Religion and Rationalization at DOJ

by publius

In this column, Dahlia Lithwick explores one of the most fascinating sidebars to the U.S. Attorney scandal -- religion and the DOJ. Using Monica Goodling as an example, she documents how deeply Regent University Law School graduates have penetrated the upper echelons of the Bush administration. Like Lithwick, I don’t have a problem with the administration hiring Regent grads (assuming they’re qualified). In fact, I’ve worked with outstanding attorneys who graduated from Regent.

What interests me then is not so much why DOJ hired Regent grads, but why Regent grads like Monica Goodling acted like they did. In particular, it’s the psychological and sociological dimensions that intrigue me. How did someone like Goodling justify her actions in her own mind? How did she square them with her religious faith? [For what it’s worth, these questions extend well beyond Goodling. How (and why), for instance, do so many social conservatives tolerate and even applaud our detention “policy” and war and unprogressive tax structures and so on?]

With respect to the more narrow Goodling question, Lithwick proposes an answer -- people like Goodling started mistaking Bush for God. She writes, “[T]he real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God's work with the president’s.” While that’s true in a sense, I don’t think it goes far enough. Assuming Lithwick is right, the more fundamental question is how Goodling (and other evangelicals) got to that point in the first place.

To take a step back, although liberals are not hostile to religion, I do think that they -- in their own minds anyway -- often conceptualize evangelical Christians in very simple ways. People get these visions of brainwashed automatons marching to the beat of Dobson and his P-Funk All-Stars. The truth is, though, that social conservatives -- like all other groups -- have a unique and complex psychology. And in their own mind, they (like everyone else) think of themselves as good people doing good things. That’s why it’s interesting to explore the specific rationalizations they use to justify actions that are hypocritical in light of their religious faith.

The first rationalization relates to our old friend, liberal hatred. I believe that evangelicals like Goodling are not so much pro-Republican as they are deeply, and even pathologically, anti-liberal. In this sense, Goodling represents the political coming-of-age of a generation of young social conservatives that has been taught from childhood to hate “the Left.” And it’s not just that the Left is bad, it’s that the Left is constantly attacking them from all directions -- e.g., the courts, the media, Hollywood, academia, etc. It’s all one big attack. I mean, Regent University is premised on the notion that Christians are under attack. (The Federalist Society was too – check out their mission statement).

The unfortunate result of seeing yourself under attack at all times is that you start conceptualizing the world in that way. You see monsters in all shadows. Take a look, for instance, at the “Political Sites” portion of Goodling’s old student web page (via Lithwick). Note that she divided up the sites into “news from the left” and “news from the right.” The “news from the left” sites included CNN and USA Today. Maybe I’m reading too much here, but I think this is extremely telling of her worldview. To her, CNN was “the Left,” and thus the attacking force. And that’s how many social conservatives see mainstream news -- as biased enemies attacking them. This perception goes a long way in explaining why so many of them have been impervious to the administration’s failures over the past few years.

Another rationalization is that, though they may not admit it, many social conservatives (particularly intellectual ones from non-urban areas) harbor a deep inferiority complex with respect to secular liberals. They perceive an unspoken bias (sometimes well-founded) within urban liberal social circles with respect to social conservative views. Accordingly, social conservatives running in these circles often hide their beliefs or, alternatively, aggressively overcompensate. But regardless of how they react, the result of these perceived sleights is that they have a strong drive to prove themselves and outshine the well-educated liberals who they think (and fear) perceive them as stupid.

On some level, these fears can produce good results. As some of you know, I grew up a moderately religious conservative from a rural southern town. Well before I went to college on the East Coast, I remember all too well harboring these sorts of feelings and resentments with respect to students from bigger towns (and better schools) in Kentucky. This drive to prove myself drove a lot of what I did and read (who knows, maybe it still does).

But what I eventually learned is that these feelings, while beneficial in some ways, ultimately poison you. They are, quite literally, the dark side of the force. You can ride them to success, but they will ultimately destroy you, or at least make you a restless, never-happy, paranoid person. And that’s exactly what they’re doing to American social conservatives. In short, they are poisoning them. They are filling them with hatred and resentment and paranoia. One hopes that many social conservatives will experience what I eventually did, which was similar to a fever breaking. There is, after all, an enormous amount of potential common ground between big-hearted progressives and big-hearted evangelicals. But until the fever breaks, their liberal hatred will fester on, preventing them from making common cause.

But turning back to Goodling, you can easily imagine how these specific resentments and rationalizations combined and manifested in her. When Goodling was in school, she wrote that her dream was to “leave the world a better place than I found it.” Instead, upon obtaining power, she became a spokesperson for Abu Ghraib, misled Congress, and routinely forced career lawyers out for younger unqualified hacks.

I’m obviously speculating, but I can see the rationalizations swimming in her head. For one, because she saw the Left as an attacking omnipresent enemy, she was more willing to bend rules for the “greater good” of self-preservation. Second, the career lawyers she fired -- products no doubt of elite liberal law schools -- gave rise to both liberal resentment and inferiority complexes. She also knew they were more qualified than her, and she resented them for knowing that. Finally, because she had no experience, she felt more determined to prove herself to her higher ups. Unfortunately, she decided to do this by becoming a political hatchet (wo)man.

In a weird way, I feel sorry for Goodling. She’s almost like a Doppelganger for me -- a vision of what my life could have been like if I had chosen a different road in the yellow wood at some point in the past. Hopefully, she’ll have her moment of clarity and her fever will break too. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

[UPDATE: Steve Benen has more.]

Comments

[Donald Johnson]

I read Lilith and Phantastes a long time ago. Wasn't crazy about them. I read a collection of his sermons (abridged, I think) some years ago too and liked those. The universalism appealed to me (whether it's true is a different matter). I liked what I think he said--Don't believe things about God that just strike you as immoral. Maybe you're wrong about it, but it does no good to force yourself to think of God acting in what you believe does not demonstrate love. If you're wrong eventually you may come to see that. I may be distorting what he said--now I'm thinking of going back to reread him myself.

[Gary Farber]

"Actually, I'm half-tempted to buy it (and the other volumes), but my wife would shoot me."

There are probably libraries where you live.

Alternatively, Tolkien's stories are all about old people from long ago, who wandered around a lot, and hit people with swords, and had tragic love, and killed a lot of evil creatures, until they got killed, usually in the course of seeking some magic item, to do something with it, maybe while singing an occasional song, and then someone wrote a long poem about them, so, really, if you've read one, you've read them all, you know.

"You know, I'm tempted to say
'For crying out loud, it's only a book!'."

In the course of writing a comment above last night, I wrote a long set of paragraphs that included a point along those lines, but I ended up deleting them as probably sounding more obnoxious that I remotely intended, while not having all that much value anyway.

(Folks have no idea how frequently I do that.)

If I were really niggling, I'd point out that it's a lot more than a single book that Tolkien contributed, and even a lot more than the creation of a universe over many volumes, with the depth of languages that only an Oxford don such as himself could bring, as well as the richness of the historical sources he plumbed, but that what his largest contribution was, was simply to show people that something that rich, and broad, and deep (if of a particular flavor that certainly isn't for everyone: but what is?) could be done.

And, of course, he's not responsible for the commercial fantasy industry that he inspired, once Lin Carter had gotten through reprinting the other earlier masters of fantasy in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series back in the Sixties, and the endless dreadfully hackneyed, completely derivative, shallow imitations of him that he inspired, along with many works that are merely mediocre, some that are quite good, and a few that are brilliant.

But I'd never say that everyone should like Tolkien, any more than I'd say that of any writer, or the work of any creator: taste is taste, and that's all there is to it.

Of course, I'd only say all that if I were really niggling. Which I'd never do.

[Donald Johnson]

Strange as it may seem, Gary, I doubt the local libraries carry 10 volumes of Tolkien trivia. They probably don't even have all of what I own--LOTR, The Hobbit, the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and "The Tolkien Reader".

I agree with your reply to Russell. Tolkien's reply could be found in "On Fairy Stories" in The Tolkien Reader.

[Jesurgislac]

Donald, you might be able to get them via interlibrary loan. Can be expensive, but often less so than getting the book itself, plus it doesn't hang around the house catching dust and annoying your partner...

[Donald Johnson]

Possibly, Jes, but inertia kicks in. Contrary to what Gary seems to believe, I do know that there are such things as libraries and I frequent them on a regular basis. If I don't find things on the shelves there I usually don't take the next step. I doubt anything in the local system has all the stuff Christopher Tolkien has seen fit to publish. I could be wrong.

[russell]

But, then again.....

I think you guys missed this part.

Rave on.

[Jesurgislac]

Donald: Possibly, Jes, but inertia kicks in.

Well, yes. ;-) I've only done it myself for books I'm really truly desperate to read. It's a bit timeconsuming and a bit expensive, but it is kind of fun, in an Aladdinish "I will make the librarian do my bidding!" kind of way.

[robert hounchell]

As Diderot said, "mankind shall not have peace until the last noble (king, politician) is hung by the entrails of the last priest (minister, reverend, pastor, bishop, Mullah, etc., etc.)