The Opposite of Right is Not Always Left

It took us three days to get through Michael Sokolove’s provocative piece in the New York Times magazine about Sen. Rick Santorum—partly because we couldn’t stop talking about it before reading to the end. (A long, loud discussion over beers at Pizza Luce on Sunday night was especially energetic.) Of course, we can’t plan these things, but we’ve had a remarkable run of good luck in our timing lately. We call it “planned serendipity.”

Sokolove’s piece on the rise of religion in national politics compliments our new cover story nicely. But where he keeps the frame tightly on Sen. Santorum, and does not wander off to compare him to any larger trends of increasingly noisy Christians in national politics, our story looked at a possible Democratic alternative, at least as it presents itself in the Minnesota state legislature—a Christian Left, as it were.

Is there an equivalent counterpart on the left, an equal and opposite religious impulse coming from the DFL? Not really, and here’s why: The left is not comfortable dealing in high moral or religious language for one simple reason—Democrats value diversity, and recognize that statements of confessional faith are inherently exclusionary and judgmental. It is not possible to speak of simple Christian morality without alienating non-christians, whether they are Jews, Muslims, atheists, or free-thinkers. Plenty of Christians are not comfortable with Christianity’s ascendency in American politics because they understand this. This country was founded in religious dissent, not religious consensus. Sen. Santorum and his many colleagues have made it pretty clear just how they feel about dissent of any kind, but they are particularly blind to the possibility that a person can be moral without being pretentious or self-righteous or even Christian about it.

As our cover story makes clear, a person like Sen. Dean Johnson recognizes as a key value the understanding that there are intractable differences when it comes to certain moral issues and positions. You can not legislate faith-based morality for the simple reason that there are hundreds of differenct faiths that cannot, should not, and will not agree.

It is time to put this literalist approach to scripture and religion out of its misery. We will no longer argue with anyone about what the Bible says or means (even when it simply “means what it says”) until our petitioner can read in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek—the languages in which most of the books of the present-day “bible” were actually composed. (Come to think of it, we’ll spot you the English translation, and you tell us which bible is it that ought to be interpreted literally? The Catholic or Protestant bible? KJ, NIV, RSV, INIV? Vulgate or Pentateuch as source document? Answers! We want answers!)

More to the point, we feel good about one thing, especially for our friends who are obsessed with Google: Finally, Rick Santorum’s search engine results will reflect something other than Dan Savage’s definition, which has slowly been inching its way toward Webster’s, and is one of the most euphonious coinages we’ve ever heard.