I happened to hear a few moments replayed on the radio this morning of the round table discussion of religion in America. The discussion was hosted by Tim Russert on “Meet the Press.” The transcript is linked here. Included on the panel was Fr. Richard Neuhaus and one Sr. Joan Chittister. You’ve got to read the whole transcript (or listen to the podcast) to appreciate how far some have wandered from the truth. Fr. Neuhaus was, as usual, the voice of reason in his discussion:
MR. RUSSERT: Why is there so much anger, so much rancor between people—amongst people who believe in God over moral issues?
REV. NEUHAUS: Well, I’ll tell you, Tim, I’m not sure there’s nearly as much anger and rancor as one would get the impression by reading, if you’ll excuse the expression, the mainstream media. I think a lot of people are very exercised about the religious right, for example, the theocons, the theocrats, that term is being—now being kicked around. There’s a fairly—and here I’d agree with Jon Meacham—a fairly constant and, you might say, normal condition of America in terms of both the vitality of religious faith, overwhelmingly of that 90 percent, 80 percent or so think they’re Christian, and in some crazy, conflicted, confused way, it is a Christian society with small minorities of others always negotiating the relationship between that and what it means in terms of allegiances to a particular religious tradition and then a national experiment. But is there that much rancor? I don’t think nearly as much as people think. People are going about their lives trying to do, essentially—and here, again, I’ll agree with Jon Meacham—religion cultures, the air that they breathe, trying to make the connections as to how they ought to live their lives and how they ought to lives together.
Aristotle said politics is the deliberation of how we ought to order our life together. So it is, in its very nature, a moral enterprise. And, for the great majority of Americans, when they’re asked about the source of their deepest convictions, their moral convictions, the answer that they’ll give is, in one way or another, religious in character. They’ll say the Bible, the Christian tradition, the church, the Judeo-Christian ethic. In other words, these are inseparable. Therefore, the politics, culture, morality, religion connection is the norm, and, within this norm, we are, from the founding fathers up through great critical moments such as the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the past century, we are in a continuing conversation, which is not always a civil conversation, but we ought to work at it being a civil conversation about Aristotle’s question: How ought we to order our life together?
And then the Sr. Chittister:
SISTER CHITTISTER: Well, what, what, what I’m concerned about is I, I talk about society now being at a crossover moment in time bigger than anything we’ve seen since the 16th or the 13th century, meaning we have a new science, and—as other speakers have said. It, it purports to concentrate on life issues. It’s bringing us to see life differently. We have a new globalism. We’re not comfortable; we’re not in our own bailiwicks anymore. Everybody’s in the same bailiwick with us, which means we have to look at, newly, what pluralism really means again.
We have to choose now with whether or not we want religion, that is this thing that binds us together, that is somehow or other genetically wired in us, that, that Aristotle talks about, that all the churches talk about. Or do we want denominationalism. What, what church, what religion do we want? Do we want the religion of the Crusades and the Inquisition and the witch burnings and segregation and slavery and the oppression of women and Puritanism that led to Prohibition, that didn’t last because it was somebody’s creed imposed on everybody else’s creed? Or do we want the religion of the peace movement that Jesus talked about, and the, the labor movement and the civil rights movement.
This new Puritanism is this notion that somehow or other, by failing to honor honorable traditions, that we’ll be a better, holier people. It didn’t work before, it’s not working now, it’s not going to—it’s not going to take America into the future.
And it goes on and on. At one point, Russert asks the Muslim about homosexuality:
Over the question of gay rights, Islam, like the book of Leviticus, which is a Bib—part of the Bible for both Christians and Jews, of course, opposes sodomy. But there is no emphasis upon it outside that of Judaism and Christianity. And in Islamic society, it’s quite interesting that the practice of homosexuality has been, I mean, from the way of mathematics, statistics, about the same as, as in Western society, Japanese society, Indian society, and people have gone about their business. It hasn’t been that they’ve hanged a sodomist every day up in a tree. That’s never happened. But legally speaking, and point of divine law, it is something which is disdained by God.
Even a cursory review of news sources in this regard show more than once some poor gay guy has been executed somewhere in Islam.
Read the entire transcript. Very enlightening.
