I just read an interesting article about Anneliese Michel, a young German woman with obvious mental instabilities who in ten months between 1975 and 1976 was literally exorcised to death:
Once convinced of her possession, Anneliese, her parents, and the exorcists stopped seeking medical treatment, and put her fate solely into the hands of the exorcism rites. Sixty-seven exorcism sessions, one or two each week, lasting up to four hours, were performed over about ten months in 1975 and 1976.[2] At some point, Michel began talking increasingly about dying to atone for the wayward youth of the day and the apostate priests of the modern church, and refused to eat. At her own request, doctors were no longer being consulted.
On 1 July 1976, Anneliese died in her sleep. The autopsy report stated her cause of death as malnutrition and dehydration from almost a year of semi-starvation while the rites of exorcism were performed. She weighed 68 pounds (30.91 kilograms).
(From
http://en.wikipedia.org/...)
This got me thinking about the current state of US politics, and the core clash between the left and the right. This is generally presented in the media as a difference of opinion, where both perspectives are equally valid, but it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that this is a battle between faith and science.
Anneliese Michel's story was an obvious influence for Poltergeist, but while that film emphasized the "real" existence of supernatural forces, Anneliese Michel died from very mundane causes: malnutrition and dehydration. She had rejected medical treatment, a choice that her parents and the priests involved in the exorcism attempts shared complicity in.
This faith/science conflict is at the core of many of the current conflicts in the US political arena. 3 of the 4 current Republican candidates for president regularly affirm that their presidency would be based on Christian principles, while strenuously advocating for actions and legislation that would inflict serious harm on vulnerable populations in the US. These individuals, whether from actual personal belief, or from cynical political gamesmanship, enthusiastically endorse causing serious and lasting harm to American citizens and communities, in order to maximize their support from conservative faith-based demographics.
If the polls showed there were votes in it, they'd be calling for funding for exorcisms. Or witch hunts. It is a fundamental liberal/progressive mistake to attempt to engage this electoral subset in rational debate about the merit of respective approaches, or to assume that rational debate can actually have productive outcomes. There certainly were, and likely remain, individuals with conservative beliefs that are both rational and well-intentioned, but they have since at least the Reagan years been a dwindling sub-population, out-competed by primal/retrograde faith-based ideologists, corporate exploitationists couching their greed in Capitalism, Consumerism, and the Constitution, and the cynical politicians and related entities that manipulate them for political capital and financial reward.
And their followers, often from low-income and low-education communities, that drool for the wealth they see around them, accept the culture-dominant meme propogated by a complicit media that they're failures because they're poor, desperate for an "Other" to blame for the operative social injustice that they're subject to on a daily basis, and happy to chew on the scraps of red meat that the false prophets, the corporatists, and the political pirates throw at them when they need a vote.
So what's the connection with exorcism? As much as I have strong respect for various faith-based initiatives, a story like Anneliese Michel's makes me crazy because it's obvious to me that this woman died because her needs were not adequately addressed from an exclusively faith-based perspective. I feel the same about people, families, and communities who/that are seriously negatively affected by ideological perspectives on poverty, abortion, health care, stem cell research, climate change, and so on and so forth. That for me embodies a level of logic-less frothery with brutal and sometimes murderous consequences that I have no tolerance for.