Alright, as any number of you have pointed out, the Grillmaster is not, in fact, a doctor. Nor a nurse. Nor a vet. The breadth and depth of my medical knowledge extends to charcoal-filtered self-medication, and not much further. Which is all a round-about way of making excuses for the fact that diagnosing the discourse disease in this country is quite a bit easier than finding the miracle drug to ease our pain.
There may be some progress to be made on the political front. There are a few commentators, notably Noah Feldman in his well-worth reading recent book Divided By God, who have tried to propose grand compromises by which the Religious Right gives up on things like mandatory prayer in schools while the secular Left admits that abortion shouldn’t necessarily be as widely available as, say, Big Macs.
The recent opinion in the Dover Intelligent Design case is an excellent example of a judge rejecting a fairly clear violation of the Establishment Clause while explicitly stating that his ruling did not seek to attack religious belief. He even goes out of his way to point out that Intelligent Design might have a place in a comparative philosophy course. It’s the sort of fair ruling that does justice to the Constitution but avoids feeding the fears of militant judicial secularism that fuel reactionary rhetoric from parts of the Christian Right.
I’d like to think that reasonable people could be convinced to reach such an arrangement across the board (mostly because it’s what the Grillmaster believes). Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons to be doubtful. First, even reasonable people have deep differences of opinion on these issues, and it would be either naïve or arrogant to assume that they can just be negotiated away. Second, there are an AWFUL lot of completely UNreasonable people out there, who engage in shrill public rhetoric because they seem to like it (The Grillmaster hypothesizes that they need more beer-can chicken in their diets). And finally, there are well-funded political lobbies on either side that thrive on this devolution of discourse. In the Grillmaster’s growing experience, all of this applies to both left and right.
With these structural and substantive obstacles in place, what’s the hope for restoring our public discourse about religion and politics? In the short run, it might have as much to do with religion as politics. Faith leaders would do a service to both our politics and their religious traditions by speaking with some authority not just on the substance of our policy debates, but the style with which those debates are conducted. We may passionately disagree with one another on the substance of issues, but there is certainly no possible Christian justification for the politics of personal attack that is so venomous in today’s political environment. I’d imagine that Jewish and Muslim leaders could make similar arguments from within their traditions.
To prove the Grillmaster’s ability to be non-partisan, check out this remarkable article by none other than Chuck Colson to get a taste of the type of charitable, humble public discourse that Christians are really called to engage in.
