I've neglected the religion beat these last few days, despite the fact that religion has been all over the news. Three quite different stories, each in its way fascinating, have been convulsing the media.
First (and least interesting), Barack Obama has been vilified for over a week for saying of small-town voters it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. The media frenzy focused on the word "bitter," and the Clinton and McCain camps did their best to stoke the flames with allegations of elitism. Conservative pundits accused him of being wrong - it's not small-town but urban and suburban folks who vote on issues like "values" (including that strange American value, the right to wield deadly force). I don't know what all the fuss is about. The words may have been poorly chosen - these were off-the-cuff remarks in response to a question - but I'm inclined to agree with his broader point (one he made already in his highly praised speech on race in America) that economic marginalization or disenfranchisement are the root causes of many divisions in the country, and that if we care about our country we should do something about the economic causes. (I'm not saying I agree with his economic policies.)
Next, the Pope has just completed his pastoral visit to the USA. Especially here in New York, where he spent the last days, it's been all Benedict all the time. Exhausting! The media love him, and love describing how much everyone else loves him too. How could anyone have thought he was doctrinaire or disciplinarian when he's such a cute old man with such a funny smile and such a quaint accent? You'd think he was offering the same vapid pablum as the Dalai Lama about peace and human rights - what's not to like in that, indeed, to love? Isn't that how we like our religious leaders - old and a bit silly - and isn't it a relief that all those nasty stories about his time as Cardinal Ratzinger can now be forgotten? They don't notice that his words are double-edged. As we know, he means something different (I'm not saying wrong, but definitely different) by words like freedom and rights than you might think. When he speaks of reason to Catholic university presidents he's not talking about the Enlightenment's understanding of reason, but the reason he argued in Regensburg is incomplete without revelation. [At Yankee stadium he said that praying for the kingdom means "overcoming every separation between faith and life, and countering false gospels of freedom and happiness." ] And they don't notice that his surprising (to them) efforts to acknowledge the priest sexual abuse scandal are just a reassertion of the open season on gay priests he announced a few years ago. I'm glad he's not ignoring the issue, the way the American bishops did, but his concern is, as it has always been, with the church rather than its victims.
Finally, there's the amazing case of the FLDS, the polygamous Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints community at El Dorado (pronounced doRAYdo) in Texas, all of whose children were taken into protective custody by the state in response to reports of forced marriages of girls to older men. At this moment, the largest gathering of lawyers in Texas history - nearly four hundred - is taking place. Stunning and disturbing also are the scenes of the mothers of these children, married several to each man (FLDS believe that a man must take three wives, like an Old Testament patriarch, to go to heaven), with similar old-fashioned dresses in bright colors, long hair in similar bouffes, and, when you hear them speak (rarely), similar childlike voices. Polygamy is illegal in Texas, as in the rest of the US, but polygamous communities are reluctantly tolerated by government officials who want to avoid another Waco. Taking children as young as 18 months away from their families is a drastic and traumatizing thing to do, but does one really want to see kids raised under such circumstances? Maybe the mothers sound like such simpletons because they grew up seeing their own mothers subordinated and infantilized in the same way. (The only good to come of this is that the people who enjoyed the television series "Big Love" get to eat their hats now. Real polygamy isn't sexy.)
