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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us November 3, 2005 Commentary Party-crashers need to head on home Rob Asghar Comedian Garry Shandling once announced that he was scaling back his social calendar. “It’s gotten to the point,” he said, “where, if I’m not invited to a party, I don’t even go anymore.” Words to that effect will soon be spoken by America’s religious right, after too many long nights of political party-crashing. In the latest outcry against their party-crashing routine, a well-known priest has complained loudly that the movement has “taken over” the Republican Party in a manner that is “divisive for the country.” Given that the accusing priest is an Episcopalian, many evangelical conservatives would huff that such potshots could be expected from a member one of Christendom’s relatively liberal, mainline denominations. The surprise is that this priest is a Republican insider: John Danforth, former senator from Missouri and past ambassador to the United Nations. Danforth is no leftist. In remarks to Episcopal Church leaders in mid-October, he sympathized with the Christian right’s concern about “the loss of our moral compass as a country,” adding, “When you look at the divorce rate and the out-of-wedlock births, they’ve got a point.” Yet this senator-priest takes his faith seriously enough to see through the motivations of many evangelicals who champion a toxic, flag-waving form of civil religion. “The thrust of what the (biblical) prophets were talking about was to rail against idolatry ... against the false gods, against Baal, against the worship of something other than the holy ... God. ... And when we create a political system that we represent as being ‘God’s’ political system, we are Baal-worshipers.” And no, Danforth is not guilty of the same, as his political life isn’t driven by hypocrisy cloaked in hubris. In a free nation, you are free to attempt to make everyone follow your moral prescriptions, to rejoice in America’s prerogatives as an empire, to be on the bleeding edge of jingoism, to wrap the largest piece of your identity within the flag. But if you do so while purporting to take the biblical worldview seriously, you engage in a sanctimonious sham that mocks your own certainty that your religion is the only route to transcendence. In his admirable book, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”, evangelical author Philip Yancey noted that, in the day of Jesus and his apostles, a good many policy battles could have been fought to prevent rampant practices such as infanticide or sexual abuse of children. Yancey attempted (futilely) to put the brakes on overeager peers by pointing out that the biblical worldview of Jesus and his apostles focused their attentions away from temporal politics. Contemporary evangelicalism sees Providence as the architect and navigator of American democracy. Yet the worldview of the Old and New Testament in no way suggests that democracy is equivalent to the Kingdom of God — instead, it calls for giving Caesar his due and getting on with other business, such as modeling forgiveness, compassion and charity outside the context of state governance. “Democracy was invented by Athenians — by pagans,” Gregory Paul happily reminded me over the phone. The un-apostle Paul, you might recall from last week’s column, is a renowned paleontologist who has outraged many by arguing that religion has done little to benefit America. While I wish Paul were willing to concede some benefits of spirituality, I find him a refreshing splash of chilly water in the face of religious arrogance. “The religious right is anti-Darwinian, but they’ve aligned themselves with an economic Darwinianism,” Paul told me. “It’s bizarre.” Bizarre, perhaps. To my mind, the religious right is indulging in something that is not so divine and all too human: a desire to have it all, to be seen as exemplars of a biblical tradition, to be the dominant forces in Caesar’s secular realm, to enjoy the ripest fruits of Western capitalism, to be the first to support the military option and even to have intellectual respectability in the scientific realm. What would Jesus do? Not this. The idolatry to which Danforth referred is properly known as syncretism, in which a person hedges bets by piling fashionable idols atop faith in one ultimate God. The religious right is today’s great syncretist, thanks to the colossal failure of preachers and theologians — other than a rare and bold Yancey or Danforth — to point out the contradictions. Evangelicals placed unusual faith in their kindred spirit, George Bush. Seemingly called forth by God for a time such as this, he was expected to usher in an exceptional era for syncretism. Given his administration’s slow fizzle, we can only hope that most evangelicals will give up their political one-night stands and return to higher principles. 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