"Trotsky and St. Benedict"

Eugene McCarraher has an interesting book review and look at the state of religion for both the right and the left. McCarraher is a Christian Socialist (I think) and is revolted by the Right's use of Scripture as a handbook for both national imperialism and personal wealth-building.

As things stand, too many Christians speak only from scripts written in the sacralized imperial rhetoric. Thus, while President Bush's evangelical faith petrifies most liberals, his administration is more aptly characterized as evangelical-Straussian. Its foreign policies, as by now widely documented, are the progeny of an unnatural embrace between conservative evangelicals and devotees of the philosopher Leo Strauss, whose epigones now infest political science departments throughout the nation. And the Bush Administration's secrecy, duplicity, and indifference to empirical evidence derive heavily from that second faction, whose utterly utilitarian conception of religion—Athens for the elite, Jerusalem for the rabble—apparently does not concern or even interest evangelical leaders.

But he also takes to task the left for its disregard for sprituality and its embrace of capitalism. And in reviewing Charles Marsh's The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justic, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today, he provides a useful reminder of the centrality of Christian faith in the Civil Rights Movement (and sneeringly points out that conservative evangelicals were not at the forefront of Civil Rights, as the Right often tries to infer these days).

He also sneers at how the "Values" debate, whether from the left or the right, is a distraction, a way of focusing on the abstract rather than actual practices.

Anyway, its thought-provoking. Though, as a card-carrying member of the "secular Left," I do not agree with his conclusion that November's election represented our "dotage." And I would remind him, as he calls for a movement that "combine[s], in Alasdair MacIntyre's wonderful couplet, 'Trotsky and St. Benedict,'" that the former gentleman ended up with an ice ax in the back of his scull.