The Opiate of the Masses?

[Agi T. Prop here, filling in for Catherine. This work is cross-posted at The Defeatists!]

In today's WAPO, Jennifer Moses makes the case that liberals are as much to blame for bible-thumping--using religion to further their political goals--as are the Christian Right. That's a fair statement. Both sides are guilty of perverting religion to their own ends. Christians typically invoke God and Jesus in the public sphere to bolster their policies and secure their power by invoking a "higher authority". I mean, if God says to vote for Mr. X, then by hell you better vote for Mr. X...you don't want to piss off God now, do you? Moses writes:

Given the human habit of unleashing violence in the name of God, perhaps I'm naive, but I tend to believe that the Christian religiosity that's the common currency of great swaths of our country generally does more good than harm, giving people a sense of purpose and community where they might not otherwise have either.

More harm than good? Christianity (and all religions for that matter) has probably done more to promote war, suffering, death, torture and poverty than it has to prevent these evils throughout history. But this is the 21st century; no one uses religion anymore to promote these evils. I don't think religion is innately bad--I just blame the people who USE religion as a means to a repressive end.

But I'm talking mainly about what I call the "good" Jesus -- the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, the one who, through his people, clothes the naked and feeds the hungry.

Oh, 'cos I was thinking about the "bad" Jesus. Okay, on with the "good" Jesus:

In the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it's that Jesus who's been making the rounds, so much so that Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, came to Baton Rouge to praise the efforts of local churches. (Well he should, too, since the federal government has all but abandoned us to our own resources.) The local newspaper covered the visit in detail. What it failed to do was mention that there might be something suspect in having a White House office of faith-based anything.

Republicans don't like it when the government helps people, but that all changes when Jesus works for the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Okay, but her point is:

As far as I can tell, progressives and liberals of all stripes don't even begin to fathom the despair and confusion most ordinary Americans feel when they hear the latest violent rap song or see a billboard plastered with an image of a 16-year-old clad only in Calvin Klein underwear. The right wing of the Republican Party, on the other hand, has long understood that most Americans yearn for something nobler in our national life, but it doesn't care unless it can use frustration and despair to harvest rage, and rage to harvest votes.

What's the answer? I don't know, but it might help if our political leaders stopped spinning and, like the prophets of old, spoke the truth.

People turn to religion because religion contains "truth" whereas politics is filled with lies. Liberals might invoke the Sermon on the Mount to justify welfare programs, but they're certainly less candid than the Christian Right, who will shrewdly use religion to legitimize war and poverty. Instead of trying to come up with positive solutions for the public sphere, people turn to a mysterious deity in the sky to solve their everyday problems. Now I get it. Religion is not for the weak-minded, it's for the lazy.