Looking At The “Post-Partisan” Religious Political Picture

What if these were “yes on 8″ republicans? OOO, what then?

“It has been often said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the fruits of weakness.
The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them, but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it.
Woe to the weak when they are preyed upon by the weak. The self-hatred of the weak is likewise an instance of their hatred of weakness.
The mere possession of power does not inevitably lead to aggression. It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. Some inner unbalance is apparently needed to keep people on the go, and it needs the unbalancing of fear to activate power.
Only when power utilizes the propensities and talents of the weak does it become ruthless and vicious.
It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that…they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat.
Great evils befall the world when the powerful begin to copy the weak. The desperate devices which enable the weak to survive are unequaled instruments of oppression and extermination in the hands of the strong.”
-Eric Hoffer

If the sign in the middle read “PEACE” not “GRACE”, I would have looked at that picture and thought of it in terms of yr alternate scenario.
Well, maybe you would have to get rid of the hokey little porcelain picture frames and the flag veneration too.

Also, on further reflection, the crucifixes are bit too kitsch-y for a liberal theological outlet. Replace those wrought iron thingies with something hand-carved or embroidered at a fair trade cooperative in Guatemala, then maybe they’d be researching alternatives to custodial sentences and how to combat climate change.
Plus, the lack of dust and well-fingered volumes doesn’t give the impression of a place where people – either liberal or conservative – spend a lot of time wrestling with complex theological issues.
Overall, I would say it’s the clean-cut, picture-perfectness of the scene that screams megachurch.

I’ve looked at this picture multiple times. There’s two strong symbols I see.
My first somewhat trivial reaction is bemusement in the color coordination between the woman’s skirt and the throw pillow.
My second perhaps more insightful observation is the man appears to be doing intense serious work and the woman could be mistaken for picking out recipes while sitting in a waiting room.
Perhaps the picture would look more “post-partisan” if the gender of the two subjects were reversed?

My eye first went to the contrast of the man surrounded by the books, and the woman in the domestic setting. This seems the essence of the Christianists to me, putting people “in their place”, as it were.
Then my eye goes to the plastic over the lampshade, and I laugh at the tackiness of it all. All surface with these folk, but tacky, tacky surface….

Visually, without the caption, I see two quite different pictures: a wealth of books on one side with a studious middle class young white man, fingers in several pages, searching, a stool at his feet to get at the out-of-reach books; on the other side, back to him, lower, more relaxed, an older white woman, also middle class, self-satisfied, in an emptier setting of earthy colors, with “tasteful” icons on the wall, apparently for sale (the cross-lamp has a new lampshade, the flag-painting a tag).
As far as flag symbols go the hands working on the bunched-up, non-waving flag is atypical of a right-wing icon and not offensive to me — isn’t that what Obama’s trying to do, get us to mend it?
It’s all quite ambiguous. Knowing ahead of time it’s a bookstore for a right-wing mega-church brings out my prejudices. But there is nothing inherently telling about even a right-winger searching through books (the left half), or a middle-class white woman surrounded by stylish, well-crafted symbols. To me they say more about the middle-class white American value of over-dramatizing a superficial search for meaning than they do about right-ring religion as such.
“GRACE,” the centerpiece of the picture, joins these two halves, these two people with their backs to each other. The only readable word to us amid all these books, it may carry the message about post-partisan religion-politics, at least if it’s not got a price tag attached.

Do you mean no-on-8 Obama supporters? Because those are the ones who would care about sinful equalities. Yes-on-8 people embrace inequality for gays and lesbians.

In exchange for tax exemption of $800,000 a year, they should have to adhere to US Civil Rights Laws.

Actually, I think it says $800,00 per weekend.

They may be reading “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” put out by Focus on the Family. Link here:
http://focusfamaction.edgeboss.net/download/focusfamaction/pdfs/10-22-08_2012letter.pdf
Today I attended a rally/march in Seattle to celebrate International Human Rights Day. Even though it was unusually cold attendance was depressingly small-only a couple hundred. I met a young member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. (I’m a member of Veterans for Peace.) He was carrying a sign demanding rights for the Palestinian people. He told me he is Jewish. We had a ten minute conversation about religious extremism and agreed that it’s true believers like, for example, the Taliban, the Jewish settlers and American evangelicals that present the greatest obstacle to peace and justice in the world.
The smugness of these extremists is reflected in this image. I have an Aunt who has been a Catholic Nun for
over fifty years. She is an intelligent woman with a MA, obviously deeply religious, but her apartment contains very little in religious items and books. She walks the walk-these people talk the talk.

cmac,
I did mean “Yes on 8″ Obama supporters. Check out the NYT article linked to in the post.

With the rise of a faith movement within the Democratic party, there is — as if all of a sudden with Obama’s victory — an heightened blurring of the lines between right and left, religious and secular. I intentionally created the scenario to go with the image given Obama’s philosophy/strategy of undermining identity politics. Mindful of that agenda, what I wanted to do was put on the table the reflex reaction we liberals had and still have to this kind of symbolism — the same mindset Nina rightly and naturally took for granted in photographing inside the conservative bastion of the fundamentalist megachurch in 2005.

First visual reaction? … Article about Stephen Cobert.

Michael does another thought-provoking and bias-revealing post.
It can be easy to condescend, but who really cares of there are plastic covers on the lampshades. Does that really tell you something about the conduct and beliefs of the people?

plasti-covers an a chr(on)ist i c

Yes, Richard. Plastic on the lampshades speaks to both generation and class. For working-class America — especially those over 60, but not exclusively by any means — nice things are hard to come by, and a major investment. If you manage to acquire them, you preserve them. So you put antimacassars or colorful throw blankets on the couch and chair; and keep the plastic wrap on the lampshades to help ensure they don’t get dusty or stained.
In the lower-middle and working classes, the line between being respectable and being white (or any other color) trash is all too thin, and scrupulous attention to keeping up your home and other social appearances becomes one of the main markers by which people can tell the difference. And church-goers, in particular, are careful to seize on that particular bit of virtue-added for all it’s worth. Cleanliness is not only next to Godliness, it’s one of the few outward indicators that you really are better than those beer-swilling, immoral heathens across the street. And because it doesn’t take more money — just more attention and effort — it’s very cheap grace indeed.
As a product of working-class America myself, I was marinated in this attitude as a child. We may not have had money; but things like an orderly household, clean clothes and shoes, and good behavior in public were the signs that my parents relied on to distinguish themselves as aspiring middle-class instead of mere proles. Almost every detail of this photo bespeaks the same attitudes and class anxieties to me. The left half looks like my dad’s study; the right half could have been my grandmother’s living room.