Filed under: Civil Liberties, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Iraq, Militarism, Politics, Religion, war | Tags: Blackwater, illegal private armies, mercenaries, war crimes
So, I intended to write two more posts today than I actually wrote. I didn’t get them done because I fell asleep.
Since I haven’t written much about the mercenary problem we have in the U.S. lately, here’s a video. the artist is Steve Earle.
The House Resolution referred to at the end of the video was introduced in the House of Representatives last year and has since been killed so don’t call anyone supporting that bill. The one you want to support now is H. Res 799. And you might want to take a look at Wexlerwantshearings.
Filed under: Civil Liberties, Fundamentalism, Politics, Progressive, Religion | Tags: Blog Against Theocracy
I had planned to deconstruct the idea that the U.S. was “Founded as a Christian Nation” that is so persistent in the culture. It’s the next logical piece of the puzzle once you understand how religous bigotry reinforces other forms of bigotry, and once you have a working knowledge of the religious Overton Window.
I’m outsourcing this piece of the puzzle to jonwil at Left in Alabama (LiA).I really can’t do any better than this great piece he put together for Blog Against Theocracy.
This has been another edition of Against Theocracy.
Back in the spring I was swinging pretty hard at the religious right. I will continue to do so when it suits me, if for no other reason than because they make up a fifth to a quarter of the republican base. I do want to be clear, however, that I have nothing against religion per se. I actually have some pretty deep religious convictions myself – so deep that I give some of my time and money on a regular basis to a fairly traditional protestant church.
I know some people view religion in and of itself as an anachronistic and destructive social force. I am not in that camp. IMO, for every squirrel-chaser out there using a pulpit to screw with children’s’ heads and keep women in the kitchen, there is also a good Christian feeding people who would otherwise go hungry. I think we need more of the latter and fewer of the former.
Educating people properly is a big key to that problem. One of the reasons hard-core fundamentalists attack public schools is that their ideas just can’t live very long in well-educated hearts and minds. This partially explains why dominionist extremists organize with big money against their fellow working-class citizens. The same ignorance that makes people susceptible to fundamentalist religion also allows them to accept the horrific consequences of free-market fundamentalism and the atrocities that come along with aggressive imperial war as facts of life.
I think religious conviction is a powerful, valuable thing if it is kept in its proper place – in the realm of the personal and private. However, I am no more willing to compromise on the separation principle than I am on torture or on the Fourth Amendment. Religious conviction alone is not a sufficient reason to make laws and public policies, especially for a very diverse society like ours. As soon as you start dictating laws and justifying them with religious principles, you’re setting in motion a chain of legal and social changes that leads directly to the destruction of the private sphere and the abolition of freedom of conscience. You can’t have free exercise without separation.
I don’t want the religious right appointing judges and making laws. They have a profoundly different view of what Christianity means and what it requires than I do. They tend to emphasize the Old Testament. They translate the Bible literally when it suits them. They totally ignore principles from the Gospels that can’t be reconciled with their ideology, and then accuse every Christian who doesn’t agree 100 percent with their theology of “picking and choosing.”
It’s not religion I have a problem with. It’s the theocracy, hypocrisy, and emotional manipulation that seems to come along with it when people bring it into the political arena. It’s the use of a sacred text to justify paternalism, racism, homophobia, social Darwinism, warmongering, the corruption of the scientific method, authoritarian government, and other forms of injustice and inequality. Christians are not persecuted in this country. Anyone who suggests that we need more laws to protect them is living in a world constructed from their own fantasies.
To the extent that my religious faith influences my politics, it does so at the level of personal morality (and note: it is not the only source of my moral convictions). It helps me make decisions about who I should stand up for and what I should stand up against. That’s why the religious right offends me so deeply. Not only do they champion a long list of political positions that require us to institutionalize injustice and inequality, they do it in a way that is makes a mockery of my religious convictions and gives religious practice in general a bad name.
If I have to choose between religious government and secular government, I’ll go secular every time. I’d make that choice even if given the chance to re-order the government in a way that directly reflects my own personal religious beliefs. That’s probably all I’ll say about my personal religious beliefs here. I’ll certainly never support a political argument by appealing to my own subjective notions of what God does and does not like.
Note: This seems like as good at time as any to test these:
(If they don’t work, please let me know).
With all the talk of Jerry Falwell’s contributions to U.S. going around in the big media, I think it’s appropriate to share my own memories of him. I will always remember him for two things in particular, and I don’t think any story about his “legacy” is complete without them.
The first thing I remember him for is his support of the Bethesda Home for Girls in Mississippi. Back when I was a teenager, the Bethesda home was in the news a lot for its abuse of the young women that it was supposedly helping. This was supposedly a Christian operation.
There was a long series of investigations by various state agencies and eventually, the Southern Poverty Law Center. During one of the investigations, Falwell flew down to Mississippi personally to defend Bethesda. Eventually it came out that, in addition to subjecting the women who lived at the home to physical abuse, the people who ran the school did things like telling young pregnant women that premarital sex is worse than murder.
One reason it took so long to close Bethesda down is because it had a lot of political support from fundamentalist Christians in Mississippi and across the country. Falwell was partly responsible for maintaining that political support.
This article explains how the original proprietor of that school was able to move on to Missouri and do the same thing to young people there. This one has some quotes from newspaper reports about Bethesda. Here is a sketch of a 1987 Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit against Bethesda. And a New York Times article detailing some of the physical and psychological abuse that was, at least in part, enabled by Jerry Falwell’s support of the home.
This article documents the fact that Falwell came down here and led a rally in support of Bethesda. Note, however, that the article minimizes both Falwell’s support and the egregious nature of the treatment that the young women who lived at Bethesda received.
The second thing I will always remember Falwell for is his contribution to the Reagan administration’s failure to take AIDS seriously in the early days of the epidemic. You may remember Falwell making statements that AIDS was a sign of moral decay, etc. The effect of these statements was help make the Reagan administration’s policy of ignorance a winning political move.
Here are three good articles that explain how the Reagan administration and their religious allies such as Falwell did nothing to help people who were suffering and dying of AIDS for nearly a decade. Having lived through this period of history, I believe it is fair to say that the reasons Reagan and the religious right allowed this to happen include homophobia, selective interpretation of the Bible to support a political agenda, and moral cowardice.
Since a member of my extended family, who was a beautiful, loving person and who was also a very hard-working, contributing member of society, died of complications from AIDS in the mid-1980s, Falwell’s contribution to Reagan’s AIDS policy is not something I can let slide. I still see the consequences of it at every holiday. Especially at Christmas, because Christmas Eve was his birthday. If that administration had taken AIDS seriously from the very beginning, that member of my family may have lived longer. He might even still be alive today.
These are the two things I will remember Falwell for: Supporting misogynistic child abusers who cloaked their sadism in the guise of “Christian” discipline, and enabling the national government to trivialize a public health crisis because a lot of the early victims were homosexual men.
When my grandchildren are old enough to understand these things, I will tell them about it, as a way of teaching them how to distinguish the real Christians from the demagogues.
UPDATE: In looking around the blogosphere to see what others are saying about Saint Jerry, I discovered a few interesting posts:
Molly at Whiskeyfire is even less diplomatic than I am.
Fred at Slacktivist asks a very fun question.
Pam at Pandagon has a post that defies explanation, so you’ll have to check it out for yourself.
Donkey O.D. reminds us that Falwell had some dealings with Rev. Moon. (Yes, I mean that Rev. Moon.)
Molly Ivors asks a very good question:
If someone could explain to me the right’s obsession with being victimized, I’d be grateful.
This has come up often enough in my own discussions with friends to be worth exploring. First I’ll deal with the right-wing in general, and then I’ll deal with the evangelical fundamentalist perspective.
I think one thing distinguishes the right wing in U.S. from all other political groups at the moment. They are obsessed with the power dimensions of politics, to the point that they exclude all other dimensions from consideration. This allows them to contort the language until the meanings of words are unrecognizable. It also allows them to make public policies on the basis of fantasies that would be laughable if they weren’t so serous in their program of social and political domination. (For a flavor of what I am talking about, see what Amanda Marcotte and Ampersand had to say about fantasy-based Republican politics yesterday).
Right wingers believe, in short: “of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” This may have been an expedient sophism for the Athenians at Melos, but for the contemporary right wing in U.S. politics, it is an unacknowledged article of faith.
When actors begin from this assumption, it is all-too-easy to rationalize or ignore very important dimensions of politics, such as the potential of public policy to create wide-spread suffering or destabilize a political community. For the wingers, the suffering created by their flawed policy approach is merely an aggregation of “personal problems,” laws mean whatever the regime decides they mean, and “justice” is only for members of the movement.
In this context, the symbolism of victimization becomes a weapon in the arsenal of demagogues. When the opposition begins to make arguments from reason based on evidence, and those arguments start to stick in the minds of the population, right-wing politicians play the victim. Even worse, they attempt to persuade the population that they themselves are victims, and that only the right-wing movement or the regime can save them from further victimhood.
This symbolism evokes an emotional response which very often short-circuits rational decision-making. Reason blooms in the minds of the people for an instant, but quickly dies on the vine. The loyal right wing base swallows the idea that “someone” is out to get them, and this creates the outrage and indignation necessary to mobilize people to political action.
Throw in a complicit mass media which subscribes to an Orwellian notion of “balance,” and the stage is set to marginalize rational criticism, exaggerate the views of small minority into the “will of the people,” and get about the business of changing laws to suit the preferences of a radical power elite. It takes only a few small steps from here to generate the hysteria necessary to scapegoat vulnerable minorities for all manner of social problems, or to decide (for example) that an overly-broad program of “victim’s rights” should trump tried-and-true practices such as the presumption of innocence and due process of law.
A cruel irony of this situation is that, when wingers do this, they gain the added bonus of obscuring the fact that their wrong-headed policies are turning real people into real victims on a massive scale. Note, also, that when they are confronted with the personal experiences of people who should legitimately be considered victims, they do everything possible to blame those victims for their own troubles. (Think about how they deal with rape victims, and think about how many of the right-wing bloggers were talking about the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings a few weeks ago).
I suspect the symbolism of victimhood has been used in this way since the first populist demagogue stood up in front of an assembly of warriors and priests in prehistoric times. But very interesting questions remain: Why does it work so well in the contemporary U.S.? Why does it work for the right wing better than it does for anyone else?
I contend that it works because the fundamentalist evangelical ideology functions in very specific ways at the level of individual psychology. Fundamentalist indoctrination pre-disposes evangelicals to respond to the symbolism of victimhood in a predictable (and politically-useful) manner.
One thing that indoctrination (religious and otherwise) does is condition people to respond to certain symbols in certain ways. I grew up in an evangelical environment and attended church every week from the time I was a small child until I left home at 17. I continued to try to participate for several years after that. If I were to make a list of specific verses of scripture I heard quoted without appropriate context by evangelicals during the first 25 years of my life, these verses would be prominent on the list.
Matthew 5:11-12
Luke 21:12
John 16:33
Romans 8:36
I Corinthians 4:12
Philippians 1:29
II Timothy 3:12
These are the easy ones, drawn only from the New Testament. I cannot count the number of times I have heard these verses and others along the same lines used from the pulpit to encourage people to look at non-believers and see persecutors. I find it interesting to read the entire chapters in which these verses appear, and to read them in versions other than the King James.
Back in the early 80s, when “fundamentalism” was used as a badge of honor to distinguish the faithful from “secular humanists,” we used to get a sermon at least every couple of months about how the socialist left humanists were gearing up to persecute the church. I don’t remember many sermons that were overtly political, but the effect of the steady repetition of this message was clear to me, even as a young teenager. The message was that Reagan was a good god-fearing fundamentalist who thought like we did, and he would protect us from the Democratic Party godless heathens.
Victim-symbolism has a deep emotional resonance among evangelicals. You can follow the victim-symbolism in Christianity all the way back into the iconography of the early Middle Ages. The sacrificial animals of the Old Testament are victims. Jesus is a victim. The martyrs of the early church and many of the apostles are also victims. God has a special place in heaven for victims, and victims are required to make the “logic” of redemption work.
Good god-fearing evangelicals are conditioned from the time they can understand words to empathize emotionally with victims, and to equate those who make them into victims with Satan.
It is not a matter to be examined by reason, because “reason is no good” for this situation. It is a matter of divine prescription. It is acceptable (even required) to hate Satan. So, anyone who acts as his agent is a legitimate object of hatred, even though most people are not fully aware of the emotional sleight-of-hand required to make this “logic” work.
If you think about this in the right way, you can find a partial explanation for why they have such a fetish for the authoritarian nuclear family. Without that social structure, the ideology cannot survive, because children cannot be sheltered from independent thought long enough for the indoctrination to take hold.
Here is where the religious doctrine intersects with real-world politics. The conditioned response to victim-symbolism leaves people — even otherwise-rational people — open to emotional manipulation by those right-wing demagogues. Here is how it works: An authority figure such as Dr. Dobson sends out a touching anecdote about how Democrats atheists are persecuting little white protestant children in the heartland by using the law to force them to question their faith (thereby placing their immortal souls in jeopardy).
Preachers — the majority of whom are honest, decent, and caring people — read this communication and swallow it without questioning what is really going on. Then they stand up in the pulpit and portray those poor little white children as victims and the Democrats atheists as Satanist persecutors. Some realize what they’re doing. Most don’t. They are all allowing themselves to be used as tools by radical ideologues.
The next thing you know, you have people all over the country up in arms, writing their representatives letters that say WE MUST PUT A STOP TO THIS RIGHT NOW OR YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE THE NEXT ELECTION.
The representatives either understand what is going on and see a way to score points, or misunderstand what is going on and believe they are getting grass-roots communication from concerned citizens. Either way, the result is the same. The evangelical elite have gamed the system, and everyone suffers for it.
It gets even worse when you think about all the opportunities that men like Dobson have to communicate with men like Karl Rove: Prayer breakfasts, “small business” events, endorsement competitions during national elections, events sponsored by institutions like Regent and Bob Jones, etc.
It is not necessary to allege conspiracy in order to see how this works. It’s really simple:
1. Power politicians craft their message about the latest victimization of god-fearing folk in a way that inspires the religious authorities/opinion leaders empathize with the victims, and demonize the “persecutors.”
2. The opinion leaders craft their own message to be inserted into church bulletins across the country.
3. The preachers read this second message and, inspired to indignation, stand up in their pulpits and say “Somethin’s gotta be done.”
4. People swallow it, identify the “victims” with saints and martyrs, take it as a sign of cultural degradation, and pressure the government to make unsound public policies.
We have seen this technique used over and over for the past three decades to attack everything from social services to public education to the legitimacy of the courts. The hellish thing about it is that, if you try to point out the dishonesty and arrogance of the technique itself — if you try to show people that they are being duped — people who are conditioned to give victims priority over reason will take your argument as proof that, yes, you really are out to persecute them. And they will identify you, consciously or not, as an agent of Teh Devil.
I won’t lay all our troubles at the feet of evangelicals. But I do think that the manipulation of the religious right by the Republican intelligentsia is contributing to:
1. Very dangerous concentration of power in the hands of the executive branch.
2. Increasing disregard for due process in particular, and for the rule of law in general.
3. Dissolution of the very important distinction between the public and the private spheres.
4. A climate of rampant anti-intellectualism and general intolerance which is making more and more difficult for scientists to do their work, for the average person to get a real education, and for policy makers to base their decisions on an accurate picture of reality.
I’m sure that a much longer list than this could be made, but I think these items alone are cause for serious concern.
What to do about it? I don’t know. But I think Ezra Klein is right when he says
“. . . the Christian Right has courted enough controversy that their beliefs have become fair game . . .”
And I also think is Molly is right to say
” . . . unlike race or gender or even sexuality, being openly, publicly religious is a choice.”
It would be smart to do everything possible to hammer those two ideas into the public consciousness.
I was very fortunate that my parents allowed me to read whatever I wanted to. I think I was able to reach the point where I was able to question evangelical fundamentalism at a young age because I fed my mind a steady diet of humanist novels, fantasy, science fiction, and enlightenment polemic pretty much from the time I learned to read. That allowed me to ask the right questions when it came time to move on into serious studies.
Individuals have to reach the point where they are willing to question their own indoctrination before they can even understand that we, as a society, have this problem. If there were an easy antidote to be applied at the social level, I think we would already have found it. The two best suggestions I can think of are:
1. Turn out in massive numbers, vote the evangelicals down for two or three national elections in a row, and put our constitutional government on a more firm footing.
2. Do unto them exactly as they did unto their own opponents in those halcyon days when Saint Reagan ruled the land: Make a concerted, persistent effort to laugh them out of the forum.
Update: Hoping I have the formatting straightend out now; will be adding paragraph breaks and links in a bit. Links to blogs are back in; will add links to the verses when I have a moment. All Done!
