I suppose I should begin this post by saying that while I am not an atheist I am also not a very religious person. I have not attended church regularly in very many years. The only time that I went to church because I wanted to in the last ten years was for my wedding. Yet I am strangely drawn to questions of religion and the role it should play in American political life. Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, makes some very good arguments in
this article on why there should be a spiritual/religious movement on the left and how it can engage in politics.
The point that I find most interesting (and that I have thought myself many times before reading this article) is how the free market ethos has had a negative influence on our culture and how conservatives (especially those of the paleo-Santorum brand) don't seem to recognize this fact. Here the essential passage, and more thoughts of my own, is below the fold.
There is a massive undermining of religious and spiritual sensibilities in the modern world, but the main problem is not secularists but rather the materialism and selfishness that have become the common sense of global capitalism. Free market ideology encourages us to see each other in narrow utilitarian terms, to "look out for number one" and maximize "the bottom line" of money and power. It is the values of capitalism that are undermining our spiritual capacities, not the refusal of liberals to allow prayer in schools...or nativity scenes on public property.
This is the point that I come back to especially when I hear my embarrassment of a senator Rick Santorum promoting his new book. Why is it that the vast majority of households are dual income? It's because they have to be. My wife and I have our first child on the way and not a day goes by when we don't discuss how nice it would be for her to be able to stay home with our children. That's not because I think women shouldn't have careers (clearly I don't believe that). The reason she won't stay home is not because she thinks that being a mom and not having a career would be unfulfilling. The reality is that if she were to quit her job and stay home we wouldn't have a home for her stay in. Now if you buy Santorum's presentation of what liberals supposedly believe you would have to come to the conclusion that the reason my wife has a job is because she is a radical feminist who looks down her nose at stay at home moms. You would have to believe that my wife and I don't really care about family when the reality is very much the opposite.
Santorum has also explicitly said that the degredation of our culture (including the Catholic sexual abuse scandal) is due to liberalism. I have to say that, builiding on the point made in the Tikkun article, the dominant political view in our nation for the last three or four decades has been free market capitalism. I don't direct this criticism only at Republicans. This also drove the Clinton administration. So if anything the cultural changes that we are seeing are less the result of liberalism than they are of a market view dominating the politics of our nation and pushing out any attempts to see things beyond economics.
Lerner goes on to say that a "spiritual perspective has a right to be championed in the public sphere because it offers a redemptive alternative to the allegedly neutral, "values free" ethos of capitalist social organization." Although I am not a religious person myself I have to agree with this assessment to a certain extent. We definitely need to maintain some distinction between religion and the laws that govern our nation but that doesn't mean that there is no place for some guidance by Americans beliefs about God and religiously based moral codes. There is even a place for this within a supposedly Godless liberalism.
I think it was Robert Reich, I could be wrong, who said that Republicans are uncomfortable with any idea that doesn't immediately result in making money. If the paleoconservatives like Santorum want to find the reasons why we have social ills they may want to start by looking at these economic problems which have been created by market fundamentalism rather than railing against gay marriage or, as Santorum has, the entire city of Boston. Before we can even begin to find answers we have to ask the right questions.