E. J. Dionne Jr.: "How many more scandals will it take for people who call themselves Christian to rediscover the virtues of humility and solidarity?"

Defrocked Indiana moralist Mark Souder inspires E. J. Dionne Jr. to say to "my conservative Christian friends": "Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists."

"It's not the self-righteousness of religious conservatives that bothers me most. We liberals can be pretty self-righteous, too. It's the refusal to acknowledge that the pressures endangering the family do not come from some dark secular leftist conspiracy but from cultural and economic forces that affect us all."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column today,

"Mark Souder's downfall shows virtue knows no ideology"

by Ken

I more or less promised yesterday, when I talked about Tony Judt's remarkable memoir vignette, "Austerity," in the May 13 New York Review of Books, that today we would come back to the second vignette from that issue, about his complicated (or maybe not so complicated) relationship to his Jewishness. We're definitely going to come back to it, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, but since we're on the subject of the role of religious faith in a person's life, I had to pause for consideration of E. J. Dionne Jr.'s eloquent column today.

Dionne, of course, resolutely refuses to raise his voice, and in that quiet, humble voice all sorts of wisdom slips into the Post's editorial pages, apparently beyond the reach (or perhaps awareness?) of the paper's increasingly cynical and corrupt management, not to mention the ministrations of closet neanderthal Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. Or maybe they're all too aware, and that's why they feel the need to print that entire platoon of screamingly imbecilic, dishonest, and corrupt right-wing columnistic phrauds and fonies.

Today's column takes off from the spectacular fall from grace of former Indiana Rep. Mark Souder, one of the most aggressively -- and, we now discover, not entirely surprisingly, fraudulently -- morality-imposing Visigoths in American public life. Souder, of course, is merely the latest in the seemingly endless procession of fake-moral fire-and-brimstone Christian Right hypocrites to be exposed for the lying sack of doody he is.

Dionne begins by noting: "I always thought he was the real deal, both serious and thoughtful in his approach to religious and political questions." Unfortunately for the dwindling band of Christians who actually understand and attempt to live by the teachings of Jesus, they are always at a disadvantage in dealing with the Crap Christians all around them, who never come closer to spirituality than feeling superior by beating others over the head with rigid bogus-moral prescriptions, which they don't (a) understand, (b) believe in, or -- all too often (c) practice.

Because Dionne actually understands the concept of "fairness," which most people, including virtually every right-winger I've known or heard of, think of as "getting what I delusionally believe I'm entitled to," he is at pains not to gloat, or to excuse liberals from the sin of self-righteousness. It's with apparent pain that he recalls Souder saying: "To ask me to check my Christian beliefs at the public door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman, and that I will not do. Either I am a Christian or I am not."

To me this simply explains why Souder is doomed to rot in the Hell to which he so easily consigned others for a (hopefully) limitlessly agonizing eternity. Whereas in Dionne it merely inspires the "hope that Souder finds a way to work out his redemption." Which sets the stage for this amazing burst of soft-spoken eloquence:

[I]t is precisely because this story hits me personally that I want to shout as forcefully as I can to my conservative Christian friends: Enough!

Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists.

Enough with pretending that personal virtue is connected with political creeds. Enough with condemning your adversaries, sometimes viciously, and then insisting upon understanding after the failures of someone on your own side become known to the world. And enough with claiming that support for gay rights and gay marriage is synonymous with opposition to family values and sexual responsibility.

Dionne offers the example of his own "very liberal Maryland neighborhood -- 80 percent of my precinct voted for Barack Obama" to propose that concerned parents, regardless of ideology or religious persuasion (including no religious persuasion) approach their responsibility to have their children educated and to instill ethical values do so in similar ways, and with indistinguishable seriousness.

Dionne concludes:

[T]hose of us who are liberal would insist that our support for the rights of gays and lesbians grows from our sense of what family values demand. How can being pro-family possibly mean holding in contempt our homosexual relatives, neighbors and friends? How much sense does it make to preach fidelity and commitment and then deny marriage to those whose sexual orientation is different from our own? Rights for gays and lesbians don't wreck heterosexual families. Heterosexuals are doing a fine job of this on their own.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." It's a scriptural passage that no doubt appeals to Mark Souder. But it would be lovely if conservative Christians remembered Jesus's words not only when needing a lifeline but also when they are tempted to give speeches or send out mailers excoriating their political foes as permissive anti-family libertines. How many more scandals will it take for people who call themselves Christian to rediscover the virtues of humility and solidarity?

Amen.

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