ReligionDispatches.org

Reading Candace Chellew-Hodge’s excellent piece on a newly-released study of the religious left makes me want to add a few thoughts on the subject.

It wasn’t until I read about this study that this made sense, but it’s precisely the communal faith of mainline Protestant denominations that makes me caution political observers about writing them off as irrelevant. It’s true that mainliners are a relatively small chunk of the population—about 12-15%, compared to roughly 25% each for Catholics and Evangelicals—but as the study points out, the communal ideal cuts across denominational lines to some extent. So even though a denomination like the United Church of Christ may only represent a tiny fraction of the overall population, it can still exert a disproportionate influence, because it can provide leadership to many Catholics and even a few Evangelicals.

Virginia Democrats, particularly ones in densely populated Fairfax County, had been pleased with their showings in the last few election cycles. For the first time in decades, the county had gone blue, turning out majorities for Governor Tim Kaine in 2005 and President Obama in 2008.

Last night that trend reversed course, as Republicans took not just Fairfax but the entire commonwealth, winning races for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general by wide margins. The gubernatorial victory is particularly the apple of Pat Robertson's eye. His vision of taking over culture and politics by building an interlocking political machine, media empire, and educational system seems to have come to fruition. Bob McDonnell, a graduate of Robertson's Regent University, became governor of Virginia.

How did he win -- with a 14 percentage point margin? By not talking about the culture war his education had molded him to fight.

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. You can only read it and weep. Today’s Los Angeles Times includes a front-page piece by Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger on an itty-bitty provision in one Senate health care bill that would require insurers to cover Christian Science “prayer treatments” as medical expenses.

Hamburger and Geiger write that the measure, introduced by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, would put prayer treatments “on the same footing” as clinical medicine and would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual health care.”

Oh, my. It doesn’t matter to me—and I hope it won’t matter to you—that the sums of money that might be paid to spiritual healers are relatively small. It matters hugely to me—and I hope it will matter to you—that a spokesperson for the Christian Science Church could tell Times reporters with a straight face that public funding of prayer treatment is part of “finding effective health care.” It matters greatly that this appalling provision, if enacted into law, will undoubtedly invite other faiths to get into the healing business in order to compete with Christian Science for those subsidized insurance payments.

A deeply fractious, but culturally very interesting, battle is brewing at the University of California at Berkeley, symbolic epicenter of left academic activism and California-style progressivism. It is a battle that offers a cautionary tale for our times.

As Peter Laarman noted here, and is making its way around the blogosphere, the Senate version of the health care reform bill would cover "spiritual care," at the behest of Christian Scientists.

The amendment at issue, which has no counterpart in the House version of the bill, was sponsored by Republican Orrin Hatch, with the support of Democrats John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy. The Massachusetts connection (the Christian Scientists are headquartered in Massachusetts) goes back a way:  Kennedy played a key role in getting similar coverage in Medicare in the 1990s.