THE POWER of the religious impulse is really quite extraordinary. The sainted folks over at Opinion Journal inform us of the conniption being thrown by the American Atheists, the group founded by the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair (may God have mercy upon her soul). It seems that when the World Trade Center collapsed, the force of the fall, or some supernatural force, fused two steel beams into a 20-foot-high cross, which has been kept on the edge of the site. The atheists want the cross removed, of course, but in their passion to do that, as the wise OJ webmaster notes, they are actually revealing their faith in the power of the cross. If it didn’t have power, why get so upset?
The truth is that even atheists feel emanations of the sacred in the material world. They’re just moved in different ways.
The religious impulse also seems to have crept into the unlikely quarters of the campaign finance debate. The Republican party tried to get the FEC to allow state parties to use soft money to run ads that ask citizens to support or oppose pieces of legislation. The campaign finance folks reacted to this suggestion as if it were the finger of Satan reaching out from the righteous rock of McCain-Feingold. The FEC ruled against the GOP request. Then, when the FEC ruled that states could use soft money to fund get out the vote drives, the reform goo-goos warned that this was seriously weakening their bill.
Now this is not using soft money to elect candidates (as if that were bad). It’s entirely benign. Yet the reformers are still opposed. In the tone of their comments it becomes clear the reformers have come to regard soft money as some supernatural evil force that must be destroyed. If somebody suggested using soft money to feed orphans in Bangladesh, they would still be opposed. Their rhetoric approaches the fervor of a religious awakening.
That’s not necessarily bad. It has always puzzled me that conservatives attack environmentalists by saying, “It’s like a religion to them.” The insult is supposed to imply that the environmentalists are not willing to listen to reason, but since when did religion imply irrationality, and in any case, what’s so bad about the religious impulse? It’s true that environmentalism is pretty poor as religions go, since it produces little more than a series of “spiritual” moments before nature’s beauty that don’t accumulate to anything. Still, as someone once said, nature is not a good religion, but nature is a good preparation for religion.
The religious impulse seems to be entirely absent, on the other hand, in the life of Jesse Ventura. He’s the one who called religion a “crutch” for the weak, apparently going through the phase in middle age that most people go through in 8th grade.
Now that Ventura has announced that he is not going to run for reelection, it’s clear how pointless his political foray was. It was good fun to have a raucous celebrity in the spotlight, but he effectively killed the Reform party because ultimately he had no final goal. His political career was never aimed at a resting spot, a goal, a point. It was just a series of celebrity moments.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has been running some appraisals of his governorship, and the general verdict seems to be that he raised Minnesota’s profile and attracted some business attention, but his actual record is mundane and by the end of his term the legislature now feels free to ignore him.
Maybe one element of the religious impulse is to expand your consciousness of relevant time. The one menace of the internet is that it shrinks that consciousness. Here today, gone in the next few moments. Religion, on the other hand, reminds one, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, that most things worth doing cannot be accomplished in one generation. So we must be saved by hope.
Give the atheists credit. They have in the back of their heads a vision of a glorious heaven in which God has been expunged from the earth and all men and women live in paradise. The campaign finance reformers have a vision of a money-less Eden, where politics is pure. As for Jesse Ventura, what exactly was the point he dreamt of? There doesn’t appear to have been one.
David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
