It’s just great.

Interesting. I am older than dirt now, but when I was a kid, the Native Americans in our small Oklahoma town, would use peyote at church. Since the majority in the town were Cherokee Indians, my N/A friends and I would sort of giggle and threaten to join that church. (Contrary to popular opinion, there was only one, or so they said.) The cops didn’t care. Far from it. In fact, in 1969, my Native American’s friend’s mother grew marijuana in her backyard. The chief of police would come and chat with her over the fence, while she was weeding her garden, where it was. They knew.

Why does the white man always seem to mess everything up?

Time will show how heterogeneous the ‘religious’ right really is.

We can learn how heterogeneous in beliefs the religious right really is by listening to them: listening to their spokes figures, talking to religious conservatives, etc.

But I suspect you are not referring to beliefs but to practice. Alas, the only real way to tell how heterogeneous they are is to give them power. If they had their own theocracy, we would find out very quickly whether Dobson and Robertson would go to war over the whether the access of married couples to condoms and masturbation by horny, single teens should be outlawed. But of course, that is exactly what we want to avoid.

One way to push the issue is to be, um er, divisive. Whenever the righties start talking about abortion (about which righties agreed), try to switch the subject to access of married couples to birth control, about which they disagree rather vehemently. The problem with this strategy is the very same people who are asking us to reach out to the religious right would balk at offending the Robertson wing of the religious right even if shouting about “first it’s abortion but that’s just a slippery slope for the Robertson wing to outlaw access by married couples to condoms” will give us the “we could, if we wanted to, use a condom, for we are Protestants” wing of the religious right. The GOP did not get the religious right by being inclusive, it got their votes by being divisive. While I don’t want us to sink to the level of the GOP and I do think we should make sure to present the moral roots of Democratic ideology (even as a Jew, I like the Matthew quotation!), people who complain that our party is not inclusive enough toward religious voices should realize that you gotta break some eggs to make an omelet and trying to please everyone will just cause us to please no one … let’s be frank: religious conservatives have a party and that’s the GOP. We won’t get anywhere trying to be the GOP-lite. But we can learn from the way the GOP was successful in gaining the votes of the religious right and instead of complaining about how we don’t respect religious voters (and pandering to them by GOP richers is their showing respect?) we can, while not sinking to the level of the GOP, actually do things that will attract some religious voters even if we alienate others.

It’s wonderful to “emphasize those aspects of our liberal tradition that ought to appeal to religious folks across the political spectrum”. And we can do better than that. When and where the religious right organizes to take a stand for the environment or against poverty or torture or capital punishment or war for oil or war for pride or for anything else that agrees with our values we can stand right beside them in common effort and respect. Those are the venues that may turn out to nurture the most useful conversations. Count me in. But so far it seems to be more rumor than action. Time will show how heterogeneous the ‘religious’ right really is.

Meanwhile I think we agree that emphasizing those aspects of our tradition that ought to appeal to them ought not mean suggesting to the atheists among us that they not criticize belief or fight to keep the line between church and state clear and in full effect or suggest the GLBTs that they should pipe down about full inclusion in American society while we appeal to the right on our common ground.

You note that “some really are motivated by a certain view of morality which does really differ from ours”. It’s a good and an important point. And unlike the crypto racism, authoritarianism, homophobia and sexism that I think provides much of their energy I do not disrespect them for holding those differences. But I think the answer to the question of how we live together with those differences lies in maintaining secular public decision-making structures and traditions. And there’s no sign that that path is acceptable to those who today speak for the ‘religious’ right.

I’m not a student of Sun-Tzu. And perhaps we don’t need to speak of enemies here. But I can’t imagine in urging understanding our opposition he was counseling underestimating or papering over our differences. Robert Frost offered an observation that also bears some thought in this matter. He said “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Let’s not be that sort of liberals.

Always too slow to stay out of EPUville.

Best,

Robbie

And lead us not into Penn Station. But deliver us from evil…

I think that perhaps the religious right is more heterogeneous than we lefties always realize (and we can use this politically to our advantage to play one group of them against the other).

Some in the religious right are motivated by nostalgia: some explicitly racist, some of it is, shall we say, sublimated racism or even Archie “those were the days” Bunker bigotry (a large part of which is a feeling that in those old religious days “guys like us we had it made” and now their security is slipping away from them — and where do you turn when insecure? to religion which promises the ultimate security!), and some of it is pure nostalgia (which rhymes with arthralgia for a reason!). For some, just as their wishful thinking of being racially superior was all poor white racists of an earlier generation had going for them, some of the religious right are really hurting and religion is their only hope.

Some really are motivated by a certain view of morality which does really differ from ours. And some of the support for the religious right merely comes due to people liking all the talk of morality and not caring about the specifics.

I don’t think we should be trying to pander to the religious right, which would be at best counter-productive. But if they are our political “enemies” we, cf. Sun-tzu, better get to know them better than many on the left do.

OTOH, we can offer things out of our platform that will speak to elements of the religious right (and possibly piss off other elements, which is not a bad thing — remember it’s divide and conquer … hey, it worked for the GOP) — and since we are taking from what we already have, it isn’t pandering and won’t be seen as such. To those who seek solace in religion because of their economic insecurity, we can offer economic security from economic liberalism. To those seeking moral leadership, we can highlight the moral aspects of our platform (note to Sen. Obama — the goal is to highlight how our policies are moral … not to complain about how straw man Democrats are not sufficiently versed at speaking to religious folk) and remind people that the justice of which the Bible speaks is primarily economic.

While I don’t think we should pander to the uglier elements of the religious right (and anyway, pandering will drive away those seeking moral leadership as it shows that we do not believe our stands are moral), we should emphasize those aspects of our liberal tradition that ought to appeal to religious folks across the political spectrum (but not complain about straw man Democrats who are anti-religious … as that only reinforces the stereotype we ought to try to avoid) — and we shouldn’t be worried about saying things that would be divisive for the religious right because we might loose some of them — we don’t have them to begin with, but if we more strongly oppose the death penalty and gain a few Catholics, heck … who cares if we loose the votes of fundamentalist Protestants who aren’t voting for us anyway (we can get the Dobson crowd’s votes when we hint the Catholics want to outlaw masturbation). We Democrats have to learn we cannot please all the people all the time but that we do have to please a majority of likely voters every election cycle. Trying to do the latter sometimes distracts from the former.

We cannot pander to the religious right, but we can get to know them better and gain votes both in our base by speaking out against the uglier (sublimated racism, etc.) aspects of that movement as well as into the right by highlighting the moral aspects of our public policy.

Of course, we also should defend our commitment to secularism as something both good for the secular and for religion!