Division and Disenchantment

Pundits and pew-sitters alike are still analyzing the significance of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's "Day of Prayer and Fasting" event on Aug. 6. Not surprisingly, these critiques appear to be feeding on the general dissatisfaction among American Christians with their political leadership.

One of the most detailed analyses TPC has read so far comes from Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way's "Right Watch." Cross-posted on Huffington Post, Montgomery writes that Perry's event was extraordinary in that a sitting public official hosted a sectarian (Christians only) event organized and financed by some of the most controversial religious extremists in America. Montgomery writes:

Organizers argued (unconvincingly) that "The Response" was about prayer, not politics. But groups like the American Family Association (AFA), which paid for the rally and its webcast, and organizations like the Family Research Council, whose president was among the speakers, are not designed to win souls but to change American law and culture through grassroots organizing and political power-building. They have a corrosive effect on our political culture by promoting religious bigotry and anti-gay extremism, by claiming that the United States was meant to be a Christian nation, and by fostering resentment among conservative evangelicals with repeated false assertions that liberal elites are out to destroy religious liberty and silence conservative religious voices.

What remains puzzling to TPC and other progressive Christians is why the GOP would embrace such "divisive extremists," as Montgomery terms them, in light of the country's disenchantment with Republicans in the debt ceiling debacle. The New York Times reportedlast week that voter disapproval of Congress is at an all-time high at 82 percent. On Aug. 2, four days before the Perry event, a CNN/ORC International Poll found that 84 percent of Americans surveyed disapproved of congressional performance, and 72 percent disapproved of Republican negotiating tactics in the debt ceiling drama, along with 66 percent disapproval of Democratic tactics.

Based on these responses, it would seem  that American voters are getting wise to polarizing political tactics, even if Standard & Poor's failed to acknowledge Republican culpability when they downgraded the United States' financial rating, according to Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson in his Aug. 9 opinion, "A downgrade's GOP fingerprints."

Meanwhile, Cathy Lynn Grossman gave readers the chance to assess Perry's prayer rally at her USA Today blog, Faith & Reason. As of 3 PM Aug. 9, there were some 1,400 responses, broken down as follows:

Was Gov. Rick Perry's prayer [rally] ...

• Humble, helpful and sincere?                      35%
• Pure politics disguised as piety?                  48%
• Unnecessary? I always pray for the USA.     5%
• A waste of breath? Prayers don't work.       13%

Finally, the disenchantment with America's political and religious leadership peaks at the Washington Post's On Faith. Chicago Theological Seminary professor Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite laments the lack of theological scrutiny of America's economic system akin to that of Reinhold Niebuhr's critiques of U.S. economics during the Great Depression. Clearly, Dr. Thistlethwaite doesn't read The Progressive Christian, or she'd be more familiar with the writings of scholars such as J. Philip Wogaman and Joerg Rieger, whose work has focused precisely on the kind of systematic critique that the good professor is seeking. [Editor's note: Her complimentary copy of the latest print issue is in the mail ].