specialagency.net: Where religion gets involved.

June 05, 2004

Where religion gets involved.

It occurs to me, after the fact, that it might not be clear why my awful experience with the religion panel is related to the larger problem of the political dialogue. I mean, it could serve as a kind of example of hostile attitudes without having to be related to politics. The program description ran like this: "Patriarchy, guilt, sex-hate, homophobia, vilification of the physical (human), fear of female sexuality/power, worship of Phallos, sacrifices sons to teach males to accept that their lives are cheap, reducer of a sacred erotica to mere sex and animal impulse where eroticism is debased into a monotonous process of reproduction, teaching a sex that isn’t necessarily different from sexual assault. Organized religion is mightily implicated in forming/maintaining rape culture. Discuss."

There's more to it than just generalized hostility towards religion, though. (and more to it than the fact that, for at least one of the panelists, this panel was more about personal theraputic value than it was about thoughtful discussion.) Religion, Christianity in particular, has become a politicized issue in America. I can see how it happened--conservative politicians have brought religion in to the dialogue as though it was a thing that belonged to them, which means that anyone opposing their political positions has to engage with their religious positions. Once that's happened, it's easy to see how people on the left, especially people who have been agitated beyond the point of reason, start to see religious belief as tangled up with the conservative political agenda.

In the spirit of inclusiveness, I feel like I should say that it's not only the right that politicizes issues. The right has politicized both religion and patriotism, but the left has politicized (for example) environmentalism. It was hard work, by the way, finishing that sentence. "The right has politicized both religion and patriotism, but the left has politicized... er... uhm..." The problem being, of course, that from where I stand it's easy to see what issues the other guys have made partisan, but not easy to see the same faults in the people I mostly agree with. I'm trying, though.

Posted by Susan at June 5, 2004 05:03 PM

Comments

What blew my mind about the religion panel was the combination of

1. total conviction that “throughout history” Christianity has been the driving force behind bad sex, and

2. a near-total ignorance of either the history of Christianity or the history of sex.

Not that I’m an expert on either one, but I knew more than the panelists seemed to. I suppose, if your personal identity is tied up in rejecting Christianity and harking back to a mythical self-actualizing life-affirming paganism for which there's not really any historical evidence, that’s bound to affect your view of history — but, still. (I did notice that Ms. Shawl, who’s got a living tradition with real historical continuity to draw from, didn’t seem to be as bent out of shape about it.)

Posted by: David Moles at June 11, 2004 01:39 PM

A side note: Economics. The left's politicized economics.

Posted by: David Moles at June 11, 2004 01:39 PM

Yeah, I thought about saying something when the panel moderator made a blatantly incorrect set of statements about Christian condemnation of masturbation through the last five hundred years; there's a professor in my department who's just written a book on the social history of masturbation, as it were, and one of his points is that it's wasn't really a condemned practice until the Victorians got involved.

That was late in the panel, though, and I was a little burnt out on dealing with ignorance.

If we were to do a panel like that again, I'd love to have Nisi on it again, actually. I feel like in a different context she would have been a great person to have that conversation with.

Posted by: Susan at June 11, 2004 01:51 PM

If another panel like that comes up, we should put together a book list and have handouts.

Posted by: David Moles at June 11, 2004 05:16 PM

There's a great social history of the Catholic monastic system whose author I have forgotten (David something?) that argues that until the 13th century it was a haven for gays and lesbians and, in some sense, intentionally so. Not that they were supposed to be having sex, of course, but that it was a minor sin that was to be expected in the course of struggling with the ideal of chastity, and that the monestary was explicitly an alternative to the family and to procreation.

Posted by: Benjamin Rosenbaum at July 2, 2004 06:30 PM

On the politicization of environmentalism -- when I lived in Italy in 1990, there were three Green Parties. There was the Laughing Sun party, which was hardcore Gaia-worshipping New Left environmentalism. There was the Rainbow party (referred to popularly as the Watermelon party -- green on the outside, red on the inside) which was Old-Left Marxist environmentalism (if you can imagine such a thing). And there was the Hunting-Fishing-Environmental party, which was a bunch of good old boy country conservatives who were very serious about reducing pollution and ensuring biodiversity and environmental balance... so they could hunt.

There's also currently an environmentalist micromovement within the evangelical Christian movement in the USA. (The buzzword, I believe, is "stewardship".)

One aspect you have omitted in your otherwise excellent analysis is the (to me) inexplicable and collosal abdication of America's religious Left (you know, the people who brought you the Underground Railroad, Martin Luther King, anti-war and pacifist movements since Revolutionary times, etc.) in the past few decades. What the hell happened to us?

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