Catholic and Enjoying It!
…is a lot of talk. Joe Carter explains:
For example, a few years ago Family Research Council (FRC)—the premier lobbying organization of the Christian right in Washington, D.C.—attempted to collect signatures on an online petition asking President Bush to approve new Title X regulations ensuring that no taxpayer money goes to subsidize the abortion facilities of groups like Planned Parenthood.
Over a million emails were sent by FRC and various other groups asking evangelicals and other Christians to do nothing more than add their name to an online petition. This is about as minor a level of commitment or involvement as it gets, yet less than three percent of the people contacted did so. More evangelicals voted for the fifth place contestant on last year’s American Idol than have petitioned to defund abortion mills.
This is the typical reaction at the grassroots level to almost every political initiative in the “religious right.” Lot’s of talk; little to no action.
Despite the fact that many of it’s staff and constituents are Catholic, FRC is considered one of the major players in the world of conservative evangelical politics. And yet that organization’s ability to have any influence or impact in the political realm is limited by the lack of grassroots commitment. Though FRC and similar groups attempt to rally the troops, they are unable to lead the army of politically engaged evangelicals because such a group is all but nonexistent.
Consider that for more than two decades the number one issue on the agenda of the evangelical wing of the religious right has been abortion.
The bitter irony is that this is perceived as the “number one” political issue for evangelicals when it really isn’t one of our top priorities. If evangelicals–and Christians in general–truly cared about this issue, abortion on demand would not be the law of the land.
That would certainly explain a lot. It makes me suspect that Tom Kreitzberg is pretty much on the money when he says, “The act of voting is the stone in the stone soup of political responsibility for Catholic citizens of democratic countries.” And it would appear that most Evangelical conservatives (and, I bet, Catholic ones as well) regard the stone as the soup. That would explain why I *still* get people who are greatly exercised about my utterly statistically insignificant vote for some doomed quixotic Third Party candidate *and* why I get lots of talk about the need to vote Republican as the Lesser of Two Evils.
It also explains the odd way that saying “I’m opposed to abortion” seems to stand in as a substitute for actually thinking about (much less doing anything about) the political scene. The president constructs a torture regime? Hey! It’s not as bad as abortion (something I am confident the guy I voted for will do something about one of these days, even though he hasn’t done anything in 30 years). The president grants himself the authority to declare American citizens enemies of the state and have them killed by government agents without trial or evidence? Hey! That’s part of the War on Terror so it’s okay. It’s a prudential judgement–unlike abortion, which I vote against and so I’m politically involved.
If Carter is right, it sounds like very soon–perhaps already–the pols of both parties are going to figure out that this constituency is all talk and no action. That would be bad, especially if that constituency lets them.
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