There is a retired pastor I've friended on Facebook (Hey, I need as much help as I can get). He enters occasional missives, much as I did before I went this route. He lives in Illinois. Some of them are brief and some of them aren't.
This morning's comment went on a while. It was 3 a.m. and he couldn't sleep. Something's been bothering him for some time now, something that also bothered me for a while but I have come to accept it, sad though it is.
"I have really been struggling of late with the stance that white evangelicals [this pastor's black] have decided to take in support of the evilness of this president," he wrote. Yeah, I know. It drives me and a number of people with similar religious feelings stone crazy.
I'll let him continue. "They have decided delibrately to close their eyes to the truth of who [45] is for the sake of some political, social, and economic advantage...The position they have taken goes against everything that is proclaimed by Jesus."
That's hit a number of us like a thunderbolt. We have sore necks from shaking our heads. Not only is 45 followed by a large number of evangelicals, he has recruited a pastor to, so to speak, keep track of them so their political support doesn't waver in this election year.
This evangelical pastor, named Paula White, preaches the so-called "prosperity gospel," advanced by more television-popular preachers like Joel Osteen, which says that God meant us to be wealthy and healthy. That means focusing on ourselves instead of others who need help and compassion. It means we can ignore the horrible crisis on our border. We can ignore those who truly need asylum, who are truly refugees, who truly see America as their last, best hope.
This approach lends itself into politics. If in fact religion is first and foremost about ourselves, it would stand to reason that it could be turned into a fulcrum of political support--that voting for a particular individual is divinely connected with God's initial will, that we take care of ourselves first.
45 has a grip on that like few ever have, as someone who takes care of himself first and only. Or perhaps he's just far more blatant about it like he's blatant about everything else, pretenses be damned (no pun intended). It's just flat-out hypocritical, though, and millions ignore it.
They ignore it because it fulfills their narrow political agenda: against abortion and same-sex marriage and in support of personal ownership of automatic weapons. 45 will heap support for those issues, too, not because he's committed to them--he's committed to nothing--but because it gets him votes and only because it gets him votes.
This spins his very existence in the White House as somehow divinely intended, as one of the former members of his Cabinet, the intellectual (?) Rick Perry, kept saying. Supporters view his previous transgressions against many others as simply a sign that God forgives: A sinner saved by grace.
Well, no: He's a sinner saved by conveniently popular positions embraced by people who have been told that their religion supports them. They need look or consider no farther.
His posturing, though, with White and other pastors are sure to reinforce the notion that he has embraced the Almighty as being the base of his attitudes. This will deepen evangelical support for him at a ferociously fanatical level. The emotionality of it is truly scary. He cares not for what any of it means.
The most important part of all this is not that others object--indeed, the popular magazine Christianity Today has called for his removal from office through impeachment proceedings, a stance brave though futile exactly because of the above attitudes--but that almost no Democrat running for president has yet called it out. Pete Buttigieg has, briefly, but only in response to an accusation by 45.
This reactive, defensive posture has informed progressives since the Reagan years, when the Moral Majority began rousting itself into political impact (another way in which Ronald Reagan ruined America). My experience as a union leader was touched by it when I spoke out against its influence in public schools. I did not gain support from fellow members. The running line was: If you go there, you will always lose. Leave it alone.
That was a collective and consistent mistake. By leaving it alone, by refusing to repeatedly reinforce the separation of church and state, Democrats have lost the high ground. Remember, this has been going on for at least forty years. It won't be reversed in a moment, or in one presidential campaign. It has been absorbed into enough of the body politic to be something of a virus, that emerges almost whenever called upon. It has eroded conversations that needed to take place and be maintained.
Lack of responses allowed Democrats to be cast as 'godless,' which was completely ridiculous. But silence implies consent, and trying to take the silent, high road got us kicked into the ditch.
That falls into line with my previous comments--namely, the Gallup poll that said that 38% of the adult population in this country cling to the notion that the human race has been around for less than 10,000 years, getting nowhere near what anthropologists have concluded (blog of 10/25/19) and that evolutionary theory has insisted. Trust me when I say this: 38% of the country was not taught that in school. You might say evolution wasn't taught well enough, or you might say that other factors, such as parents and churches, had their intended effect. But during the last forty years, at least 90% of the school population went to public schools, and those schools almost universally stayed away from establishing biblical interpretations of universal origins.
This rubs off on other established information that 45 has no need for or finds irrelevant: That India and China do actually share a common border, and Kansas City is mostly in Missouri, not Kansas. No Sharpie can change that. So in religion, too, things are what he says they are and the properly faithful (again, no pun intended) nod in agreement.
This has to be addressed in this campaign. It's one of the biggest reasons why I was hoping that Republican Senators would be truly able to take a step back and see what 45's been doing to us as a people. Problem with that is that people's votes determine whether the Senators get to cast them at all.
Very much too bad. I wanted Mike Pence to become president. Nobody on the Republican side has come right out and expressed blind religious fealty to 45 and all that that means--all the incredibly hypocritical nonsense that can be conjured from it. Pence is the center of all of it, manipulated by 45 as he was, too, and his emergence into the presidency would have forced him and those around him to come out and preachify their twisted, clinging shibboleths (real shibboleths, not the metaphorical ones) to the incredulous rest of us. For now they're still in the background, still operating slightly beneath the surface, where the politically faithful are happiest--to sneak religion into the conversation in the back rooms so it can't be sniffed out until those needing to commit to it are properly vetted and reminded in other, far more 'perfect' conversations.
Lacking that, a second 45 term will cast an iron grip on us from that standpoint. We will be openly 'encouraged' (one of those weasel words that means requirement by social strictures which are even more enforceable than legal passage) to infuse prayer and Christian beliefs into all of our politics, that one cannot exist without the other. That double-talk is complete nonsense, and it must be called out by the Democratic nominee. It must be confronted and made part of the official Democratic position of the campaign: a restatement of the vitality of the secular state before it becomes too late to reinforce it.
There is a risk there: that Democrats will be castigated as 'godless.' That, again, is an extreme and collective smear. But it has to be challenged. This gradual erosion of anti-intellectual, quasi-religious (which is what it should be called--flat-out phony) rhetorical reinforcement creates a damage that is impossible to fix in the short run, and encourages mindless acceptance in the long run.
Previous Democrats, running at all levels, have been able to slide by without specifically facing this phenomenon, but that time has passed. An absolute charlatan is utilizing the kind of thinking that people's personal savior used to get them to think about someone else for a change, and is showering them with the need, his need, to keep him in power--power for its own sake, power to betray all we have stood for for two centuries plus, in the very name of he who would completely reject such notions.
It has taken something as powerful as religion to ruin America, or at least to try to do so. Another preacher, the Reverend Barry Black, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, caught some attention when, at the start of Friday's momentous impeachment debate session (not a trial; sorry, no witnesses, no trial), he asked the Almighty to remind the Senators the biblical notion that they reap what they sow. My interpretation of that was: You may deny justice now, but you won't get it when you want it later, either. It can't be conveniently put off.
That might have been what bothered my Facebook friend the most: That we will pay for this twisted, politically-driven distortion of what was meant by the Sermon on the Mount (preached from the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church, USA, just yesterday), that it will come back to us in a form we never anticipated. The meek will still inherit the earth, but if we keep going down this road it will be only after what this government is supposed to mean and how it is supposed to be maintained has been eroded to such an extent that it's unrecognizable. Indeed, it will take a big step toward that fate on Wednesday, when the president will almost certainly be acquitted.
The descriptive word for that is anarchy, controlled only by extreme violence and a police state. We are closer to it than you think. If that keeps you awake at 3 a.m., too, where the unthinkable is now on the agenda, welcome aboard.
It's sad to preach fear into campaigns. But since the Republicans are getting so good at it, the issue needs no longer to be whether fear is appropriate. The only challenge now is what to make people afraid of. The results of forcing religion down people's throats is much more to fear that separating it from the affairs of government.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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