crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter

Fundamentalist, conservative religion threatens to destroy this nation, this great experiment of the Enlightenment. Sadly, though, it’s hard to speak out against the imprecations of the fascist theocrats who have seized power through the Republican party. Religion, you see, is on an elevated plane. One must speak carefully about it, lest one offend everyone who considers themselves religious. Tender skinned, those who’ve been “saved”, those who have an eternity in Heaven to look forward to when they leave this mortal plane, this great gift from which they seek such eager escape. While they’re here, though, obeisance must be paid. The religious right, of course, hides behind this social taboo, all the while attacking anybody who doesn’t conform to their beliefs. “Good” christians act as a protective shield, slapping down anybody who tries to attack these dangerous radicals where their strength lies … in their dogma. After all, they say, we must “respect” other’s relgious beliefs.

Well, some of us must disagree with this naive and dangerous demand. In fact, we find that no less a respected man than Bill Moyers finds that this is A Time For Heresy:

Now when a young boy in the tribe was ready to become a man, a ritual took place.  Wearing masks, the elders would kidnap him and take him into the woods, tie him down, and with a flint knife slice the underside of his penis. It was painful, but the medicine man said this is how you became a man.

It meant shedding one’s innocence. At the end of the ritual one of the masked men dipped the bullroarer in the boy’s blood and thrust it in his face, simultaneously removing his mask so the boy could see it’s not a god at all – it’s just one of the old guys. And the medicine man would whisper, “We make the noises.”

Ah, yes – it’s not the gods after all. It’s just the old guys – Uncle George, Uncle Dick, Uncle Don. The “noise” in the woods is the work of the old guys playing gods, wanting you to live in fear and trembling so that you will look to them to protect you against the wrath to come. It takes courage to put their truth-claims to the test of reality, to call their bluff.

We need such courage today. This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our elections right out from under us. Power has turned government “of, by, and for the people” into the patron of privilege. And Christianity and Islam have been hijacked by fundamentalists who have made religion the language of power, the excuse for violence, and the alibi for empire. We must answer the principalities and powers that would force on America a stifling conformity. Either we make the heretical choices that will inspire us to renew our commitment to America’s deepest values and ideals, or the day will come when we will no longer recognize the country we love.

We cannot fight this dangerous social movement without attacking the battery that powers it, and the battery that powers it is its dogmas. Sadly, though, as this twisted fundamentalism has appropriated the words and images used by other believers, it is nearly impossible to confront them without running the risk that doing so may give offense to others. It is imperative, though, that we not let this stop us. In fact, we can look at religious leaders in the past to see that the words and images are ephemeral. It is deed and actions that must motivate us, that we must use to demonstrate our allegiance to whatever it is we hold sacred. Moyers again:

So, my friends at Wake Forest, there is work to do. These charlatans and demagogues know that by controlling a society’s most emotionally-laden symbols, they can control America, too. They must be challenged. Davidson Loehr reminds us that holding preachers and politicians to a higher standard than they want to serve has marked the entire history of both religion and politics. It is the conflict between the religion of the priests – ancient and modern – and the religion of the prophets.

It is the vast difference between the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus.

Yes, the religion of Jesus. It was in the name of Jesus that a Methodist ship caulker named Edward Rogers crusaded across New England for an eight-hour work day. It was in the name of Jesus that Francis William rose up against the sweatshop. It was in the name of Jesus that Dorothy Day marched alongside auto workers in Michigan, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. It was in the name of Jesus that E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield stood against a Mississippi oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude. It was in the name of Jesus that the young priest John Ryan – ten years before the New Deal – crusaded for child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor. And it was in the name of Jesus that Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to march with sanitation workers who were asking only for a living wage.

This is the difference. OF versus ABOUT, acts rather than creeds … this is the difference between those who have used their faith or beliefs as a call to do good, to spread freedom, to bring succor to those in need, and those who use their creeds to bludgeon and to punish others. Many of those in the Democratic Party, frightened by the continued successes of the Republicans, fall into the trap of aping their tactics.  

We must mock the religious right. Deride the religious right. Drag the absurdities of their ridiculous theologies into the light, show the contradictions and the damage caused by these backwards superstitions. TRUE faith, after all, cares nothing of the mocking of us athiests, or the catcalls coming from the believers in other faiths … it is only those of weak faith who can’t take comfort in their beliefs. It is important that we attack the religious right at the source of their strength, because their brainwashing and lies and cons damage those who can least afford it. Whether it is poor whites being fed misogynistic bullshit or poor blacks being fed homophobic bile, these sick and twisted versions of Christianity allow the Republicans to redirect people as political foot soldiers, all while they set about dismantling the underpinnings of our society in the service of making the obscenely wealthy even richer, as Joe Bageant spells out in is inimitable style:

My brother’s church is what is known as an “independent Baptist church.” Independent enough of your world and mine that he says things like, “I helped cast out my first demon yesterday, Joey. I wish you could have been there.” Actually, I do too. Independent fundamentalist churches are wild and woolly places theologically, whose characteristics and belief systems can accommodate just about anything “Preacher Bob” or “Pastor Donnie” or whoever can come up with from misreading the Good Book. The “clergy” arise from within the church ranks and are usually poorly educated. (Hell they went to public school in America, didn’t they?) This has always been true of American fundamentalism since the backwoods stump church days, and it continues to provide the nation with charismatic literalists whose reading and abstracting ability is minimal to zilch. Combine that with 30 years of Christian school growth, and you can begin to understand how we got in such deep shit today…why so many states find themselves revamping their educational systems so that the fables of Adam and Eve may replace Darwin and we can all be reassured that David slew Goliath despite the complete lack of evidence of either’s existence.

Yet, look across the congregations of these churches and you see these aren’t bad people. They are neither a minority nor a cult in this nation, given their millions, and are simply what the ordinary Americans are today—working class people whose interior lives were clobbered by the Twentieth Century. Unaware of it as they are, theirs is part of a global revival of fundamentalism, which emerged when triumphant materialism arrived in the wake of the enlightenment. Poor dear enlightenment! So brief! Then smashed by two world wars, Verdun, Dresden, Auschwitz, the gulags, nuclear weapons, impending ecological disaster… Not that anyone in this church ever heard of the enlightenment. Two generations of them were raised in Christian schools amid the unyielding hostility and fear of the Cold War and declining real wages and education. Is it any wonder they are so attracted to the Apocalypse both materially and literally? From home as they know it on this planet, you look out the window what you see is the approaching end of the fucking world.

In response, they long ago collected themselves in what amount to mental and theological compounds, built thousands of Christian institutions and schools and trained two generations for a theocratic state. Fundamentalist thinker Gary North announced decades ago, “We will train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”

Well, they’ve done it.

They’ve done it, only they’re not done yet. It’s not just gay marriage, or abortion. They want to invade our bedrooms, including that of married couples. Sex, after all, is filthy. Human life enjoyed, pleasures indulged, are sinful, and it will be the business of the state, THEIR state, to make us conform with their dogmas, their prejudices, their own hatred of their own essential humanity. Militarism, however, is fine for these Christian soldiers. How can we not confront them, and how can those Christians who claim to reject them not see that it is the dogma that must be attacked, that we must do so BECAUSE they have taken words and symbols that mean things to people and twisted them?

One of the great things that came out of the Reformation was the eventual emergence of the idea that it was a person’s own conscience that was the center of religious belief, not the words, not the images, not the dogmas and vestments and long lists of rules. Moyers again:

Many Baptists are fundamentalists; they believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible and the divine right of preachers to tell you what it means. They also believe in the separation of church and state only if they cannot control both. The only way to cooperate with fundamentalists, it has been said, is to obey them.  James Dunn and Bill Leonard are not that kind of Baptist. They trace their spiritual heritage to forbearers who were considered heretics for standing up to ecclesiastical and state power on matters of conscience. One of them was Thomas Helwys, who, when Roman Catholics were being persecuted by the British crown, dared to defend the Catholics. Helwys went to jail, and died there, for telling the king of England, King James – yes, of the King James Bible – that “Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] conscience than ours, and that is none at all.”

Baptists helped to turn that conviction into America’s great contribution to political science and practical politics – the independence of church and state. Baptists in colonial America flocked to Washington’s army to fight in the Revolutionary War because they wanted to be free from sanctioned religion. When the war was won they refused to support a new Constitution unless it contained a Bill of Rights that guaranteed freedom of religion and freedom from religion. No religion was to become the official religion; you couldn’t be taxed to pay for my exercise of faith. This was heresy because, while many of the first settlers in America had fled Europe to escape religious persecution at the hands of the majority, once here they made their faith the established religion that denied freedom to others. Early Baptists considered this to be tyranny. Said John Leland: “All people ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that each can best reconcile to their own consciences.”

After all, isn’t that basic, most American of ideas in line with this admonition of the Son of Man, you know, the one the right claims to worship? Didn’t He say:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. 6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Matthew 6: 5-8