On Dec 2, 2006, at 11:52 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> I'm saying that we must engage the religious, not because they are
> more ordinary than the irreligious (though the former are certainly
> far more numerous than the latter in the USA and West Asia), but
> because they are, in many respects that matter politically, superior
> to the irreligious in practice at least in the USA and West Asia
I await Carrol Cox's rebuke of this sort of generalization.
But really, this is extraordinarily abstract - as abstract as any M-L sect gassing on about the proletariat. Which religious people? There are all kinds in the USA, from reactionary white evangelicals (who are all but hopeless politically: 24% of the electorate in 2006, 70% voted for Republicans), to members of mainline Protestant denominations (mainly center-left to center-right, though there are plenty of exceptions), to Catholics (often conservative, but there are those missile-hammering nuns), to a wide variety of Jews (reactionary orthodox to Marxist seculars), to New Agey religions (also all over the place politically), etc. Black evangelicals, a large portion of the A-A pop, are social democrats on economic issues but very patriotic and conservative on social issues.
So do you engage this immense variety as religious people, or just as people who happen to be religious (which, in the US, can be nearly everyone)? Do you use a religious vocabulary, organize outside churches after services, or what?
And remember that frequency of church attendance correlates very highly with voting patterns: the more frequent, the more Republican. Recruiting among the pews doesn't seem very promising.
Some of these pleas sound like the resolutions made by left-liberals in the aftermath of the 2004 election - hey, man, America's religious, so we gotta get with 'em! You could hardly open a paper (or The Nation) without reading the name "Jim Wallis." A little bibliometric support - the number of articles containing the words "Jim Wallis" in the Nexis major newspaper database for six-month intervals:
5/1/04-11/1/04 43 11/1/04-5/1/05 154 5/1/05-11/1/05 77 11/1/05-5/1/06 60 5/1/06-11/1/06 61 11/8/06-12/2/06 22 (daily average mulitplied by 182.5)
Note the peak right after the 2004 election, and the decay. If trends over the last month hold, Wallis will be even less quoted than he was before W's re-election! This is not surprising coming after an election when the religious right was thumped, and voters said religion played too big a part in politics. As Andrew Kohut writes <http://pewresearch.org/obdeck/?ObDeckID=91>: "The real religion story of this election is that the least religious Americans -- voters who attend church rarely or never -- made the biggest difference to the outcome of the election. This group gave Democrats an even greater share of their vote -- 67%, up from 55% in 2002."
Further, Gallup <http://www.galluppoll.com:/content/default.aspx? ci=25585&t=MRK2872.A0QTKCr0DIRzS20r% 2fRJXp37TsW3usxewKjX5PI17TBIntkGDXY5lcmbFBkPvkPSkpSDcdMBpZoJ0Ho8kOyeilL1 mFNfRFe3nGAMbPovmk8u2RA17Ct2UWMdbzFXU3X7UToRm%2f4j2j1yyEFD9IvVB5RhM> reports that religion matters most to blacks and women, groups who are more left-leaning than whites and men, to the old rather than the young, to the less-educated rather than more - and that the salience of religion in American life is actually declining over time. So an explicitly religious turn might not be going with the tide of history, at least in the US.
By the way, interesting Gallup poll of the Muslim world at <http:// www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3637>. The "radicals" are better-educated, richer, and more optimistic about the future than the "moderates." This comports with the argument made by Chris Harman <http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/harman/1994/prophet/ch08.htm> that Islamism served as an ideology of a rising class in Iran that wanted to displace the old Western-associated managerial class; anti- imperialism served their self-interest, and ranting about traditional morality mobilized the lumpen (his term, not mine: "They used Islamic language to mobilise behind them sections of the lumpen proletariat into gangs, the Hizbollah, which would attack the left, enforce Islamic 'morality' [for instance, against women who refused to wear the veil] and join the army in putting down the separatist revolts.")
Doug