Is Trump Reading A Trend?
Former President Donald Trump declared that the November election will be “Christian Visibility Day” in opposition to President Joe Biden’s declaration of “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31, which coincided with Easter Sunday this year.
“Election Day, November 5th, will be the most important day in the History of our Country. It will also be Christian Visibility Day, the biggest turnout of Christians in the history of our Country!” the former president declared on his Truth Social account.
Axios provides some context:
The presumptive GOP nominee is encouraging supporters to buy the "God Bless the USA Bible," which draws inspiration from country singer Lee Greenwood's patriotic anthem, "God Bless the USA."
"We must make America pray again," Trump said in a video posted to his Truth Social account Tuesday encouraging supporters to make the purchase.
The former president said "religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country."
But isn't this not so far from remarks the liberal Cardinal Gregory made on Face the Nation Sunday evening?
Whereas faith used to be the- the- the voice, the moral voice that political people, whether they adhere to everything, they would turn to find that the moral compass with faith. I think, in some cases, it's the political world that's beginning to set or claiming to set the moral voice. We've switched position. There is a- there is a great need, I believe, to place faith in its proper position, which is not necessarily antagonistic to the political arena but to seize the- the responsibility of being that guiding principle, that moral light for our people to turn to. And that has- that's been turned upside down in so many cases, too many cases.
But then I found a remarkably opaque think piece from William A Galston in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, The Danger of Making a Religion of Politics. Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Wall Street Journal columnist, and a regular talking head in the usual places, making him a conventional neoliberal. And he's worried:
The effort to explain rising internal opposition to liberal democracy has become a cottage industry in the past decade. In an op-ed for the Washington Post last month, journalist Fareed Zakaria argued that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, rapid economic and social changes have corroded communal life and empowered minority groups in ways that have “unnerved” longstanding majorities. “Freedom and autonomy often come at the expense of authority and tradition,” Mr. Zakaria wrote. “As the binding forces of religion and custom fade, the individual gains, but communities often lose.” The result, he said: We are freer but lonelier, and we struggle to fill our sense of emptiness.
It gives me a headache just to try to diagram these sentences, much less figure out what they mean. TS Eliot could have written this a century ago, which is part of the problem with TS Eliot. Galston goes on,
New York Times columnist David Brooks agreed, contending last month that dissatisfied Americans are feeling an absence of “meaning, belonging, and recognition.” Like Mr. Zakaria, he suggests that infusing liberal politics with moral meaning is the remedy for the declining power of religion.
If you think about it, the views of Zakaria and Brooks are precisely the sort of thing to which Cardinal Gregory objects, "it's the political world that's beginning to set or claiming to set the moral voice." Galston is also against it, but for much more obscure reasons:
I have two qualms with this argument. First, it minimizes simpler explanations for the declining confidence in liberal democracy. One is that the U.S. has been ill-governed for the past two decades. Consider the record: two costly, mostly failed wars; a financial crisis from which it took years to recover; a pandemic during which Americans experienced more restrictions and more deaths per capita than many other advanced societies; a postpandemic inflationary surge; cultural conflict that has polarized politics. Against this backdrop, we need not invoke religion to explain declining confidence in liberal institutions, which are, like all forms of government, judged mostly by their fruits.
In other words, there's no need to invoke the loss of religion to explain the current mess, it's just that the politicians have screwed things up by themselves. But that just begs another question: why did the politicians screw things up? Aren't we allowed to seek out causes? He then makes something of a leap:
But for most people, a sense of true purpose and belonging won’t come through politics. This is especially true in liberal societies without enforced religious orthodoxies, whose denizens pursue their own conceptions of meaning and worth mostly in families, voluntary associations, religious institutions and work.
What he envisions here is one view of the constitutional principle that there must be no established religion, which earlier he equates with the whole idea of liberal democracy. Let the people work things out, by implication outside the political realm. You have bowling league Tuesday nights, church on Sunday, work all week; these have nothing to do with politics in a liberal democracy. He concludes,
When we ask politics to fill the role vacated by religion, the consequences are dangerous. The natural longing for perfection shifts from heaven to a realm that resists it. Doctrinal commitment to a set of secular ideas is pitted against the diversity of belief inherent in free societies. A religious-like fervor for a particular set of political values undermines the spirit of conciliation that makes peaceful common life possible.
To cure our current ills, better governance is a safer bet than a politics of meaning, even one designed to bolster liberal principles and hopes.
As best I can tell, he's saying we should forget religion, it goes against liberal principles. What, then, do we do with religion? I think the only answer is a secularist one, that religion is an evolutionary vestige based on primeval myths that are little better than dinosaur skeletons in the local museum. We must concentrate on good governance independent of religion, because, apparently, values, at least those based on religion, are misleading and deleterious to social order. But what do we do with common-sense observations from even secularists like Richard Dawkins?
"If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I choose Christianity every single time," he said. "I mean, it seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that, I think, Islam is not."
Dawkins argued that Islam is less compatible with British values than Christianity, particularly regarding the treatment of women and homosexuals.
"I'm not talking about individual Muslims, who, of course, are quite different," Dawkins said. "But the doctrines of Islam — the Hadith and the Quran — is fundamentally hostile to women, hostile to gays. And I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith."
Isn't this the essence of what Trump is saying?