When Religion and Politics Collide

The role of religion in politics has rarely been so openly controversial as today. Religious conservatives are trying to reverse decades of their diminishing ability to determine political outcomes. It’s all about tolerance.

In our own Catholic diocese, Bishop Thomas Paprocki’s Family School Agreement reverses the traditional tolerance that Catholic schools have shown toward non-Catholics. That Agreement would require non-Catholic families of students at Catholic schools, including Our Saviour and Routt and schools in Springfield, to attend weekly Mass and donate 8% of their income to the Catholic Church. It’s hard for me to imagine, for example, how any Jewish family could accept those conditions and the disrespect for Judaism it implies. This shift back towards intolerance was prompted by Paprocki’s intolerance for homosexuals. He initiated the Agreement when a same-sex married couple enrolled their children at Christ the King elementary school in Springfield.

In Kentucky, Kim Davis has catapulted from county clerk to conservative celebrity, one of a number of public officials who refuse to follow the Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

The Republican presidential candidates are divided on this issue. Those who are more conservative and more supportive of fundamentalist Christianity echo her argument: she should be able to put her religion ahead of the law, even when acting as a government official.

The issue is again intolerance for homosexuals, but also part of a larger agenda and a broader intolerance. Note Senator Ted Cruz’s statement: “Those who are persecuting Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office. That is the consequence of their position. Or, if Christians do serve in pubic office, they must disregard their religious faith — or be sent to jail.” For Cruz, a “Christian” opposes gay marriage. Other ideas can’t be Christian.

Tolerance eventually leads to equality. Advocates for equality, as far back as we can see, argued for tolerance and tried to exhibit it. Those who said “no” were not willing to tolerate people they felt were inferior and so should be unequal.

These are skirmishes in a bigger battle between religious fundamentalists and more tolerant Americans within their own faiths, as well as between fundamentalists and more secular Americans.

For Cruz and many other conservative Christians in politics, religion always trumps the law. The highest law at any time must be their brand of faith. Government must serve Biblical law. This political ideology is called “dominionism”, deriving from the passage in Genesis which gives to men “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle and over all the earth....” Although there is nothing about one group of humans exerting dominion over others, Christian fundamentalists assert their own interpretation, as written by Rousas Rushdoony, the founder of so-called Christian Reconstructionism: “every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion.” Rushdoony denied the Holocaust, said democracy was the enemy of Christianity, and called Southern slavery “benevolent”. Among current Presidential candidates, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee follow this line of thought, intolerant of any religious interpretation except their own.

The politics of our major religions mirror wider American politics. Not only Catholics and Protestants, but also Jews and Muslims are divided into factions, one which cannot tolerate equality for gays, women, and any other religion, and one which preaches tolerance and supports equality.

That split has always existed. But as the center has moved inexorably toward equality, traditionalists have become angry. They are doing everything they can to slow down the future.

As Pope Francis pulls the whole Catholic hierarchy explicitly toward more tolerance, conservative Catholics push back. As Protestant denominations open their doors and their offices to women, to immigrants, and to gays, fundamentalists shut them out.

The ultimate battle is not just about religious practice. Conservative Christians claim that they are only defending freedom of religion, but there is no attack on their freedom to worship and believe as they like. They want more. They want laws which apply to all Americans to reflect their religious beliefs. They demand the right to disregard laws they don’t like. They want their religion to be our politics. They want dominion over the fish and birds and the rest of us.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 15, 2015

We Need Better Political Reporting

The presidential election is in the news every day, even though we won’t vote for another 14 months. Most of the news is about polls. There have been at least nine different polls in the last month in Iowa alone. Who is ahead? Who is falling behind? Who cares?

Instead of reporting about what kind of president the candidates might be, news organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on polling. The focus on polling comes from the desire to predict, to be the first to know the answer, like Hermione at Hogwarts. Political prediction may be an exacting social science, but it’s very limited in how far it can see into the future. None of the legion of political writers predicted last year that Bernie Sanders would be a Democratic candidate at all. No pundits predicted that Donald Trump would be a viable Republican candidate, even though he had run for president before.

We don’t need more predictions today. At this point, early in the campaigns, it is more useful to remind ourselves of what we already know about politics. I will try to do this in several columns. Let’s begin with equality.

Since the earliest days of our nation, human equality has been hotly debated. The American version of equality was revolutionary and inspired people all over the world. But that version also included cultural and political disdain for people who did not originate in northwestern Europe. For the last 250 years we have been repairing the flawed perspectives and politics of our founders. Equality remains a goal, not an achievement.

Each time another great stride toward human equality was on the horizon, powerful voices said no change was needed, no change was good, the past should be our guide. Those voices have been consistently wrong.

Defenders of racial inequality were wrong. Supporters of slavery were wrong. Critics of abolition were wrong. The creators of Jim Crow were quite successful for a long time, but they were wrong, too. Their political victory over racial equality was a great loss for millions of Americans, which still reverberates today.

America was one of the freest places in the world for Jews, but ancient Christian ideas brought over from Europe prevented Jews from winning even more equality than they did. When the Nazis threatened Jews across Europe, more were allowed into the US than anywhere else. But powerful religious voices and vote-counting politicians kept those numbers much lower than they could have been. Those people are now dead and dishonored. The Holocaust confronted traditional antisemites and an antisemitic political tradition with the consequences of these ideas, and Americans recognized they were wrong.

The opponents of women’s suffrage in the early 20^th century were wrong. Their arguments came up again in the 1960s, when the demands for equality for women went far beyond the vote. It seemed then that the defenders of inequality could still find an active following. But who remembers Bobby Riggs? He claimed he was fighting for the preservation of male superiority. He lost three sets to Billie Jean King and the larger argument about women’s equality.

Just in my adulthood, the struggle for equality among sexual identities has transformed our nation. The voices of “no” are still newsworthy and attract vocal popular support. But they have lost the battle for public opinion. They are reduced to arguing that an intolerant religion gives them the right to an intolerant politics, the same argument they made about race and gender .

The past voices of “no” now populate a Who’s Who of political losers. Have those voices been right yet? They achieved nothing more than delaying equality for people they didn’t like.

The American conversation about equality brings people into the streets every day. There is much more to hope for. Listen to the voices of our candidates. Which side have they been on?

The election is far away. In these next months, family crises will appear and pass, people will marry, children will be born, jobs will be won or lost. There is no hurry to add up hypothetical votes over the phone. There is plenty of time for the people who want our vote to say clearly where they stand in the endless river that flows toward equality, and which way they are swimming. Let’s judge them by their words and deeds.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 8, 2015

Science, Averages and Hokum

Suppose your doctor is sure that you have a serious condition, but the causes and treatment are not fully understood by medical science. She recommends a treatment. You go to another doctor, who says the same thing. Many other doctors in many different countries all say the same thing. On the internet you read about a doctor who says something very different and proposes a much cheaper medication, whose manufacturer pays him to praise it.

What do you do?

Republicans advise us to listen to the internet. Not about your personal medical condition, but about the health of our earth.

Republican politicians nearly all say the same thing. Don’t worry about climate change. The science is uncertain. Global warming is not happening. But if it is happening, it’s a good thing. Whatever is happening, don’t do anything about it.

Both NASA and NOAA reported that 2014 was the warmest year since data began being collected in 1880. That assessment was echoed by scientific agencies in Japan, Germany, and England.

Recently, climate scientists said that 2015 will most likely be even warmer. July was the warmest month ever measured.

Are the vast majority of climate scientists around the world right? What about those people on the internet who say “no”? What about Republican politicians who say “no”? How can you tell what we should do?

Numbers matter. The fact that well over 90% of climate scientists agree that the globe is warming and that human actions are the main cause is significant, just as you might be convinced if nearly every doctor agreed that you had a disease and needed treatment. What about that tiny minority, though?

That is where some understanding of science is important. When tobacco companies were denying that smoking was addictive and caused cancer, they paid and deployed scientists to write articles which “proved” there was no connection. The tobacco industry also overwhelmingly funded Republican politicians. When the Food and Drug Administration said in the 1990s that nicotine should be regulated as a drug, House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that the agency had “lost its mind”.

So-called think tanks, like the Heartland Institute, transferred money from tobacco companies and conservative donors to scientists who wrote articles denying the link between cancer and tobacco. The president of Heartland, Joseph Bast, wrote a piece in 1998 that is still on their website denying that moderate smoking or second-hand smoke was bad for you. A year ago, Bast publicly denied writing that article.

Scientists with PhDs, writing advertisements for private companies or political donors who pay them, do not produce science. Real science is much more complicated: funding comes from sources who are not committed to particular results; articles go through a lengthy process of peer review; every claim, every footnote, every number is checked for accuracy. The method of argument must stand up to careful scrutiny.

The science of global warming and the “science” of denial are separate and unequal worlds. The scientists quoted by deniers might have impressive credentials, but like the scientists who so confidently asserted that smoking was good for you, their results are bought and paid for. Their articles, reproduced in many forms by people with political interests, do not stand up to scrutiny. Take one of the most often repeated claims by warming deniers, that we have been in a cooling period since 1998, thus global warming is a hoax. The Heartland Institute has used a seemingly impressive graphic to make this claim for years. The graphic is not a fake, but the conclusion from it is. July 1998 was the warmest month ever at the time. The year 1998 was the warmest ever by a significant amount. That yearly record was not broken until 2005, but the monthly record was only broken this July. By highlighting the peak of July 1998, Heartland and others still claimed earlier this year “No global warming for 18 years”.

Measuring the temperature of the earth means averaging many thousands of temperature readings. Temperatures vary considerably by season and by region. In 2014, parts of Illinois were much cooler than usual, while California, Arizona and Nevada had their warmest year ever.

The variation across the globe in July 2015 can be seen in this map. Global warming is a long-term process that cannot be measured in any one month. In fact, the decade after July 1998 was significantly warmer than the decade before it, or any decade since measurement began. Averages show that no cooling occurred.

When you take the claims of global warming deniers, such as the so-called pause in warming, or the number of scientists who are skeptics, or the lack of consensus of the world’s scientists, and investigate the footnotes or check the math, you see that they are not doing science. Their work cannot stand peer review, so it is published on the internet, where they get maximum readership with minimal credibility.

Just like the miracle cures of snake oil salesmen, it’s hokum, paid for by oil companies and conservative billionaires, all to prevent government from doing anything. Like any miracle cure, it’s seductively attractive – take this pill and you’ll lose weight, cure cancer, prevent aging.

Swallow that at your own risk. It’s bad for your health.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 1, 2015