Crossroads of Faith and Democracy

 

My father once told me, quoting Disraeli, that “the secret to success is constancy of purpose.”
Well, if this election cycle was a success, it succeeded mainly in driving Americans mad. And I mean mad in the bonkers sense, not the “angry” sense that American English so often misuses.

We’ve endured an unrelenting assault on our senses—by the media, by social networks, and by friends who’ve been so deranged by the onslaught of opinion, misinformation, disinformation, and rumor that we’ve algorithmically relegated them to the trash bin. There, they sit alongside solicitations from Amazon, the Vitamin Shoppe, and LA Fitness. Our email filters now tune them out entirely.

I can’t fully grasp the motivations of Americans who still support MAGA Republicans, despite having been fed a steady diet of explanations from journalists, friends, and even clergy. (Clergy, after all, have fewer topics to ruminate on these days, since many can no longer persuasively argue—except to the true believers—that God, or some facsimile thereof, still exists.) Polls suggest that only about half of Americans now say with certainty that God is “up there” on a cloud, answering prayers, His white beard festooned across the heavens.

Given that most of the Founding Fathers were deists—skeptical of prayer but believing in some form of divine creation without divine interference—it’s hard to see why evangelicals, fundamentalists, and conservative Catholics embrace recent Supreme Court decisions as “progress” in the American experiment enshrined in the Constitution of 1789.

Take abortion. It is a religiously fueled issue that has deeply divided the nation. Donald Trump—who lost the 2016 popular vote by three million—appointed three religious zealots to the Supreme Court. They misled Congress during confirmation hearings, then overturned abortion rights that had stood for over fifty years, with disastrous consequences. That Trump had no popular mandate did not trouble him or Mitch McConnell in the slightest.

Religion in America has flourished because of the separation of church and state, not in spite of it. The absence of a state religion was a guiding principle for the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The founders affirmed this freedom—though in early America, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Rhode Island were still settled by distinct religious factions. Back then, without a national polity or modern communications—no telegraph, no internet, no mass-circulation press—there was little exposure to competing points of view.

Today, the irony is stark: fundamentalists attacking the very separation that has allowed religion to thrive. Religion can be beneficial, but it is far too easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians who profess no sincere faith, guided only by expedience.

The Electoral College is another relic of 1789—a compromise with slave states, many of which used biblical justification for human bondage. Eighty years later, the Civil War tore at the nation’s fabric to end that supposed divine sanction. Lincoln himself was no conventional Christian; his blend of rationalism and fatalism allowed him to evolve beyond the doctrinal defenses of slavery found in both Old and New Testaments. Some modern theologians have had to redefine those texts entirely to sidestep their endorsements of bondage.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves: religion fueled that war, as it has fueled countless crusades, pogroms, and inquisitions. And the persistent idea that “if Jews were Muslims there would be no war in the Middle East” ignores an even darker truth: without two thousand years of Christian teaching that Jews killed Christ—and thus were wicked, subhuman, and fit for extermination—there would have been no Holocaust.

Which brings us to today’s rising tide of anti-Semitism, still anchored in those ancient tropes. The claim that Israel is committing genocide against Hamas willfully inverts victim and aggressor. Hamas exists for the destruction of the “Zionist entity,” not for building a viable society. Building tunnels and firing rockets at your neighbor is no substitute for building schools, hospitals, and civil institutions—nor is kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering civilians.