Doug Henwood Talks

On Dec 2, 2006, at 11:52 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

I’m saying that we must engage the religious, not because they are more ordinary than the irreligious (though the former are certainly far more numerous than the latter in the USA and West Asia), but because they are, in many respects that matter politically, superior to the irreligious in practice at least in the USA and West Asia

I await Carrol Cox’s rebuke of this sort of generalization.

But really, this is extraordinarily abstract - as abstract as any M-L
sect gassing on about the proletariat. Which religious people? There
are all kinds in the USA, from reactionary white evangelicals (who
are all but hopeless politically: 24% of the electorate in 2006, 70%
voted for Republicans), to members of mainline Protestant
denominations (mainly center-left to center-right, though there are
plenty of exceptions), to Catholics (often conservative, but there
are those missile-hammering nuns), to a wide variety of Jews
(reactionary orthodox to Marxist seculars), to New Agey religions
(also all over the place politically), etc. Black evangelicals, a
large portion of the A-A pop, are social democrats on economic issues
but very patriotic and conservative on social issues.

So do you engage this immense variety as religious people, or just as
people who happen to be religious (which, in the US, can be nearly
everyone)? Do you use a religious vocabulary, organize outside
churches after services, or what?

And remember that frequency of church attendance correlates very
highly with voting patterns: the more frequent, the more Republican.
Recruiting among the pews doesn’t seem very promising.

Some of these pleas sound like the resolutions made by left-liberals
in the aftermath of the 2004 election - hey, man, America’s
religious, so we gotta get with ‘em! You could hardly open a paper
(or The Nation) without reading the name “Jim Wallis.” A little
bibliometric support - the number of articles containing the words
“Jim Wallis” in the Nexis major newspaper database for six-month
intervals:

5/1/04-11/1/04 43 11/1/04-5/1/05 154 5/1/05-11/1/05 77 11/1/05-5/1/06 60 5/1/06-11/1/06 61 11/8/06-12/2/06 22 (daily average mulitplied by 182.5)

Note the peak right after the 2004 election, and the decay. If trends
over the last month hold, Wallis will be even less quoted than he was
before W’s re-election! This is not surprising coming after an
election when the religious right was thumped, and voters said
religion played too big a part in politics. As Andrew Kohut writes
http://pewresearch.org/obdeck/?ObDeckID=91: “The real religion
story of this election is that the least religious Americans –
voters who attend church rarely or never — made the biggest
difference to the outcome of the election. This group gave Democrats
an even greater share of their vote — 67%, up from 55% in 2002.”

Further, Gallup
reports that religion matters most to blacks and women, groups who
are more left-leaning than whites and men, to the old rather than the
young, to the less-educated rather than more - and that the salience
of religion in American life is actually declining over time. So an
explicitly religious turn might not be going with the tide of
history, at least in the US.

By the way, interesting Gallup poll of the Muslim world at . The “radicals”
are better-educated, richer, and more optimistic about the future
than the “moderates.” This comports with the argument made by Chris
Harman http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/harman/1994/prophet/ch08.htm
that Islamism served as an ideology of a rising class in Iran that
wanted to displace the old Western-associated managerial class; anti- imperialism served their self-interest, and ranting about traditional
morality mobilized the lumpen (his term, not mine: “They used Islamic
language to mobilise behind them sections of the lumpen proletariat
into gangs, the Hizbollah, which would attack the left, enforce
Islamic ‘morality’ [for instance, against women who refused to wear
the veil] and join the army in putting down the separatist revolts.”)

Doug

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