Though I am sure a vast group of zealots on the far right side of the political spectrum would disagree, the seemingly exponential growth of the Religious Right has ill served both that particular group and the nation as a whole over the last two decades or so.
I would contend that the hideously contrived and brazenly waged “culture war,” essentially the principal overarching enterprise of the Religious Right, has been one of the most shameful and ultimately embarrassing movements in our history. Shameful to a nation that prides itself on its grand legacy of tolerance and inclusion (with some obvious, jarring missteps), and embarrassing in that we have bewildered the rest of the globe by conducting ourselves in a fashion so dramatically divergent from the marvelous documents that are at the foundation of “The American Experiment.”
And the irony, of course, is even more omnipresent and overwhelming than much of the ecclesiastical effluvium that is at the core of the Culture War manifesto. In a country where Christianity reigns as the impregnable, dominant theology, but also a country founded on the idea of separation of church and state, those very same Christians have managed to somehow portray themselves as beleaguered and under assault from an unholy triumvirate of atheists, mainstream media and Hollywood elites.
It’s all fairly nutty, of course, but it has also gained so much traction that it’s impossible to ignore. And they keep up the hilarity by every so often finding new avenues to spot encroachment on Christian values. My personal favorite is the delusional conspiracy to remove the word “Christmas” from the Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s bacchanalia of orgiastic consumerism tastefully adorned with mangers, the odd Christmas carol here and there and Salvation Army bell ringers dutifully shivering in the cold in front of Wal-Marts as far as the eye can see. Yeah, there’s a real problem for us to address: the precarious foothold that Christmas has on the American scene. Kwanza is liable to overtake it if we’re not careful.
The wailing from the Religious Right would be funny if it were merely confined to the ravings of its most influential voices, like the inveterate gasbag Pat Robertson, who in recent years has descended to heretofore unimagined depths that make his mutterings from the previous millennium sound positively enlightened by comparison.
But for every bit of comic lunacy where speakers like nutso Robertson have gone so far ‘round the bend that taking them seriously isn’t even an issue anymore, there are countless other instances where pronouncements from religious leaders wind up having real, often hateful and damaging consequences.
The extraordinarily potent mixture of evangelical fervor and political pandering has left us with excruciating debacles like the Terri Schiavo case, which prompted the then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in 2005 to metaphorically publically urinate on his medical degree on the floor of the United States Senate. That too, especially as described here, might have been funny, except that the debate about end-of-life issues ought to be real and substantive, and presumably never will be as long as the Right holds sway over the so-called Republican leadership.
How could we have reach this amazing juncture where the theology embraced by such an overwhelming majority of the country could find its most strident adherents somehow feeling victimized and under assault? It’s an odd mixture of changing times and the underlying insecurity that lies at the heart of virtually every evangelical movement.
The changing times are highlighted by things like the Internet, video games, ten zillion cable channels and all the electronic gadgetry that seems so important to anybody born in the post Age of Aquarius era. I’ve got news for those folks so cosmically off to my starboard side: all that modern crap confuses and annoys me probably even more than it does you, but I don’t feel compelled to try to rearrange the universe in response to that discomfort.
All that stuff is just change, and trying to resist it, or just generally trying to turn back the clock, winds up being at best a stupefying waste of time and at worst an exercise that ends up actually hurting others simply from the vehemence of the argument itself. And there is a decent probability that the normal pendulum swing will eventually take us back away from this anal preoccupation with a bogus culture war. Eventually, it will simply occur to too many Americans that we are fighting a boogeyman that doesn’t warrant our time, attention or resources. Few from either end of the political spectrum would argue that there isn’t a lot more serious stuff that will have to be addressed sooner or later, and the luxury of tomfoolery like the misguided culture war will not be indulged forever.
But what of the “underlying insecurity” mentioned above? How do we explain the evangelical fervor that seems to captivate so many? One would think that having a certainty in your heart that the afterlife has been adequately taken care of would enough to bring about a kind of epic peace of mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Nope, it says here that the great big dirty secret about evangelical anything is that it stems from insecurity rather than unassailable belief. People of all stripes, be they the robed baldies at the airport or the more hirsute types in the Middle East, brandish evangelical mania like a cudgel precisely because of uncertainty in their own beliefs, which, of course, is splendidly ironic, since they labor so feverishly to convince us that the exact opposite is the case.
Non-believers – which can mean atheists, agnostics or merely others who believe in a different god than they do – are terrifying (and thus threatening) to those who would try to convert them because their very adherence to a different belief system raises doubts in the devotee’s mind about the supremacy of their own God.
Trying to get the evangelicals to be content to go to heaven (or wherever) by themselves and allow the rest of us to fend for ourselves in the afterlife would seem like a quixotic undertaking of staggering proportions, but at the very least, it’s nice to fantasize.
It’s more than a little annoying to be hectored by somebody else’s insecurities, especially when I have more than enough of my own to keep me busy until, well … until I reach the afterlife.
Mind your own business.
- T.S. O’Connell