This was an interesting find today. Kevin Drum, over at his blog on Mother Jones, offers us this graph, adapted from a post on a website called Secular Right, showing the frequency of prayer plotted against strength of partisanship:

Drum comments:

The data is from the General Social Survey. Apparently, strong political partisans also tend to pray a lot. Weak partisans and independents, not so much. The effect is roughly the same if you confine the analysis to whites only.

Why? Is it just a reflection that some people are strong believers and others aren’t, and this temperamental cast applies to everything they believe in? Or is it something else? Speculate away!

Its not directly related to this point, but its been frequently reported that there is a strong correlation between “weekly church goers” and republican affiliation, but I’ve long suspected (and have seen some evidence for the notion that) if one looked at “not-quite-weekly church goers” the numbers even out much more. The data that form the basis of this graph seem to bear out the notion that its not right to correlate faith with a particular partisan affiliation. But what does it mean that those with comparitively weaker partisan affiliation seem to report praying less?

I’m not sure…

Certainly, one aspect of my longing for a new administration has been my sense that we need to account for our use of torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques”) in the Global War On Terror (GWOT). I blogged about my concerns about torture extensively, including its incompatability with Christian Ethics, its lack of utility as a tool for either protecting the homeland or prosecuting the GWOT, and the effects it has had on our relationship with other countries. More vital than our military might is the force of our ideas, and the hypocracy and moral injustice that our use of torture requires evicerates any standing we once had to be a “beacon of light for the world.” If that is something we think our nation ought to aspire toward, then the use of torture is simply incompatable (whatever else you want to say about the fact that Christian thought cannot theologically allow it, or the utter foolishness on relying on torture-derived information in a practical sense).

And so I am well pleased to read Josh Orton this morning, summarizing a portion of Obama’s interview on 60 Mintues last night pertaining to torture. Orton draws from this Think Progress report, which cites this relevant portion of the interview:

CBS: There are a number of different things you can do early on pertaining to executive orders.

OBAMA: Right.

CBS: One of them is to shut down Guantanamo Bay. Another is to change interrogation methods that are used by U.S. troops. Are those things that you plan to take early action on?

OBAMA: Yes. I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

(emphasis in original at Think Progress)

And the video is also available on you tube:

Whatever your thoughts are on the election of Barack Obama to be our next president, I hope you can see this as a major advance, should Obama follow through with this, in America’s standing around the world. And even if it didn’t lead to that, it would be the right thing to do. Reconciliation can come, but it must follow a formal end to a policy that led us down that dark tunnel in the first place.

My friend over at landonville pointed me to zefrank’s delightful photoproject: from 52 to 48 with love. Its a moving collection of pledges to civic unity after the 2008 presidential election, written from the vantage point of either Obama supporters (the 52 percent) or the McCain supporters (the 48), directed to the other.

Here’s some examples:

While my first impulse was that “I totally agree with this, but its a far cry from what I’ve felt from the victors when I’ve been on the losing end, and they’ve not been that charitable to me,” I think that a better response is to embrace the idea without that cynicism. I mean, isn’t this better than a discussion about what is “real America” and who “loves America”?

Check it out! Its worth a few minutes of your time, and might make you feel better about our nation and your neighbor in the process…

I’m glad to read about this today:

The National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed an anti-torture statement saying the United States has crossed “boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible” in its treatment of detainees and war prisoners in the fight against terror.

Human rights violations committed in the name of preventing terrorist attacks have made the country look hypocritical to the Muslim world, the document states. Christians have an obligation rooted in Scripture to help Americans “regain our moral clarity.”

“Our military and intelligence forces have worked diligently to prevent further attacks. But such efforts must not include measures that violate our own core values,” the document says. “The United States historically has been a leader in supporting international human rights efforts, but our moral vision has blurred since 9-11.”

The statement, “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror,” was drafted by 17 evangelical scholars, writers and activists who call themselves Evangelicals for Human Rights. The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group, announced late Sunday that it had endorsed the document.

…

“There is a perception out there in the Middle East that we’re willing to accept any action in order to fight this war against terrorism,” Cizik said. “We are the conservatives — let there be no mistake on that –who wholeheartedly support the war against terror, but that does not mean by any means necessary.”

…

The document says government and outside researchers have documented “acts of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” against U.S. detainees, “especially in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, in CIA black sites and at the hands of other nations.”

The authors praise the U.S. Army for last year releasing a revised field manual that bans beating, sexually humiliating and threatening prisoners, among other interrogation procedures.

But the evangelical writers criticize the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a Defense Department system for prosecuting terror suspects. The evangelicals condemned provisions of that act that allow indefinite detention for some suspects and does not always hold intelligence officials to the same standards as the military.

Quoting a wide range of sources including the Bible, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the authors say the federal government has a moral obligation to follow international human rights treaties that the U.S. has endorsed.

“As American Christians, we are above all motivated by a desire that our nation’s actions would be consistent with foundational Christian moral norms,” the document says. “We believe that a scrupulous commitment to human rights, among which is the right not to be tortured, is one of
these Christian moral convictions.”

The NAE says it represents 45,000 evangelical churches. However, it does not include some of the best-known conservative Christian bodies, including the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family.

Go hug an NAE member today! While you’re at it, check out the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

I was glad to see the rhetoric about an ostensible “war” on Christmas virtually gone this holiday cycle. Replacing it, however, seems to be an ostensible “war” on those who believe in the divinity of the Torah. Dennis Prager (my emphasis):

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? (“Divinity” does not necessarily mean “literalism.”)

I do not ask this about “the Bible” as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But “Bible-believing” Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.
…
Very often the dividing line in America is portrayed as between those who believe in God and those who don’t. But the vast majority of Americans believe in God, and belief in God alone rarely affects people’s values. Many liberals believe in God; many conservatives do. What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. Those who believe that He has spoken through a given text will generally think differently from those who believe that no text is divine. Such people will usually get their
values from other texts, or more likely from their conscience and heart.

That a belief or lack of belief in the divinity of a book dating back over 2,500 years is at the center of the Culture War in America and between religious America and secular Europe is almost unbelievable. But it not only explains these divisions; it also explains the hatred that much of the Left has for Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Mormon Bible-believers.

…
This divide explains why the wrath of the Left has fallen on those of us who lament the exclusion of the Bible at a ceremonial swearing-in of an American congressman. The Left wants to see that book dethroned. And that, in a nutshell, is what the present civil war is about.

What’s this all about? Muslim congressman-elect Keith Ellison’s plans to re-take his oath of office with a hand on the Quran. (Yes, all congress members are sworn in through a general oath, not related to any hand on any holy book; many congress members choose to have additional ceremonies with their hands on the bible, or the TaNak, or the Book of Mormon, or the like… Check out that very good NPR report…) Prager and some others (like congressman Virgil Goode) are apoplectic about this…a good example of Christian Fusspots.

And what exactly is the divinity of the Torah, specifically, or scripture generally, in Christian thought? Scripture may be considered “god-breathed,” or divinely-inspired, by most Christians. But divine? No. Thinking God speaks through a text (a medium) is not the same thing as regarding that medium, that revelation, as itself divine. Thinking that a text points uniquely, authoritatively, to the experience of human beings with a loving, covenantal God throughout human history is not the same thing as to deify the account of that experience. We worship Christ the Word made Flesh as one person of the trinity, of the one triune God. We don’t worship the text. It is not divine. And its authority isn’t, repeat, isn’t something that just conservatives subscribe to.

I don’t know what’s worse: calling the bible itself divine or saying that only my way of reading  it is the only way to believe in its “authority.” Both smack of idolatry and hubris to me.

This is not even to get into the crap Prager deals about liberals and conservatives in that piece (and note earlier posts on this board about conservative Judaism ordaining gays and lesbians, for example; so much for that theory that “bible-believing” folk line up on every major social issue…)….

This is not to get into Prager’s isolation of the Torah within the Christian canon, or the elision of major interpretive, theological, and yes axiological differences we have with other “people of the book”.

And this is not even trying to parse out exactly what Prager means when he says his complaint about “divinity” does not “necessarily” mean something with regards to “literalism.”

Regardless of all this, this choosing which holy-book congress members are permitted to chose when taking their unofficial oaths business is loony. But then again, loony seems to sell, which is the sad thing to me.

(h/t Joshua Micah Marshall)

… guest blogger Steve Benen also has comments over at The Washington Monthly.

As a followup to my last post, Josh Marshall reminds us why that the opposition party runs, and wins, on opposition…

So, while Democrats look poised to take back at least one house of Congress, we all know that this is in spite of the fact that they’re relying on opposition to President Bush rather than on putting forward a positive program of their own, right?

Please.

Seldom has Washington conventional wisdom been a more obedient handmaiden to historical illiteracy.

Let’s say this once and for all, after a deep breath and for the record: In US politics, in off-year elections with unpopular incumbents it is always that way.  Always.  Hear it again, always that way.

Consider a few examples: the 1946 (Truman), 1974 (Nixon) and 1994 (Clinton) mid-terms. There are a few others that come close. But these are the three big wave elections of the New Deal and post-New Deal eras. In each case, the winning party ran overwhelmingly and almost exclusively on opposition to the sitting president of the opposite party and — in two of the three cases — the congressional leadership.

…

And 1994, finally an election the great majority of us have a living memory of. A positive agenda? Please. The 1994 election was an anti-Clinton election, full-stop. Against Clinton’s health care plan, which was already a dead letter, against the tax increase. Against. Against. Against. The Republicans, to their tactical credit, went to great pains to avoid putting forward any substantive agenda. The ‘Contract with America’ was just a campaign stunt that only really became a big deal after the election.

Remember some of these great broad vision planks from the Contract.

#6 “No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.”

And who can forget #7 “Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years.”

The real heart of the Contract was that it included no mention of any of the major policy positions Republicans favored. No mention of the repeal of the 1993 Clinton tax hike, no mention of health care reform, no mention of Social Security privatization. It obfuscated all the big policy issues in favor of a list of poll-tested bromides.

It was an anti-election as mid-term congressional election always are. This isn’t to say that that is good or bad, simply that it is built into the structure of American politics. It’s the norm.

Its frustrating to me when an argument is advanced that, while the republicans might have botched Iraq, the democrats don’t have articulated a viable plan for the struggle against Islamic terrorism. I concede that the dems need to better voice such an alternate vision, but I disagree that there is “no plan.” There are competing alternate plans, and the democratic leadership has been slow to adopt one or the other of them. But there is a competent democratic vision for more than a year now that has articulated re-engaged diplomatic, social, economic and educational efforts in the Muslim world in conjunction with a re-deployed, targeted military application (and a withdrawal of some sort from the debacle that is Iraq). There is internal disagreement about how to handle Iraq, but my view is that we’ve made a mess and have a moral obligation to work to fix it if it can be fixed, and that we might not be the best ones to do the military part of that fixing any more. Our army there, at the moment, is making it worse, not better.

That vision is opposed to in conjunction with a Republican view of ’stay the course:’ we must win, we in fact are winning, and we don’t need any real change to get the job done. At least, that’s been the vision up to recent days. The frustrating part is how vapid that vision is, and how politically inspired it has been: this is the strategy for optimal political success in the US (since it makes those dems look like weak flip-floppers!), so lets stick with it.

Only now, when huge numbers of the American public are waking up to our inability to sustain our current course in Iraq, to what our military involvement there means for our limited military application elsewhere in a troubled world (read: Korea, Iran, Syria, Sudan, &c), to month after month of “deadliest months for US troops” caught in the middle of a Civil War we can’t stop or adjudicate, only weeks before an election which, polls suggest, might well spell disaster for the Republican party, only then are we told that, no, that vision articulated earlier was not really the vision. In truth, the vision is something different, and actually a bit more like what the democrats have been saying.

John Stewart:

And here is the president’s own backtracking: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/22/bush-stay-the-course/

So tell me: what is left of the republican “vision” for the global war on terror? How are we going to succeed in this struggle that we really must succeed in, if those who are leading us are not really leading at all, but are working on keeping their power at home? I’m honestly struggling to give Bush and co. as much benefit of the doubt as I can, but come on, the evidence is right there, in video and in transcript. I just hope that we don’t bite it hook, line, and sinker…

I really feel for our military on the ground, who are on the front lines of this thing. Egads.

(…Note: edited Tuesday PM to add an extra hyperlink.)

In the nearby state of Missouri, Jim Talent and Claire McCaskill are neck-and-neck in a race for the US Senate. MSNBC argues that this might be the bell-weather election of the cycle, but even if Talent wins I think a strong showing by Democrats elsewhere is quite possible. Josh Marshall has a point, however, about the “irrational exuberance” of some democratic voices out there; still a lot of time before the election, and tides can shift quickly. There’s a lot of money flowing around, and who can predict events on the ground?

But back to the Talent-McCaskill contest. Its close; apparently, real close. Turnout by the bases and appeals to the swing voters will likely decide it. And that latter, I think, is why the race keeps coming down to the stem-cell issue.

I’ve not been following a lot of the ads on teevee (mainly because they’re back and forth about who has done nursing homes more wrong), but when Josh Marshall pointed out this McCaskill ad featuring Michael J. Fox, I was intrigued. It might make a big difference:

The stem-cell debate is complex, as are positions that support or oppose fetal stem-cell research. There are emotional components to the argument on both sides; the one in this ad, I wonder, might make the difference.