[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Steve,

Steve said:
What other examples of theocracy besides obligatory religious 
overtures in Presidential addresses do you see? The attempt to get 
creationism taught in science classes is certainly one attempt at 
theocracy (imposing Christianity upon nonChristians) through 
democratic means. Can you suggest some others?

Matt:
I don't have any off the top of my head.  Part of that is because I 
don't fear theocracy as much as I fear corporatocracy.  I think the 
only reason right-wing political strategists care about Christianity is 
because, on average, 1) the less education you have, the more 
likely you are to be religious and 2) if you are from a rural as 
opposed to an urban environment, the more likely you are to be 
religious.  And because the Republican, urban, manufacturing North 
won the Civil War and became rich (since industrial manufacturing 
is where the money is), the rich took over the Republican party, 
and FDR ran as a Democrat to ally himself with the poor and the 
South (who would not vote Republican because the humiliation of 
the Civil War was still too vivid).  When the Nixon campaign 
formulated the Southern Strategy to put the South in play for 
Republicans again, the South in those days was both less educated 
and more rural on average than the North, so it became a natural 
(and an excessively winning) strategy to yoke unconscious racial 
bigotry with explicit religious rhetorical grandstanding.  And the 
people who did so were largely what Eisenhower referred to 
privately as those "stupid Texas oilmen" who wanted to turn back 
the New Deal.  These people only care about money: they are 
neither inherently racist or religious, but simply use both as a 
means to a single end: getting as much cash as they can to buy 
islands to live on when the whole ship they've pillaged goes down.

Because of the right-wing propaganda echo-machine, I think much 
discussion about religion is distorted and needlessly inflammatory on 
both sides.  I don't blame it on the religious; I blame it on the 
corporatists who are simply taking advantage of them.  The more 
heat they can generate, the easier it is for them to steal our money 
while we're looking in the other direction.  And I can only applaud 
you and Stout for wanting to effect a Copernican shift in the dialogue, 
so as to better talk about both religion and politics.  This would be 
getting the anti-theists and theists who are more flamethrowers than 
thinkers to see that they live each other's deaths (which is no way to 
live intellectually).  I say godspeed to that.  My only suggestion is not 
wedding "secularism" to the position occupied by the miltant atheists 
who think that religion sans phrase is a sickness.  I don't think this 
for douchey reasons like a dictionary told me so, but because I think 
it's good rhetorical policy to reserve an ism that has wide recognition 
(even if not totally good recognition--what term does?) for the 
position you want to fight for, and once we abandon atheism and 
anti-theism as too narrow in parameter, I'm not sure what other 
good flags there are to plant in the ground we want to occupy.

It's a weird thing to argue.  Rorty wanted to enlist Donald Davidson 
as a pragmatist for years, but Davidson demurred for years 
because he couldn't dissociate pragmatism from its traditional 
theory of truth.  Rorty made a judgement call after a cost-benefit 
analysis on the term "pragmatism," and decided pragmatism was 
the flag for him (and Davidson whether he liked it or not).  Was he 
right?  Time will tell.  But I would likewise, currently, decide that the 
benefits of choosing "secularism" as your flag outweigh the costs in 
most circumstances, and plant it for me (and Stout whether he 
liked it or not).

Matt