December 9, 2017
In the days after 9/11, Americans decried with one voice the
theocratic autocracies which rained down misery while professing piety. Their leaders spinning conspiracy theories
from the minbar, their seething hatred of other religions and people as
cultural cornerstone, their men praying upon young girls with the blessing
of community elders, and their hastening of us all toward some glorious
end of days, our nation recoiled at this abhorrent display of such feverish and
misdirected anger among the devout.
Now we must all look in the mirror. We have become what we fear most: a nation
capable of rationalizing nearly anything.
A PRRI/Brookings poll of evangelical Christians found in
2016 that 72 percent said, "an elected official who commits an immoral act
in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in
their public and professional life."
In 2011, that number was just 30 percent. So please, let’s
all dispense with the shameless piety and finger-wagging. As I wrote in a prior piece, the blue states
have lower rates of divorce, prostitution, teen pregnancy, and opioid addiction
than their red counterparts. And yet, courtesy
of the religious/political leaders in those red states and their commanding
heights of morality and ethics, we’re all faced with the specter of occupants
in our highest offices who shamelessly prey upon young women and spout
dangerous conspiracy theories from their bully pulpits, dragging our nation
into a bereft and barren landscape of dust and dirt along with them.
Even Barry Goldwater – no friend to liberal policies –
understood what is at stake, saying, “Religious factions will go on imposing
their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that
religion has no place in our public policy.”
He’d read our founding fathers, it seems. As James Madison, the father of the Constitution to which conservatives ascribe so much of our national ethos, put it so very well, “religion and
government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed
together.” Is that not what we all
seek? A church pure in spirit, and a
government pure in practice?
Too many of our citizens today are far from home, having
searched for (and finally found) inclusive and supportive communities where
they may live their lives, raise their families, and practice their faith, with
welcoming friendships and greater measures of academic, cultural, and
socioeconomic parity. They well remember
the people at whose hands they suffered as children and all of those who looked
the other way. We cannot continue the
attitudes and resentments that have driven such separation in us and hope to
thrive. We cannot live as two nations
claiming to be one. Our great country finds
itself at the mercy of a (new?) plurality which seemingly aspires to wealth
without enlightenment, leadership without kindness, and reverence without
compassion. We pursue a cognitively
dissonant and intellectually incoherent narrowing of national horizons and
upward redistribution of wealth, while defiance, anger, and resentments fuel the
plurality’s rise to power as it dismantles any remaining accomplishments of the
20th century – that time, ironically, when America was great.
It’s all starting to feel a bit hopeless, and one might be
forgiven for concluding there is little more we can do to avoid the wreckage ahead. Evangelical Christian apologia for and support
of ethical and moral transgressions (which in recent memory would have ended any
prayer of public aspiration) demonstrates that there is, effectively, no
bottom for a large portion of this block; and if there is no bottom, there is neither
rationality nor reason. Therefore, the
horror show must be visited upon their own doorstep for them to admit it, and
what form that will take is in equal measure both frightening and unknown. They cannot simply hear of it and
change. They cannot simply witness it
and change. They must live it, which
means we must all live it. And America
will never be the same.
