Mutual admiration …

… President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa by Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The President: How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them? 

Robinson: Well, I don’t know how seriously they do take their Christianity, because if you take something seriously, you’re ready to encounter difficulty, run the risk, whatever. I mean, when people are turning in on themselves—and God knows, arming themselves and so on—against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously. I don’t know—I mean, this has happened over and over again in the history of Christianity, there’s no question about that, or other religions, as we know.

So we're back to the belief the President expressed in 2008: "It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." And Robinson seems to share that view.

Here is another piece of Robinson's that Dave sends along: Awakening. And here is something from that:

I will say at the outset that I do not know how this problem can be resolved. I cannot find any slightest inclination in myself to make concessions, precisely because I attach religious value to generous, need I say liberal, social policy. If it would be illiberal and unchristian of me to suppose that divine judgment might be brought down on the United States for grinding the faces of the poor (despite all the great prophet Isaiah has to say on the subject), I take no comfort from the certain knowledge that my opposite is struggling with just the same temptation, though mulling other texts. So, is this order of seriousness, the consequence of the compounded effects of relative democracy and a basically religious habit of mind, on balance stabilizing or destabilizing, good or bad? There is little point to the question, since these things are so engrained in the culture that they are no doubt our perpetual storm, raging in place like the red spot on Jupiter. If there is a dynamic equilibrium at work here, then it takes its stabilizing force from the belief in and expression of views that are opposed. Therefore I can in good conscience put aside my attempts at evenhandedness.

To conflate the practice of your faith with politics — to, as far as oneself is concerned, have no separation of church and state, but your own private theocracy instead, seems to me to really get things mixed up. For one thing, it has to mean that those who disagree with your politics are not just wrong, but evil. Robinson talks a good game about religion in general, but when it gets down to specifics, the self-righteous sanctimony shows.