Kristina Keneally: Religion certainly belongs in politics

When I say “religion shouldn’t mix with politics,” it’s not because I don’t think that, in principle, religion shouldn’t influence people’s stands on issues. It’s just that when it does, at least in the U.S., it’s rarely for the better. The opposition to gay rights and gay marriage, as well as to abortion; the promotion of prayers and legally-taught creationism in public schools; views on euthanasia; the “just world” view of the poor (“the poor deserve what they get”); and even opposition to global warming—all of these views (and virtually all promotion of creationism) simply wouldn’t be as pervasive without religion. And I won’t even mention the politics of countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which are not only harmfully infected with Islam, but are almost coincident with Islam.

In contrast, when people do good in the name of faith, I suspect they would have done good anyway, for they’re simply good people. I really do think Steven Weinberg was on to something when he said, “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Well, it can also take unthinking ideology, as in the case of the Nazis and Stalinists. But it’s the invidious effect of religion on politics and morality, and faith’s ubiquitous side-effect of proselytizing, that convinces me that we should be deeply suspicious of politicians who get advice from God, or even who claim that their faith informs their politics.

But Kristina Keneally, former head of Australia’s Labor party and premier of New South Wales (now a commentator on Sky News), thinks otherwise. Or so she argues in a new Guardian piece, “Of course my faith influenced my political decisions, as did my gender. So what?” She’s a pious Catholic, which makes it more worrisome.  While arguing that most of the decisions she made had nothing to do with her faith, she starts off on a bad foot:

Religion isn’t silly, of course. Neither is politics, most of the time. Occasionally the two intersect.

Well, yes, religion is silly, both its tenets (a man’s death on a cross redeemed us all from a sin committed by two nonexistent progenitors of all humans) and its trappings (have you seen what the Pope and his cardinals wear?). And it’s based on the firm belief in things that either cannot be demonstrated or have been disconfirmed. So yes, religion is silly: it’s a childish thing that humanity should have long ago put away.

Keneally’s argument that it’s no more irrational for religion to inform politics than gender, or economics, as in the quote below, is bogus:

Yes, I believe in Jesus Christ but I am also a disciple of Joseph Stiglitz. Why did no journalist ever ask how much my economic thinking influenced my political decisions?

Well, maybe it’s because at least you can adduce evidence for views on economic policy (Paul Krugman does this regularly in the New York Times), but you can’t for Christianity. And as for gender, if a woman has experienced discrimination, it sensitizes her to its ubiquity and bad effects in her country, and so it’s perfectly rational to inform your politics with gender. I would argue, in fact, that the natural stand on abortion by women should be pro-abortion (or its euphemism “pro-choice”) rather than “pro-life,” since laws forbidding abortion take away a woman’s choice over what she does with a parasitic fetus (see Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “parasite” argument).

Likewise, it’s rational to inform your politics with your ethnicity. That’s exactly what American blacks did in the Sixties, and of course that produced the Civil Rights act and a new era of legal equality. The view that the U.S. would be better off without segregation didn’t come from a revelation or scripture (which usually says the opposite)—it came from observation and reflection.

But where Keneally really goes off the rails is when she explains why we shouldn’t trust atheist politicians:

 . . . In fact I have often wondered about atheist politicians. Surely the logical conclusion to atheism is nihilism, in which case, why bother engaging in political activity, trying to improve the lives of your fellow citizens and make the world a better place? Which politician is scarier: the one who insists there is ontological meaning and transcendental purpose to our lives, or the one who denies objective truth and believes that existence is ultimately a useless void?

I’d say the former! The religious-activist politician in the U.S. is likely to be an evangelical Christian Republican, and we know what they’re trying to do to the country. Further, Keneally is simply dead wrong when she claims that atheists are nihilists and therefore wouldn’t make good politicians. Is she aware of the fact that there are atheist politicians (not many will admit to that in the U.S.) and that, more important, many atheists are out there doing good? We don’t lie abed all day, dumbstruck by nihilism. One would think that someone with two neurons to rub together would realize this and jettison the “atheists-are-nihilists” argument. It’s simply dumb.

Keneally’s trump card: religion has always been with us, and always will:

There are those who argue religious belief has no place in civic discourse. Yet from the earliest periods of recorded history we are presented with evidence that human beings possess a spiritual dimension. The people with the longest continuous cultural history on Earth, Aboriginal Australians, tell rich spiritual stories to explain creation and humanity’s relationship to it.

Human beings are physical and they are spiritual. They bring their spiritual selves, however expressed, to their political discussions. This is not a threat to civil society. For thousands of years the spiritual life of human beings has supported and encouraged the extension of human rights, the establishment of civic communities, promulgation of the public good and extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for one’s fellow citizens.

Here she’s confusing “spirituality” with “morality”. Those of us on this site—most of us, I suspect—who favor gay rights, equality of women and ethnic minorities, and other liberal values, don’t do so out of our “spiritual dimension,” but because we think these stands have salubrious effects on society.

So yes, let’s keep religion out of politics, and by all means let us ask politicians to tell us whether and how their political views are colored by their faith. That’s a perfectly fair question.

What do we replace religion with, then? Why, with secular humanism and secular morality—much better guides to running societies.

I’ll leave it to the Aussie readers to tell me how Keneally fared as a politician in their land.

Kristina Keneally

h/t: Phil D.