Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Reader Question: Conservatives vs. the Pope

I've seen tons of conservatives on TV taking shots at the Pope, now that he is in the US. Is this the clincher that their "Christianity" is just a tool? -Greg
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Thanks for writing in, Greg.

I have said, for a long time, that for a large number of politicians, Christianity is a flag that they can wave to get support and talking points without having to be nailed down to actually meaning anything in particular. While any number of them might actually consider themselves to be Christian, their policies are not particularly faith driven, for reasons I have discussed at length elsewhere.

But no, this isn't the clinching proof of that.

A lot of non-believers (yes, even some of my atheists) have difficulty understanding that Christianity is not, and has never been, monolithic. Even when using it as part of an atheist rationale ("Whose version of the Bible is right?") the truth behind that talking point often gets lost... that there are many, many versions of Christianity out there, and there has never been a time IN HISTORY when every member of the faith was on the same page.

(To me, as it happens, this is one of the most compelling arguments against the "let's invent a faith for X reason" conspiracy theories... if Christianity was invented as a part of a conspiracy, they would have gotten their story straight, first.)

So what does this have to do with Conservatives and the Pope? Well, first, despite what some Catholics might tell you, the Pope does not represent Christianity as a whole, and so it is entirely possible to oppose him and still be Christian. And speaking of opposition:

There are traditions within American Protestantism that are nearly defined by opposing the Pope, to the point of portraying anything even remotely Catholic as satanic and evil, viewing the Catholic Church as the great evil that seeks to control the world for Satan while we "good" Christians carry on the fight, good here generally meaning "white middle class Protestants" and all those lesser people we can save from the evils of Papery.

It even took depressingly familiar forms. Nearly any modern day stigma you can think of against Muslims at one point had its Catholic counterpart, with Catholics perceived as inherently unAmerican immigrants who came to take our jobs and who would obey the Pope, rather than our laws. That last point was held up NATIONALLY as recently as the 1960's, with people worried if John F. Kennedy, if elected, would follow the will of the American People or the Pope.

Nothing new under the sun, it seems.

It is true that classic conservative Protestants are being more restrained in their critique of the Pope than they have in the past, largely because conservative Catholics now make up a significant part of their voting block, but it doesn't surprise me that Pope Francis makes them crazy, if only because a significant aspect of conservative Catholicism IS Papal obedience, which was safe enough when Popes were sticking to safe subjects like birth control and abortion, but now that a Pope is reinforcing Biblical commands about helping the poor and the immigrant, the message has gotten somewhat muddled.

But in general, a lot of these conservatives, the ones who actually do have Christian roots, come from a tradition that was always going to be, at the very best, HIGHLY suspicious of anything that came from under the Papal hat, and for (ostensibly) religious reasons.

So no, current opposition to the Pope, especially as he makes his American visit, is not the clinching proof that the Christianity of American Conservatives is just a talking point to rally support. All it proves, in the end, is that old habits die hard.
 

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