Religion And The #Shutdown Strategy Of The GOP

R3 Editor

As the government continues to be stuck on shutdown and coming perilously close to defaulting on our loan payments which all the experts say would be a cataclysmic failure, an overwhelming majority of voters blame the Republican controlled House and Republicans in general for the shutdown. Some have commented that all House Speaker Boehner needs to do is to bring a clean “Continuing Resolution” to the floor and it would pass because there are some members of his own caucus who have publically declared that they would support the measure. However, Boehner has decided not to do this, evening changing the rules to prevent a vote from happening. This leaves him and the majority of elected Republicans in the House and Senate scrambling trying to find a way out of a problem of their own making.

This Republican recalcitrance has frustrated not only the majority of Americans but also political pundits. Moreover, pundits have been trying to figure out why some, mainly Tea Party representatives, continue with their shutdown strategy. Some argue that race plays an important part. Colbert King noted that, “[T]here is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.” Further, he writes:

Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all.

Both Stephan Richter and Ari Berman note the GOP reliance on the South and an updated Southern Strategy. Others such as Roger Simon note the blatant racism from some GOP supporters, while Zach Beauchamp offers a more detailed analysis on how racism caused the shutdown. While these critiques offer much in the way of understanding the mindset of many contemporary GOP and Tea Party adherents, few have noted how religion shaped this shutdown strategy. I suggest that an understanding of the shutdown and the pending default without understanding the religion associated with it is an incomplete analysis.

I am not along in this assessment—others have come forth to talk about the religion that led to the government shutdown and impending default and we here at Rhetoric Race and Religionhave collected some of them

/blogs/rhetoricraceandreligion/p/on-october-1-2013-congress-could-not.html”>here. For instance, Morgan Guyton has written on Christian Dominionism as the prevailing theology of the government shutdown while Anthea Butler noted apocalyptic theology’s role in the shutdown. However, it has been Frank Schaeffer, who has not only written extensively about the GOP and religion, but also makes the argument that to understand the GOP/Tea Party group of conservatives one must attend to their religion and theology.

In writing about “non-reasoning” members of the GOP/Tea Party, Schaffernoted:

Reason-based Americans need to address non reasoning America on its own terms. Those terms are about something that makes many reason-based people feel uncomfortable: religion. The real issue facing us in a threatened shutdown isn’t government or economics. The real issue is what it’s always been in America since our founding: religious delusion, and the search in all the wrong places for philosophical presuppositions that give our lives meaning.

In another post, he writes:

Face it, church and state are no longer separated. They’ve been folded into one deadly destructive, economy-threatening entity by the Republicans. It’s time to stop being any less forcefully truth-telling about religion than we are about politics. They are one and the same. The shutdown is a slow motion religious extremist attack on America no less deadly that a suicide vest attack.

In writing about Rousas Rushdoony, a leader of what some call Reconstructionist theology, Schaeffer notes that:

Until Rushdoony…..began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States. Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were “New Testament Christians.” In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the “New Covenant” of Jesus’ “Law of Love.” By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings—on everything from capital punishment for gays to the virtues of child-beating—were still valid because they were the inerrant Word and Will of God and therefore should be enforced. Not only that, they said that biblical law should be imposed even on nonbelievers.

Schaeffer laments that ongoing media coverage of the government shutdown still lacks attention to religion. He offersa reason why:

The reason we don’t get the straight story from the media is because of undue respect for religion on the one hand and a refusal to believe that religion is still so important on the other hand. Deference waits upon scorn. And between these two attitudes the real story gets ignored. But if you listen to what’s said, it’s all cast in terms that anyone in the evangelical world, or raised there, will recognize.

He further writes in the same post,

The media have been analyzing the shutdown but largely ducking the truth. Until the media expose the beliefs of the religious extremist as the root cause of the shutdown nothing can change. Want to know why the Tea Party folks seem to take it on faith they’re right and the polls are wrong? They have been trained by their churches and pastors to ignore facts and trust their “
hearts.” From global warming denial, to accepting Jesus as their personal savior no fact need apply, it’s all about trusting a web of myth, feeling and bigotry over anything that can be argued.

I have been saying and writing all along that an understanding of religion is paramount in understand not only the shutdown, but also GOP/Tea Party (non) governance. One cannot understand the erratic and heartless cutting of SNAP benefits, the theological cognitive dissonance that many Evangelical Christians displayed in supporting a devout Mormon, Mitt Romney, or the response and (non) action after ANY mass gun murder without understanding how (toxic) faith and religion plays a role. In short, for folks who claim a faith tradition and elected to public office, how they proclaim and promote their faith in public shows us how they will perform their faith while in office. Moreover, as we are discovering folks who have narrow, narcissistic and nativist faith, makes for some bad elected officials.

Religion and the #Shutdown Strategy of the GOP