"Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power."
-Martin Buber
When I was growing up I was taught that there were two things never to be discussed in social situations; one was politics, the other religion. This admonition seemed to make sense to me until my teens, when intellectual curiosity and a proclivity toward antagonism overwhelmed any sense of rhetorical restraint. As the broken stained glass of my Catholicism crunched under my bare feet, shards impaling and scarring the permanent surface upon which I would stand irrevocably, I walked bloody into the dark alleys of metaphysics, transcendentalism, orientalism, existentialism, and countless other
-isms and
-ologies, dousing myself in the cool waters of Kierkegaard, breathing the opiate smoke of Krishnamurti, and playing cat's cradle with the challenging approach to dialogue by Martin Buber's,
I and Thou, which I mistakenly understood to describe "holding your ground" as an excuse for the confrontation of individuals, even on those previously ascribed subjects of taboo. My first attempt at a dialectical explanation of
metaphysica generalis was in response to my father's question, "Why aren't you going to church?" However, the denouement was less than satisfactory and resulted in things getting broken, irreparably.
This is not an extraordinary story. It is the most common of stories. It is the story of anyone who has ever asked a question or taken a journey. It is the story of Siddhartha and the story of Odysseus as well as Huckleberry Finn, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and, it could be argued, all of literature, science, and philosophical inquiry. Therefore, in classrooms and amongst individuals engaged in robust dialogue, the ideas intrinsic to religious and political doctrines, however diverse, have always provided the dynamic of responsible dialogue. Occasionally, when the polarities were too great to find common ground and emotions fueled the debate, irreconcilable differences led to, well, wars, crucifixions, the Crusades, Fatwas, and every prefix of -cide based on intolerance of others' belief systems. Today, in the U.S., the individual polarities of politics and religiosity are scrambled and recombinant in such a way and to such an extreme that dialogue is meaningless. Strident, dogmatic doggerel is screamed into microphones by idiots propped up by mass media to the abasement of us all by the likes of Hannity & Colmes, The O'Reilly Factor, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthew, the Sunday morning masquerade of meaningful talk shows, and by the opposing team leaders of extremism. I tend to agree with what David Foster Wallace had to say about political discourse, back in 2003,(from an interview with Dave Eggars in Believer Magazine):
The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it's supposed to be about. Meaning it's become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody's pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O'Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left's been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it's totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken's broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham's latest Harper's columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It's all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There's no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or "dialogue"); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one's own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything's relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O'Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country's macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy's outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way--as is the belief that every last person you're in conflict with is an asshole--but it's childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.
My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it's like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that's having the problems ours is.
This is not to say that if one has enough time to waste listening or watching this polyphonic posturing that one will not hear a statement or two with which one may agree (which means to which someone else will disagree). It is the complete absence of critical thinking and of measured and extrapolating debate in any popular media. The so-called news outlets are merely the evolutionary result of the 80's talk shows, such as Donahue, Gerald, Oprah (old style), Sally Jesse Raphael, Springer, et al, whereby the host or moderator takes part in the argument, no matter how vile a subject, not just as devil's advocate, but as instigator. A mere nugget of truth seems to be anathema to this theater of the absurd.
Unfortunately, this makes the "news" organizations par of the culture, rather than objective reporters of such. There exists no impartial, scrupulous, and analytic reportage and certainly no balanced debate. George Orwell said, "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." I have no problem with the "truth" being proclaimed stridently by those with the courage of their convictions; recently we have seen the likes of John Murtha and Russ Feingold state unambiguously truth to power; revolutionary acts to be sure.
With global socio-economic and geopolitical dynamics such as they are, i.e. rapidly changing, unstable, unpredictable, and all of the world's organized religions in sectarian crises, such as the schisms in the Muslim faith between Wahabiism, particularly Al Takfir Wal Hijra, and the many more moderate sects, i.e. the Sunni and the Shi'a and the more obscure sects, such as the Sufis and the Ismailis. The Catholic Church, with all its Papal supremacy and ecumenical posturing, is actually also in crisis. Its congregation as well as its clergy is shrinking within modern nations; the Church's orthodoxy in conflict with modernity itself. However, it is the insinuation of these world religions into geopolitical battles, both metaphorically and actually, that causes the concern. In the U.S. it is the Evangelical Christian (political) Right, having insinuated itself into all aspects of government and cultural matters, that threatens to cause a schism of mutual and irreparable intolerance between those that follow their rigid Biblical interpretations and admonitions and everyone else, from the wholly secular to those who follow other organized religions but abjure a commingling of religion and government. So entrenched in overt political influence is this Evangelical movement, a phenomenon that saw its realization in the 2000 elections, that a historical perspective on Evangelism and Protestantism in America is necessary to understand the potentiality of their numbers and conviction
Obviously, the liberating effects of the American Revolution were manifest in how individuals saw themselves within a social structure. Questioning the centricity of authority was a dynamic that affected not only individuals, and not only the secular aspects of freedom, but also the authority of various church orthodoxies in favor of the religious culture of insurgent populist preachers. A succinct excerpt that captures this period is quoted below from Ian Frederick Finseth's, Liquid Fire Within Me:
The fifty years following independence witnessed dramatic changes in the character of American society. As is the case with all periods of momentous social change, the early national period generated both optimism and unease. While the Revolution had succeeded in throwing off the British yoke, it by no means resolved the fledgling nation's infrastructural, political and racial problems. Rather, in the sudden absence of imperial control, Americans of all stations were confronted with the task of structuring and preserving a viable society in a time of great uncertainty and flux, when internal political discord, unstable international allegiances and the disorienting surge of capitalist enterprise shook the foundations of tradition and security that they had long relied upon. Particularly distressing was the realization that political union did not necessarily entail cultural harmony, and that conflicts between Americans could become vitriolic and even violent, as exampled by the hysterical party warfare of the 1790s, by such eruptions of economic discontent as Shay's Rebellion, by ethnic- and class-based urban disturbances, and by the seemingly insoluble dispute over slavery. In many ways, American society seemed to be growing more rather than less fragmented.
Indeed this should ring a chord of familiarity with today's readers. Although the U.S. electorate is currently equally divided between the two major parties, i.e. Republican and Democratic, the regional and local differences are more predominately one or the other than at any time in the nation's history. Bill Bishop, as staff writer for the Austin American-Statesman puts it this way:
The result is that voters on average are less likely today to live in a community that has an even mix of Republican and Democratic voters than at any time since World War II. They are less likely to live near someone with a different political point of view and are more likely to live in a political atmosphere either overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic
.
Between the 1790's and the 1840's the metamorphoses in American economics, politics, and intellectual culture had a counterpoint in the transformation of American religion, particularly as a Protestant phenomenon. This phenomenon became known as the Second Great Awakening and resulted in a lessening of the central power of established churches and an increase in the power of local preachers and their congregations. In American Methodism a plan of multiple meeting places known as circuits was established, and the preachers to whom these circuits throughout the land were charged were called circuit riders. Peter Cartwright (1785-1872), in his eponymous Autobiography, described the life of the circuit rider:
A Methodist preacher, when he felt that God had called him to preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical Institute, hunted up a hardy pony, and some traveling apparatus, and with his library always at hand, namely, a Bible, Hymn book, and Discipline, he started, and with a text that never wore out nor grew stale, he cried, 'Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.' In this way he went through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain; climbed hills and mountains, traversed valleys, plunged through swamps, swollen streams, lay out all night, wet, weary, and hungry, held his horse by the bridle all night, or tied him to a limb, slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle-bags for a pillow. Often he slept in dirty cabins, ate roasting ears for bread, drank butter-milk for coffee; took deer or bear meat, or wild turkey, for breakfast, dinner, and supper. This was old-fashioned Methodist preacher fare and fortune.
He describes a typical revival:
They would ... erect a shed, sufficiently large to protect five thousand people from wind and rain, and cover it with boards or shingles; build a large stand, seat the shed, and here they would collect together from forty to fifty miles around, sometimes further than that. Ten, twenty, and sometimes thirty ministers, of different denominations, would come together and preach night and day, four or five days together; and, indeed, I have known these camp-meetings to last three or four weeks, and great good resulted from them. I have seen more than a hundred sinners fall like dead men under one powerful sermon, and I have seen and heard more than five hundred Christians all shouting aloud the high praises of God at once; and I will venture to assert that many happy thousands were awakened and converted to God at these camp-meetings.
These 50 years following the revolution and encompassing the antebellum period also saw the rise of individualism in the form of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. These proponents of a spiritual view whereby God is permanently and directly present in all things, a pantheistic and mystical world where individuals can experience divine contact with divinity during, as an example, a walk in the woods, where the objects of nature, including people, are all equally divine were best represented culturally by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. At a lecture in1880 before the Concord Lyceum, Emerson described Transcendentalism thusly:
It seemed a war between intellect and affection; a crack in Nature, which split every church in Christendom into Papal and Protestant; Calvinism into Old and New schools; Quakerism into Old and New; brought new divisions in politics; as the new conscience touching temperance and slavery. The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness.... The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world
.
Certainly there were social contexts within which these various schools of thought could flourish. Demographic change, with the effects of both a growing capitalist population in the cities of the northeast and suddenly expounding frontiers and opportunities westward and southward, formed the basis of the dynamic. Both the Treaty of Paris (with Britain, 1783) and the Louisiana Purchase (1804), which doubled the size of the new nation, offered the former colonists huge tracts of land and opportunities in remote areas where centralized government authority was much less of an influence. With the rise of wealth and capitalism came the social afflictions of greed, corruption, and economic upheaval, along with a steady growth in lawlessness and its concomitant moral apathy. America's first financial crisis was the Panic of 1819 that resulted in foreclosures, bank failures, unemployment, and a recession in both agriculture and manufacturing.
The panic was frightening in its scope and impact. In New York State, property values fell from $315 million in 1818 to $256 million in 1820. In Richmond, property values fell by half. In Pennsylvania, land values plunged from $150 an acre in 1815 to $35 in 1819. In Philadelphia, 1808 individuals were committed to debtors' prison. In Boston, the figure was 3500.
The causes effects, and remedies of this economic upheaval deserve more attention. However, suffice to conclude that the modern conflicts inherent in our society took root, not the least of which was the issue of race that manifested itself in the Missouri Crisis. The crisis was ignited by the application of Missouri for statehood, and it involved the status of slavery west of the Mississippi River. Indeed, the debate over slavery in this context portended the inexorable dichotomy that would lead to the Civil War. John Quincy Adams wrote that the Missouri Crisis was on the "title page to a great tragic volume." With the intractable tenets of Evangelism, in the dominance of the Methodists and Baptists (along with Presbyterians), taking root and rapidly spreading in the South and Midwest, and the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic and the ascendance of the individual in divinity of Transcendentalism and Unitarianism firmly gaining ground in the urban Northeast, the present day demographics of social thought and religious influence saw its incipient foundation lain.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states first and foremost, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" Any overt influence of one religion within the institutions of government should quite rightly raise alarm. It is all too transparent that the peddling of influence in Washington D.C. by lobbyists representing every economic, political, and (yes) religious interest is de rigueur. As appalling as this is, particularly in the effectiveness of these influences and the co-opting of our elected representatives, the most insidious are those influences that infiltrate and diminish our constitutional rights. So, in 2006 A.D., in the U.S., it is time to suspend the familial etiquette of avoiding politics and religion in our quotidian rhetoric. The ominous signs of theocracy are permeating every aspect of our government through legislation, political rhetoric, and influence upon the "press", i.e. media. Everywhere in the culture, religion, of a particular and specifically Christian bent, is rearing its sanctimonious head. If you are a breathing American, you can not be impervious to overt religiosity's effects. Whatever your news media of choice, the predominant stories are imbued with religious overtones and implications, exhortations by right wing demagogues, and class warfare insidiously waged within the context of popular culture. Obviously the apotheosis of Terri Schiavo by the right was a case of overt Federal Government interventionism into the private sanctity of individual rights. However, the genesis of Evangelism's becoming the strong right arm of the Republican Party was Mr. Bush's 1999 speech at Bob Jones University, where he told 6,000 students, almost all white, ''I look forward to publicly defending our conservative philosophy.'' It could be argued that Mr. Reagan's speech 20 years prior at the same venue, stating his support of "states rights", was the first step of political legitimacy for Southern Evangelicals. However, the fundamentalism of today did not really take root until Mr. Bush sold his political soul to this massive sleeping giant of religious and political extremism. Not only is it pay-back time; this huge block of the electorate is an investment in maintaining the status quo of Republican domination. On every extreme conservative issue, from reproductive rights to First Amendment rights, from stifling cultural expression to gay rights, the Evangelical right is funding, promoting, and demanding its agenda to the extent of using belligerent language, i.e. threats against "activist judges" to accomplish their ends.
Although I am as far from the tenets of Evangelism as an individual can get, I hesitate to admit I am reminded now of Yeats' line from The Second Coming: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; When we are yielding science to myth, as in teaching creationism along side (instead of) evolution, in a world where our educational standards are rapidly declining statistically on a global level, then we are certainly in crisis and not merely hashing out some nuances of perspective. When the Legislature allows by law companies to impose their censorship on the culture, whereby using electronic scrubbing devices or editing, these "moral watchdogs" clean up our movies, then we are frightening close to an Orwellian oligarchy. When a state legislature spends time policing the "moves" of Texas high school cheerleaders (cheerleaders!), then the culture is getting very close to imploding from irony. Consider the fact that the people who were in control of our security on September 11th, 2001 are either still in power, promoted, or awarded medals of honor. Consider the fact that these same people took us into an illegal war using false data to sell their initiatives and have managed to escalate international terrorism rather than "defeat" the enemy. Consider the fact that our economic standing in the world is in jeopardy of falling into oblivion. Consider the fact that our environmental policies have been set back 100 years, and that the damage possible in the next few years will be immutable in human years. Consider the fact that the unyielding Fundamentalists may, in the next few months, (insert the NSA illegal domestic wiretaps, the Patriot Act II, and all manner of fourberie, hypocrisy, bullshit, & sedition) set back 200 years of legislative history and bring our government to a halt. Has anyone noticed that potholes are everywhere, that our bridges are unsafe, that we have a health care crisis, that corporate greed and conglomerations are rampant? Is no one concerned that in three years everyone in the U.S. will be legally required to carry a National I.D. card ("Your papers please!")?
My mother was a wise and kind woman who taught me humility, compassion, tolerance, intellectual curiosity, and gave me an ethical and moral foundation gleaned from eons of human existence. She valued human industry and generosity, and she believed that is everyone's duty to give something back to the society that protects its people. So it is with the good sense to question authority, which she also instilled in me, which I venture into the obnoxious world of inappropriate dinner conversation. Since the religious Right is insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives, and the legislated values of the nation are course and skewed toward the obscenely wealthy, those of us who value the freedom of the individual to choose his/her own spirituality, his/her own divinity, and who value freedom from government, must speak, nay scream, now, no matter the time, place, or social situation. Bush may circumnavigate the globe extolling "freedom", but our individual liberties in the United States of America have never so much been in jeopardy.