Religion and Politics

The Non-Easter Proclamations, the President, and the Election

Posted on by David Rodeback

On Friday the White House issued two proclamations about Sunday, March 31, 2024, the day I and many fellow Christians worldwide observed as Easter. Each was accompanied by a lengthy official statement. One proclamation called Sunday César Chávez Day and was mostly ignored. The other set off a firestorm. It labeled the holiest of Christian holy days, Easter, a Transgender Day of Visibility.

Finally, on Easter itself, the White House issued a very brief statement by the President and First Lady with their “warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday.”

Some on the right speculated that no one at the White House was even aware of Easter until a chorus of angry voices pointed it out. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the White House publicized and hosted its annual Easter Egg Roll — and specifically forbade the use of religious imagery in decorating Easter eggs for the event.

Some on the left rushed to assure us (a) that the timing of this Transgender Day of Visibility was a coincidence, because it doesn’t move and Easter does, from year to year, and (b) that you have to be part of “the Trump cult” to be bothered by it anyway.

It’s reasonable for the right to be suspicious. When the Left’s project is to demolish a nation’s culture, so they can replace it with a different culture in which they rule with awful power over everyone else, they understandably attack their target’s most sacred institutions, including its holy days.

My Privilege, My Blessings

Posted on by David Rodeback

I’ve thought a lot in recent years, especially at this season, about two somewhat similar activities: counting blessings and checking privilege.

The idea of counting blessings is far older than me. Some of my earliest memories of church services feature the chorus of a well-beloved old hymn: “Count your many blessings; / See what God has done.”

Checking privilege is a newer phrase, at least to me. It was alive and well on college campuses when I was in graduate school in the Ivy League in the 1990s. There I often heard the phrase white privilege and occasionally even the historically fraught white guilt. Over the next decade or two what I’d met in the academy infused itself into our broader culture.

On reflection I find moral worth in both activities — checking my privilege and counting my blessings — but I find some important differences too, and some risks.

One housekeeping note before we proceed: Returning readers may wonder, when they encounter religious content here, why this essay is at The Freedom Habit instead of Bendable Light. The reason is simple: I intend BendableLight.com to be a safe space from politics. When my other themes, including faith, overlap with politics, their place is here.

Check Whose Privilege?

There are two basic versions of checking privilege.

One version is second-person: check your privilege. This might be said kindly and with good intentions, but it’s often — and easily — weaponized. When it is, it becomes shorthand for “people like you have dominated everything forever; it’s time for you to shut up.”

(A certain sort of abuser could weaponize “count your blessings” too, but in my experience that is rare.)

The other, healthier version is first-person and introspective: check my privilege. One considers one’s own privilege in a mode of sincere self-evaluation. Only this version bears comparison to counting blessings.

Human Purpose and Identity, the Judeo-Christian Tradition, Independence Day, and the Left

Posted on by David Rodeback

Leftists, who are not the same as liberals, have a natural enemy in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Western culture and government. We should not be surprised to see them attack that tradition persistently and comprehensively. This natural hostility reaches to the early pages of the Old Testament, the very foundations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and to some famous words in the Declaration of Independence.

For today, because we can’t dive into the deep end of every pool in the neighborhood at once — this is an essay of modest length, not a book — I’ll ignore some things and assert others without detailed discussion. Each of these deserves careful consideration, but it won’t happen in this essay:

  • Is the expected attack under way, perhaps even well advanced? There may be few more important questions in our culture and politics, but I’m avoiding this question today, for economy’s sake and because I hope people with differing views of this question will read this essay.
  • I assert without discussion here that American liberals and leftists are not the same; they too are natural enemies. At the simplest level, when the labels make sense, liberals seek liberty. So do American conservatives. Leftists seek power.
  • I’m ignoring the extreme Right in the United States. They exist, but they are virtually irrelevant at present, except in Leftist rhetoric, and they occupy no significant place in the hearts and minds of most Americans, including the vast majority of conservatives. Moreover, the extreme Right’s goals closely resemble the Left’s; the major difference is branding. Much of what I say here about the Left would apply to the extreme Right as well.
  • I note without detailed discussion some concerns of religious and secular observers alike, including scholars. They point to increasing challenges among the rising generation of American youth and young adults, including an unusual lack of purpose and identity and a lack of hope for the future. (If one happens to believe the Left’s expected attack is well advanced in the US, one might see these unfortunate trends as highly convenient or even intentional.)
  • I assert without writing a book about it that the Left by nature works to destroy culture, the rule of law, and every traditional moral and social restraint, and to divide people into warring factions. This is their theoretical and historical path to seizing comprehensive power amid the rubble.

If your comfort requires you to read this discussion as purely theoretical and hypothetical, feel free. But if you happen someday to notice the American Left attacking the Judeo-Christian tradition — in real time or in history — you’ll know it is simply being true to itself, doing what so many Lefts have done before. It is using its power, when it has power, to attack its chief cultural rival.

All of that said (or evaded, as the case may be), we need a slightly larger foundation before we proceed.

Ten Commandments and the Revolution

Posted on by David Rodeback

The Ten Commandments are ancient and the Russian Revolution is old news, but this is about contemporary America: our politics, economics, culture, and more — things we often see as two-sided. Many people with strong political or cultural opinions see themselves either trying to make substantial, structural changes in American government and society, or trying to prevent others from doing so. Whatever passions, philosophies, and intentions may exist behind the rhetoric, each side accuses the other of tearing down our values and institutions.

You may have examples from your own perspective. I’ll give you a few of mine, in discussing the Bible’s Ten Commandments — key pillars of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which incubated the American political tradition — after we’ve talked about Russia. Soviet Russia, to be precise.

Let’s do that now.

Mr. Justice Mike Lee? Not in 2018.

Posted on by David Rodeback

United States Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) is said to be on the short list, but perhaps not the shorter list, to fill the US Supreme Court seat opened by Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement.

Here we’ll consider why President Trump might nominate Utah’s junior senator — and why he probably won’t.

Senator Mike Lee
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah)

Guest Post: Molly Hogan – “We Need Them As Much As They Need Us”

Posted on by Molly Hogan

Molly Hogan

Nine years ago, my husband Brady and I were living in a small but cozy apartment in Salt Lake City. We were pregnant with our first child, going to school for our bachelor’s degrees, and working full-time. After crunching the numbers again and again, we realized that I would still need to work once the baby was born.

I’d always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, so I began to look for jobs that would allow me to work from home. After a lot of searching we found an apartment manager position just a couple of blocks away. We went to check it out.

The Post I Never Finished Last Year (Updated)

Posted on by David Rodeback

For me 2015 was, among other things, a year in which I didn’t blog as much as I hoped to, and didn’t finish some of the writing I started.

I’m trying to avoid that this year, in part by scaling back my expectations, but also by doing a little better outside of election season. There are things other than politics and government about which I want to write — am writing — elsewhere, but these things matter too.

I have fragments of an unpublished post from last year in which I predicted some things for the coming year. I thought it might be interesting to look back, forward, and around on the same topics one year later.

Constitution Day: A Big Deal

Posted on by David Rodeback

US ConstitutionHappy Constitution Day!

228 years ago today, the 1787 Constitutional Convention finished its work and formally sent its proposed Constitution of the United States of America to the states for ratification. It was a pivotal day (and then some) for the United States, but also for the world.

Granted, the Founders each brought large, vigorous bundles of competing interests to the convention. Granted, they were imperfect on many levels, as mortals tend to be. Granted, some of them owned slaves, and the rest of them were (just barely) willing to defer that problem as the price of having a functioning government at all. Granted — and inevitably — their work was imperfect, incomplete. That’s why they established a mechanism for amending it. But their compromise of compromises was the best they could do under the circumstances. It was the best we have ever done. They gave us a flawed, tempestuous republic which survives to this day.

SB 296, SB 297, Religious Freedom, and Nondiscrimination

Posted on by David Rodeback

My readers may know two things about me, based on statements in public meetings, private conversations, or what I wrote at this blog’s predecessor, LocalCommentary.com.

First, for a long time I have supported local and state legislation to prohibit discrimination in housing and employment based on actual or perceived gender identity or sexual orientation.

Second, the level of my confidence in the Utah legislature is perennially low.

These two themes came together last year at about this time, as the Utah legislature sat on its hands and refused even to debate last year’s version of a non-discrimination law (SB 100). I wrote:

It’s an extraordinarily discerning litmus test, where Mormon Utah Republicans are concerned. It tells us where people land on the freedom-versus-using-my-power-to-compel-universal-righteousness spectrum, which sometimes seems to be the primary axis of Utah politics.

Beyond the moral principles on which society generally agrees, and finds suitable for regulation by law, I believe that sinners as I define them and sinners as you define them deserve political, economic, and religious freedom. I believe that a person’s violation of someone else’s sectarian principles (or his own) should not jeopardize the roof over his head or his means of earning his daily bread, assuming he doesn’t work for an organization with a primary mission to promote those principles. . . .

I . . . believe that the greatest and most constant threat to free and healthy society and good government in Utah is the subset of Mormons who think the law is a suitable tool for imposing their principles on all people — and who think that this is somehow a proper exercise of their religious freedom. (“I Am Unfit for the Utah Legislature,” February 5, 2014. See also “Rights and Rites and Right and the Rights” and “Tonight in American Fork.”)

When the Utah Legislature took up the topics of nondiscrimination and religious freedom this year, I was skeptical of their competence to produce wise legislation on such a topic, and skeptical of their good will, too.

Consider Character, not Religion

Posted on by David Rodeback

Yesterday’s e-mail brought its share of supposedly urgent political fund-raising notices. All but one went straight to the virtual dustbin.

The message which caught my eye was from Utah right-wing activist Cherilyn Eagar and her American Leadership Fund. It went out again this morning: “Deadline TODAY!”

Judge Not, Unless You’re Fund-Raising

Both messages said, in their subject lines and titles, “Why Harry Reid is an embarrassment to his Mormon faith.” A third message this afternoon added: “Here’s the blunt truth. Senator Harry Reid is an embarrassment to his Mormon faith. I know. I’m a Mormon.”