Religion & Law

I sometimes enjoy the writing of Jon Meacham.  Last year for Christmas, someone gave me a copy of his book on Andrew Jackson, and I thought it a fun read about an important figure.  On occasion, I've read magazine pieces of his on religion in America which I've thought interesting.

But this piece in the weekend's NY Times book review struck me as off pitch.  In the process of reviewing what seems like a strong new translation of the Books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, Meacham tries to draw direct parallels between the trials of Job and President Obama's recent political fortunes.  "Like Obama," Meacham says, "Job was once the highly favored one."  But boils and other Republican afflictions have come to beset "a man seemingly rich in the gifts life has to offer, happy and blessed."  Job and President Obama cannot understand why just men such as they have been consigned to suffer.  Like Job, Meacham continues, the President has been forced to "humble[] himself" (God's pestilence is even compared to "Dick Cheney's vision of unfettered executive power" -- difficult to know how seriously to take this, or how it actually cuts).  "And yet, and yet," concludes Meacham.  "All is not lost, which should give the president some hope amid the shadows, and should keep the Republicans from thinking that their own course will be unimpeded."  (From this, I gather that Republicans are actually not meant to represent the pestilence or the cold fury of God.).  The political allegory of Job stands for the notion that for those who "endure in tribulation . . . perhaps all may be well."

I recognize that in the wake of electoral losses, the losing party looks for explanations for its defeat.  This is as it should be, and analysis has been in no short supply.  But my own view is that political defeats should be approached politically, not by the path of religious allegory.  Putting aside the silly comparison between the devastations of Job and the political discomfort that the President has recently experienced (perhaps not quite comparable tragedies), there's a difference in kind that makes this sort of comparison inappropriate. 

A large part of the meaning of Job's plight, I've always thought, is the inscrutability of God's will.  God's plans and judgments are beyond the understanding of men, and -- difficult as it may be (and very often is) -- these are not matters for men to control.  To apply that kind of lesson to politics is to miss the core point at a number of levels.  The motions of politics are well within the sphere of the humanly knowable, the realm of human control.  To use the book of Job as political allegory lends an air of (divine?) inevitability to political forces and judgments that is entirely misplaced. 

And if the President is Job, who exactly represents the divine in this allegory?  Is it the blind and impersonally deterministic forces of politics, something like the political Fates?  Or is it something even worse -- "the people" themselves divinized, and allegorized as the wrathful godhead?    

I don't agree substantively with a good bit in this piece by Mark Lilla (it begins after the comment by Ronald Dworkin), but it seems to me to be at least the sort of medicine that is directed at the right variety of illness -- political prescriptions for political failings.  At a time when politics and religion seem to be more and more intertwined, the temptation to ascribe religious significance and meaning to ordinary politics -- and to find grand Biblical explanations for all too human events -- seems to me a category mistake.