If God is a Republican, could Jesus be a closet Democrat?
Europe is aghast at the way Bush won the election. Morals? Religion? In Sweden, probably the most religion-alienated society in Europe, people just don't understand. What about economics, environment, jobs, not to mention education and health care. "What went wrong," they say. "Are Americans stupid?"
Not. And certainly not more than voters in Sweden or any other democratic country. Politicians say what people want to hear. In Sweden, people want to hear gobbledygook about cultural integration. In America they want to hear gobbledygook about God.
One contributing reason for this, I think, is the heavyweight influence churches and other religious denominations have on social (read: family) life ín the US. Most of the adult middle class population have grown up in an environment where a good portion of what they did with their free time was and is related to some sort of church activity. Scouts, sunday school, all-you-can-eat church dinners, cookie bake-offs, choir practice, camp, youth groups, senior citizen groups, day care help for young mothers, church-sanctioned Halloween parties, Christmas peagants, Purim pageants, and who knows, maybe even end-of-Ramadan feasting.
The church (and in this sense mostly Protestantism as far as the US is concerned), plays a leading role in the lives of millions of Americans, whether they realize it or not. If you're not a church-goer yourself, then your neighbor is. And his neighbor and neighbor's neighbor.
What doesn't rhyme with the ditty here is the fact that of all modern societies, the United States is the most officially committed to a strict separation of Chruch and State. Officially. Unfortunately, what is happening is that the moral/religious movements of today are encroaching on the boundaries of that very civilized and well-thought through tenet of the Constitution. Read recently in FoxNews on the Internet that a school board in Grantsburg, Wisconsin has demanded of its teachers that creationism be placed on par with evolution.
Why then, this upswing in interest in moral values and religion?
The basis for the upswing is the very institution of the church. It represents stability and security for millions of Americans (not counting a few thousand confessionally-molested boys), and perhaps even more so to those born soon after the war in an up and coming and economically strong country, that is to say even the generation of leading politicians today. Now connect this to Bush's war on terror, where American society is quickly becoming one of mass suspicion and where laws are factory-legislated to promote this "public awareness". What you get, of course, is an even stronger focus on that which is supposed to give you and me a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in life. And both meaning and purpose have been commercialized, institutionalized, merged, tax-rebated, nationally broadcasted and invested in.
Bush is one smart cookie.
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3 comments:
One smart cookie for sure - which many people don't understand. But this is, as you indeed imply between the lines, even more frightening. I fully agree with your analysis of the importance of the church, but you get one thing wrong: the whole seed of this neo-religious "movement" lies in the floods of born-again evangelical protestants who emerged in the eighties under Reagan, and the effects and consequences are bloomig fully just recently. Attributing the current presidency any importance to this is just not true; rather, Bush, as you say, knows how to surf a powerful wave when he sees one. However, comparing the gobblydook about God with the gobblydook about integration, as you do, just isn't quite intellectually truthful. In the modern, secularized, version of the democratic system, integration IS something which can (even if it shouldn't) be discussed in the political sphere - God just isn't. America was, albeit perhaps only officially, founded on quite contradictory ideals, and it is these very ideals which are being put into question - the very concept of America. That's the really sad thing...
I think you missed one of the points. Of course, I'm not equivocating "belief" in cultural integration with belief in God. What I am doing is pointing out that certain things incite public interest and involvement, and that the establishment is always right there, ready and willing to capitalize on it.
Gobbledygook is always gobbledygook.
As an American who voted for Bush, maybe I can explain a few things about "moral values" that seem to be over simplified and neatly labeled for consumption of the public, particularly our liberal friends across the sea. maybe that is the first explanation. Do you not find labels a tad too simple when attempting to explain people and ideas?
Let me go on to say that I am a Democrat, or the party that supported Kerry for presidency, but I did not vote for him. I will tell you that my vote, at least consciously, had little to do with "God" or the current presidents invocation of the name or his blessings.
Rather, what I have noticed in society, and you may have as well, is that freedom has lately seemed to turn from "freedom from oppression" of ideas, speech and press, etc to a "freedom" from responsibility. Every action has a reaction. Let us take for instance, drinking. We are free to drink alcohol, but, we are not free to harm others in the process. We know drinking and driving are "bad" and we take steps to insure that people do not do it and harm themselves or their fellow man.
By the same argument, sex is not "bad" whether in or out of marriage. However, it has consequences, not the least of which can be pregnancy or disease. Based on European stats, the instances of AIDS or other STDs are no less per capita than in America and that is with the very liberal view of teaching "sex education" to the very young which does not seem to have mitigated the instances. Why do you suppose that is?
While we have freed ourselves from certain constraints that seem rather petty, many have abrogated their responsibility in the process. It is that responsibility that is not actually inherent in human nature, but is taught. For me, if one would ask what "moral values" I was concerned about, that would be my main issue, not gay marriage nor abortion nor the invocation of "God".
As for why I voted for Bush rather than Kerry, it falls under two categories, but winds up the same. Having met several people in and from Iraq, who talked about freedom such as we (our countries) enjoy and the oppression that they suffered under for years (who ever is responsible), it came to me that leaving there and leaving them to their own devices to whatever strongman might be able to impose his will on them again, was an abdication of responsibility.
Mr. Kerry could not convince me that we would not abandon these people to their fate for political expediency if he was President. We have been doing that for a very long time. When I say "we", I mean also our European brethern along with the US.
We are rather insular humans I have found. Many people speak as if they are enlightened, understand the world and how to go on, but, what I hear is talking and very little action. This is what Mr. Kerry offered: talk. Many things have been achieved through talk, but just as many things have been lost as well. If one is to talk about freedom for men, then one must be willing to act on it.
You may have noticed that world organizations such as the UN are quite capable of talking and writing resolutions, but rather hindered in their ability to enforce or convince people to behave differently. Most recently, they were not able to dissuade the US from it's course. More famously, they were certainly not able to stop the slaughter in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, nor Rwanda nor Darfur Sudan.
It was not for lack of talking either. There comes a time when words must be backed by action or the words are meaningless.
What say you? Should all men be free? Or, should only the countries who are free today remain so and play some game where we talk about the cultural differences of certain societies as we drink wine and eat brie all the while watching as people are murdered and saying "tsk-tsk, someone should do something about that"?
Let me return to "labels". I believe that the media as well as your own minds may be playing a rather wicked game with you. Over simplifying and labeling any group of people is not only a grave dis-service to those people, but to yourself as well. People and governments that do, do so at their own peril. they will have missed the meaning behind the actions. Doing so, they will continue to fumble about and look for some way to approach the situation and be wrong, continually.
In the same manner, reading your blog and profile, I could just as easily assume that a man who reads Proust, attends lovely dinner parties and rides pricey horse flesh was a detente with too much time on his hands. I am sure, also, that if I were to fall prey to such over simplification, I would find myself quite wrong.
By no means is this an attack on you, but rather, I wish to show you that you are falling prey to the same failings.
Having said all that, you may have one thing correct and that is that many have grown up associating with one religious establishment or another and participated in such groups. And, even having left that behind in some manner, many are still subject to it's teachings. Probably quite true for many. However, from my view point, I have wondered lately why it is that so many fear this? It is not a bad foundation to work from. The boy scouts are hardly the new Nazi youth being indoctrinated to hate others and believe in their own purity above all else. They do teach responsibility as well as tolerance. Two excellent guideposts for young people, don't you think?
As for the intentions of the founding fathers and the constitution, it has come to my attention that many here in the US as well as in other countries, totally misunderstand the American fore fathers and their purpose in writing the constitution as well as it's attendent amendments. The first would be to assume that they intended for religion to be totally wiped out within the government or it's representatives. This is hardly true.
The first amendment actually reads: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
It does not claim some total "separation" of church and state, so much as it says that the government cannot establish any religion, cannot keep a religion from being practiced nor hinder the type of worship, nor can it adopt an official religion or sect as the "official" religion of the state.
It was never intended to keep men of faith from using their beliefs to guide their decisions in law or representation of their people. The personal records and correspondence of these same men would bare witness to this fact, particularly as these men were wont to offer prayers for guidance, en masse, before legistlative meetings and even during the writing and ratification of this document as well as the Declaration of Independence, which was signed by many of the same people who later ratified the Constitution. That same document claimed that men were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights".
If you read that correctly, they were, by no means, leaving out the blessing or guidance of a higher being for their endeavors.
So, I find it quite interesting and quite "revisionist" for people to claim that these men never had any intention of including God or the tenets they learned from such worship in the very governance they were undertaking. Letters, statements and other recorded history bares out that they frequently invoked the guidance of such a higher being as they understood that they were fallible and could use all the help they could get.
It is only today, when people believe that such moral groundings are the thing that keeps them from achieving some great humanitarian utopia sans religion as the ultimate agitator, that some people have decided to revise their meaning and seek total anhilation of such subjects from public discourse.
And, that my friend, should be just as scary to you as anyone trying to enforce their religion from a legislative seat. Because, deciding that such a point of view cannot exist because it is contradictory to someone's ideal government, actually means that they are violating the first amendment, which also includes freedom of speech and press as well as worship.
It's a very slippery slope and we should be careful of the outcome.
Kathleen
Red State of Missouri
United States
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