessarily reliable. As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has noted, something like 40 percent of Iowa voters and half of New Hampshire voters decide who they’re supporting in the last week before they go to the polls.
Nunberg told Mak that his decision to speak out was the result of a concern that Trump may not be getting a clear picture of his impending doom. But there are indications that he may be getting the message. For one thing, the veiled suggestion that Ted Cruz is an inauthentic evangelical because he’s from Cuba has returned to Trump’s stump speech (because God only knows that Donald Trump is a true evangelical). At the same time, Trump’s Iowa organization is ramping up, per the Wall Street Journal. And the retired reality TV star has started saying that he’s actually going to spend money on television ads in the new year.
At the same time Rubio’s rivals for the establishment mantel have started gunning for him, with both a pro-Jeb Bush super PAC and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie slamming the Floridian for absenteeism. I suppose it makes sense for the various traditional candidates to want to wipe each other out in an attempt to get a solo shot at Trump and/or Cruz, but The Donald’s free pass continues to amaze.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, December 30, 2015
“Iowa Intrigue”: Huckabee And Santorum Backers Reportedly Plotting To Help Rubio Against Cruz
The late stages of the invisible primary would not be complete without reports of intrigue and skullduggery in Iowa, with campaigns forming tactical alliances against common enemies. We have one today from National Review‘s Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson, who report that supporters of the last two caucus winners, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, are so bitter at being eclipsed by Ted Cruz that they are conspiring to block the Texan and instead elevate Marco Rubio. There’s only one problem with that scenario: Under Republican caucus procedures, there’s no way the disgruntled social conservatives can achieve their alleged goal without damaging their own candidates, who will probably drop out if they don’t do surprisingly well in Iowa.
The reason Democrats are usually featured in these Iowa intrigue stories is that their caucus procedures encourage tactical alliances via minimum thresholds for “viability” (i.e., the opportunity to elect state convention delegates, which is the only measurement of success), meaning that support can be loaned to favored candidates and denied to disfavored candidates on a precinct-by-precinct basis. Republicans, by contrast, have a simple candidate preference vote at their caucuses, so there’s no way for would-be tacticians to loan or borrow support without hurting their own candidate’s statewide tally.
That’s what makes the NR report suspect. Are Huck and Santorum zealots really so angry at Cruz that they’d screw over Huck and Santorum to help Rubio? That’s not at all clear. Yes, the campaigns of the two former caucus winners are going after Cruz hammer and tongs, trying to exploit Mike Allen’s pseudo-scoop about Cruz telling an audience in sinful New York that fighting same-sex marriage would not be a “top-three priority” (long story short: Cruz enclosed the issue in his top priority, defending the Constitution as he misunderstands it). But that’s because the Texan is obviously the primary obstacle to their survival in Iowa. Helping Rubio try to beat him by giving away any of their own meager support would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise.
The intrigue-within-the-intrigue is burnished by the fact that the only people on the record validating the part of the cabal involving surreptitious support for Rubio are (1) a 2012 Santorum supporter who’s now neutral, and (2) Craig Robinson, proprietor of influential web page the Iowa Republican, who’s not really a Christian right figure but who does for some reason seem to hate Ted Cruz. There is a quote from a Santorum campaign official saying that Rubio’s immigration record is “more honest” than Cruz’s, but that’s in the context of condemning both.
The bottom line is that what Alberta and Johnson are reporting appears to be either a Rubio campaign plant, or scuttlebutt from scattered folk in the Huckabee and Santorum camps who actually want their candidates to drop out sooner rather than later and are (disloyally) already making their plans for the future. In Iowa, the intrigue is often deeper than it first appears.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 30, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 