THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN U.S. POLITICS:

Crises of Democracy

Since God is more elusive than government, the likelihood of outrageously subjective interpretations of “God’s will” can only run rampant. This has been amply demonstrated in pronouncements by such divinely inspired political stalwarts as John Ashcroft and Tom DeLay. The US government assuredly doesn’t want an Islamic state in Iraq, yet DeLay has openly stated that God has assigned him to promote “a biblical worldview” in how he goes about his political responsibilities as House Majority Leader. Meanwhile, John Ashcroft tells us that “Jesus is our only King,” and Commerce Secretary Don Evans reveals to us that God told George Bush to wage war on Iraq.

For the first time in 50 years, Republicans constitute a majority of state legislatures. They dominate no less than three branches of the federal government. In the newspapers we read that the male scions of “boomer” parents are enthusiastically gung-ho about the military establishment. They nearly equate it with the Republican-dominated federal government. Hence, both party and government are deemed to be one: efficient, upright and trustworthy—meriting a 75% approval rating roughly coinciding with that of the president himself.

At the end of May, President Bush signed off on another economically unnecessary tax cut—$350 billion worth—which of course is also a politically pre-emptive act, with the 2004 elections being just 17-18 months away. Mr. Bush also sanctioned an almost trillion-dollar increase in the government’s borrowing capacity, thus adding the same amount to the national debt on which interest is to be paid. Deficits, we are assured, don’t matter anymore, and I dare say, might well outlast the war on terror.

Fueling that conflict is the assumed notorious “axis of evil,” according to Bush. He intoned the phrase against Iraq, Iran and North Korea in a nationally televised address on 20 September, 2001, little more than a week after 9/11.

The first Puritans to arrive on American shores would have approved.

Clearly possessed by Satan, the natives had to be eliminated, and they were. The Indians’ village was set ablaze; hundreds were killed—either shot, drowned, or sold into slavery.

According to the organiser of the Mayflower expedition, William Bradford, this constituted “a sweet sacrifice to God.” Evildoers, in short, must be either summarily punished or killed. Both would come to pass in Salem in 1692, when fanatical judges saw to it that 19 innocent people were hanged for being possessed by the Devil.

The most Hebraic of the original Protestant sects, the early Puritans—control freaks extraordinaire—believed that church and state should be separate but closely associated and led by the same types of people in either case.

The Puritans’ wars against Native Americans spawned frightful delusions throughout New England. The Puritans’ theology of choice was Calvinism—the elect few predestined by God to success and wealth versus the many predestined to perdition, misery and hell on earth; everyone in effect lived in a state of unrelieved anxiety that consequently instigated a kind of nervous activism. Beginning with the infamous Salem witch-trials of the 1690s, we’ve had periodic political witch-hunts ever since.

In the 1970s Reverend Jerry Falwell publicly concluded, “Satan has mobilized its forces to destroy America.” Such born-again religious fervor ihas been on the rise ever since.

No wonder Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked, in a letter to Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s, about the emerging American character: “We are a little wild here.” Indeed we are. Welcome to Redneck America.

To be “born again” is an evangelical legacy of the Puritan tradition; to be born again is to be an adamant “true believer,” such as that described by author Eric Hoffer. All of which puts me in mind of those secular true believers, the Jacobins of the French Revolution.

When Jacobin leader Robespierre hijacked the people’s Revolution in their name, he corrupted it totally, ushering in a prolonged period of massacres and slaughter—an early symptom of what Alexis de Tocqueville would later term, with his usual uncanny prescience, “a virus of a new and unknown kind”: what in Western culture would morph into genocidal inclination—evil committed in the name of an insane nationalism, ethnic cleansing, or ideology—or, as is increasingly the case these days, in the name of some intolerant, absolutist religious fundamentalism. (Surely Hitlerism and the Holocaust exemplify the first most horrific “virus of a new and unknown kind” in modern times.)

The French revolutionaries were not unlike the English Puritans in one respect. In their mad zeal, they rendered themselves incapable of conceiving the validity of a loyal opposition. None who thought otherwise could be their equal; therefore those who disagreed with them were deemed traitors who had to be eliminated. One could only be 100% for the Jacobins or 100% against them, which prepared the ground for their Reign of Terror in 1793-1794 during which thousands were executed.

Is anything more fatal to humanity than ‘either/or’ thinking? If all who disagree with you are, by definition, irredeemable traitors then no real democracy is possible! Such a state of affairs, by extension to our own day and time, is what ultimately concerns me about those on the religious and political Right. They typically present themselves as knowing, better than anyone else in the world what we as a nation need to do, impetuously brushing aside questions from, or discussion with, those who differ with them in the slightest.

It was in the name of a fervent nationalism that the French revolutionaries finally declared war on all of Europe’s great powers. After years of Napoleon’s spectacular victories, France nonetheless collapsed from its imperial reach.

It is in the name of national security, a euphemism for nationalism, that the present administration in Washington is preparing for war without end—in our name, and presumably for our own protection. Our consent is absent, except for that which the Bushies manufacture. Shall we be so naïve as to trust the ethics of their intentions? Yet, it is not their intentions that are at issue, but the likely fatal consequences of the actions that these holy warriors—most of whom have never been in battle—have in mind.

Of late, I’ve been quoting James Madison in public, perhaps the most far-seeing of the founders of what we nostalgically refer to as the American Republic. The American imperium, in Gore Vidal’s view, was born the day the National Security Act was enacted in 1947. Here are Madison’s amazing words, expressed in a letter to Jefferson in 1788 as the Constitution was nearing completion: “There may be a certain degree of danger that a succession of artful and ambitious rulers, may by gradual and well–timed advances, finally erect an independent Government on the subversion of liberty.”

I believe we are moving toward that end at a fast clip. What was essentially a political vision of presidential dominance in Watergate became quasi-religious with Reagan, and now, insistently, evangelically fundamentalist with the current administration in Washington. This situation cannot be tolerated much longer. We cannot remain constantly worried and/or somnolent until unpleasant things somehow blow over, allowing us to “return to normal”—an understandable but naïve hope.

Right now, therefore, we have to think anew, strategize anew, and act anew on behalf of the entire spectrum of the democratic prospect. We cannot afford to behave like the good Germans of the Nazi Reich.