Category: Religion

From Andrew Sullivan: “A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR: That’s Bill Bennett’s conclusion. He won’t be the only one. What we’re seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. […] But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options.”

UPDATE: Amy Sullivan has a different take on this: “the “huge fundamentalist Christian revival” took place about thirty years ago, not last month, and it has always been explictly political”. Worth reading, but flawed. Yes, the revival took place years ago, and Reagan and Bush Snr. courted the religious right and then ignored them. Dubya did pretty much the same in 2000. This is the first time that religious wedge issues have been so nakedly and cynically exploited as part of a GOTV effort, and it coincides with (1) the election of a new crop of Republican congressmen who are as rabid as Newt’s crowd were but are explicitly religious in their allegiance, and (2) the likely opening of 2-4 Supreme slots. I think that it is going to be different this time.

With the blessing of the Vatican, two Italian theologians have just published a book on sex for Catholics, entitled It’s A Sin Not To Do It. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is just a way to get the faithful to increase the Catholic birth-rate; far from it. It’s much more expansive in scope. For example, as the Telegraph reports, the book “unearths theological justification for post-coital masturbation for women who fail to achieve orgasm during intercourse”. How times change. Mentioning something like that in the Catholic school I attended back in the early 1960s would have meant six of the best. (But I thought Catholic teaching was supposed to be inerrant and eternal….)