Moyers on Rove's Manipulation of the Religious

Bill Moyers waded deep into the issue of Karl Rove's manipulation of religious American voters this past week, saying

There is, of course, more to be said. What struck me about my fellow Texan, Karl Rove, is that he knew how to win elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W. Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the good lord was speaking in a Texas accent.

Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat — a battering-ram, aimed at the devil’s minions, especially at gay people.

It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber, and if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew that, in politics, you better bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.

At the same time he was recruiting an army of the lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row — twice in the lone star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles — paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption.

Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals being investigated as we speak, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the attorney general of the United States into a partisan sock-puppet. Rove is riding out of Dodge City as the posse rides in. At his press conference this week he asked God to bless the president and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism; he wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator. On his last play of the game all Karl Rove had to offer them was a Hail-Mary pass, while telling himself there’s no one there to catch it.

Moyers' take seems to be that religion, while susceptible to manipulation, is not to blame and that Karl Rove was really a wolf in sheep's clothing. Rove, on the other hand, in a direct response to Moyers' claim (based on various reports) that Rove is an Agnostic, said to Chris Wallace of Fox that

I'm a Christian. I go to church. I'm an Episcopalian. I think he [Moyers] may have taken a comment that I made where I was talking about how — I have had colleagues at the White House — Mike Gerson, Pete Wayner (ph), Leslie Drune (ph), Josh Bolten and others — who I'm really impressed about how their faith has informed their lives and made them really better people. And it took a comment where I acknowledged my shortcomings in living up to the beliefs of my faith and contrasted it with how these extraordinary people have made their faith a part of their fiber. And somehow or another he goes from taking it from me being an Episcopalian wishing I was a better Christian to somehow making me into a agnostic. You know, Mr. Moyers ought to do a little bit better research before he does another drive-by slander.

Whatever one's position on whether Rove is a genuine believer or not, one thing Moyer got right: George Bush would have never been elected governor of Texas or President of the United States without manipulating, or genuinely appealing to, the votes of the Christian religious right in America and receiving their support. They are also the same voters who by and large have stood by his disastrous invasion of Iraq, and many of them are pushing him to bomb Iran. Their religious beliefs play a significant role in their political policies and votes, just as religious belief plays a significant role for a Muslim Jihadist. Conversely, I would be willing to bet that the percentage of Atheists and Agnostics who actually voted for Bush, support the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the bombing of Iran and/or jihad is quite low. That's no coincidence.

As for our religion debate here, I think it can be distilled to this. TMcD's overall point here and here, in defense of Bush speechwriter Gerson who himself peppers Bush's rhetoric with manipulative religious themes, was that religion appeals to society's better angels and should therefore presumably be a part of political discourse by politicians. I have taken an opposite position here and here: the world would be better off if religion were kept out of politics and political discourse by politicians, because those who employ it in politcs usually do so as a cynical cover for other less godly motives (i.e. the Neoconservatives, Rove and Gerson). This is a genuine disagreement, and I hardly think that any of my points has "dissolved into dust."

So, this is the essential disagreement we are having, although within that larger debate I have also questioned the value of religion as a moral compass because its teachings (mythoi) are inevitably full of things that are not true, and historically religion has divided people across gender, class, ethnicity and race and has been an essential component of building public support for wars of aggression. A problem within this debate is that we are defining religion differently. By religion, I mean religion as it is traditionally understood and popularly practiced, not the minority view of a few theologians read mainly by other theologians and/or a few academics that religion represents "human imagination", or "superrationalism", or "spirituality" -- notions which I might add have not yet been clearly defined in actual practice by an actual practitioner on this blog and would probably be labelled "heretical" by all the leading governing bodies of every major religion in the world for their (as I understand them) Euhemeristic aspects.

I should also say that I think that religion itself would be better off if religion were left out of public political discourse by politicians (of course it's perfectly appropriate and necessary for religion to be a part of private church/synagogue/mosque... politics and most especially blogs). Even if you think religion as it is actually and widely practiced is good, when you mix ice cream and manure, the manure wins out every time. We all know that politics and politicians are full of shit and always will be. Nothing will ever change that, including and most especially "God".