Disturbing Disconnect and Disfunction 

in American Politics and Religion

Results of the latest Religion and Public Life Project by the Pew Research organization imply a disturbing disconnect between politics and religion in America where 78% of adults self identify as Christian.  A basic foundation doctrine in all denominations of the Christian religion states unequivocally that believers should care for their neighbors, all their neighbors, as they care for themselves. It is common knowledge that the man whose short life 2000 years ago serves as the basis for the religion was committed to helping the poor and marginalized people in the area where he lived. History doesn’t give us  many details about his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, but the details about his activities in the three or four years before his death at age 33 show him doing what he could do to help people who were having a hard time coping with basic human problems like hunger and illness and alienation and isolation from what was considered the good life.  Most of the problems he addressed were caused by poverty. He was clear in his directive that one’s central moral responsibility is to love other people, to care for other people, with the same enthusiasm and determination that one directs toward caring for himself or herself.

Other religious traditions in America stress the same basic value: Treat others the way you want to be treated.  Want for your neighbor what you want for yourself.  Don’t do anything to someone else that you wouldn’t want them to do to you.  That ethical value is central to Jews (1.7 percent of Americans), Buddhists (0.7 percent of Americans), Muslims (0.6 percent of Americans), Hindus (0.4 percent of Americans.  Other faiths, like Unitarians, New Age, and Native American religions make up 0.7 percent of the American population; and they all stress the importance of what is called “The Golden Rule.”  Most of the 16.1 percent of Americans who say they are unaffiliated (0.8 decline to answer the survey) with any religion say in surveys that caring for people who can’t care for themselves is an important cultural value.

How did we get to be the way we actually are culturally?  Where do our actual cultural values (not the ones celebrated in religious rituals) come from…?   Where do we start:  West Virginia’s and other regions river pollution?   Resolute refusal of many citizens to support social programs like universal health care and other basic social security programs?  Refusal of many politicians to agree to extend unemployment benefits to people who haven’t been able to find jobs?  Insistence that family benefits and family recognition should not include couples who happened to be of the same gender?  How do we explain Tea Party politicians’ headlock on uninformed, uneducated, citizens who vote them in and keep them in elected office?  How do we explain the political rhetoric of Tea Party celebrities like Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee who claim deep religion commitment to that guy who actually lived and died in service of poor, marginalized people 2000 years ago?  What do we tell our young people about the profit first motive in our culture with its growing numbers of citizens who live in poverty?  What do our politicians plan to do about the shrinking middle economic class and the accelerating increase in numbers of billionaires and millionaires in America?