A friend alerted me to a description of Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right after the author, E. J. Dionne Jr., was featured on an hour of the Hugh Hewitt Show. From the publisher, Princeton University Press:
The religious and political winds are changing. Tens of millions of religious Americans are reclaiming faith from those who would abuse it for narrow, partisan, and ideological purposes. And more and more secular Americans are discovering common ground with believers on the great issues of social justice, peace, and the environment. In Souled Out, award-winning journalist and commentator E. J. Dionne explains why the era of the Religious Right--and the crude exploitation of faith for political advantage--is over.
Now, this is amazing. If you vote on the right because you believe in those positions--and, in fact, believe they better reflect Christian values and goals--you are "selling out," and "abusing faith," and (from the next paragraph) you are a "prop for the powers that be" who is being "crudely exploited for political advantage." But all this would be over if you would only learn to vote on the left! If you favor positions on the left for exactly the same reasons, then you're just doing the right thing. I think I know why people like Dionne are unable to see the unbelievable hypocrisy of this, and I'll explain in a moment. But first, another excerpt:
Based on years of research and writing, Souled Out shows that the end of the Religious Right doesn't signal the decline of evangelical Christianity but rather its disentanglement from a political machine that sold it out to a narrow electoral agenda of such causes as opposition to gay marriage and abortion. With insightful portraits of leading contemporary religious figures from Rick Warren and Richard Cizik to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Dionne shows that our great religions have always preached a broad message of hope for more just human arrangements and refused to be mere props for the powers that be.
The idea that all politically conservative Christians care about is abortion and same-sex marriage is an embarrassingly misguided one, and yet very widespread (I believe this goes back to the left's unwillingness to understand people on the right or take them at their word). Dionne is honestly unaware that people could possibly think that the issues of justice (including economic) and social good are all better addressed by conservative positions than liberal ones. Have they ever even heard of the Acton Institute? No, for Dionne and many of the religious left, the only possibility is that conservative leaders have deviously trapped gullible religious people in a "narrow electoral agenda."
One has to make a deep, unexamined assumption to end up with this inexcusable blindness. The assumption is: liberal policies are obviously moral and conservative policies are obviously immoral. Therefore, they conclude, if any religious person thought about anything other than abortion and same-sex marriage, then naturally, he would be on the left instead of the right. Therefore, widening his scope of issues would keep him from voting for conservative candidates and thereby becoming a "prop" of the right. (How it could be that taking on and promoting uniquely leftist policies would not simply cause these newly leftist Christians to become "props" of leaders on the left is never actually explained.)
It's amazing--and a little scary--how rarely people on the religious left examine themselves and their rhetoric and how little they understand conservatives. This doesn't bode well for robust and productive debate anytime in the near future.
On more than one occasion in the past year I've heard the sentiment (mostly from pastors) that we should have church on the grass and give all of what would otherwise be the "building fund" money to the poor. People who say things like this generally tell glowing stories about members of their congregation who do "radical" things like sell most of their worldly possessions and move to the mission field. In one such story, a young man sold most of his stuff and was now living in his car. 