Dogma days

Religion is becoming an endless political distraction -- but cultural secularism is not the answer. Plus: The amazing Obamas! The return of Gennifer Flowers! And the lamest duck of all

By Camille Paglia

Read more: Camille Paglia, Opinion

Dec. 12, 2007 | Is there a lamer duck than George W. Bush? Bumbling and fumbling even more than usual in his inability to finesse the embarrassing release of an intelligence report on Iran's stand-down of its nuclear program four years ago, Bush has seemed moody and unnerved by his marginalization in the news, which is swamped by sharp primary skirmishes in both parties.

With Vice President Dick Cheney, our Styrofoam iron chancellor, having been rushed to the hospital the prior week for yet another heart scare, the U.S. government seemed to have an ominous vacuum at the top. But America's enemies shouldn't relax: Nothing is more dangerous than the reflexive lashing out of a regime in decline. Iran is still a mighty big target for an inept administration desperate for a legacy. Never mind the innocent Iranian civilians who will be slaughtered in a "surgical" aerial bombardment. Nameless, faceless, they don't matter in the White House craps game of high-stakes Mideast strategy.

If the "surge" is really working in Iraq, all my fellow Democrats should rejoice, because it's one more step toward getting U.S. troops the hell out of there. Let Bush have his face-saving claims of victory -- who cares? Just bring this stupid, wasteful war to an end. Our brave soldiers and their families have suffered enough. And the toll in death, mutilation and trauma among hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqis is obscenely high and will never be fully documented. I remain skeptical about long-term political prospects in Iraq, whose nationhood was a convenient British fiction after World War I and whose border territory may eventually be devoured by its neighbors, including Turkey and Iran.

Meanwhile, the thundering horses in the presidential sweepstakes have been neighing and nipping at each other as time grows short. Mitt Romney may have been breathtakingly presumptuous in commandeering the flag-bedecked forum of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library for his long-anticipated speech on religion, but on balance, I think the event was a success for him merely by demonstrating his idealistic, bouncily upbeat character. Rudy Giuliani, dogged by tacky ethics questions, seems in contrast like a shadowy, hard-bitten wheeler and dealer, like Hillary Clinton a ruthless pursuer of power for its own sake. True, Romney's had a million positions on any question, but who's counting?

Romney's move may have been tactically necessary to counter evangelical Protestants' rejection of Mormonism as a cult, but the speech wasn't as conceptually developed as it should have been. As an atheist, I wasn't offended by Romney's omission of nonbelievers from his narrative of American history. On the contrary, I agree with him that the founders of the U.S. social experiment were Christians (even if many were intellectual deists) and that our separation of church and state entails the rejection of an official, government-sanctioned creed rather than the obligatory erasure of references to God in civic life.

But what does Romney mean by the ongoing threat of a new "religion of secularism"? The latter term needs amplification and qualification. In my lecture on religion and the arts in America earlier this year at Colorado College, I argued that secular humanism has failed, that the avant-garde is dead, and that liberals must start acknowledging the impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young. Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.

But primary and secondary education, which should provide an entree to great art and thought, has declined into trivialities and narcissistic exercises in self-esteem. Popular culture, once emotionally vibrant and collective in impact (from Hollywood movies to rock music), has waned into flashy, transient niche entertainment. The young, who are masters of ever-evolving personal technology, are besieged by the siren call of materialism. In this climate, it is selfish and shortsighted for liberals to automatically define religion as a social problem that needs suppression or eradication. Without spirituality in some form, people will anesthetize themselves with drink or drugs -- including the tranquilizers that seem near universal among the status-addled professional class of the Northeastern elite.

Europe, which has settled into a comfortable secularism, is no model for the future. The great era of European achievement in arts and letters seems to be over. There are local luminaries but no towering figures any longer of the stature of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or Ingmar Bergman. Europe is becoming a museum and tourist trap, as people from all over the world flock to see the remnants of Europe's royal and religious past -- the conservative prelude, in other words, to today's slack liberalism.

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