The WaPo had a must-read item highlighting the religious right movement’s highly-selective attention span. It helps further underscore the value differences between the religious right and religious left.
When hundreds of religious activists try to get arrested today to protest cutting programs for the poor, prominent conservatives such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will not be among them.
That is a great relief to Republican leaders, who have dismissed the burgeoning protests as the work of liberals. But it raises the question: Why in recent years have conservative Christians asserted their influence on efforts to relieve Third World debt, AIDS in Africa, strife in Sudan and international sex trafficking — but remained on the sidelines while liberal Christians protest domestic spending cuts?
Conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family say it is a matter of priorities, and their priorities are abortion, same-sex marriage and seating judges who will back their position against those practices.
“It’s not a question of the poor not being important or that meeting their needs is not important,” said Paul Hetrick, a spokesman for Focus on the Family, Dobson’s influential, Colorado-based Christian organization. “But whether or not a baby is killed in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, that is less important than help for the poor? We would respectfully disagree with that.”
At first blush, this may sound like a vaguely compelling argument. With many religious ministries, a hierarchy of priorities develops and some initiatives generate more attention than others. With the Roman Catholic Church, for example, there’s staunch opposition to abortion and the death penalty — we may hear more about the prior, but that doesn’t make the latter untrue.
But the comments from Focus’ Hetrick are shallow and little more than defensive spin. Dobson & Co. can take an active role in opposing abortion rights, but they’ve also made it abundantly clear that the plight of families in poverty is of no interest whatsoever.
Consider some specific examples.
On the website for Dobson’s Focus on the Family, there are nearly three dozen pages that reference the “death tax” (what Republicans call the estate tax). In each instance, Focus wants the tax, which only affects millionaires, repealed entirely.
In contrast, there are half as many references to food stamps on Dobson’s site, and nearly all mention the most effective anti-hunger program in American history in a negative context. Such as:
Our welfare system, in the aftermath of the Great Society programs, rendered millions of men superfluous. Indeed, government assistance to women and children was reduced or denied when a father was present in the home. Food stamps put groceries in the pantry.
Focus isn’t worried about whether the food-stamp program is being cut (it is); it’s worried that the anti-hunger program undermines a man’s role as head of a household.
Indeed, Focus’ “news” page includes an extensive set of links along the left side where visitors can learn about the organization’s perspective on “family” issues, including all the hot-button political controversies you’d expect from any religious right group: abstinence, abortion, stem-cell research, assisted suicide, school vouchers, pornography, gambling, and of course, “gay activism.”
You’ll notice that there are no links for poverty or hunger, because that’s not part of the conservative agenda. Dobson, like his cohorts, isn’t committed to a religious agenda per se, but rather a rigid ideological agenda that borrows parts of Scripture that are politically convenient. It is, as Focus told the Post, “a matter of priorities,” and they’ve decided that feeding the hungry and tending to the sick aren’t on the list.
Jim Wallis, editor of the liberal Christian journal Sojourners and an organizer of today’s protest, was not buying it. Such conservative religious leaders “have agreed to support cutting food stamps for poor people if Republicans support them on judicial nominees,” he said. “They are trading the lives of poor people for their agenda. They’re being, and this is the worst insult, unbiblical.”
I think the religious right knows this; I just don’t think the groups or its members care.