Truthiness, All the Way!

Lopez on Colbert:

...Colbert’s  interview with Walters rekindled my annoyance with a recent Washington Post profile of him. “Stephen Colbert offers a ‘thoughtful Catholicism,’” the Postannounced. The implication was clear. This sort of “thoughtful Catholicism” is something unusual. That institution that has built and nurtured some of the greatest universities and culture is the home of men and women who follow blindly. That the incubator and propagator for the convergence of faith and reason is somehow without the latter.

The hook for the Washington Post piece was the spectacle of Colbert’s recent appearance on Capitol Hill. He testified in character, at the invitation of Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren at a subcommittee hearing on migrant workers. It was a circus. And then, during the course of the question-and-answer session, he said, “‘Whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers,’ and these seemed like the least of my brothers, right now. A lot of people are ‘least brothers’ right now, with the economy so hard, and I don’t want to take anyone’s hardship away from them or diminish it or anything like that. But migrant workers suffer, and have no rights.”

This was typical Colbert: injecting religion into discussions. He does it in such a way that it’s not co-opting. It’s not necessarily attaching a political or policy view to it. It’s not offensive or even preachy. It’s sometimes completely unclear where he’s pointing to in the discussion other than Heaven. The one thing that is clear, however is that he believes it is good to be good and, the Catholic Church knows something about the Good. Religion is just explicitly present in a completely different way, as far as talking heads shows tend to go...