The response I often hear to these points is: “Well, Republicans at least need to fight.” On this I agree. It is imperative that we fight for what we believe in. But we should fight smartly. I have never heard of a football team that won by throwing only Hail Mary passes, yet that is what is being demanded of Republican leaders today. Victory on the field is more often a result of three yards and a cloud of dust.
Daniel Larison Carson and Religion in the Public Square
Ben Carson said some objectionable things yesterday about Muslims, but I thought this defense of his position was by far the strangest one he could offer:
Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.
I say this is the strangest defense he could offer because it is extremely easy to imagine this same argument being deployed against Carson–or any religious conservative–in exactly the same way.
.. On top of that, it is self-defeating to insist on the great importance of protecting religious liberty for Christians while declaring in the next breath that members of a religious minority cannot be considered fully American.
The Politics of the Benedict Option
Remember, in the Gospels, Jesus often retreated to the desert to pray after meeting with crowds. In order to be active in the world as Christians, we must also be contemplative.
.. A reader passes on this BenOppish comment from the conservative writer Gary North, who ponders what the people who donated $17 million to conservative Christian Rick Perry’s failed second bid for the presidency could have done with that money instead of sending it to a long-shot Republican presidential candidate:
.. Congress does not change. The courts do not change. The federal bureaucracy does not change. “But if we can just elect a President…”
Reagan failed to change Washington. Why would anyone believe that Rick Perry could do this… especially Rick Perry?
The futility of national politics should be obvious. But it isn’t.
Evangelicals and the Carson Illusion
And unfortunately evangelical voters have a weakness for this kind of pitch. From Pat Robertson in 1988 through thin-on-policy figures like Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, even Michele Bachmann briefly in 2012, the evangelical tendency has been to look for a kind of godly hero, a Christian leader who could win the White House and undo every culture-war defeat.
.. But evangelical culture, as James Davison Hunter notes in “To Change the World,” his magisterial account of recent Christian engagement with American politics, has a particular fondness for the idea of the history-altering individual, the hope that “one person can stand at the crossroads and change things for good.”
.. This is part of why evangelical Christians, notwithstanding their numbers, tend to have less influence over actual Republican governance than fiscal conservatives or foreign-policy hawks. They’re always looking for a hero (or heroine), while the party’s other factions focus on staffing decisions and policy commitments, where the real work of politics takes place.