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So it's the 4th of July, and also Blog Against Theocracy week (half-week?), so I want to say something about that, I think.
Ironically, it's in large part my solid Protestant upbringing that makes it difficult for me to deal with this subject. For those of you who are mostly familiar with the current noisy breed of evangelical Protestant rabble-rousers, what you might not know is that traditionally, most American Protestant denominations have a strong, ingrained tradition of high disapproval against anything that smacks of the church getting involved in any way with secular politics. Part of it has to do with being closer in time to the extraordinarily violent sectarian wars of the 16th-18th centuries in Europe and being deathly afraid of anything like that happening here -- part of it has to do with a native philosophical dualism that stresses how earthly, ugly, corrupt, and hellbound the game of politics is and encourages the church and the faithful to "lay up their treasures in heaven" instead -- part of it has to do with deep-seated anti-Catholicism and an abiding hatred of the conflation of sacred and secular rulership that Catholicism has tended to promote; Protestants are the "priesthood of all believers," and they have always reserved the right to fire uppity preachers, quit the church and found another one right down the road, and generally do as they believe God wants without giving way to any ecclesiastical authority or other papist nonsense -- a set of religions that won't even let their own clergy tell them what to do is not very fucking likely to let any secular authority meddle in church business, and it used to be much more clearly understood that when church and state got into bed together, authority would be exercised in both directions, unavoidably.
Of course, it hasn't always been so simple, and there's certainly a strain of "activist" Protestantism, as well as a string of occasional attempts by this Protestant sect or that one to exercise a "dominionist" authority over this city or state or that one -- none of which have ever lasted very long. Most of the history of the American Protestant church has been about a left-wing that promotes reformist goals, a right-wing that promotes some brand or other of theocratic ideals, and a vast, intractable Mainline Protestantism that is "conservative" in the traditional sense, meaning resistant to change, but that highly values being left the hell alone and is more than willing to do the same in response, and emphasizes personal relationship with God, Biblical literacy, and internal spiritual development.
Like with any religious tradition, there's a lot to like about my cradle religion, and a lot to be critical of. First of all, there's an obvious sophistry involved in the use of phrases like "Christian nation" and "founded by Christians," but the honest truth is that the reason that U.S. citizens have a legally enforceable right to practice the religion of their choice is that the founders were exactly that kind of Protestant; they varied in how personally observant they were, and a few of them may have been more atheistic than they chose to go on the record as being -- hard to say, but given their class and nationality, it's possible. But for the most part, they considered themselves personally among the faithful. It was not in spite of that, but because of it that they cared enough to encode freedom of religion in the Constitution. That "don't mess with us and we won't mess with you" runs very deeply in the American Protestant ethos, and what it protects is the kind of freedom of conscience that's *essential* to real Protestantism; your conversion is worthless if it isn't a choice you've made. Every time some overenthusiastic dink bugs you about whether or not you've "accepted Jesus Christ," stop and think for a second about the democratic implications of what they believe: they don't give a damn who you are, *your acceptance matters* -- it's the ultimate "one man, one vote" religion.
The idea of universal rights came up during the Enlightenment, deeply entangled with Protestantism; their respective core values -- liberty, reason, and the private, personal religious conscience -- are so intimately connected and have so powerfully nurtured each other that there's no intellectually honest way to look at any of them individually. No other religious tradition in the world could have created and been created by a constitutional republic, and like I said before, there's stuff to love about that statement and stuff to be profoundly creeped out by.
Because the love of religious independence, like the American love of every kind of independence, is protective in a million different ways and truly does keep us buffered against tyranny -- but it also carries an essential detachment, an intellectual coldness whose underlying assumption is that if I'm handling my business all right, whether or not you are is of absolutely no consequence to me. I have a strange, perverse love of the crazy evangelical assholes that I also hate, because their brand of extremism shakes up the entrenched mainstream; like the hard left, the hard right still hangs onto that minority belief that what happens to you is my business.
Which I think it is; I'm very out of the mainstream in that sense. That's part of why I feel comfortable in paganism, a set of religions that have very little concept of the private religious conscience and take very clear stances on one's obligations to the community. To the Protestant mind, people are born for God, in order to, depending on your point of view, know God, love God, or serve God. To the pagan mind, the people are born for their families -- for their ancestors, for their children, and in more complex societies by extension for their tribes and their states -- and the gods are, in a sense, engineers and law-enforcement, who take an overt interest in bolstering and maintaining those families and super-families. It's a worldview that just resonates with me much more strongly: we are here for each other, we are born for each other, we rise and fall together, and if we sometimes manage to rise instead of fall, it often feels so miraculous that it's hard not to believe it's because of divine blessing.
But that's not a worldview that's as good at supporting religious freedom in a pluralistic world as mainline Protestantism is, truthfully. I don't always have the luxury of watching people violate my basic religious principles and shrugging it off as their business, their crazy, foreign religion that I can ignore if they don't bother me. When my basic religious principles are that the health and welfare of your neighbors are the measure of your own health and welfare, that human law should be to the best of our ability an accurate reflection of cosmic law and never go in opposition to the forces of balance and reciprocity that govern everything that exists, that to benefit endlessly from privileges and never pay your debt by giving back into the system in equal amounts is a basic injustice of the most irredeemable proportions -- I can't always deal well with the choices other people make for religious reasons. Those things aren't just their choices to me; those things are corrosive to my community, and since I don't recognize any strong distinction between "me" and "my community," corrosive by extention to me personally.
I have sympathy for the "theocrats"; I always have. I know they're more like me than either of us are like most Americans, and I recognize their passion, their anger, and their frustration with a world that is mainly ruled by materialism, consumption, convenience, instant gratification, and self-aggrandizement. All of that is in me, too, and never too far from the surface. I think I'm just fucking lucky, in a sense, that I'm not surrounded by a large, powerful subculture of people who agree with me and are always whispering in my ear about how the world I want is possible, if only we get rid of this, if only we enact that, if only we enforce whatever. The world I want is very fucking unlikely, and that keeps me humble, I think.
The worldview that isn't mine has made me able to "personally choose" to adopt a worldview that's deeply critical and suspicious of the one that provided me with those very tools. I'm thankful, I'm so thankful for who the Founders were and what they believed, including those parts of their ideology that aren't my own, and I think a lot of non-Christians in America have that thought, too. Or else they should. Moreover, a whole lot of *Christians* ought to be more thankful than they are that they live in a country where people with a religious sensibility much different from their own were so concerned to keep religion a private matter and not vulnerable to the whims of politics; things would not go well for these people if a lot of the stuff they hold dear had to be voted on in open elections.
It's hard. It's hard to believe in anything intensely, intimately, palpably, and at the same time stand back and say, "But all right, that's optional." When you've felt that something is *right* and it's *real* and it's *holy,* it's never going to be entirely easy to live with the fact that that something is entirely irrelevant to the people around you; I know what it feels like to think if they just *understood,* if I could just make them *listen,* and then they'd know. One of those moments from West Wing that will stay with me til my deathbed is Toby Ziegler's they'll like us when we win. I feel that way. I feel that way all the time, and it's a daily process to recognize and adjust again and again to the fact that, actually, it doesn't work that way at all.
That's the journey my shadow-counterparts on the right also need to take, and I do sympathize; I know what I'm asking from them, how hard and unwelcome it is. But it has to be done. They can't win the country the way they think they can; they can only tear it to shreds. They have to stop fighting this battle before they go past hurting themselves and everyone around them into outright destruction of same. I hope their God leads them to the strength and courage necessary for that.
Ironically, it's in large part my solid Protestant upbringing that makes it difficult for me to deal with this subject. For those of you who are mostly familiar with the current noisy breed of evangelical Protestant rabble-rousers, what you might not know is that traditionally, most American Protestant denominations have a strong, ingrained tradition of high disapproval against anything that smacks of the church getting involved in any way with secular politics. Part of it has to do with being closer in time to the extraordinarily violent sectarian wars of the 16th-18th centuries in Europe and being deathly afraid of anything like that happening here -- part of it has to do with a native philosophical dualism that stresses how earthly, ugly, corrupt, and hellbound the game of politics is and encourages the church and the faithful to "lay up their treasures in heaven" instead -- part of it has to do with deep-seated anti-Catholicism and an abiding hatred of the conflation of sacred and secular rulership that Catholicism has tended to promote; Protestants are the "priesthood of all believers," and they have always reserved the right to fire uppity preachers, quit the church and found another one right down the road, and generally do as they believe God wants without giving way to any ecclesiastical authority or other papist nonsense -- a set of religions that won't even let their own clergy tell them what to do is not very fucking likely to let any secular authority meddle in church business, and it used to be much more clearly understood that when church and state got into bed together, authority would be exercised in both directions, unavoidably.
Of course, it hasn't always been so simple, and there's certainly a strain of "activist" Protestantism, as well as a string of occasional attempts by this Protestant sect or that one to exercise a "dominionist" authority over this city or state or that one -- none of which have ever lasted very long. Most of the history of the American Protestant church has been about a left-wing that promotes reformist goals, a right-wing that promotes some brand or other of theocratic ideals, and a vast, intractable Mainline Protestantism that is "conservative" in the traditional sense, meaning resistant to change, but that highly values being left the hell alone and is more than willing to do the same in response, and emphasizes personal relationship with God, Biblical literacy, and internal spiritual development.
Like with any religious tradition, there's a lot to like about my cradle religion, and a lot to be critical of. First of all, there's an obvious sophistry involved in the use of phrases like "Christian nation" and "founded by Christians," but the honest truth is that the reason that U.S. citizens have a legally enforceable right to practice the religion of their choice is that the founders were exactly that kind of Protestant; they varied in how personally observant they were, and a few of them may have been more atheistic than they chose to go on the record as being -- hard to say, but given their class and nationality, it's possible. But for the most part, they considered themselves personally among the faithful. It was not in spite of that, but because of it that they cared enough to encode freedom of religion in the Constitution. That "don't mess with us and we won't mess with you" runs very deeply in the American Protestant ethos, and what it protects is the kind of freedom of conscience that's *essential* to real Protestantism; your conversion is worthless if it isn't a choice you've made. Every time some overenthusiastic dink bugs you about whether or not you've "accepted Jesus Christ," stop and think for a second about the democratic implications of what they believe: they don't give a damn who you are, *your acceptance matters* -- it's the ultimate "one man, one vote" religion.
The idea of universal rights came up during the Enlightenment, deeply entangled with Protestantism; their respective core values -- liberty, reason, and the private, personal religious conscience -- are so intimately connected and have so powerfully nurtured each other that there's no intellectually honest way to look at any of them individually. No other religious tradition in the world could have created and been created by a constitutional republic, and like I said before, there's stuff to love about that statement and stuff to be profoundly creeped out by.
Because the love of religious independence, like the American love of every kind of independence, is protective in a million different ways and truly does keep us buffered against tyranny -- but it also carries an essential detachment, an intellectual coldness whose underlying assumption is that if I'm handling my business all right, whether or not you are is of absolutely no consequence to me. I have a strange, perverse love of the crazy evangelical assholes that I also hate, because their brand of extremism shakes up the entrenched mainstream; like the hard left, the hard right still hangs onto that minority belief that what happens to you is my business.
Which I think it is; I'm very out of the mainstream in that sense. That's part of why I feel comfortable in paganism, a set of religions that have very little concept of the private religious conscience and take very clear stances on one's obligations to the community. To the Protestant mind, people are born for God, in order to, depending on your point of view, know God, love God, or serve God. To the pagan mind, the people are born for their families -- for their ancestors, for their children, and in more complex societies by extension for their tribes and their states -- and the gods are, in a sense, engineers and law-enforcement, who take an overt interest in bolstering and maintaining those families and super-families. It's a worldview that just resonates with me much more strongly: we are here for each other, we are born for each other, we rise and fall together, and if we sometimes manage to rise instead of fall, it often feels so miraculous that it's hard not to believe it's because of divine blessing.
But that's not a worldview that's as good at supporting religious freedom in a pluralistic world as mainline Protestantism is, truthfully. I don't always have the luxury of watching people violate my basic religious principles and shrugging it off as their business, their crazy, foreign religion that I can ignore if they don't bother me. When my basic religious principles are that the health and welfare of your neighbors are the measure of your own health and welfare, that human law should be to the best of our ability an accurate reflection of cosmic law and never go in opposition to the forces of balance and reciprocity that govern everything that exists, that to benefit endlessly from privileges and never pay your debt by giving back into the system in equal amounts is a basic injustice of the most irredeemable proportions -- I can't always deal well with the choices other people make for religious reasons. Those things aren't just their choices to me; those things are corrosive to my community, and since I don't recognize any strong distinction between "me" and "my community," corrosive by extention to me personally.
I have sympathy for the "theocrats"; I always have. I know they're more like me than either of us are like most Americans, and I recognize their passion, their anger, and their frustration with a world that is mainly ruled by materialism, consumption, convenience, instant gratification, and self-aggrandizement. All of that is in me, too, and never too far from the surface. I think I'm just fucking lucky, in a sense, that I'm not surrounded by a large, powerful subculture of people who agree with me and are always whispering in my ear about how the world I want is possible, if only we get rid of this, if only we enact that, if only we enforce whatever. The world I want is very fucking unlikely, and that keeps me humble, I think.
The worldview that isn't mine has made me able to "personally choose" to adopt a worldview that's deeply critical and suspicious of the one that provided me with those very tools. I'm thankful, I'm so thankful for who the Founders were and what they believed, including those parts of their ideology that aren't my own, and I think a lot of non-Christians in America have that thought, too. Or else they should. Moreover, a whole lot of *Christians* ought to be more thankful than they are that they live in a country where people with a religious sensibility much different from their own were so concerned to keep religion a private matter and not vulnerable to the whims of politics; things would not go well for these people if a lot of the stuff they hold dear had to be voted on in open elections.
It's hard. It's hard to believe in anything intensely, intimately, palpably, and at the same time stand back and say, "But all right, that's optional." When you've felt that something is *right* and it's *real* and it's *holy,* it's never going to be entirely easy to live with the fact that that something is entirely irrelevant to the people around you; I know what it feels like to think if they just *understood,* if I could just make them *listen,* and then they'd know. One of those moments from West Wing that will stay with me til my deathbed is Toby Ziegler's they'll like us when we win. I feel that way. I feel that way all the time, and it's a daily process to recognize and adjust again and again to the fact that, actually, it doesn't work that way at all.
That's the journey my shadow-counterparts on the right also need to take, and I do sympathize; I know what I'm asking from them, how hard and unwelcome it is. But it has to be done. They can't win the country the way they think they can; they can only tear it to shreds. They have to stop fighting this battle before they go past hurting themselves and everyone around them into outright destruction of same. I hope their God leads them to the strength and courage necessary for that.
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Date: 2007-07-05 05:45 pm (UTC)From:just as a matter of interest :) Catholic communalism is one reason why I resonate with it so strongly. Really, there were a lot of things that my seven-year pagan interlude introduced me to that I was surprised to discover in my own cradle religion. The spirituality of the everyday is another great example.