Wednesday, December 20, 2006
(11:37 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Beyond the Religious Right Debate
I think it's safe to say that the conversation on the religious right -- assuming it ever happened to begin with -- is breaking down. When the liberal-democractic procedure of "dialogue" falls apart, where does one go? The only place you can go: objectifying discourse that attributes motives to one's opponent which the opponent obviously would never acknowledge. So I concede in advance: dearest colleagues, you are going to feel like I am mischaracterizing you. Deal with it.What touched off this debate was a post that falls into a fairly common genre on left-wing blogs. The format is as follows:
- Quote some news story about the religious right
- Offer no analysis aside from asserting that it's really terrible
- Invite everyone to engage in a ritual denunciation of the religious right
Still, as I have been reading Gramsci's prison notebooks, I have been struck more and more by the sense that we can do better than the panic/ritual denunciation and in fact that it's urgent that we do better. I have been denounced recently for downplaying the impact of the religious right, but I won't downplay their importance as a part of the alliance that is keeping a really dangerous and toxic politics in place -- a politics that is not the fantasy used to fleece some hick preacher, but that is very real and making large strides day by day. It's important to analyze the ways that the religious right is brought on board with this, but it's also important not to let our natural disgust at the religious right blind us to what's really going on -- we get stuck at the level of "Oh my God we're heading for theocracy!" and think the work is done. Well, left-wing Americans: encore un effort.
Part of the problem seems to me to be the doctrinaire atheism of many left-wingers. It's not the atheism that's the problem -- it's the uncritical atheism. It's the kind of atheism that acts like if people could just embrace atheism, all of society's problems would be, in principle, solved. (Of course no one out there is going to admit that they think this -- as I said, this is the kind of discourse that happens when conversation breaks down. The time is past when "you're mischaracterizing my position" is a relevant response.)
Marx said that the critique of religion is the beginning of all critique, and I think he's right. The problem comes from the impression that somehow that critique is already, in principle, accomplished, and we can move on. This strikes me as a very undialectical and ultimately un-Marxian position. It also strikes me as implausible that the critique of religion was accomplished so easily by Feuerbach in a handful of books, while the critique of political economy was a vast undertaking that Marx couldn't have completed in four lifetimes. Gramsci seems to me to move beyond this position, influenced in part by Max Weber -- but it doesn't seem to have trickled down to most left circles.
Thankfully, in the mainstream press, there has been some progress on this front. The coverage of the religious right in Harper's in recent years has been absolutely first-rate, escaping from the "report, denounce, panic" routine and giving us genuine analysis. We need more stuff like that in blogs now. Perhaps I'm going to have to start doing it -- up until now, I definitely have not been modeling what I have set out in this post.
But in any case, I grow weary of the "report, denounce, panic" crowd and of the insinuations they hurl at anyone who wants to break out of that tired paradigm. I hate the religious right as much as or more than anyone here. At a certain point, though, you have to move beyond knee-jerk anger and take a look at what's really happening.
