Sunday, November 23, 2003

Roy Moore, Politics and Religion

The British religious scholar Karen Armstrong has pointed out in the context of the Middle East that one hazard of mixing religion and politics is that it can make compromise more difficult. If there's political dispute over boundaries, the two sides can cut a deal. Both sides can give something to get something.

But if both sides believe that God gave them that land, making a deal doesn't just involve some disappointment to a policial consituency. It means failing God. Or worse, betraying Him.

We can see examples of that in America, e.g., the pre-Civil War Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison refusing to participate in democratic politics because to him it meant tacit acceptance of a Constitution that endorsed slavery.

Supporters of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore on his Ten Commandments monument seem to have fallen into a trap something like that in embracing his "states rights" defense in defying a federal court order.

Even the Christian Right legal beagles at the American Center for Law and Justice expressed frustration at More's decision to base his defiance on a segregation-era states rights argument rather than make use of more plausible legal strategies.

But militants from Operation Rescue rallied to his cause, dubious though the legal basis was. His Ten Commandments monument cause seems only tangentially related to Operation Rescue's main cause of opposing legal abortion.

The uncompromising spirit of religious radicalism may be providing a platform for a showboat in the form of Roy Moore on a cause that seems to offer little on either substantive issues of religious freedom or on "winning souls for Jesus."

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