If you are familiar with my diaries, chances are you know me primarily as an expositor of liberal religious views. That's what I put most of my energy into, both here and elsewhere. I joined up with DailyKos back in 2006, became a hard-core participant on Street Prophets shortly thereafter, and left Street Prophets after a few blow-ups (still have fond feelings for most people individually, but the site feels toxic to me). So, I write about religion here most of the time. Street Prophets at one point felt like exactly the community I'd been looking for all my life. Here, I've found a niche, and a small, loyal audience, but it's a strange experience often.
On the flip, where I'm at today with some of that strangeness.
I went to bed last night right after popping into a GBCW diary in which religion was a major theme.
I'd also been ruminating on an exchange from an earlier diary of mine.
From those two examples, I'm musing on two interrelated insights today:
- George Lakoff might as well be talking to a wall when he posts on Daily Kos.
- The distinction between doctrine and tradition is lost on most contemporary liberals.
First, Lakoff has made a cogent philosophical argument why "fact-based" arguments are insufficient for political efficacy. He's made his argument here many, many times, often ending up on the rec list. Rather, he pays attention to the fact that we all perceive all facts within a frame. There's a certain addiction to the achievements (and they are real achievements, both epistemological and practical) of the rationalist empiricism of the scientific method that gets in the way of Kossacks really absorbing the full import of what Lakoff is trying to get at. Overall, the dominant vibe, as far as I can tell, seems to be "we can just reason our way with facts to the right position and how could anyone be so dumb as to not see the facts in front of them?" This is the essence of the "reality-based community:" Facts are trustworthy; narratives are not.
Occasional references to "moving the Overton Window" aside, that basic perspective of facts over narratives strikes me as the dominant assumption here. It's an assumption I don't share, though I do share a horror at the Right Wing's effective and total disregard for facts. I see this polarization of political discourse into a camp that likes facts and statistics and another that is completely unmoored from any sense of responsibility to ground claims in truth as one of the saddest aspects of the contemporary political scene. I agree with Frederick Clarkson's point that the religious right's continual culture war is the primary culprit for this polarization. (For recent examples, see this and this.) But, I also see a long-standing historical division between Anglo-American philosophy and Continental philosophy in play. The division between a "fact-based" and a "frame-based" way of thinking goes back to that philosophical divide, with Anglo-American philsophers dismissing Continental philosophies as "fuzzy." It's the assumptions of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition that Lakoff has spent his career demolishing, but I have yet to see people sort through the cognitive dissonance that should have arisen between Lakoff's proposals and the whole idea of a "reality-based community" given the popularity of both perspectives on the site.
Which gets me to my second point, that the distinction between doctrine and tradition is lost on a certain kind of liberal. In contemporary discourse, religion is generally reduced to a set of beliefs, a self-contained set of propositions about the world one either accepts or rejects. In other words, in this understanding, to be religious is to agree with a particular doctrine - and all repercussions of religion flow from this starting point. This is the base assumption, I believe, I was resisting in the first image of the diary, So, Like, Are You a Christian? It was also the assumption to which the commenter I linked to was committed.
However, religion is not simply a set of beliefs, but a set of activities that bind people together - both as communities and to their past. As one friend, a Jewish philosopher who teaches at a State university, described an unspoken assumption that surfaced among his students: "they see religion as a respectable form of ancestor worship." This set of activities is as integral to what religion is as is a body of beliefs. And, tradition and doctrine often exist in a productive tension with each other. How the two relate to each other is always up for grabs.
So, let's go back to the attempt to peg me as a Unitarian Universalist in the exchange I linked to. There is much about Unitarian Universalism I respect. As a liberal theologian, there is much about Unitarian Universalism I am indebted to, as the impetus for liberal theology in the United States came out of Unitarian Universalism. However, liberal theology has been a strand of theological thinking across denominational lines for a good two centuries now. On doctrinal grounds, I am an agnostic as to the question of universal salvation, and I remain committed to a Protestant understanding of the corruptibility of reason that is pretty much anathema to the core perspective of Unitarian Universalism. But, more fundamentally, my religious commitments bind me to the biblical and Protestant traditions - it is the strengths and weaknesses, the good and evil in those traditions to which I maintain a loyalty and responsibility. Furthermore, there is a direct line in German Protestantism to liberal theology that does not go through Unitarianism, and which informed American liberal theology from the late nineteenth century onwards.
For many readers, WeBetterWinThisTime's conflation of race and religion must have seemed simply absurd. After all, I know of at least two African-Americans on this site who identify as secular, as does the friend with whom I exchanged dissertation drafts. What these examples show is that there is no necessary link between race and religion. However, the conflation of race and religion that emerged in that diary is a historical connection, which despite being a contingent connection is a concrete connection that was described to me several times by African-American classmates when I was in seminary. I read the exchanges last night, half-asleep, realizing that there was a great deal of talking past each other because of a basic blindness to that fact. For more wisdom than I have on the matter, I turn you over to James Cone, a premier theologian of the latter half of the twentieth century:
I generally prefer to think things through more before I post, but it's the end of the year, I'm burned out, and this is what you get. I wish my philosophical chops were more honed than they are.