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.
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
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