James Carville, Religion Deserves a Place at the Table

Good ole boy James Carville took the spotlight last week to let loose what just might be the main Democrat talking points of the campaign. It’s a fight against Christian nationalists, he said, ready to install a theocratic dictatorship.

I had heard rumblings of this sort from my liberal and radical acquaintances. “He’s seeking revenge and he’s going to be a dictator,” says one; another one calls him “the Savior figure of the right.” They all invoke the specter of not just an Elmer Gantryism but a new Puritan dictatorship or Spanish Inquisition (wait — nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!). The appeal to my love of democracy (democracy itself is threatened!) and of the crucial First Amendment freedom of religion. Most think that should be especially appealing as a member of a decidedly minority religion.

I tell them I am with them in supporting the First Amendment. But the religion that it forbids our government to establish is not just Christianity or, as in the practical issue confronting the framers, one particular Christian denomination. Rather, that amendment, by mentioning no particular religion, includes them all. And that includes the messy, inconsistent, everchanging, unprovable points of belief of those who choose to construct their own belief set rather than subscribe to a traditional faith.

For it is the nature of this world that we all must act on the basis of things that have not been proven. This is so in the most particular and practical sense — I do not have a deep working knowledge of the laws of aerodynamics, yet I still fly on commercial airliners. And someone who does have such knowledge has probably not verified that every system that allows the plane to fly safely has been checked. If we only depended on things we verify completely and meticulously, we could do very few things.

This also applies on the largest and most universal scale. “How does one prove that reality exists?” asked a friend of mine who taught relativity physics in universities and applied his knowledge working for the government. Yet all the work of science depends on reality, well, being real.

As Rabbi Robert Zimmerman once put it, “You’re going to serve somebody.”

What the Democrat talking point ignores, as they have done consistently, is that they have what is meant by religion as well, putting faith in all sorts of unproved doctrines that they then seek to enforce with the comprehensive ruthlessness of an Inquisitor. Ask the cake baker in Denver. Ask the victims of bodily mutilation who face a life of a eunuch. Ask those who were expelled from the military because of their concerns about mRNA vaccines. Ask the parents of suicides, the beaten wives, the kids who lost a year or more of schooling due to the draconian lockdowns. Ask those who suffered from the pitchforked mobs of true believers who set out vigilante style to enforce the new dictates of the new faith.

It is the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West that cited biblical and rabbinic sources to justify and inspire the move toward political freedom. Read Eric Nelson, who still represents the greatest traditions of academia at Harvard, where those traditions have been so conspicuously absent of late. Read his great work The Hebrew Republic. Follow the path he traces to undo the fallacious dogma, still taken as absolute truth by so many of my left-leaning friends, that the path to democracy lay in the renunciation of Christianity and Judaism. (RELATED: Backlash Against Harvard’s Claudine Gay Is Indictment of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’)

Then enter the fray and argue, not against the Left’s right to fight for policies it believes in but against its dishonest presentation of itself as having the sole right to enact its faith as binding on us all, claiming falsely that only we are disqualified from enforcing faith by law.

Carville has always brought a smile, and he was pretty adept to keep the forces of #MeToo at bay while he derided one of the many women Clinton used and discarded, calling her what you find when you troll through a trailer park with a $10 bill. He is now trying to project the intolerance of the new religions of the Left onto those who have made their choice in old traditions that have learned lessons through the centuries and eventually joined in support of religious freedom as a religious principle.

He and those who follow his lead seek to monopolize religious intolerance by using the Constitution to suppress traditional religion as political force and to reserve the deep power of faith to be used by his allied believers alone.

It is a position that deserves the most minimal respect, if any. It deserves the steady and true criticism that it receives when it seeks to undermine the First Amendment by deceptively and falsely claiming that its beliefs alone deserve to be supported and enforced by the government.

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