Apologies for being MIA the last week and a half. I was down South visiting family… and since returning my brain has been in that mode where I feel like starting lots of things, but can’t seem to finish any of them. Anyway, I was thumbing through my alumni magazine yesterday evening and was annoyed to see that they’d marked the anniversary of Humanae Vitae by publishing this story by E.J. Dionne, a visiting professor in the journalism department last year. I had the idea that his name looked vaguely familiar, and when I glanced at the bio I figured out why; he’s the author of one of those sleazy political books that you see on the front tables as you’re walking into Barnes and Noble — the kind with blunt, hit-you-upside-the-head titles and the obvious intention to snag those lefties in a panic about the evil conservatives and all the havoc they’re wreaking in America. His particular title? Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Cute.

So what was a guy like this doing in the Notre Dame Magazine? Sigh. Peddling an old and tired message, I’m afraid. He was trying to be all subtle and fresh-sounding, but the take-home message was basically, “Abortion is always going to be legal in America, so get over it. We have more important things to worry about, like beefing up entitlement programs and pulling out of Iraq.” Among the people he cited with approval were: Mario Cuomo (the famous 1984 “personally opposed” speech), Mark Roche (with his famous “why Catholics can vote Democrat” letter to the NYT) and Reinhold Niebuhr (who my husband likes to call “the dean of liberal Protestantism.”) Like so many others, he obviously resents the frequent implication that the Democrats are morally bankrupt, and contends that religion is so much bigger than any particular political party. Here we see Dionne’s climax:

“I titled my recent book on religion and politics Souled Out, because I thought the pun embodied the large changes in the landscape of faith and public life. The title could be read in two ways. It spoke to our country’s exhaustion with a religious style in politics that was excessively dogmatic, partisan and ideological. It was a style reflecting a spirit far too certain of itself and far too insistent on the depravity of its political adversaries. Linking religion too closely to the fortunes of one political party, or to one leader or group of leaders, is always a mistake. It encourages alienation from faith itself — where, after all, did the current new atheist writers come from? — by turning a concern with the ultimate into a prop for temporal power. It distorted great traditions by requiring their exponents to bob and weave to accommodate the political needs of a given moment or the immediate requirements of a given politician. A great many people — including a great many religious people — have had enough.

They have had enough for the reason embodied in the other sense of the title: Reducing religion to politics or to a narrow set of public issues amounts to a great sellout of our traditions. It is common to speak of religion as “selling out” to secularism or to modernity or to a fashionable relativism. But there is a more immediate danger, particularly in the United States, of religion selling out to political forces that use the votes of religious people for purposes having nothing to do with a religious agenda — and, often enough, for causes that contradict the values such voters prize most.

It is a great sellout of religion to insist that it has much to teach us about abortion or gay marriage but little useful to say about social justice, Iraq, the organization of our work lives or our approach to providing for the old, the sick and the desperate. Religion becomes less relevant to public life when its role is marginalized to a predetermined list of “values issues,” when its voice is silenced or softened on the central problems facing our country and our government.”

Heh heh. Interesting concept of “selling out”, Mr. Dionne.

The first thing to observe is that, for a guy who claims to want to encourage more bi-partisanship, he’s certainly awfully willing to stab pro-life Democrats in the back. A few thousand words on why the Republicans shouldn’t be the only option for Christian voters, and he doesn’t even give them a mention. In fact, the whole tenor of his piece suggests that those brave holdouts have been on a fool’s errand all along.

Next thing: he’s certainly right that the GOP is not God’s own party. Anybody who thinks that is mistaken indeed, and I absolutely would never contend that all Catholics are morally obligated to vote for the Republicans. The single-issue voters I know — and I know quite a few — don’t do much bobbing and weaving over “the immediate requirements of a given politician.” Their demands are perfectly straightforward and their philosophy utterly simple: we don’t vote for anyone who supports the legal murder of innocents. And we also frown on people who attack the foundations of family life by confusing the nature of marriage and further degrading our appreciation of the value of life. It’s a contingent fact that, in America, only one of the two political parties has been remotely sympathetic to that agenda in the last two decades or so. If that reduces the Church to a “prop for temporal power,” I don’t really know what to say except that, sometimes, decency and truth do lend support to particular temporal powers more than other ones. But I’m sure I’m not the only Catholic here who would be perfectly willing to consider voting for the Democrats, if only they’d leave off their support for killing babies and old people, promoting sodomy, distributing contraceptives abroad, and other related depravities. It’s rather obtuse to accuse the Church of “selling out” when she’s just repeating the same things she said all along. Who’s really bobbing and weaving here?

Dionne says that Christians are “tired” of being used as a “prop for temporal power”, but it’s pretty obvious where the exhaustion is really setting in. People like him are tired of hearing that they have no values. They’re tired of the fact that, contrary to their confident predictions, people aren’t “getting over” their hang-ups about legal abortion, the Church isn’t giving in on contraception and divorce, and even on the one front where the liberals have made some real headway (homosexual “rights”) it’s becoming increasingly clear that their cherished comparison to the Civil Rights movement isn’t really so apt after all — opposition is not going to melt away in a decade or two. Trapped in such a predicament, it’s not surprising that some decide to engage in a little wishful thinking, declaring that the battle is all but won in hopes that this will make it true.

On that note, my favorite part of this piece was in the segment entitled, “Youthful Excitement.” Here Dionne predicts that the winds of change are a-blowin’, in a progressive direction of course, as seen by the fact that, “in the 2006 midterm elections those under 30 voted by 3-to-2 for the Democrats.” I was indeed impressed by these statistics — “is that all?” I thought. The young are almost always more drawn to liberalism than their elders, and the 2006 election was a particularly rough one for the GOP with six years already in the White House, the economy sputtering, and a few Republican scandals in the previous year to sour the milk a bit more. If they can’t pull down more than 60% of the under-30 vote at a time like that, the Democrats could well be looking at tough times ahead. Meanwhile, liberals are presently taking hope from Barack Obama’s rise to political rock stardom… but this, surely, has all the makings of a flash-in-the-pan moment. Young people are easily charmed by good-looking, deep-voiced progressives who promise them that they are living in “the time.” Disillusionment is sure to follow once the election ends, nobody walks on water, and people get back to quibbling instead about gas prices and social security. In fact, the fall will probably be much harder if Obama actually gets elected. How many fresh-faced young baby boomers marched against the Vietnam war, and sang about how the times were a-changin’, and now are preparing to vote for John McCain?

The final irony about a piece like this is that the author’s own weakness is perfectly revealed in his accusations against others. He contends that intractable Christian voters are letting their religious beliefs be compromised in a quest for political power. That’s perfectly silly, of course. While every trend among voters will end up being used for somebody’s political ends (that’s just how democracy works), it’s not skyrocketing intractable pro-life voters into positions of influence; quite the contrary. What it really does is slam doors on people who aren’t willing to set aside their moral repugnance — doors that Dionne wants to walk through. So, he agrees that abortion is bad, but suggests that the better solution is to establish more entitlement programs. He tiptoes around homosexuality and other controversial issues, but it’s obvious that his final analysis is, “This development is inevitable. Give it up and move on to more important things.”

So that’s the point that we have to keep making, over and over and over again. There are no more important things. As I point out in my Humanae Vitae post (which you’ll all be welcome to read, if I ever finish it), these other problems — war, disease, poverty, poor labor conditions, corrupt governments, etc etc — have been with us forever. Most of them are less bad, actually, than they were in centuries past. We shouldn’t just neglect these problems, but we also need to accept that we can’t just solve them, any more than we can simply get rid of sin. The poor we will always have with us.

The decline of the family, on the other hand, is another matter. This is not an area where we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that such is simply the condition of the human race. This is one where we should compare ourselves to civilizations past, and acknowledge that we stack up pretty badly. It’s kind of a drag, I guess, to risk making ourselves politically irrelevant on so many other issues just to make a statement about this one. On the other hand, it seems we are making some kind of statement, or there wouldn’t be so many people eager to tell us what dinosaurs we are. So, apologies to Dionne and others out there who are tired of having to choose between being faithful and being relevant. But it does warm my heart a little to see that we intractable Catholics are really starting to wear on people like you.