Peter Suderman, I think, is
far too magnanimous in his response to Andrew Sullivan's
knock on his perfectly reasonable
blog post concerning faith & politics. Actually, I'd love
to see Sullivan's grand declaration that "religious restraint in
politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal
democracy..."--agreed--reduced down to simply "restraint in
politics..." I no more want to live at the whim of the
hope-obsessed than the faith-obsessed, but it seems to me that so
long as we're going to accept
politics' devolution into a game of which team's king of the
mountain gets to regulate and mandate, we have little cause for
complaining about whatever the fantastical bee in the ultimate
victor's bonnet. Sullivan spent a good deal of this year stumping
fanatically for Barack Obama, a self-declared Christian dedicated
to "discovering His truth and carrying out His works" and a man
who wants to lead a government intervention (or, sometimes,
unappreciated "nudging")
into any number of areas of my life, and chooses to frame all of
it in moralistic terms. Sounds familiar, no?
A Christianist, it seems via process of elimination, must be
someone Andrew Sullivan didn't endorse for president.
This highlights an issue I don't see tackled very much: the
relationship between ideology and religion. Ideology (the -isms
we read about) operates the same way as religion. It asserts
certain assumptions about the world to make sense of what we
encounter in the world. In that regard, maybe we should begin to
regard ideology as the constitutional equivalent of religion and
begin to excise it from public discourse and policy in the same
way we're told we should excise religion from public discourse
policy.
Leroy Hurt| 12.21.08 @ 10:34PM
This highlights an issue I don't see tackled very much: the relationship between ideology and religion. Ideology (the -isms we read about) operates the same way as religion. It asserts certain assumptions about the world to make sense of what we encounter in the world. In that regard, maybe we should begin to regard ideology as the constitutional equivalent of religion and begin to excise it from public discourse and policy in the same way we're told we should excise religion from public discourse policy.
Sincerely,
Leroy Hurt
www.C-scapeBlogazine.net
www.YourUnfinishedBusiness.net
biniki| 8.28.09 @ 10:46PM
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