Camille on Religion

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.2.07]

I’ve been a fan of Camille Paglia since the early 90s. She has this unrestrained quality to her statements and writings that is provocative and always interesting. I often disagree with some of her statements but, just as often, wildly agree with others. What I find most interesting is how she makes use of so many vastly different cultural events and icons to come to her unique conclusions and opinions.

An example follows. It’s from salon (to which she was a founding contributor) done just before the November elections:

Salon: It seems like religion has never been a bigger issue in American politics… Have the Democrats changed the longtime Republican characterization of them as godless?

Camille: Well, as long as the Democrats are perceived as the anti-religion party, we’re going to lose the culture wars. That’s why Hillary has made such a show of churchgoing and wearing crucifixes — even while there seems to be little connection between her Christian ideals and her…activities as a politician… But religion is absolutely central to this country… I’m speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list — like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we’d have anarchy.

Religion is also a metaphysical system that honors the largeness of the universe. So I think that the constant sniping at religion coming from liberal Democrats is really a dead end.

But there’s reason for alarm at the right-wing intertwining of religion and politics, where the Bible is seen as the prophetic master plan of the universe and where Israel as the Holy Land must be protected at all costs from Muslim infiltration — duplicating the agenda of the medieval crusades. But to claim, as Democrats often do, that there has always been a separation of church and state in America is misleading: The U.S. simply has no official state religion. The formative influence in our intellectual heritage came from Puritan dissidents in New England. Major universities like Harvard and Yale were founded on religious principles.

What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It’s snide, elitist, and politically marginalized. The chattering class clearly has no effect whatever on decision-making in Washington. Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush’s decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler’s rise.