Religion and Politics -- hopefully a series

By Sara

In our times of disorder as to direction and all here at TNH, I propose a series of essays on the matter of Religion and Politics, but limited in the sense that I want to review several highly controversial books of recent pub dates, and I hope that folk will try to keep within the lines, and discuss the books which you have actually read, or the reviews of the books, or at least something that is not just off topic or off the top of the head. 

I have about a dozen books stacked up, read and underlined, and outlined,  that I plan to review, in series.  I have Chris Hedges, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2006, Free Press), and not really about religion, but about organization, "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy", by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.  Equally about organization, we have Kevin Phillips 2006 work, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" Viking, 2006.  I plan to review "The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege" by Damon Linker. Doubleday, 2006.  I have Michelle Goldberg's "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"  Norton, 2007 in the stack, and Ray Suarez's fascinating work, "Holy Vote, The Politics of Faith in America" 2006, Harper Collins.  I may deal with Jim Wallis's 2005 offering, "God's Politics: Why the Right gets it Wrong, and the Left doesn't get it",  Harper, 2005, and finally in the current stack -- underlined and with notes is Peter Singer's "President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George Bush," Dutton, 2004. 

Now I have another stack that I will refer to -- books about the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and thereabouts.  This is a history I have followed off and on since Arthur Miller's play of the early 50's, the "Crucible" got my father and grandmother to tell me what was, in fact an eleven generation passed down semi-secret story about an ancestor, Dutch Elwell, who was the last woman to be arrested in the Witch Trials.  I have I suppose a few of her genes.  The new histories of the trials have finally allowed me to recover something of who she was, and recovering her history has always been an objective.  She didn't get stoned or hung, in fact she was released from jail after a few days, as the Governor of Mass had decreed that no more spectral evidence could be introduced in trials.  But she lost in a sense -- she and her husband had to sell the farm, the house and the orchard at Gloucester, along with an interest in the fishing boat, and move first to Rhode Island, and eventually to South Jersey.  Dutch Elwell was no great religious leader or theologian, but she was a target of intolerance, and while my grandmother never attended a play, she did read Miller's script, and approved.  It fit with what she understood from the handi-me-downs of family history.  But in fact Miller wrote the work in the shadow of McCarthyism -- and that is how it was interpreted.  Since then the Salem Phenonema has been through two additional interpretations, the nutty witch stuff was a product of eating rye bread that was infected with a fungus that made people slightly mad, and what is the more recent, the application of demographic methods to both the accusers and the accused really reflects something like PTSD as a result of witnessing the scalping of parents and others during the King Phillips War on the Maine Coast, where many from the Mass. Bay Colony had moved in the decade before the War, and perhaps ten years before the Witch Trials.  In otherwords we have a ton of causes -- 1690's McCarthyism, Rye Bread and PTSD as a result of witnessing bloody massacres.  I still think they have to figure why it was all done 'in the name of God' and under the auspices of the Theocrats of the place.   In the meantime, doggie Elwell, named after Dutch, has come to life and requested a cookie run.  Elwell is a very proud Siberian Husky.  But that earlier Elwell Ancestor, who got jailed in the Salem events yea 13 generation's back, remains an inquisitive spirit.   

But why blog a series on Religion and Politics?  Why read all these books, or at least some of them?  Chris Hedges opens his work with a quote from Pascal;  "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from Religious Conviction."   How does that help us comprehend that grand Morman statement of last week -- or the referenced earlier Kennedy Contribution?  How do we essentially set up Pascal against the demands for religious confession in politics, and then the reviews as to whether it is complete and authentic, and put that against the "no religious test" language of Jefferson, Madison and the other founders?  But that is just the ideal -- reality is quite different.   

Chris Hedges gives us many ways to think about Fascism -- his introduction is a very lengthy quote from Umberto Eco, all of the criteria worth a good meditation, but what caught my attention was material in his last chapter -- Hedges Harvard Ethics Professor, one James Luther Adams (Interesting name for a Harvard Theological Don), had spent much time in Germany in the 30's watching the struggles of Protestants to not renounce the Old Testiment as had been demanded, and to attempt to stay independent from the Nazi Christian Church.  But then during the war he was recruited (by my great interest, George Marshall) to instruct officers designated for the occupation Army.  Testing them, he found these Officers more given to Nazi Attitudes than to American Ideals.  He found little difference between attitudes toward American Blacks and the perception of Nazi attitudes toward Jews -- and among the American Officers, no sensibility that either were really wrong.  He found no sense that a Christian Church should oppose white, gentile supremacy attitudes, and in fact, no attachment to any theology that stood in opposition.  Questioned on Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, they associated more with Nazi dogma than with FDR's various proclamations on war objectives.  Adams concluded that 100% Americanism covered over these blatent attitudes, that it was used as cover, and that it was a reliable measure of something of a fascist tendency buried well into the American psychic, at least at the US Army Officer level in the 1940's.  He sees it as deeply attached to Religion, but Religion mixed with American Culture.  (What difference from some of the current concerns with Boyden and others at the General rank?)   In effect, Hedges is convinced that little has really changed vis a vis the religious-political connection since the formal fascist era (and with the exception of Spain and Portugal) since the 1940's. 

I have questions about this historical construct -- but next post. 

Comments

[MarkC]

This sounds interesting but I would change the title to "Religion and Politics in the US" based on your list of books. With the possible exception of part of the book on Fascism, many of these works are talking about a specific time and place. I note this because my work touches on religion and politics, but not in the west, and not in the modern period. From my vantage, many of the bedrock assumptions people on both the right and the left make in discussions about church and state are really very historically contingent. In this context, the work of Talal Asad (Genealogies of Religion, Formations of the Secular) or Jeffrey Stout (Ethics After Babel, Democracy and Tradition) might be worth looking at because they attempt to examine situate ideas about religion in and politics of the current American moment in historical and global context.

[Minnesotachuck]

Sara, your mention of your interest in George Marshall incites me to comment, even if tangentially to the main topic. 50+ years ago I became addicted to World War II history when I stumbled across Samuel Eliot Morrison's fifteen (or whatever) volume history of the US Navy in that war in my high school library. Over the years my interests have evolved in focus from the guns and gore that appealed to a testoterone-soaked adolescent to the impact on personal lives and the interplay of inevitable tides of history versus the influence of individual people. I've largely kicked the addiction over the past couple of decades, but every now and then something triggers the old craving, as happened a few weeks ago when I saw and heard Mark Perry, the author of Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace, on BookTV.

Reading the book from the perspective of having lived through the past couple of decades, and especially the last seven, disastrous years, reinforces again the fact of how extraordinarily fortunate our country was to have those two men, plus a handful of others such as Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Stimson at the apex of our national leadership in those parlous times. Certainly the men immediately below Eisenhower in the European theater were nowhere near their caliber, nor were any of the other possible candidates for the COS position when Marshall was appointed in 1939, such as Hugh Drum or, God forbid, MacArthur.

In my view Marshall, especially, is in a class by himself. I don't see how anyone who has read about those years in some depth can doubt that the world would be a much different and worse place if someone else had been Army Chief of Staff during that war. And his contributions after the war, as Secretary of State and, later, Defense were very significant as well. But his impact during the war was crucial. It was he who had the vision to see, based on his First World War experience at Pershing's side, that a unified command structure was essential to success on the western fronts of the war. But just as importantly he had the combination of firmness in support of that view, plus the ability minimize the degree to which that firmness was taken personally by his British counterparts (and sometime adversaries) to successfully push his views through. For my money, Marshall is the greatest American public servant who never held the presidency, and in that latter category only Washington, Lincoln and perhaps FDR are near or above him in stature. And Roosevelt's historic reputation is based in considerable measure his having appointed Marshall as chief of staff over scores of more senior officers.

[silence]

Another book which, to some extent, covers the topic which you might want to read is Albion's Seed

[William Ockham]

Sara,

I think this is a great idea. As you might guess from my nom de blog, this is a topic that I'm more than interested in. I have some suggestions. From my point of view, the books you've listed appear to be more about Politics and Religion than Religion and Politics (I'll explain what I think the difference is). I haven't read any of them (except for Wallis's book), but I'm generally familiar with their content from excerpts, reviews, and my knowledge of many of the authors' other works.

The books on your list are primarily about the effect of religion on politics and I assume that is the focus of your series. This is an important topic and appropriate for this site. It is related to, but complete different from, the effect of politics on religion which is also of interest to me (even more than the other topic). This site is not the place for this latter topic. Other than Jacques Ellul, I'm not aware of any writer who handles both topics well.

I said all that just to say that I think it would be helpful if you provided a framing post discussing where you see the bounds of the discussion you want to have.

[Rev. Ray Dubuque]

It's not a book, but it's a publication on the www that deals with the topics of this post of yours which you and your readers might want to explore : http://churchvstate.org/

[Jodi]

I find the literature about witches very interesting.

So called WitchCraft played out as advantage and disadvantage for women, much as firearms did for Negroes.

[Sara]

MinnesotaChuck -- I agree with you, particularly recommending "Partners in Command" to anyone interested in why I find George C. Marshall so important. But I do not minimize FDR, because I actually think understanding how Marshall and FDR worked together over time is key to understanding that era. FDR comprehended how to keep fully advised, yet not day to day personally engaged in Military matters. They (FDR and Marshall) had a division of labor that was masterful. FDR deployed his political skills to support Marshall -- and Marshall knew how to work carefully with all factions in both the Congress and the military services, so as to open the way for FDR to do the kind of post-war political planning necessary to reaping the various goals of that war.

It is interesting how they forged their relationship. The first met on the margins of Versailles, relatively junior members of the political and military delegations. Marshall a temp. Lt. Col. on Pershing's staff, FDR, a young very social man with a famous name in Wilson's entourage. They met at various receptions, dinner parties, and being of comparable (low) rank, were seated a bit below the salt at these salons. Apparently both had traveled around Europe observing the disorder, the famine, and all the rest in the aftermath of 1918 -- shared discouragement with the emerging Versailles agreements, and if ever so briefly, they shared notes. The next time they would meet would be 1933 -- FDR needed the Army to build and staff camps for his rapidly expanding CCC program, and Marshall was in command of the base in N. Georgia closest to the earliest tree planting project. Marshall impressed, delivering camps under budget and before schedule. It was on those grounds they renewed their relationship...Marshall got promoted steadly, and FDR had precisely the kind of Military Partner he would need. They never really became social friends, apparently had few outside interests in common, rarely shared a joke, and neither seems to have ever reflected on the relationship. But somehow the two profoundly agreed on what shape a post Fascist world should take, and they worked as a total duo to get to that goal. It's too bad so little is generally known about the FDR-Marshall relationship, it really denies all of us the model against which to compare the present or any future President and his choice of military staff support. If people only knew as much about Marshall as they do about Patton.....

[Rose Davis]

Have you read Eve LaPlante's "American Jezebel" about her ancester, Anne Hutchison?

[Sara]

Let me continue with what I wish to focus on here. My thesis is that Religion and Politics have always been related to each other in the evolving American Culture, at times in a profoundly beneficial way, and at other times in destructive and highly disfunction ways. I want to tease out some of the narratives so as to enrich our understanding of the relationships, (understood as shared universes) to get us beyond the business of just calling out the obvious. What this is about is just a pile of books devoted to recent explorations of the relationships, and what they might indicate as food for deeper thought.

If others have books I am not using as valuable to this exploration, please use comments to review them.

It is my intent to write this over several weeks, with a series of posts. Something like a magazine series.