Church, Tribes and State 2024.

  

 

My father told me once, quoting Disraeli, that “the secret to success is constancy of purpose.”

Well, if this election cycle is successful, it will have succeeded in driving Americans mad.  And I mean mad in the bonkers sense, not the angry sense as is commonly misused in American parlance.

 

Chiefly, the assault on our senses by the media, social networks, and our friends, some of whom have become so deranged by the onslaught of opinion, misinformation, disinformation and rumor, we have algorithmically relegated to the trash bin, among solicitations from Amazon, Vitamin Shoppe and LA Fitness.  We have set our email systems to tune them out.

 

I do not know how to make sense of the motivations of those Americans who still support MAGA Republicans, although I have been fed a diet of many opinions by journalists, friends and even clergy.  Clergy have not much else to ruminate about these days since most of them can no longer argue, except to true believers, that God or some facsimile thereof, still exists.  I think the most recent information reflects that only 50% of the public has expressed certainty that God is still up there on a cloud answering our prayers, his white beard festooning the heavens.

 

In view of the fact that a majority of the founding fathers were deists rejecting the efficacy of prayer, but believing in some form of divine creation, but non-intervention in human affairs, it is even more difficult to discern why evangelicals and other fundamentalists, including conservative Catholics, believe in all the recent steps taken by the current Supreme Court as some form of progress in the 1789 constitutional experiment. 

 

Abortion is one of the issues advanced by religious fundamentalists.  That issue has riven the country, and although Donald Trump, as a candidate who lost the popular vote by three million in 2016, appointed three religious zealots to the Supreme Court who lied to congress in their confirmation hearings and later overturned abortion rights that had been in place for over 52 years, resulting in life threatening social consequences. That Trump really had no popular mandate did not disturb him or Mitch McConnell a bit.

 

Religion (tribalism, I use the term interchangeably)) has prospered in this country because of the wall of separation between church and state, not in spite of it.  There exists no state religion, as in Europe, the flight from which was a guiding ideal of the pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. That freedom was later affirmed by the founders.  Massachusetts and Maryland and Rhode Island, for example, were settled by different religious factions.  But back then there was no national consensus, no modern exchange of information, no telegraph, no internet exposing people to differing points of view.  There were local newspapers, but they did not widely circulate.

 

The irony of the separation of church and state being under attack by fundamentalists lays waste to the ideal that religion has been beneficial to our polity.  Yes, there has been benefit, in social order and morality, but these days, on balance, it is challenging to accept that it is a positive force.  It is too subject to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians who have no sincere religious beliefs, but instead, are guided by transactional agendas.  

 

I am clinging to the hope that the American public will not fall for the siren call of a charlatan who has fooled them once.  The electoral college is another creation of 1789 that compromised democratic ideals to slave states which, among other rationales, reasoning that the bible conferred authority to enslave other human beings.  As a result, about 80 years after the founding, a great civil war tore at the sinews of the nation, partially to cure the biblical notion that slavery was endorsed by a divinity. Lincoln himself did not subscribe to traditional Christian beliefs, but instead to a complex philosophy of rationalism and fatalism, allowing him to evolve and eventually eschew the doctrinal justification of slavery existing in the old and new Testaments (as have some modern theologians who now define slavery differently.)

 

Let us not think that religion or tribalism did not play a part in strongly contributing to that war, and many other wars, crusades, pogroms and inquisitions as well, including the inescapable notion that if Jews were Muslims or Muslims were Jews there would be no war in the Middle East.  And take it a step further. No Holocaust predicated on 2000 years of liturgy that Jews killed Christ.