The 2014 elections are now over and it seems that the clown car of American politics is heading for the cliff once again. We seemed to be able to vote for ballot propositions to do good things like raising the minimum wage while also voting for the candidates who have vowed to block or eliminate that very same thing. So what is going on?
The elections over the last 30 years have left many of us bewildered. On the right, many desperately double down on issues that would appear to be most harmful to themselves while on the left, many press for solutions that would help the very people on the right who oppose them. So what is going on?
I was active in a local Move On group a few years ago that was organized to discuss and plan the their agenda for the next election cycle. We were discussing election issues in one meeting and when the woman next to me expressed bewilderment with why some mid-west voters were adamantly against it, I remarked that this was a religious values issue. She shot back, "No it is not! This is an economic issue and they are voting against their own best interest. It has nothing to do with religion." This is a common reaction among self identified liberals or progressives. Later on she disclosed that she was a "secularist" and didn't believe in God.
She missed my point. Just because she may have never been in a church or may have been raised in some religious tradition, reacted negatively to it, and now sees things with secular or even atheistic or agnostic eyes, it does not mean that all issues become secular economics for everybody. And, more importantly for this diary, just because she saw no value in a religious argument it does not mean that religious values have no relevance. This is an old divide in our culture that we all need to understand better if we are to move beyond our current self-destructive behavior as a country.
Full Disclosure: As you can see from my bio, I do have some skin in the religion game. I will provide reference links to some books and useful online material. I want to make it very clear that I am not attempting to evangelize anyone. We can have meaningful discussion(s) on the religious topics here, on atheism, either yours or someone else's, and/or the Flying Spaghetti Monster if that is your choice for Friday/Saturday/Sunday entertainment. My purpose here is to inform, not convert so as to help clarify what is going on in "Kansas". It is all part of being effective change agents.
The first thing we should understand is that the U.S. was indeed founded not only on religious principles but specifically English Protestant religious principles. To be clear, "Deists" such as Thomas Jefferson and others were religious. So was Issac Newton, Charles Darwin, and most of the Enlightenment scientists. See Karen Armstrong's excellent book,
"The Case for God". Feel free to ignore anything "making the case" and instead follow the history of how European, specifically English Enlightenment religion and theology changed from the 13th century of Thomas Aquinas. This history is how we have gotten to this place. See Steven Prothero's book,
"Religious Literacy" for a detailed history of the deep influence of Protestantism on our public schools. For the record, I disagree with his proposal but his history helps explain the abandonment of public schools for home schooling among Evangelicals and Fundamentalists.
Another blog here, "Yo, Pundits! ..." addresses some of my topic by looking at the four cultural groups identified in the colonial period. Each of these groups with the exception of the Catholics in Maryland are all English Protestants. The Puritans and Borderers trace their religious origin to John Knox, a prominent and forceful Calvinist. The Cavaliers were a Calvinist mix including Church of England, now Episcopalian, (Calvinist lite because they were/are already "elect", what many have called "The Frozen Chosen"). The Quakers rejected Calvinism but they, like Catholics, were a minority. Some argue that religion follows politics and culture and others argue the other way around. Which came first is long lost in history. What is important is both feed on and reinforce each other. We need to understand both. These Calvinist roots are important.
Armstrong's book also discusses the importance of Logos and Mythos. The Greeks figured this out a very long time ago. Logos is "rational" thinking. It answers the "What" and "How" questions and dives into the details. Engineers and accountants do it all the time. See her chapters on the Enlightenment and especially Newton to see how this crept into "God" talk. If the discussion is proving God exists (or not) by logical proofs, you are in this territory. This is the land of Creationism and Intelligent Design. Mythos on the other hand addresses "Why" questions and explore the value of one thing over another. It does this with symbols and stories that may be thin on documented facts but reveal deep truths. These symbols are often physical things that cause us to act in certain ways when we are around them.
The popular notion in the post-Newton period was all about approaching religion with logos tools. As a result, we may not be explicitly aware of mythos these days but it is all around us. It is the story or the narrative, often acted out or experienced, that makes sense or reveals the truth behind the facts through the experience. It may seem that mythos has been banished from our modern world but consider that "faith in the Free Market (Capitalism)" is a faith statement. It is mythos territory at the same level as the Holy Trinity or Nirvana. Our problem these days is our logos only blindness. Even atheists have a mythos even if we may not recognize it. Armstrong has a better discussion of atheism than we have space for here. We will come to this again below.
NOTE: The fight over prayer in schools right up to the latest laws passed in Mississippi in 2013 are not about atheists taking over our schools. In the 1962 and 1963 cases before the Supreme Court, it was practicing Unitarians suing over the Evangelical or Fundamentalist prayers required by the school authorities.
I'll leave the details to Armstrong's book and go to the summary: Deism, which a part of the norm by the 18th century, appealed to Thomas Jefferson and others in his Enlightenment educated class but turned off most other American Protestants who found it too cerebral and too "liberal" (with the Bible). This conflict fueled an "evangelical" movement in the early 19th century. This was the first fundamentalism and it was and still is uniquely American in character. I am well aware that modern Evangelicals and Fundamentalists consider themselves separate but they do have these common roots and core theology. Fundamentalist movements have also formed in other religious traditions over the last century. Each is unique in its religious specifics but regardless of their Islamic, Protestant Christian, Jewish, Hindu or other traditions, they all share a common dynamic of reaction and rejection of modern economic, religious, and political (colonial) pressures. Even the atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens is little more than a negation of modern Christianity. Fundamentalist movements start off in a defensive position and they become increasingly extreme when they get into conflict with and come under pressure from other groups.
We used to call the cultural group that had the power in the country WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. To be specific, these Protestants may have identified as Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians or, in later decades Assembly of God or Southern Baptist, but they are all Calvinist in origin with a uniquely American intensity. We will go into some these traits of modern Calvinism below. But before that we should note that these Protestant religious groups once dominated politics, education, and business as the country expanded before, during, and long after the Civil War. I can personally cite the case of my father, who was an administrator and teacher in L.A. Unified, one of the largest public school systems in the country. He was discriminated against in a "merit" appointment in the early 1950s because he was a Catholic. It seems that to become a High School Principal in those days, you needed to be an upstanding member of a Masonic Lodge, an unspoken requirement that informally but reliably weeded out Catholics, especially Irish Catholics. My mother, also a teacher, didn't even apply for positions in some Southern California school districts in the late 1930s because the word was out that those districts simply did not hire Catholics. WASP domination of the power structures was not all that long ago. In some places, it is still in charge.
So what does this have to to with Kansas?
There are two aspects that apply. First, the Calvinist world view extended far beyond the pews on Sunday and during some misty time in the past. Second, "WASP" dominance of American society has been in decline and this has added pressure to this already defensive segment of our population.
I grew up Catholic so I explain Calvinism as one who did not grow up in (and assume) a Calvinist world view. This is important because if one grew up in a Calvinist environment, that psychological world view is the default, the "normal". If you did not grow up in it, you probably think something is "not quite right" but don't know why. Calvinism is foreign to me and I notice it. It's like noticing that people in the UK drive on the "wrong" side of the road...
Calvinist doctrine can be summarized with the acronymn TULIP. Follow the link (and Google the term) for the details. We will concentrate on just a few points here although all five apply. The first point of doctrine is that all of us humans are totally depraved and helpless to save ourselves (in a go-to-heaven sense). We can only be "saved" if our God decides (on his own) to let us in. The second is the doctrine of "double predestination". It is "double" because if some "elect" are predestined to be "saved" through no effort of their own, there are others, the rest of us who are "not saved" with no recourse or appeal.
These doctrines create an interesting psychological dynamic summed up in the anxious question, "How can I know if I am saved?" Calvin's followers (not Calvin himself) addressed this anxiety by asserting that God showed his pre-selection by favoring the "elect" in this life. In other words, if you prospered in your life circumstances, you were one of the "elect" and if you didn't, well, you are undeserving and damned. Needless to say, this was an idea that has been quite popular among the merchant classes including the early immigrants to the American colonies. This interpretation comes out in its most pernicious form in the Prosperity Gospel. See The One Percent video to see this in action. Listen carefully to what slips out in what his father says. For the wealthy, their mansions, multi-car garages with elevators were symbols of their being "elect". In the Old South, the "Whites Only" drinking fountains and restrooms set you apart, either as "elect" or "damned". Most of us may view segregated drinking fountains as repugnant oppression but to the not so obviously "elect" whites, these were a comfort. Not because the other fountains were dirty, but because you could at least be assured that "your" fountain was "clean". This is the mythos I mentioned above in action.
The question is especially anxious if you are not in the "one percent" but somewhere in the middle. In this stratified world of the "elect" and the "damned", it is very psychologically important that there be someone else below you on the ladder to salvation. And the closer you are to the bottom of the ladder, the more important it is that there be someone, anyone on the rungs below you. It is even better if they are standing (permanently segregated) on the ground below the ladder. I was both shocked and puzzled by a poor white man I met in the mid-1960s while stationed at an Air Force base in Mississippi who told me that, "Well, at least I'm not a N****r." This made no sense until after I studied church history years later. There is an ever present anxiety about being at the bottom (and damned) deep in the WASP segment of our American culture.
Combine this anxiety with the demographic shifts over the last century and things get worse. When my Dad was born in 1906, the population of the U.S. was about 86 million and more than 70% of them lived in small towns and rural areas. But the Dust Bowl, Depression, and World War II changed all that forever. Our population is now 320+ million and 80% of us live in metropolitan areas and have non-farm related jobs. Most of the population increase has also come from non-white immigration. There was a time when one could describe a "Real American" as a white, Protestant resident of a small town in a rural state. That has not been remotely true for over 70 years. The Caucasian population of my state of California will be a minority in the not too distant future. In addition, with the decline of Christian church affiliation and church attendance over that same period, the population that would identify itself as Protestant is even smaller.
This dynamic is not restricted to the WASP portion of white America. See How the Irish Became White. This and other books show how other immigrants adjusted and accommodated the old order. My Irish and German ancestors were not welcomed until they too "went along". And the habits learned by Grandpa take a few generations to unlearn.
These demographic and cultural shifts have chipped away at the old WASP establishment and its power. It would be harder, if not impossible, for a school district to use the "Masonic test" in almost any city today. Given the built-in anxieties in Calvinist experience, it is easy to see how even a minimal reduction in the dominance of white Protestant culture could generate panic. This became blatant when Tea Party protesters at town hall meetings screamed, "We want our country back!" I remember seeing a 30-something woman screaming that line in a news segment video from a small town meeting. It was Deja Vu all over again. I saw her in the deep South back in the 60's.
We need to reflect on two of her words, "our" and "country". By "country" does she and the Tea Party mean the U.S.A. of today or the U.S.A. of 1955 or 1940, or 1910? Which country are we really talking about? And does that country even include the demographics of the 200+ million who weren't here in 1910? There is an old joke where Tonto replies to the Lone Ranger when the Apaches show up, "Where do you get this 'we' business, kemosabe?" Who are these "my" and "our" people? Does "our" extend to anybody other than this white woman's suburban best friends and family? Does it extend beyond the de-populated small towns that she and so many of her compatriots come from or reminisce about? These are important questions.
We have had a demeaning turn in our politics over the last 40 years. When Ronald Reagan vowed to "get the government of your backs" in Philadelphia, Mississippi way back when he announced his run for the Presidency, he was very calculating and specific as to whom he was identifying with. The post-WW-2 world has not been kind to the old order. Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1947 and Brown v. Board of Education hit at the core of segregation. When Ike sent in the National Guard to enforce integration, a line was crossed. The 60's were most unkind and the 70's were a lonely time for the old order. Reagan knew whose "back" was involved and he used it to advantage.
All seemed fine until Clinton arrived. His election was not supposed to happen. The Reagan years promised a come-back and return to "normal" but we have been living with the anxiety that all of it could be undone again. Karl Rove bragged of a "permanent GOP majority" but when Obama was elected after the Bush-Cheney disaster, a full rip panic set in. I can understand the intense emotion of that young woman. Obama, if anything, is a most powerful symbol. If he and what he represents is in any way successful, the mythological small town white America that woman wants back would be finished, gone forever.
Sarah Palin celebrates small town America, the "Real America" even though it is now a minority backwater. All one needs to do is look outside the window of my home in Santa Cruz, CA and see the end of "The West". There is only the Pacific Ocean out there. There is no more "west" to go to and most of the folks from Arkansas, Kansas, and Minnesota who would have moved are already here. The old order is simply becoming outnumbered. If you grew up knowing that your God arbitrarily chose who was "elect" and saved and who was not, it becomes a matter of great anxiety every time you see someone else passing you on the way up ladder of success. If all those sermons and their not so implied connections between financial and social success and the assurance of being "elect" in spite of being "totally depraved" have any effect, any emptying of the rungs below you cannot be comforting. There is not even a drinking fountain designated just for you anymore.
Political manipulators from long before Nixon and Reagan have known this and the likes of Limbaugh and Palin play to it all the time. The "Bridge to Nowhere" is more than a budget earmark. It is also a powerful metaphor that these manipulators can use. So long as there is no exit path, their followers will stay rooted in the mythical past. Folks really know at some level that the premise underneath all of this is a lie. They know that there is no going back but, in their panic, they double down and become more extreme. We can see this better if we attach some dates to their current hot button issues. Consider the closing of family planning clinics (1973), vote ID laws (1965), charter and home schools (1954), Medicare vouchers (1967), privatized Social Security (1937) and we see this dynamic at work. The last time WASP America really felt confident about itself was early October, 1929. Underlying all these issues is the common theme of going back to a time when things were simpler, in control, and therefore more psychologically secure. If we go back to the logos/mythos discussed above, these dates represent key points in the decline in the (Calvinist) American ideal because each represents the destruction of a barrier between the "elect" and the undeserving. This has been a steady chipping away at that ideal world. What makes the manipulation more powerful is that nothing in the mythos is mentioned explicitly. Limbaugh and friends can evoke the fear of not being "elect" without actually saying so.
Progressives also need to understand this. Small town white America may only exist in people's minds but within that narrative, everyone knows their place and how things are supposed to work. We can easily see that Kansas is very unhappy but until there is a bridge to somewhere better, Kansas won't move. This brings us back to the discussion at the Move On meeting. This is why it is a religious argument. The old Calvinist "stuff" is being used because it works, especially in the shadows. One does not need to explicitely mention the drinking fountain to evoke the nostalgia.
The problem I saw with the Move On meeting was that we were just discussing point issues like the minimum wage or single payer health care. The discussion was a point by point agenda; a three bullets per slide Powerpoint presentation. We couldn't see the forest for the trees. In a very real sense, we were all logos and very little mythos. Logos makes the trains run on time but mythos motivates one to get on it and we had no way to make the case for getting on the progressive train. What can progressives say at this level that addresses the fear with hope?
Progressives need to express the story of their values in a narrative and that cannot be done with a Powerpoint slide. Somehow we need to integrate the spirit of likes of Mt 25:31-46 and Jn 14:2-3 and other stories into our conversation. Note that I say "conversation" and not "debate". Neither of these passages have had much prominence in most Protestant pulpits for a long time and society has been impoverished by their absence. Younger Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are starting to re-discover these and other, neglected parts of the Bible which is good assuming that they are still within the church. The power of these passages is that they are life narratives that put important values in a context anyone can understand. Matthew is significant because Christians are enjoined to care for "the least of my friends/brothers/children", to have compassion. This directly contradicts what the latter-day American Calvinist pulpits have been preaching for a long time. John's "many rooms" makes the political bridge to nowhere a lie. There is still room in America for the children of WASP America. They just need to get more comfortable with all the rest of us who live in the other rooms...
These passages could be a good start but if Bible passages are not one's thing, fine, use another narrative. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's power is rooted in her ability to place issues like mortgage reform or student loans into a real life narrative that one can relate to. We know what she values by what she tells stories and talks about. Can we describe what our nation should look like? Can we tell a story that explains it? Or do we just have a list of issues with no connecting storyline. Until we do, until we can present a story and act out that story in what we do in a way that provides a place that Kansas can feel a part of, they will stay with what they know - even if they don't really like it.