Research shows growing influence of liberal Christians in politics.
By Nathan Crabbe
Staff writer
A new University of Florida study finds the religious left is emerging as an alternative to the Christian right.
Gainesville can be seen as a leading indicator of the trend. Faith-based liberal activism has long been a community tradition, from advocacy for the homeless to protests of executions.
“This is a town where there is certainly a religious left,” said UF political science professor Ken Wald, who collaborated with two other researchers on the study.
The research found that Christians who value being active members of a religious community tended to vote for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008. The research contradicts the “God gap” theory that white religious Christians are conservative and likely to vote Republican, Wald said.
He said the religious left is becoming more influential with the election of Barack Obama and his experience in community organizing and expansion of a White House office on faith-based initiatives. At the same time, Wald said, young evangelicals are placing more emphasis on traditionally liberal issues such as addressing climate change.
“I think you’re seeing the religious right erode a bit, and at the same time the religious left gets more aggressive,” Wald said.
In case you weren’t riveted to Snook’s comments this weekend, a discussion of Catholic homeless and soup kitchen services sprang up here, debating the social effects of believing in the higher moral authority of “church doctrine” that would refuse help to those living in sin. This story adds texture to Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Delong of Carlinville, Ill., at teacher at Southwestern High School in the nearby town of Piasa, will face a school board hearing November 2, after being suspended from teaching. A parent of one unidentified student thought the optional reading assignment was inappropriate for her child . . .
When this and this coincide in the same week, what are kids actually learning do you think, about the values woven into America’s power of story?
The teacher’s disciplinary hearing was Monday night, and perhaps there’s a better lesson in how it ended than in how it started, a fitting lesson of today’s American president as true to yesterday’s American precedent: Read the rest of this entry »
They have used the same arguments — for tradition and states rights, against “big government socialism” — in every era. In those past eras, history was not on their side. It is not in our time, either.
. . .These conservative arguments have always been tinged with more than a little hysteria, just like today. And no matter what, conservatives always insisted they owned the moral high ground.
Related news reinforces the Lux WorldView: the former governor of my state now accuses President Obama of attacking American capitalism. Jeb Bush does this not just publicly but apparently for calculated effect not on capitalism or the economy’s current crisis, but his own political prospects.
He needed to make the news he’s been so out of and must re-control if his plan to resurrect any of his traditional dynasties — the Bush family, GOP, Roman Catholic Church — with himself anointed to lead, has a prayer.
The latest round of thinking parents playing “What’s in a Name?” as a floating blog-game of religion and politics costumed as each other for Halloween, apparently started with Lynn and JJ and many commenters both places, riffing on Frank Schaeffer’s books and his new MSNBC repudiation of the evangelical radicalism he was weaned on, taught to use as a weapon of mass destruction in mainstream politics and governance, back in mid-century America. He used some very colorful and contentious language to make his case that this was a bad thing then and a worse thing now.
Oh,and Monty Python got involved because isn’t it axiomatic that satisfying intercourse between smart people just does revert to Monty Python sooner or later?
And here we are. My last comment at Cat’s is reproduced below as an invitation if you’re so inclined, to take on the Python persona of your choice and join the improv, here or there across artificial boundaries and dubious definitions as you prefer:
Well, let’s define terms immediately upon using them, or far better, stick to dictionary definitions. A good argument needs no redefinitions, right?
Or a good argument is almost entirely redefinitions. Need we first argue to define good argument?
To that point, I’m surprised you missed this Python definition of argument!
I laughed at that in the 70s because it was really absurd while Bill Buckley was doing Firing Line on PBS for real — breathing life into intellect and intellect into argument and argument into television.
Initially, Cleese simply contradicts everything that Palin says. Palin insists that it is not an argument but merely contradiction and asserts that “argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gain-saying of anything the other person says.” Cleese asserts that, to have an argument, he must “take up a contrary position.” Palin is frustrated until he realises that Cleese is actually engaging him in a sort of meta-argument about what constitutes an argument.
But it’s not so funny when television and real life become one big intellectually bankrupt contradiction clinic 24-7.
I think of “good argumentation” much like, ahem, other forms of healthy human intercourse.
It is meant as a creative force to uplift, connect and sustain virtues rather than do harm to anyone directly or indirectly through vice and self-indulgence. It is “good” intercourse and fun to share with the right person for the right reasons, when it’s Read the rest of this entry »
Last fall, we went on tour debating the topic “Is Religion Good For The World?” Our arguments were captured on film for a new documentary, Collision. Are our morals dictated to us by a supreme entity or do discoveries made by science and reason, make Atheism a natural conclusion? You decide.
And to go with it, I offer religion historian and former nun Karen Armstrong in Foreign Policy Magazine, with THINK AGAIN: God:
“Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. . . .”
Finally, Dale at Meming of Life is writing about how we can communicate with each other across religious-atheist divides:
Now, thanks in large part to the Internet, the nonreligious are finally finding each other and forming communities—with the same good and bad results. Sometimes we devote ourselves to good things like service and social justice, and sometimes we focus and facilitate a level of hatred and division that would not be possible without the reinforcement of that likeminded community.
So it’s not just a religious thing. It’s a human thing. And the difference between the good and bad result goes right back to comfort and contact with difference.
The more a group shuts off contact with unlike minds, the sloppier it gets.
Including Church. Including School. Including journalism and media coverage. Including “entrepreneurial” or “abstinence” or “extraterrestrial” or “family values” beliefs. Including political arguments about saving liberty or avoiding debt for the next generation.
Just for today, never mind the real horrors and outright tragedies — maybe if we stop to sweat some smaller stuff, we’ll adjust our eyes to better see how the big stuff got so big that we no longer even see it, and when we do catch a glimpse, why we usually can’t believe our own eyes.
If I write a blog essay on this topic today, I think I’ll somehow weave together these power of story posts:
What I am saying is that feeding the paranoid delusions of people on the fringe of the fringe contributes to a dangerous climate that may provoke violence in a few individuals. And convincing folks that Armageddon is on the way, and all we can do is wait, pray, and protect our families from the chaos that will be the “prelude” to the “Return of Christ,” is perhaps not the best recipe for political, economic, or personal stability, let alone social cohesion.
It may also not be the best philosophy on which to build American foreign policy! The momentum toward what amounts to a whole subculture seceding from the union (in order to await “The End”) is irrevocably prying loose a chunk of the American population from both sanity and their fellow citizens. . .
and I realize all over again how personal and individual power of story is, how it’s different for my nephews than for my own children (their cousins) not to mention other children I don’t even know . . .
“So easy a caveman could do it” sells insurance on tv as laissez faire capitalism good for us all. A new congressman boldly goes where no Dem has gone before, calling out GOP obstructionists and greedy antisocial insurance companies as “foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals” this week. [see six-minute mark into video]
Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?
. . .The once-popular killer ape theory is crumbling under its own lack of evidence . . . towards increasing evidence for humans as cooperative and empathic. . . people do not always adhere to the profit principle.
We care about fairness and justice and sometimes let these concerns override the desire to make as much money as possible.
Its purpose is to articulate and put into coordinated action the humanist perspective for making the world a better place.
As Dale’s personal epiphany puts it:
“The atheists weren’t absent. They were invisible. . . Prayers and songs and religious rituals announce themselves. Quiet conviction goes unseen.”
Education, health, peace, child welfare, the environment and all life on the planet we share.
The Big Bang fund.
The humanist parent education program!
Q: I’m a religious person. Can I be a member?
Sure! Secular humanists volunteer and donate to religious organizations all the time. Another analogy would be the Gay Straight Alliances across the country, which straight members join to support the efforts of their GLBT friends to achieve equal treatment. By joining a secular humanist foundation, you are supporting this effort by secular humanists to make the world a better place.
There will be forums and all sorts of interactive resources to come beginning January 1, but Dale already has the new FBB blog up here.
“It’s really wrong to assume that there is an inconsistency between seeing complexity and taking a strong position. . .In a society committed to free speech . . . we are called on to maintain our courage to confront bad words with better words. That is the hallmark of a university and of our democratic society.”
Suppose religious freedom and education freedom — indeed real education of any kind — are not only not the same thing, but can be shown to be in conflict.
A point that needs to be made more often is that religious schools suppress freedom of religion.
“Three in five (60%) of the general population and two in three (66%) of those in ethnic minority groups think religion is more divisive than race today.”
Fat kids, skinny kids, their heads are full of rocks?
What do kids get taught by public universities these days, particularly political science, history, journalism (and religion?) majors, about how human power of story plays out in real life?
Thinking Parents are quick to see family decision-making freedom at the center of both education and religion, to draw Venn diagrams with giant overlap or intersection between the two freedom sets.
But are we as clear-thinking as our own good minds should require, when it comes to accurately representing and defending society’s sets, those freedom circles we all move in and cannot move between except when that’s how we’re drawn?
Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way!”
We live in a 21st century, multicultural society, and yet we allow a significant proportion of our school system to be run by followers of supernatural faiths.
If this had no impact on our society then it would be fine, albeit unsettling on principle. But the evidence shown here Read the rest of this entry »
Public school? Check.
In the United States of America? Check (well, it’s Tennessee, and the states aren’t very united these days, does that still count?)
Constitution still technically in effect despite a decade of stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with evangelical Catholics? Hmmm. . .
At a football game on the school’s field, cheerleaders at Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School hold up a sign with a Biblical verse on it. After a complaint last week, the school has banned the cheerleaders from using any more signs with religious statements on them, saying it violates the U.S. Constitution.
Don’t even try to calculate how many objective orders of magnitude worse this is, without a peep of protest from the self-appointed School Indoctrination Police (still snarling about what sickening idol worship it was for some little children to sing a non-religious song about the first African-American president during Black History Month.)
Fort Oglethorpe Mayor Ronnie Cobb vehemently disagrees with the ban and said he’ll call on the City Council to support the cheerleaders and their signs.
The signs don’t infringe on anyone’s religious rights and are good for school spirit, he said.
The mayor said football coach John Allen made the signs a tradition around 2003 and it has continued ever since.
“If it’s offensive to anyone, let them go watch another football game,” he said. “Nobody’s forced to come there and nobody’s forced to read the signs.”
Current head football coach Todd Windham said the school system must obey the law, despite everyone’s opinions.
Both are public servants paid with taxpayer dollars, are they not? — both charged with responsibilities to the whole community, not winner-take-all favoritism especially in intramural dispute. Strange that it’s the elected mayor who gets it wrong and wants to choose up sides and fight instead of concentrating on Read the rest of this entry »
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Religious Left Emerges, Religious Right Erodes
15 11 2009From my hometown newspaper this morning at the heart of Gator Nation, in the South! — even though it’s something I can be proud of this time rather than apologize for, like what passes for good communal citizenship just down the road from UF, in a giant corporate enclave of relatively wealthy, morally pious old folks called the Villages.
In case you weren’t riveted to Snook’s comments this weekend, a discussion of Catholic homeless and soup kitchen services sprang up here, debating the social effects of believing in the higher moral authority of “church doctrine” that would refuse help to those living in sin. This story adds texture to Read the rest of this entry »
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