Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason
Posted: August 19, 2009.
Print: The Independent
Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: “The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital.”
The election of Obama - a black man with an anti-conservative message - as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right’s view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.
When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn’t compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of “Drill, baby, drill” have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right’s world-view - to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation - has swollen. Now it is all they can see.
Brilliant. This comports with a theory I have that all of the purportedly unsolvable, intractable social problems, the so-called culture wars are ultimately reducible to religion, with the exception of abortion. i.e. Faith-based thinking. The whole seems to me to be the most potent argument that dishonesty has terrible unseen consequences. If we are ever able to convince a majority that faith is not something deserving of repect in one cordoned off part of life, I think our descendents will look back at this period with melancholy. Every debate about these culture war issues should begin with an interrogation of the idea that faith is a noble quality. This argument could take the form of a book by someone more compitent than I…
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