Obama Been Elidin'

I think Barack Obama means well. I believe his professions of faith are sincere. They do not strike me as brazenly cynical as the constant hectoring and nagging of various "family" organizations, or the usual gaggle of Republican politicians who use their public piety as currency.

That does not mean that Obama is right, or that it was even a point that needed to be made. Nor did it sound as if Obama had any real solution to propose.

Like most liberals who are religious, Obama finds a powerful demand for social justice embedded in the great faith traditions. He took a swipe at those who would repeal the estate tax, saying this entailed "a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don't need and weren't even asking for it."

Well, you can find principles for social justice within or without traditions of faith. I think there is a sort of quiet, maybe even unintentional arrogance, on the part of many people of faith, to presume that secular or agnostic/atheist folks are somehow bereft of what are really rather fundamental, universal moral principles.

And I don't know where he gets the idea that the people who would benefit from the repeal of the estate tax haven't been explicitly asking for it. Just because Bill Gates Sr. has voiced his opposition doesn't indicate a trend. There is no other reason for the prolonged life of the asinine "death tax" pseudo-debate, than because the elite class of people who rent politicians expect certain returns on their investment. It's a rather naïve rhetorical flourish on Obama's part.

But he insisted that social improvement also requires individual transformation. When a gang member "shoots indiscriminately into a crowd . . . there's a hole in that young man's heart -- a hole that the government alone cannot fix." Contraception can reduce teen pregnancy rates, but so can "faith and guidance" which "help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy."

Fine. But again, what Obama -- and really all the faith-based hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers on both sides of the aisle -- fail to see is that such personal, transcendent issues are specifically not the role of government. You want to set up a church group to counsel troubled teens in your neighborhood, then do it already. You want to try to guide others into your belief system, then go out and give it your best shot. Just don't expect everyone else, whether or not they agree with your personal take on the universe, to endorse it, institutionalize it, or pay for it. It's that simple.

Michelle Goldberg, whose book I would like to eventually read but probably won't for some time to come, lightly chastises Obama for reinforcing the myths Republicans have implanted about the godless left (when in fact a great many people on the left are religious, they just don't feel the need to rub everyone's nose in it), but I think misses the more important point as well.

He gets the spiritual void at the heart of American life, and the need for social movements to offer people meaning and existential solace along with practical policy solutions. "Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds -- dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets -- and they're coming to the realization that something is missing," he said. "They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them -- that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness."

Again, how and why is this somehow the role of a government or a political party? Fix the roads, regulate commerce and product quality, maintain the court system, defense capabilities, infrastructure, banking, etc. -- that's the role of government, as far as I'm concerned. I hate this touchy-feely "something is missing" shit that has nothing to do with running the country. Look, if you feel something's missing, go to church. Knock yourself out. What kind of a person turns to a politician, of all people, to feel better about themselves?

This is where it starts getting real thick:

When I was in Dover, PA during the intelligent design controversy, a preacher's wife told [me] that if evolution is true, life has no meaning. "Where's this universe heading?" she asked. "What's the purpose of it all? There's no standard, no guidelines."

Yes, and? Why is this relevant to anything? The objective implication of this woman's plaint is that the Dover court's role -- and by extension, the American government's role -- is to affirm her need for structure and purpose, for assurance in an indifferent, entropic universe. Government apparently is there to resolve the regular existential crises of believers.

Let's stipulate that these folks have come by their tragic misapprehensions of government's functionary role for a reason -- politicians have encouraged them to do so. In their need for structure and assurance, they bond themselves to a deity who scratches them behind the ears when they're good, scolds them and swats them across the nose when they're bad, sometimes does shit to them for no good reason at all, and dangles the promise of a better future after their earthly rehearsal. And they vote for their political leaders the same way.

Maybe I'm the one that's naïve here; maybe I'm just stubbornly refusing to recognize the cold hard political reality that politicians instinctively know. If so, that's a sad commentary on the state of the electorate, and maybe Mencken was right that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

But we never see nearly the level of energy expended on getting to the vast pool of non-voters, compared to the energy spent attempting to wheedle percentages of religious votes back and forth over various social issues and non-issues. Why is Barack Obama preaching to the choir; why isn't he trying to motivate people with voter registration rallies and events or something along that line?

It's not that Obama's speech doesn't have some worthwhile points; it does. But he and Goldberg miss the greater point that mainstream public figures seem reluctant to talk about, this double standard where the religious get to wedge their belief system into public policy, and then erect a wall around their pet beliefs to protect them from the supposed predations of godless bureaucrats. Instead of reminding the religious pharmacist that his beliefs do not entitle him to push his customers around, and deny adult women prescriptions for birth control, they would rather lecture everyone else on their intolerance for his, um, intolerance.

So instead of getting caught up once again in this tiresome feedback loop, this circle jerk of parsing the role of religion in American public life, how about we start from the other end, and determine what sort of things we want government to be responsible for? Shouldn't religion be a personal matter, and as such, shouldn't it be out of the government's purview?

Or is it that Americans really do need to affirmed and validated, that scratch behind the ears, rather than good, efficient, competent, honest government?