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| Comments on "The Left Co-opts Religion for "Social Justice"" |
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 | Monday, September 1, 2008 at 8:22:34 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Mike Hardy
E-mail: hardy(at)math.umn.edu
"Co-ops"? Did you mean "Co-opts"?
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| Monday, September 1, 2008 at 9:43:35 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Billy Beck
E-mail: wjbiii(at)frontiernet.net
URL: http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php
Wake up. This is not new.
I can tell instantly that you know almost nothing about Field Marshal Rodham.
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| Monday, September 1, 2008 at 13:13:03 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Gina Liggett
E-mail: GLiggett(at)comcast.net
First of all, I fixed the typo thanks to an Objectivist friend.
Secondly, Mr. Beck, this phenomenon IS new. The Left has, until relatively recently, completely ignored religion. They've made passing references to THEIR OWN religious beliefs, but never before made it a GUIDING ETHIC for the welfare state they plan to implement on a GRAND SCALE. YOU wake up!
In response to your rather hostile comment, I am fully awake... the problem is, many in America are not. They are sitting in front of the TV watching reality shows.
If this issue of the religious left really bothers you, maybe you can contribute to the blog by making insightful and informative comments about this insidious problem.
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| Monday, September 1, 2008 at 13:16:16 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Gina Liggett
E-mail: GLiggett(at)comcast.net
Besides, who gives a flip about Rodham?! She's outta the pictah!
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| Monday, September 1, 2008 at 14:32:23 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Bob Sanders
E-mail: Sanders101(at)clc.net
I am not a historian of the 20th century but I am fairly certain that the welfare state was justified since the Progressive Era by religion, specifically on the grounds of the charity tradition of Christianity. The Left has always had its share of churches as allies. So, I'm not that sure that the Religious Left is a truly new phenomenon. Also, I think it is a good thing for the Left to get religion. It would make it easier to link religion and socialism for the purposes of intellectual advocacy and perhaps would draw many of the religious away form the Conservative big tent and possible open up the way for a secular Rightist movement.
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| Monday, September 1, 2008 at 16:09:56 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: BrianS
E-mail: blspro (at) gmail
I think it is interesting to note that Dr. P himself admits he didn't acknowledge the important role of religion in his book "The Ominous Parallels". In his OCON 2008 Q&A, he was asked: "Is there anything you would write differently if you were writing 'Ominous Parallels' today?"
To which he responded: "Yes. Definitely. I wouldn't repudiate anything I said in 'The Ominous Parallels', but I would much more stress the religious character of fascism, of Nazism and the religious influence on its development. At the time I really wasn't... I knew that there was that element. And I knew all about the Lutherans who were his big supporters and everything. But I wrote that at a time when religion, believe it or not, was simply not taken seriously - in the whole culture. Nobody took it seriously. Or if they did, they didn't talk much about it. So, I put it in, but its like that as an ancient phenomenon. And its only really seeing what's gone on since Reagan, and then where my own thesis in the DIM hypothesis is leading me to, that I realize I did not give enough indication of the role of...put it this way, the role of the *real* metaphysics of Hitler. I concentrated too much on epistemology. And, within that, too much on instinct and emotion.
All of that is certainly true. And all of that would certainly have to be said. But it should have been given a much more religious interpretation, both metaphysics and epistemology. Not religious in the sense that Hitler was a Christian. But religious in the sense his system rested on a supernatural world, not just a distortion of biology, which I didn't stress at all."
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| Monday, September 1, 2008 at 20:25:56 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Joseph Kellard
E-mail: theainet1(at)optonline.net
URL: http://www.theamericanindividualist.blogspot.com/
The title of Ayn Rand's book from the early 1970s was: "The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution."
"Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution" is the expanded edition of that original book, put out, with additional essays, by Peter Schwartz in 1999.
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| Monday, September 1, 2008 at 23:01:42 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Kyle Haight
E-mail: khaight(at)alumni.ucsd.edu
URL: http://www.leftist.org/haightspeech/
I think I encountered a couple of religious leftists doing door-to-door canvassing earlier this weekend. They were a clean-cut couple trying to drum up support for an initiative on the ballot in California to ban gay marriage. The man thought my neighbor's pro-Obama sign was mine, and it led him to comment on how much he'd liked the speeches at the Democratic National Convention earlier in the week.
Opposition to gay marriage is often religious in nature. Support for Obama and the Democrats is usually a sign of left-wing views. Both in one person looks a lot like a religious leftist.
Granted, this is both speculative and anecdotal.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 1:34:38 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Gina Liggett
E-mail: GLiggett
Thanks Joseph. I didn't clarify well that the Return of the Primitive came from Ayn's Rand's original book," The New Left." I should fix that.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 8:24:51 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Billy Beck
E-mail: wjbiii(at)frontiernet.net
URL: http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php
"If this issue of the religious left really bothers you, maybe you can contribute to the blog by making insightful and informative comments about this insidious problem."
I *did*, Luv. It's regrettable if you thought it "hostile", but that's your affair and there is nothing that I can do about it except to point out that you don't know what you're talking about: you haven't seen "hostile" from me at all. It's just what you think.
Now: wake the fuck up. Go study Rodham's Methodism.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 9:04:23 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Anonyme
"[T]his phenomenon IS new. The Left has, until relatively recently, completely ignored religion. They've made passing references to THEIR OWN religious beliefs, but never before made it a GUIDING ETHIC for the welfare state they plan to implement on a GRAND SCALE."
This is simply not true. The American Left (the Progressive Movement) was, from its very beginning in the late 19th Century, a phenomenon with its feet firmly planted in religion. Although the historical record is filled with evidence of this fact, one has only to read the speeches and writings of the great Progressive educator and President, Woodrow Wilson, to recognize this. It was this explicitly religious foundation that made the American Progressive movement (the Left) seemingly different than the European Left with its roots in Hegel, Marx and their fellow travelers. To put this another way: though certainly inspired by German socialism, it was Religion that gave American Progressivism its legs, and it was from the pulpit that these ideas were spread throughout the society.
It was only the ascendency to national prominence of the New Left and its fascination with Trostsky and Mao and Castro, etc. in the late 1960s that pushed religion to the background. If anything, we are witnessing a RETURN to religion by the American Left.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 10:31:38 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Billy Beck
E-mail: wjbiii(at)frontiernet.net
URL: http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php
"Anonyme" -- that's exactly right.
I wish you folx would indulge me for a more general and principled point.
First, go see Myrhaf's recap --
http://tinyurl.com/5hgufb
...of some recent lefty jollities and some of the implications.
Then: I don't know how to put it more tightly than I did at my place so I'll quote it here:
Myrhaf is absolutely correct about that. I myself am not "uncertain". There is no question to me but that the religious right can in no way match the threat to the West that the left does, and for the reasons that he states. The "religious right" may be irrational but they are not animals. They have not run past Nietzsche to the exvaluation of values like the leading elements of the left have, and they never will. At the end of their day, they not only still hold values but they also understand the necessity of values to human life. The essential political dispute with them turns on which values to act for. This discussion cannot be seriously undertaken with the left because their post-modern premises.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 14:03:16 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Ryan C
URL: http://ryantheegoist.blogspot.com/
The Religious Left is indeed not a new tradition, but one that is emerging from the cavalcade of different Leftist positions. It should be no surprise to anyone that being your brother's keeper is an admirable position for the Socialists of America.
I blog a lot about this, especially lately, at my own blogger account listed above.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 15:57:30 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: Valda Redfern
E-mail: valda.redfern(at)gmail.com
URL: http://valzhalla.blogspot.com
"Now: wake the fuck up. Go study Rodham's Methodism." Ignoring the aggressive rudeness of the first sentence (and of the comment as a whole), I address the second: why would anyone have bothered to study Hilary Clinton's Methodism? I didn't know she was a Methodist, because religion was not part of Hilary's platform. The potential of a religious left in politics was always there, but it's only now that it is on the cusp of being realised.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 16:06:44 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Bob Sanders
E-mail: Sanders101(at)clc.net
Wasn't the essence of Hillary's ideology based on Saul Alinsky and various other Communists? I know Communism is secularized religion but it was secular Communism that motivated Hillary not the Sermon on The Mount. That she just recently embraced superficially in response to the rise of the Evangelical movement.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 17:57:04 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Anonyme
Both Saul Alinsky and Hillary Clinton were/are New Leftists in the Trotskyist mold. Both represented a break from the traditional (read, Religion-based) so-called "liberal" past.
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| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 19:21:59 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: Billy Beck
E-mail: wjbiii(at)frontiernet.net
URL: http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php
"why would anyone have bothered to study Hilary Clinton's Methodism?"
It's because that was her earliest -- and has since been her principal -- *ethical* framework. That's why. Her *political* outlook actually owes more to Gramsci or the Fabians. She in fact rejected Alinsky's political strategy of subversion, arguing instead to wield power from the inside: he offered her a job at a "training institute" for "community organizers" and the like. He was going to pay her to play the street radical in 1970. She preferred Yale Law. Her ethics were wired before she and Alinsky met only during her senior summer at Wellesley, and the fact is that Alinsky was a dalliance of *tactics* between heart-kin.
The Wesleyan Methodist tradition in her family is not a deeply-hidden secret. She was ripe for the head-press of the "Reverend" Don Jones and his "University of Life" by the time she met him. While at Wellesley, she regularly read "motive" magazine, published by the Methodist Church, with a particular taste for Carl Oglesby. In 1994, she said, "I still have every issue they sent me." (Brock, 1996, p. 17)
Anyone who doesn't know this stuff should have no serious problem Googling it up.
Her ol' pal Marian Wright Edelman is another excellent case in point of all this, unless of course one believes that these people are not exemplary or pertinent because Rodham's "outta the pictah!"
{shrug}
Someone like that is fairly likely to consider all this news after all. It's not, though.
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| Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 12:59:50 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: Ron Good
E-mail: rdg(at)rongood.net
URL: http://northernsubverbia.blogspot.com
Gina:
Have you never encountered the phrase "Liberation Theology" referring to essentially (but not entirely) Roman Catholic leftism? Are you also unaware of the heavily religio-socialist traditions of, say, the United Church of Canada or the British Christian Socialist movement and the impact those traditions have had on American leftism in general?
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