Is the always shaky alliance between the Evangelical Protestants and the Catholics about to break down? Over at Salon Digby sees signs of it.
Ted Cruz went on the “Today” show yesterday and laid out his belief that the real victims of discrimination in this country are evangelical protestants, because the Supreme Court is unrepresentative of “flyover country” and the people who live there. The justices are a bunch of east coast Catholics and Jews, you see, and they just don’t have any respect for Real Americans. Cruz thinks all that untrammeled Catholic and Jewish power needs to be stopped. “There are no protestants, no evangelicals, on the Court,” he said. “They think our views are parochial and don’t deserve to be respected. What a crazy system to have the most important issues of our day decided by unelected lawyers.”
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If Cruz is speaking for anyone but himself, this marks an interesting shift in the religious right and one that could be consequential. The alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians has been one of the most fruitful political collaborations in our history. And it was, for all of its pursuit of noxious public policy, a rather weird demonstration of American progress.
Everyone who follows politics undoubtedly recalls that there was once a tremendous amount of anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States even as there was a political faction of Catholics who were active politically. The push and pull of that faction was an influential part of our history. The anti-Catholic vote was equally influential, and it resulted in shifting coalitions over a long period of time. Some of this was really ethnic in nature, holdovers from our European religious wars and nationalist prejudice, and some of it was based upon serious theological differences. American evangelical protestantism was as defined by its rejection of Catholic doctrine as it was by its own.
With the installation of a Jesuit Pope there is even a war going on in the Catholic Church.
And now, with his controversial (and long overdue) encyclical on climate change, conservative Catholics are in full revolt. All the Republican presidential candidates have publicly distanced themselves from the Pope’s pronouncements, some in a derisive style that would have very recently been seen as disrespectful had it come from a liberal critic of the Church’s teachings. Rick Santorum, for example, told the Pope to stick to what he knows:
“I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.”Jeb agreed saying, “I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinal or my pope.” Then he fatuously declared that “religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm.”
This reminds me a bit of the war between the Shiites and the Sunni although the Jesuits may be more like the Sufi. The Jesuits have always been a strange breed of Catholics. I always had a great deal of respect for the Jesuit Scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was a paleontologist who wrote that humans are still evolving and the church must evolve with them. He died in 1955 and his work was censored until 2009 when he was instead praised. I have read most of his works, not easy reading but they may be the result of translation issues. For those steeped in religion evolution is always a difficult thing especially when they don’t even believe in it. The Catholic Church is leaving the Evangelical Christians in the 16th century at it slowly evolves.