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DECEMBER 2005
-THEODORE ROTHKE
0 COME ALL YE FAITHFUL
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
Christmas, that pagan holiday appropriated from the
followers of Odin, is a time for feast and fellowship, a convivial
warmth against the cold winter ahead. It is a parochial celebra­
tion that affirms a civic Christianity as the national religion
although the nation is the uneasy host for every conceivable
form of theology. Usually the public piety is casual, indifferently
observed, but occasionally the puritan past clamors for power,
generally during periods of disruption and confusion such as the
present when theolitical ideologies imprint a grim, intolerant and
despotic orthodoxy upon Constitutional law.
It might yet be difficult to accept willful ignorance and
evangelical vengeance as the center of political direction and
intellectual discourse but the anguish that underlies American
culture is a schizophrenia unable to resolve material greed with
spiritual piety. The political tolerance for a variety of religions
that is assured in the nation's laws is probably due more to an
awareness that no one sect has been powerful enough to rule
over the others, and just to be sure, religion is not allowed to
directly interfere with government except as inspiration and
manifest destiny. The practical consequence of separation of
church and state has been (o protect each from the other.
By its own law the government cannot and should not
enforce or impose any manner of worship or religion upon its
citizens or any others who live in this country. It cannot attempt
to regulate or interfere with religion or with anyone's choice of
worship or choice not to. The current debate about church and
state is less about religion than it is a dichotomy of political
values between those who would impose a narrow doctrine of
absolutes that are not to be questioned or resisted, only obeyed,
and those who believe that everyone has the right and obligation
to choose their own beliefs about what is right and wrong.
If the United States adopted or was forced to accept a
single religion distinct from a loosely defined public creed other
religions would be purged, in particular those that are not
Christian. Races other than white would lose all of their already
minimal civil rights, women would be shoved back into second
class status, and most democratic freedoms would soon be
suspended. The course of the current intrusion into politics
by the religious right is less to glorify God than to manipulate
religion as a conduit to political power and conversion of the
government into a militant theocracy. If the religious conserv­
atives who are clamoring for absolute control of the government
succeed in changing the nation into an ecclesiastical state the
result would be perpetual inquisition and religious war.
As precarious and brief as has been the history of
political liberty, its only real opponent is the people's belief in
a divine deity and their fear they might be immortal. Religion
serves as handmaiden to political rule. From the beginning of
history humanity has evolved religions to explain life and its
possible place within it, and always there has been the desire
that life not end at the crypt. Religion has thus been a political
instrument in every society, at once a source of philosophical
inquiry and a political doctrine of identity and rule. By the very
nature of the fear that produced it, religion is authoritarian and
exacts servitude from its followers. The hope for life after life
has served secular government. The misery of life can be borne
steadfastly and in service to life's oppressors by the promise of
rewards beyond earthly life, which it is not necessary to prove.
The dilemma of where we rank in the cosmos has been
narrowed considerably to serve the ambitions of a very few
who, paradoxically, seem to reap all earthly rewards for the pious
suppression of their followers and subjects. It is double-edged:
the use of religion for purposes of rule makes it essential to both
regulate religion and inflict its doctrines upon government. The
state supplants God but belief in God is necessary to support the
state.
Nationalism is itself a virulent form of religion but its
major disadvantage is that it cannot promise life after death.
Great masses of citizens believe that the nation is an extension
of divine rule, however, or is an acceptable substitute. They
proclaim the same fervor toward a flag as towards a deity, and
often confuse them.
American religious conservatives used to think the
conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, right­
eously denounced as the "Evil Empire," was the classical final
confrontation between good and evil and would, through the use
of nuclear weapons, result in the end of Earth. Now they find
other apocalyptic struggles between God/Anti-God, once again
crusading against Islam reminiscent of the advent of the first
millennium, while simultaneously focusing culturally inward, at
gay people, assertive women and 3rd world immigrants who
transport alien gods to these shores. The Christian conservative
backlash is not simply the perception of the disintegration of
society as the result of the deterioration of spiritual values but
what they also perceive as a war against religion by the govern­
ment, which in reality generally accommodates religious beliefs
unless arguments against them are compelling
Religious fundamentalists are rarely accommodating
but instead exhibit malevolent contempt for dissent and refuse
to accept that people who think differently might be sincere and
even noble in their points of view.
JU A N ITA HUEBNER
True believers put a rather low priority on mortal life,
which is only a process of mortification and putrescence to the
faithful. They profess a distaste for life and its pleasures and
pains. They despise what is known as humanism, which is
simply an ethical and compassionate responsibility for being
human but which is reviled as permissive heresy. They believe
that all who claim to be Christian must support every activity that
fulfills biblical prophecy even if it destroys the rest of us. This of
course would be the desired Armageddon and selection of souls,
the so-called ‘Rapture’. Good and evil would both be destroyed
with the end of Earth, but good would return with the reappear­
ance of Jesus Christ. Earth would be resurrected and repop­
ulated with the souls of the faithful who would dwell for eternity
in the joy they eschewed in life. Everyone would have to die
first, and everything homo civilis has spent millennia to construct.
It is ironic that the most grim, unbending, intolerant and ignorant
are unshakably certain that only they are beloved by God. It is
perhaps more ironic that one would have to willfully participate
in the murder of life to be worthy of living forever.
Most religions are preoccupied with death, with shades
and shadows, and with few exceptions they share apocalyptic
visions of the end of Earth. A wonderful yearning of spirit and
intellect is distorted into oppressive sets of scriptures that stifle
the inquiry that originated religions. Questions are bent into rigid
answers that must not be questioned All religions demand their
followers suspend the progress of knowledge and that nothing
pertaining to theological doctrine be advanced beyond the period
in which a particular religion was founded Mythologies develop­
ed hundreds or thousands of years ago are taught as absolute
certainties and subsequent learning is dismissed as heretical
A distinction must be made between religion and spirit­
uality An atheist can be profoundly spiritual while a religious
follower might only be so because of social pressures, ambition
or as a result of fear, which is a greater draw to the pew than the
boilerplated love of God One does not have to prostrate before
a disinterested deity to be moral Morality is the conscience of
humanistic behavior. In that sense most religions have seldom
acted morally, and in this Millennial era of inquisitionary fervor
the political intent of religion is immoral
The issue of church and state is much more serious
than the tiresome ambitions and subversions of zealots and
despots Separation of church and state embodies all other
disputes, ethnic, religious, racial and gender which have resulted
in civil wars elsewhere in the world but are so far contained
within the normal but very strained framework of American
politics. Yet the middle ground of civility and reasonability is
disappearing. Comparable to the slavery issue, no matter how
many compromises are erected to stall or slow the outbreak of
civil war, the confrontation between religious or secular domin­
ance of the government seems to inevitably await solution in
suppression and corruption of the democratic process and
perhaps ultimately in violence.
Deep religious beliefs are at their core a very real human
desire to exist in harmony without cant or hypocrisy. Religion like
music has the power to bring us together despite our differences,
but for most of history it has been utilized to separate us and
ensures that the majority of humanity is perpetually at war with
itself.
We live at a time when the incredible pace of knowledge
might liberate us from idolatry and specicide, but instead we use
what we have learned to terrify and threaten ourselves with
extinction, and as a consequence retreat into psychopathic
regression. We shield ourselves with fairy tales constructed
during epochs when Earth was thought to be the center of
everything but heaven and hell, and which we should should
have jettisoned with our historical adolescence. We seem unable
to respond maturely to our diminished status in the universe or to
understand that our religions and gods do not adquately address
the real situation of perishable life or the birth and death of stars
far beyond our reach We would destroy all that we have built
and all we are rather than change ourselves into what we might
be That is the real tragedy of clinging to superstitions we have
outgrown.
Perhaps it is time to reexamine the legacy of the man
we know as Jesus Christ and his message to humanity. Instead
of a Son of God predestined to die to defer human responsibility
for its sins of greed, rapacity and butchery, we have an ordinary
carpenter (son of a carpenter) who for reasons that have been
lost due to his deification, felt compelled to fight the slavery
and injustices of his era and attempted to raise up the poor and
disenfranchised into a powerful force of revolution. If that is what
he truly was, then he did not die to save our souls: he lived to
make us free and was put to death for that apostasy.