Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (23 page)

Because both political progressives and progressive Christians have not understood the role of nurturant morality in their religion and their politics, the entire field of religion and politics has been left almost exclusively to conservatives. They have taken good advantage of the lack of strong opposing voices. And they have created a set of symbolic issues linking strict father morality to both religion and politics.

Abortion is not a “life” issue for right-wing Christians, though it may be for others. So-called pro-life conservatives are typically in favor of the death penalty. As we have seen, they favor conservative policies that result in America having the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world—twelve per one thousand births, which is almost three times the average of 4.5 per thousand. These deaths are a result of conservative policies
against prenatal and postnatal care, universal child health insurance, Medicaid, programs guaranteeing adequate food and shelter for poor children. They favor energy policies that result in high pollution rates and an asthma epidemic in our cities, and in mercury poisoning in our streams and ocean waters so high that fish caught in streams cannot be eaten in forty-eight of the fifty states and that one out of six women of childbearing age have so much mercury in their bodies that they would be ill-advised to bear children, and when they do, there is high incidence of neurological disorders.

If they were really pro-life above everything, they would support programs for pre-and postnatal care, universal health care for all children, programs to feed and house hungry and homeless children, antipollution programs, and safe food programs. Instead, they let strict father morality dominate over issues of life—that the poor are responsible for their own poverty and that they and their innocent children should suffer for it, and that government should not interfere with corporate profits through public health regulations for clean air and water.

If life in general is not the paramount issue, what is really going on in the case of abortion? The same thing that is going on in gay marriage.

Abortion and gay marriage are symbolic issues for fundamentalists. That is why they are paired, even though they literally have nothing to do with each other. Both of them, symbolically, represent threats to the very idea of a strict father family—and threats to their idea of freedom.

The strict father model of the family is strongly gendered. The parents cannot be gay—one must be male and the other must be female. Only daddy and not mommy can protect and support the family, be strict enough to discipline the children, and be strong enough to be a moral authority. If your very identity is based on your role in a strict father family, then your identity will certainly be threatened by gay marriage.

The abortion issue functions symbolically in a similar way. The issue is about who has the moral authority over family life. In a strict father family, the father is the moral authority and makes the ultimate decisions on all important matters. If the daughter seeks an abortion, then she has acted immorally and should be punished by having to bear the consequences of her actions, even bearing the child if her father decides, or getting beaten or thrown out of the house in extreme, but all too prevalent, cases.

To say that women should make such decisions themselves is an affront to strict father morality. Again, suppose your very identity, as either a man or a woman, is defined by strict father morality. The very idea that a woman can make such a decision—a decision over her own reproduction, over her own body, and over a man’s progeny—contradicts and represents a threat to the idea of strict father morality.

The right has defined abortion and gay rights as “the moral issues”—rather than, say, poverty, the destruction of the environment, the deficit that burdens future generations, nuclear proliferation, starting a war on false premises, torture, spying on fellow citizens, or honesty and openness in government, which are among the major moral issues that confront our society. They have been made “moral issues” because their symbolic values have powerful political effects that favor the radical right. They have become “the moral issues” only because progressives have allowed right-wing conservatives to monopolize talk of morality and virtue. Progressives can no longer afford to do that.

These issues are now being cast as a battle over the heart of American life—freedom. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech come together as freedom to proselytize. The separation of church and state becomes freedom from religion—the opposite of freedom of religion, enshrined in our Constitution. Upholding the separation of church and state is seen, therefore, as an “attack on religion”—a freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.
When Democrats criticize a court pick for bringing religion into the public sphere, they are attacked as “anti-Christian” and “antireligion.”

The removal of overt Christian symbols from public places—including “Merry Christmas” signs in store windows—is seen as such an attack. Jerry Falwell, taking the word symbolically for the thing, has framed this as an attack on Christmas itself, as if America’s most beloved holiday—a holiday celebrated by most Americans—were itself under attack, instead of the use of religious words and symbols in prominent public places.

Freedom of speech becomes the freedom to teach the truth of the Gospel, including intelligent design in science classes, and freedom of access to information becomes the freedom of students to have access to opposing views, as if intelligent design and evolution were just opposing theories. Intelligent design is a current battleground for fundamentalists. But evolution is not the central issue. As intelligent design advocates at the Discovery Institute, their main center of institutional support, point out, the deeper attack is on real science as real scientists carry it out. Science, which looks to nature for natural causes and natural explanations, is referred to as “materialism.”

Fundamentalists supporting intelligent design take the idea of materialism to be the real enemy. They see it as amoral, relativist, and antireligious, underlying the scientific approach to understanding reality. Since materialism accepts only material and not spiritual explanations for physical phenomena, it makes the implicit claim that God cannot be taken as an explanation for any events in the world or as an explanation for anything physical that exists—such as the physical world itself and all the living things in it.

It is not an accident that materialism involves systemic causation; thermodynamics and quantum mechanics require systemic causation, as does evolutionary biology. On the other hand, the idea that God intervenes in the physical world is an
instance of direct causation. The issue of causation is central to science, and it is not surprising to find the strict father/nurturant parent dichotomy determining the kinds of causation accepted by fundamentalists.

Science
does
challenge, not religion in general but fundamentalist religion, which insists that its reading of the Bible is not a reading but an absolute truth about the nature of reality. Most religious people in America do not require such a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible; they read the Bible instead as providing important and useful stories and parables for understanding and guiding one’s life—metaphorical stories that represent a moral but not necessarily a literal truth, stories that offer spiritual and moral insight but not a true account of all reality.

For both fundamentalists and scientists, an attack on truth is an attack on freedom. Since fundamentalist religion says that it has the absolute truth of the Gospel, and since their practice of religion requires that that truth be spread as far and as wide as possible, it should follow that freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of access to the truth should require intelligent design—its truth—to be taught in public school science classes as an alternative to evolution, the most highly established science we have.

Freedom of inquiry says otherwise, that evolution is the one and only overwhelmingly established, true account of how life was formed and how species got here. Progressive morality, and the politics it is based on, insists on responsibility—and it is irresponsible, and hence immoral, not only to hide a truth so deep and important but also to attack the very source of so many of our deepest and most important truths.

Thus for progressives as well, an attack on truth is an attack on freedom—in this case freedom of inquiry.

On the Web site of the Discovery Institute are some remarkable claims. Not just the claim that intelligent design as a theory is just as good as evolution, but rather that there is evidence
from scientific investigation itself in favor of intelligent design! As a cognitive scientist, I am quite interested in what counts as such “evidence.”

What the authors did was take metaphorical descriptions of scientific results, pick out all the metaphors that describe events as the results of actions, then take the metaphors as literally true: Every action, in this reading, necessarily implies an actor. For example, consider an article that describes DNA metaphorically as having messages encoded in it. If it’s “encoded,” there must be an encoder. Or a paper that describes the complex structure of the cell. Well, if it’s complex, it must be put together out of simpler elements. And if it’s “put together,” someone must have put it together. If there are “information-rich genes,” then someone must have put the information there, and if there’s “information,” someone must be doing the informing. If there are “highly organized physical organizations,” then someone had to do the organizing. Metaphors are read as if they are literal truths. And not just
any
literal truths. In each case, a complex system involving complex causation is described using verbs of direct causation: “encode,” “put together,” “inform,” “organize.”

Advocates of intelligent design seem to have no idea of what real science is. Real science requires evidence—converging evidence. In evolution, there is massive converging evidence: Millions of fossils with carbon 14 dating have to fit together into a time line. That evidence has to converge with the geological evidence from all the places where the fossils were found. And the fossil and geological evidence has to converge with the DNA evidence. That’s what makes evolution the most overwhelmingly supported science there is.

These are facts, millions of them fitting together. But they do not fit the fundamentalists’ frame. When the facts don’t fit the frame, the frame stays and the facts are ignored.

Now that we have worked though the logic behind the politics of fundamentalist Christianity, let us take a look at the language. Stem-cell research is an excellent example of the fundamentalist use of language. The conservative language technicians suggested that this scientific technique always be referred to as
“embryonic
stem-cell research” since the word “embryo” evokes the conventional image of a little baby. Actually, stem-cell research is carried out on blastocysts—hollow spheres about five days old consisting only of stem cells. As Arnold Kriegstein, director of the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Program at the University of California’s San Francisco School of Medicine, said in a
Dallas Morning News
interview, “In the stage used—a 3-to 5-day-old embryo—there are no distinct organs. There aren’t even cells that could be categorized as bone or skin,” just undifferentiated stem cells in a hollow sphere. Yet former Republican leader of the House, Tom DeLay, referred to stem-cell research as the “dismemberment of living, distinct human beings.” The word “embryonic” sets the frame, and if the word is allowed to stand, it doesn’t matter to the public debate what the facts are.

That is an example of surface framing, a single word evoking an image that shifts the discussion in one direction or another. But the repetition of words like “freedom” and “liberty” by the right makes use of deep framing. The logic of the argument begins with the link we described above between truth and freedom:

• The Bible is taken as truth.
  

• Freedom of speech implies the freedom to speak and communicate the truth.
  

• Freedom of religion implies the freedom to practice one’s religion—to proselytize, to control your children’s education, to do charitable works, and to act so as to
  follow God’s plan by creating a society consistent with fundamentalist Christian values.
  

Thus, all of their issues are freedom issues: the Pledge of Allegiance, school prayer, abortion, gay marriage, intelligent design, the “war on Christmas,” the Ten Commandments, school vouchers, faith-based programs, and so on.

The following passage comes from the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal arm of the Christian right, describing what it does:

Here we see the link in fundamentalist Christianity between freedom and religion spelled out plainly. “The First Liberty” is “the right of people of faith to hear and speak the Truth of the Gospel.” Intelligent design is the truth of the Gospel, which people of faith have the right to hear. Christian prayer in public schools exercises this right. “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance exercises this right.