Religious people often ask what’s so bad about mixing faith and politics. Right wing activists wonder why they aren’t allowed to put their God into the government.
There are a lot of good arguments that explain why the separation of church and state, and a quarantine between religion and politics, is a good idea. I’ve discussed those at length before, and I could do again, but I’m not going to now.
Now, I have an easy short-hand for explaining why it is a bad idea for politics and government in America to come under the thrall of religion: Ray Nagin.
Ray Nagin is the mayor of New Orleans, and is in charge of a great deal of the reconstruction there. Monday, in a Martin Luther King Day speech to a small group of supporters gathered at City Hall, Mayor Nagin pronounced,
“As we think about rebuilding New Orleans, surely God is mad at America, he’s sending hurricane after hurricane after hurricane and it’s destroying and putting stress on this country. Surely he’s not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely he’s upset at black America, also. We’re not taking care of ourselves. We’re not taking care of our women. And we’re not taking care of our children when you have a community where 70 percent of its children are being born to one parent.
We ask black people: it’s time. It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way; it wouldn’t be New Orleans.”
When I saw this story yesterday, I had to check twice to make sure that it was true. This is the kind of thing that we’re used to hearing from the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but could an elected official of a major American city really have made such a statement?
I checked. I made sure. Yes, Ray Nagin made the statement in his speech. Yes, Ray Nagin said he thinks that God sent hurricanes to attack America last year because of the Iraq War and because “black America” is not taking care of its women and children.
Consider the logical implications of these claims, if they were true. If God is attacking the United States of America with hurricanes in retaliation for the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, then that means that God is an Iraqi insurgent. He’s one of those people George W. Bush calls an “evildoer”. God is evil. That means that when George W. Bush proclaims, “God bless America”, he’s calling upon the dark forces of evil. That means George W. Bush is a satanic high priest!
If God were really so upset that African-American women and children were not being taken care of, why did he send hurricanes to drown them? Was this a mercy killing? Call Chief Justice John Roberts! Maybe it’s not too late for him to change his recent decision that he can overrule the Constitution whenever “public morality” is at issue. God supports euthanasia!
Okay, now throw those logical conclusions away. They’re junk. They’re logical in their structure, but they start out with a false premise, a premise that can never be proven. No one could ever know, even if they knew for certain that God exists, what reasons God would have for sending, or allowing, particularly nasty hurricanes to beseige the coastline of the United States.
What kind of explanation could I come up with for the claim that God wants New Orleans to be “chocolate”, other than that God is a pro-segregationist racist who supports ethnic cleansing? We all know Ray Nagin was not talking about Hershey Bars.
Ray Nagin said yesterday, in his defense, that he consulted with religious authorities before making his speech. The sad thing is that Mayor Nagin really believes that’s a defense of his statements, rather than part of the problem.
We progressives like to describe ourselves as members of “the reality-based community”. What do we mean by that? It’s more than just a cute response to the Bush Administration’s accusation against people who were not just willing to follow him on blind trust. It means that we try to base our policies on what we know for certain to be real, not what we would like to be real.
When Mayor Nagin consulted with religious authorities, he left the reality-based community, and entered the faith-based community of politicians – the same community where George W. Bush lives, and proclaims that God is on his side, and speaks through him. In the faith-based community, facts don’t matter as much as feelings, and empirical reality is regarded as much less trustworthy than inspiration.
So, in the faith-based community, claims that hurricanes are divine retribution are supported, because they sound right. The idea that cosmic powers are interested in which ethnicities are allowed to live in particular neighborhood is given credence, because it feels right in the heart.
Americans have the right to follow such absurd lines of faith-based reasoning, of course. But the question at hand is not whether American politicians should be allowed to have their politics inspired by faith-based ideas, but whether it is wise for them to do so. I don’t think that it’s wise at all.
Because faith-based politics are based on feelings, rather than facts, they indulge and amplify the personal inclinations and prejudices of politicians. Under the scrutiny of faith-based politics, the ultimate test of a policy or a pronouncement is merely this: If it feels good, do it. So, whatever ideas the politician is already inclined to believe are reinforced and exaggerated, becoming not merely an opinion, but the divine will of the universe.
The people of New Orleans deserve better than that. The American people deserve better than that. We deserve leaders who are willing to discipline themselves to form a government based on reality instead of mere conjecture. In the federal government, that means that we need leaders who are willing to look at the weather map so that they can see a storm coming. In local government, that means that we need leaders who are willing to make plans based more on the reality in the streets than the pie in the sky that’s promised from the pulpit.
That goes for Democrats as well as Republicans.
I’m a Democrat, and so is Ray Nagin. So, some people will say that I shouldn’t be so hard on Ray Nagin – because he’s on the right side. They will say that I ought to be focusing my criticism on the problems that the Republicans are causing America, because we need to beat the Republicans in the 2006 congressional elections.
They’re wrong.
What America needs to defeat in this year’s elections is not a political party. The Republican Party is not in itself the problem. The problem is the mindset that the Republican Party tends to promote – a mindset that says that faith, and not reality, has all the answers. When Democrats share that mindset, they are part of the problem too.
It much less important which political party wins the congressional elections, than whether America will have the strength to pull itself out of its current descent into the faith-based realm of wishful thinking. The United States of America is too rich, and too powerful, for its citizens and politicians to abandon reality.
Post script:
Elsewhere, we have started a less serious discussion of the idea of God, hurricanes, and divine retribution through meteorology.
The abuse of children by two parent families isn’t so bad now? And do I take it men and parents don’t need to be looked after at all? What a horrible speech in so many ways…
Quality over quantity.
Oh, and just in case I misread it, by it being “chocolate” does he REALLY mean “occupied by a large amount of people with dark skin”? That is… Somehow very depressing. It’s 2006 over there too, right?
Yes, it’s 2006, and 2006 is seeing much of America retreating as fast as it can into a medieval state of mind. Never fear – the rest of us Americans are fighting this trend kicking and screaming.
Yes, you read that part about “chocolate” right.
Not to mention that Nagin has brought together a business-dominated team to determine which parts of New Orleans will be rebuilt and which will be demolished. There are plans in the works to destroy entire neighborhoods that were poor and black. So it seems Nagin’s being a hypocrite for good measure.
Oh, yes. Before the passage above, he asserted that New Orleans would always be an African-American city.And people cheered for this racist. On MLK Day.
It’s a tough call, trying to rebuild a demolished city with intermittant funding and opposing plans, trying to keep as much of the city’s cultural heritage as possible, with many of its residents still missing or relocated. There are legal problems, environmental obstacles, a mountain of waste to dispose of, infrastructure to rebuild, condemned historical buildings must be analyzed as to the feasibility of rehabilitating or destroying, business interests vs longstanding New Orleaners’ wishes, municipal police and fire companies to reconstitute and re-educate (in terms of the disaster response), LEVEES to rebuild and the list goes on and on. Some communities will probably be neglected (guess which ones?) while others will be reconstructed and some areas will be completely different than what existed before Katrina. i’m not sure Nagin was being racist (any more than some of the white officials and sports people over the years meant any harm by speaking in generalities and on subjects regarding race or people of color). He may just be trying to reassure the long-time residents of the city that they would be included and welcomed back (think of all the hospitality staff, municipal workers, musicians, chefs, etc and you get the picture – it’s their city too). We gotta get off this “race” track in this country if we’re to show the world that it’s okay to be different and accepted. This is the real democracy, not the elitist model that Bush and company project.
Some aspects of rebuilding New Orleans aren’t such tough calls. For instance: the federal government suspended the requirement that contractors pay the prevailing wage to workers rebuilding New Orleans. Displaced citizens could have been given temporary housing and paid a decent living wage while they rebuilt their city and levees at federal expense. As building progressed, they could have moved back into their old homes and jobs. Instead, workers are brought in and live by the dozens in tractor trailers, not earning enough to ever buy a home or support a family. If we’re going to pump hundreds of billions of federal dollars into reconstructing New Orleans, shouldn’t a man or woman be able to come back to his or her home and earn a living wage for an honest day’s work rebuilding his or her own city? Gosh, the businessmen say, tough call!
The difference between Nagin and King is obvious.
King’s dreams were for all of us–white and black, together. Nagin could have talked about the art, music and culture of New Orleans, how that came out of a mix of Cajun, African, and other ethnic groups. He could have spoken to all those people, of all races, spread across America who still call New Orleans home. He could have promised to do everything in his power to let them come home again, and called on the state and the nation to do the same.
Instead, he invoked God’s supposed wish that a certain geographical area have a certain ethnic makeup. King never said anything like that, and with good reason: it would have put him in some very bad historical company.