Brooks's column today was so stupid, such an exercise in dancing with the religious freak what brought yuh - or, given the views on dancing that his patrons hold, NOT dancin' with them - it made my blood boil. The title says it all: "One Nation, Enriched by Biblical Wisdom".
Brooks's entree to this subject is the current debate about the "One Nation, Under God" part of the Pledge. He notes a recent book called "A Stone of Hope" by David Chappell, a book about the Civil Rights movement, that supports his thesis that the Bible contains wisdom surpassing that of all secular sources.
To Brooks, the Civil Rights movement had two components - Northeastern mostly secular mostly white liberals with an "optimistic" view of human nature, who felt that the eradication of racism would "merely take a combination of education, economic development and consciousness-raising to bring out the better angels of people's nature."
The other segment of the movement was mostly black and southern. It's leaders, including MLK, "drew sustenance from a propehtic religious tradition, and took a much darker view of human nature." MLK and other leaders from this school "did not believe that education and economic development would fully bring justice, but believed that it would take something as strong as a religious upsurge." The point is that the Civil Rights movement "was not a political movement with a religious element . . . [but] a religious movement with a political element."
The conclusion to this segment of Brooks's column: "If you believe that the separation of church and state means that people should not bring their religious values into politics, then . . . you have to say goodbye to the civil rights movement."
Obviously, this doesn't withstand much analysis. The Civil Rights movement was clearly aiming for political rather than religious transformation. If it's goals are viewed as primarily religious, then it must be considered an abject failure. Churches remain the most segregated institutions in the United States, whereas government service and public accomodations are the most integrated. In the end, regardless of the religious beliefs of the movement's leaders - which was an incredibly diverse lot - from atheist Communists to a variety of Black Protestant movements to Northern Jews to Catholic labor leaders like Walter Reuther - the Civil Rights movement sought a transformation not of relgious views but of political and legal rights. Not integrated pews, but integrated schools. Not a transformation of white Southern preachers (among the strongest defenders of the status quo) but of judges, politicians, university presidents, union leaders and corporate CEOs. The check MLK brought to be cashed in the March on Washington was not written against the Bible's account, but against the Constitution's.
Brooks's issue here is not the civil rights movement, obviously, but the current Christian Right movement, which presents its best face when it says that it is merely giving expression to its religious views in its politics. Brooks pays tribute to the Civil Rights movement in a backhanded way by trying to import its unique legitimacy to that of the Christian Right movement. Brooks argues for their moral equivalence. This argument is patent nonsense, but its one the Christian Right has been pushing for years. I guess I could go into the many ways in which this is wrong, but the main difference seems to be that while the Civil Rights movement used religious motivation to achieve strictly political ends grounded in our Constitution, while Christian Right movement uses political means for religious ends at odds with our Constitution.
BUT BROOKS GETS EVEN MORE OUTRAGEOUS FROM HERE, arguing that religion is important, get this, because "religious wisdeom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences[.]" (Good thing he qualifies "science" with that "social")
"For example," Brooks writes, "watch thoroughly secularized Europeans try to grapple with Al Qaeda. THe bombers will declare, 'You want life, and we want death' - a fanatical relgious statement par excellence. But thoroughly secularized listeners lack the mental equipment to even begin to understand that statement."
Would that we all lacked the equipment to understand such a statement. If the best argument that relgion can muster is that it helps us to understand the beliefs of religious fanatics, then it's conceded the field. Brooks inadvertantly fingers the problem with political action that attempts to attain religious ends. It winds up conceding the field of political action to irrational and ultimately unreconcilable viewpoints.
But the framers got the equation right - leave the religious debates for church, where it won't get too out of hand, and keep the government away from refereeing such irrational and ultimately fruitless disputes.