Religion in Public Life

Kevin Drum has a very good post on Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdack's possibly electorally fatal error in which he asserted that pregnancy due to rape is a "gift from God,” and "something that God intended to happen."

Drum points out something that has puzzled me for a long time. Even in the U.S., which is the most religiously observant nation in the developed world, directing public policy according to thoroughly conventional religious views is never popular.

Any Christian theist who takes their faith seriously has to struggle with the fact that bad things routinely occur in a world designed and actively administered by the divine will. Asserting that tragedies are mysteriously consistent with God's plan is not exactly an uncommon or far-out belief among practicing Christians. Yet Mourdack's act of bringing the abstract into specific focus as part of a political campaign seemed to many beyond the pale.

It reminds me of the patently inconsistent view held by religious conservatives who assert that full human rights are conferred upon a microscopic egg at the moment of conception and yet condemn the killing of abortion doctors. If a fetus is literally a baby, then why is what an abortion doctor does more excusable than what was done to the Lindbergh baby? And if one had the opportunity to shoot Richard Hauptmann (presumably) just before he dispatched the Lindbergh child, would he or she not be praised? I have always believed that this reveals that members of the Right to Life do NOT in fact literally believe that a fetus is a baby. It is merely a rhetorical assertion designed to express their condemnation of the practice of abortion. It is a metaphorical rather than literal belief.

In the case of conservative theists like Mourdack who obviously believe that God not only designed and created the world but also actively participates in its living history, the problem of evil is a truly difficult conundrum. He might have said--had he the benefit of a classical education--that God only intended that humanity should have free will, and that an unfortunate--indeed often horrible--consequence of this is that sometimes people suffer at the hands of others. God's "plan" was to give the potential rapists of the world free will. It was not his plan that they should actually rape. That's on the rapist.

Had Mourdack spent more time in a philosophy classroom and less time patting fellow travelers on the back with comforting recitals of shared religious and political axioms, he might be in a better political position than he finds himself today.