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1. On (Not) Arguing About Religion and Politics
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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1 In the spring of 2003, during the American invasion of Iraq, my friend Michael attended a peace vigil. As he stood quietly on a street corner with other participants, a young man leaped very close to his face and screamed: “Traitor! Why don’t you go to Iraq and suck Saddam’s dick?” Michael was taken aback by the vehemence with which the insult was delivered as much as by its indelicacy. Why, he asked, does disagreement make some people so angry? This is and is not a rhetorical question. That is to say, it is a question about rhetoric, and the question requires an answer. In A Rhetoric of Motives Kenneth Burke asserts that “we need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, faction as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression” (20). But in America we tend to overlook the “presence of strife, envy, faction” in our daily intercourse. “Argument” has a negative valence in ordinary conversation , as when people say “I don’t want to argue with you,” as though to argue generates discord rather than resolution. In times of crisis Americans are expected to accept national policy without demur. Indeed, to dissent is to risk being thought unpatriotic. Inability or unwillingness to disagree openly can pose a problem for the maintenance of democracy. Chantal Mouffe points out that “a wellfunctioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic con1 On (Not) Arguing about Religion and Politics 2 ON (NOt) ARguiNg AbOut ReligiON ANd POlitics frontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification” (Democratic 104). When citizens fear that dissenting opinions cannot be heard, they may lose their desire to participate in democratic practices, or, to put this in terms congenial to Mouffe’s analysis, they may replace their allegiance to democracy with other sorts of collective identifications that blur or obscure their responsibilities as citizens. Something like this seems to have happened in America. Members of a state legislature flee the state’s borders in order to avoid voting on a bill that will gerrymander them out of office. Other legislatures are unable to cooperate well enough even to settle on a method of deliberation. Authorized public demonstrations are haunted by the possibility of violence. Media pundits tell us that “the nation” is “polarized.” Citizens do not debate issues of public concern with family, friends, or colleagues for fear relationships will be irreparably strained in the process. Joan Didion suspects that we refrain from discussing current events because “so few of us are willing to see our evenings turn toxic” (23). Didion writes that some issues, such as America’s relations with Israel, are seen as “unraisable, potentially lethal, the conversational equivalent of an unclaimed bag on a bus. We take cover. We wait for the entire subject to be defused, safely insulated behind baffles of invective and counterinvective. Many opinions are expressed. Few are allowed to develop. Even fewer change” (24). Clearly this state of affairs threatens the practice of democracy, which requires at minimum a discursive climate in which dissenting positions can be heard. Discussion of civic issues stalls repeatedly at this moment in American history because it takes place in a discursive climate dominated by two powerful discourses: liberalism and Christian fundamentalism.1 These two discourses paint very different pictures of America and of its citizens’ reThe Boondocks © 2003 Aaron McGruder. Dist. By Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. [54.242.75.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:49 GMT) ON (NOt) ARguiNg AbOut ReligiON ANd POlitics 3 sponsibilities toward their country. Liberalism is the default discourse of American politics because the country’s founding documents, and hence its system of jurisprudence, are saturated with liberal values. The vocabulary of liberalism includes commonplaces concerning individual rights, equality before the law, and personal freedom. Because of its emphasis on the last-named value, liberalism has little or nothing to say about beliefs or practices deemed to reside outside of the so-called public sphere. Indeed , in the last fifty years American courts have imagined a “zone of privacy ” within which citizens may conduct themselves however they wish, within certain limits (Gorney 135–39). Fundamentalist Christians, on the other hand, aim to “restore” biblical values to the center of American life and politics. If they have their way, Americans will conduct themselves, publicly and privately, according to a set of beliefs derived from...