Notes from Evil Bender

The best recent example of the odious things people will do under pressure from religious leaders is Mormon funding of the Yes on Prop 8 campaign. And I’m certain the irony of the LDS Church rushing to defend “traditional marriage” isn’t lost on my readers (though if it is lost on you, start here).

But bigots campaigning to deny civil rights isn’t the only fucked up thing that’s happened recently regarding organized religion. A much more minor, but perhaps similarly telling example, is discussed by Pam: it seems that at least one Roman Catholic priest* is telling his parishioners not to take communion until they’ve done penance for voting for Obama.

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

“Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president,” Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

Naturally, some people in the Catholic Church object to Newman’s position, and even suggest he does not have the authority to make such a pronouncement. I’ll leave such matters of hierarchy to the Church: what I want to point out is how incredibly ridiculous it is that people take such pronouncements seriously. Newman’s message is one of credulous received morality: voting for Obama is wrong because the Church says it is. And the Church says being pro-choice is wrong because they claim to know what the all-powerful God of the Universe says on such a matter.

“Hubris” doesn’t begin to describe such a position. It is absolutely arrogant beyond measure.

And worse than the ultimate arrogance of such a position is the death of critical thinking: religious hierarchies invariably come to serve as a means of the powerful few to constrain the many. It substitutes authority for conscience, the demand of Church leaders for the judgement of individuals.

The only good news here is that most Catholics seem perfectly content to make their own moral decisions, and not listen to the Church’s bullying. For example, more Catholics voted for Obama than McCain. But while I’m glad that lay Catholics seem to have more wisdom than many of their leaders, that doesn’t change the fact that Catholic clergy members regularly attempt to bully their parishioners by threatening their souls: do as we say, the message goes, or spend an eternity in Hell.

That amounts to odious, immoral emotional blackmail.

Perhaps all this is why the religions I find most common cause with are ones that emphasize personal conscience over received wisdom. As soon as we let ourselves be told what to believe and bullied into acting as others tell us, we forfeit out ability to act ethically, for we’ve exchanged the agonizing task of being a moral actor in a complex world for the much easier–and vastly emptier–act of Doing What We’re Told.

* I know many Catholic clergy disagree with Newman’s stance, but the Church still emphasizes received wisdom over the dictates of conscience: that problem isn’t specific to the abortion issue.