Faith Reaffirmed

In this campaign year, now at a conclusion following Election Day 2012, the essential faith in democracy held by the American public has been reaffirmed with the reelection of President Barack Obama. This faith was sketched by the President in his victory speech:

Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight. And it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty, and we can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.

Our national faith in democracy held fast in the face of an almost overwhelming assault by corporate and moneyed elites. Today’s United States has witnessed a widening gulf between the haves and the have nots, the rich and the poor. The Citizens United decision in 2010 that empowered corporations as “people” has propelled this disparity and allowed millions of dollars of corporate money to be funneled into a rightwing opposition, an opposition that in its extremes—and sometimes at its heart—is profoundly anti-democratic.

Democracy is enacted through coalitions among disparate groups of like-minded individuals. In some Western democracies, particularly those with parliamentary forms of governance, the coalitions are more fluid than in the United States, where groups tend mainly to coalesce under the banner of Republican and Democrat. Few other parties have gained more than token traction during the modern era, since the mid-twentieth century.

The Republican coalition has become virulently rightwing and, I would argue, has dragged the country right of center generally. On its most radical fringe are the Tea Party tax resisters, religious zealots, homophobes, xenophobes, and racists. Unfortunately, mainstream conservatives have seen fit to pander to these anti-democratic factions in an attempt to hold political power. That strategy has worked in various places at various times. It did not work for this presidential election.

The Democratic coalition, pulled right by the ardent conservatism of the Republicans, is consequently more centrist with a purely tepid radical left. Fortunately, the Democratic Party has not been pulled so far right of center that it has abandoned basic tenets, such as universal civil rights and equality in education, job, health care, and so on. The Democrats remain the “big tent,” where folks of all races, sexualities, and incomes can come together. It is under this big tent that hope resides that the American middle class can be salvaged and, in time, expanded. President Obama put it this way:

I believe we can keep the promise of our founding, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight.

The presidential election has affirmed that we will not, as a nation, follow a path where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer…at least not for the next four years. The electorate has reaffirmed its faith in American democracy, not corporate oligarchy.

Our Misplaced Faith in Factions

“There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism,” said Alexander Hamilton. We are this year in one of those seasons—a presidential election year.

Hamilton had a turbulent life and career. He was born in the mid-1770s in the West Indies of unwed parents and essentially orphaned at age eleven. In 1804, at age forty-nine, he incurred the wrath of Aaron Burr, whose election defeat in the gubernatorial race in New York had been assisted by Hamilton. A duel resulted, in which Hamilton was mortally wounded and died shortly after. However, in between he crafted an influential career as one of the American founders, in particular in matters of the Constitution and finance. He wrote 51 of the 85 installments of the Federalist Papers, much of which content still influences constitutional interpretation today. Under President George Washington he served as the first Secretary of the Treasury and helped to found the U.S. Mint and the first national bank.

Much of Hamilton’s professional life coincided with the rise of “factions”—political parties—with Hamilton aligning with the Federalists, while founders such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson emerged in the ranks of the Democratic-Republicans, at the time known as Republicans, though not to be confused with today’s Republican party. This early Republican party dominated the presidency from 1801 to 1825—in succession, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. This Republican party was the direct predecessor of the modern Democratic party.

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both wrote about the dangers of partisan politics in the Federalist Papers, numbers 9 and 10 respectively. With uncanny insight and prescience, Madison in the latter paper wrote:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

The American founders had faith in the common good and feared that factions, or political parties, would damage the democratic union they lived and died to establish. Today’s powerful factions, the Republican and Democratic parties, are contending in a manner that is accomplishing what the founders feared. In particular, the Republican party has increasing emerged as Hamilton’s “factious men,” clamoring with false patriotism not for the common good but for political power to enrich further the already wealthy and to empower corporations as “people” under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United (2010). A leading factious voice for this party, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, reduced the party’s objective of power over people to a much-quoted statement: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Now millionaire candidate Mitt Romney, backed by a millionaire old boys’ club of corporate bigwigs, is putting teeth into the proposition that the United States should abandon democracy in favor of a corporate oligarchy form of governance, though they stop short of saying this honestly. This movement, too, is something that the American founders recognized and warned against. It was a warning reiterated by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, the year before his assassination:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Now, one hundred fifty years after Lincoln gave voice to this fear, we are on the brink of this reality. The Republican push to conflate partisan politics and corporate greed and to convince the unsuspecting by “working upon the prejudices of the people” is indeed imperiling our republic. No threat to the common good of American democracy has ever been greater than this internal, insidious movement now making inroads under cover of a once-respected political party.

Faith in the People

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Sadly, we have not followed Jefferson’s advice. The consequence is that corporations have increasingly come to dominate our national sense of direction, so much so that the United States now leans strongly toward corporate oligarchy as a form of governance. Is “we the people” becoming “we the corporation”?

In this election year we are seeing the effects of corporate “personhood,” as it is called, particularly in the arena of campaign finance. Much of the current presidential contest revolves around money, and not just Mitt Romney’s personal fortune and where he keeps it. It has become, to the disgust of many across the political spectrum, a tenet of the current conservative contenders that votes can be bought and lies passed off as truth if enough money is thrown into the mix. In the party of the wealthy, who has the money? Corporations, of course.

Two Supreme Court cases dominate. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the Court held that political spending is protected by the right to free speech in the First Amendment. Then, crushing Jefferson’s hope, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Court held that corporations have a right to free speech under the First Amendment, just as though they were individuals. The latter decision opened the floodgates for corporate spending to promote the interests of monied elites—wealthy corporate entities—over those of individuals.

Democracy invests faith in the people to govern. The United States was founded on the democratic principle that all citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. This principle has yet to be fully achieved. But progress has been made incrementally over the past two-plus centuries, granting equal civic personhood through freedom and enfranchisement of various segments of the demos, such as African Americans and women.

In this progressive realization of our democratic principle, however, the granting of corporate personhood has been a misstep. When the powers of governance come to be held by a small number of people, an elite of any sort (the military, royalty, etc.), which is the danger of corporate personhood, then we trade democracy for oligarchy. For Aristotle, oligarchy was synonymous with the rich.

Most of us—the 99% much referred to this year—are not rich and are being disenfranchised, our individual personhood diminished, as wealthy corporations become an ascendant aristocracy. Whether the American “experiment” can survive will depend on whether we the people can revive the power of the demos in our democracy. 

Faith in Positive, Progressive Humanity

The news is always bad. This is a simple, reassuring truism, although it often is uttered as a lament.

“News,” by definition, is the label journalists give to the exceptional. The ordinary is rarely considered to be newsworthy. That the news is generally negative should be taken as a signal that positive events—with the exception of the truly extraordinary—are viewed as the norm. We don’t get exciting about routine goodness; we expect it. Despite all of the world’s ills, this is reassuring. Positive is normal, negative is not.

So, one feels compelled to ask, why does negativity appeal to a large—and largely conservative—segment of the American population? I am not talking about negative campaigning here. Both conservative and liberal campaigns stoop to mudslinging. Rather, I am talking about the fundamental positions held on the left and the right: the “pro” and “anti” positions that undergird our opposing political parties’ philosophies.

By far, conservatives rack up more negatives than do liberals. The farther right, the more negative conservative positions are likely to be. The Right can be counted on, for example, to be anti-tax, anti-gun control, anti-immigrant, antigay, and anti any number of other things.

But, hang on, what about pro-life?

The veneer of “pro-life” overlies a thoroughly negative underbelly. Pro-life actually means pro-fetus; the “pro” does not extend to life after birth. Anti-universal health care (more recently, anti-Obamacare) accounts in large measure for the position of the United States in the statistics on infant mortality: 34th in a field of 194 nations, behind the European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and some unlikely nations, such as the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Brunei, Croatia, and Cuba. This is according to the United Nations. The 2012 CIA World Factbook puts the United States at 49th among 222 countries. These are dismal showings for the richest nation on earth.

“Pro-life,” incidentally, does not include pro-life imprisonment; and pro-death penalty can hardly be counted as a positive. Perhaps (tongue firmly in cheek here) it’s the “pro” in “progressive” that conservatives are responding to so negatively. It’s truly a bleak vision of the world, this country, and our population. It’s a black-and-white view where black predominates.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.” Sloganized patriotism—“America First,” “We’re Number One”—belies the facts in many aspects of our commonality that we are not at the top of our game as a great democracy. We have made strides in expanding civil equality and the “right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” spoken about in the Declaration of Independence, mostly uphill against the persistent tide of regressive conservatism. But there is much left to do.

American positivism, rooted in the core belief in democratic progressiveness, as expressed by Roosevelt and many others, is an essential attribute in the struggle for the common good, whether it be in terms of civil rights expansion, the welcome we give new immigrants to our immigrant-created nation, or the extension of adequate health care to all our citizens. It is our civil faith and our national ideal, though it falls short of universal acceptance.

Faith in the Common Good

Recently “socialism” has become a principal pejorative in political rhetoric. The label is applied to anything and everything that smacks of affecting, usually to their benefit, the majority of the population. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), so-called Obamacare, has been labeled as “socialist” in the same sense that Social Security was so labeled by its critics when it was created in 1935, during the Great Depression. One might be excused for confusing the “social” in Social Security with “socialism” were it not for the fact that such confusion, particularly now, is political rather than definitional. In the eyes of Obamacare’s critics, socialism equals bad, therefore any program that can be painted with the brush of socialism can be characterized as bad for the nation. This is patent nonsense, of course. But it sells well in some sectors.

Social Security was created at a time when more than half of all senior citizens lived in poverty. PPACA has been enacted—and upheld by the Supreme Court—at a time when more than 50 million Americans are without health insurance, which in this country amounts to being shut out from adequate health care. More than 60 percent of the uninsured live in households earning less than $50,000 a year. Children living in poverty are more likely to be uninsured than others. Indeed, the lower one’s income, the less likely one is to have health insurance or adequate health care. This situation might be excused in a developing nation but is unacceptable in one that claims to be the world’s leading democracy and is the world’s wealthiest nation.

Socialism is an economic system wherein means of production are owned by the society, the government in the case of state socialism, which is what most politicos who use “socialism” as a pejorative mean. To conflate “socialism” and the “common good,” which is a tenet of American democracy, is disingenuous at the very least. One is reminded of something Hubert Humphrey said, “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” The idea of our nation being founded on the belief that democracy provides the best possible hope for the common good is imbedded in the first sentence of the Constitution, in the phrase “promote the general Welfare.” The common good is fundamental to our “more perfect Union.”

Faith in the common good also is a tenet of Christian belief, though the Christianists on the far right seem to disavow it. For those crying “socialism” of a religious bent, it might be piquant to quote Woodrow Wilson, himself highly religious, a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister: “There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.” I also like Rev. Matthew Dutton-Gillett’s take on the notion. In a commentary dated February 19, 2010, on the blog, Below the Surface (subtitled A Conversation Between a Priest and a People about Life in Christian Community), Dutton-Gillett of Trinity Episcopal Church in Menlo Park, California, writes:

All that stuff about loving your neighbor as yourself, taking care of the poor, giving people who asked you for your coat more of your clothing than they had asked for, the suggestion that we should sell what we have and give it to the poor, the parable about the rich man and Lazarus the beggar—these are all teachings about redistributing one’s own wealth so that the more vulnerable in society would be protected and provided for. It seems clear to me that if we were to classify Jesus’ views according to today’s political definitions, he would probably fit into the category of “socialist” more easily than any other.

Faith in the common good seemed evident when Mitt Romney, as governor, signed the Massachusetts healthcare insurance reform law (referred to as Romneycare) in 2006. The law mandates that state residents obtain government-regulated minimum health insurance coverage and provides free health insurance for residents earning less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Now, ironically, as the Republican presidential candidate, Romney must—in order to align with the “socialism”-shouters in his party’s rightwing base—argue against the common good, against the very law he championed that is mirrored in Obamacare.

Faith in the common good—for the good of us all and for the good of American democracy writ large—ought to be unwavering. When it is smeared by epithet and battered by the hot winds of political expedience, we should be wary of those doing the smearing and blowing the hot air.

Faithful Magic

Faith stories combine history and literature. Though we do not apply the term to our own faith stories, they are in fact a form of myth. Thus a literal reading of biblical stories and history deprives them of power and fundamental truth. Superficially, they are too fantastical as well as too contradictory to be read for literal meaning. Doing so requires what literary critic Northrup Frye said was required to read fiction successfully, that is, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” To believe that Moses literally parted the sea is to believe that Ramesses II, possibly the pharaoh of Moses’s time (it is open to dispute), was larger than any of his subjects, for that is the way he is depicted in the monumental sculptures that honor him.

Faith documents should not be read as fiction. But they should be viewed, at least in the case of the Bible, as allegorical history. Events are magnified through hyperbole, symbolism, metaphor, and other rhetorical devices to convey important ideas and theological lessons. Ramesses is sculpted in enormous scale not because he was physically large but because he was hugely important. The parting of the Red Sea denotes an event of high historical and theological significance—the freeing of the Jews from captivity, in every sense, through the power of belief in God—not an actual display of supernatural or magical powers, but a magnified iteration of human determination.

When Christianists conflate literalistic faith and modern governance, they apply magical thinking to governance issues and problems that require rationalism. Deus ex machina must be saved for the stage. Magical godly intervention will not solve human problems. Human problems demand human solutions.

Little in biblical history would pass muster by today’s standards of historical scholarship, which has been largely, though not entirely, separated from the story aspects necessary for myth-making. Theological attribution in certain views, however, has maintained the thread of myth-making to the present day—but exactly in reverse of the biblical writers of antiquity. Modern literalists flip this notion of attribution on its head, making storytelling into truth-telling.

For example, we are admonished by those who persist in the ancient belief in a wrathful God, rather than the God of love identified by Jesus, that disasters ranging from the AIDS epidemic to Hurricane Katrina are God’s punishment. This approach to the faith stories of the Bible constitutes a reconceptualized myth-making constrained by an ideologically driven, purposeful misreading of Scripture. It is no coincidence that some literalists’ interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah, the AIDS epidemic, and Hurricane Katrina all focus on divine punishment for homosexuality, because literalism finds its greatest resonance among fundamentalists with strong antigay sentiments. Christianists who use fundamentalism as a political force would reify this magical thinking in governance policy.

Situating biblical truth outside the contemporary culture of the ancient writers of the Bible is problematic because reading the stories through the lens of modern literalism inevitably leads to misinterpretation. When such magical thinking spills over into government, it leads to unreasonable governance—literally, governance in which reason is obscured or subverted by reference to faith interpretation that is grounded in fundamentally misreading the Bible.

When we approach the Bible as allegorical, rather than literal, and thus penetrate the maze of biblical story, what we discover at the center is not a mythological Minotaur but Truth. That Truth is worth examining by people of good character because at root it reveals humans throughout recorded history engaging in human endeavors. Those endeavors and what humankind has learned from them can legitimately guide our modern endeavors to govern well for the common good. 

Falsifying Faith

Galileo Galillei once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” The Italian physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who shook his head in dismay in the seventeenth century at the Catholic Church’s opposition to heliocentrism—the scientific discovery that placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of our solar system—would be equally dismayed and bewildered today by the coopting of Christian faith by persons and parties determined to enshrine their ideologies as “true religion” and thereby to subvert democratic governance.

The discussion that follows here will be as heretical to these interests, which I cluster under the rubric of “Christianist,” as Galileo’s advocacy of heliocentrism was to the dogma of seventeenth-century Catholicism. A definition is necessary. “Christianist” must be understood as distinct from “Christian.” Time magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan (2006) made this distinction: 

Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque.

Christianism falsifies faith through ideological alignment, which is almost universally negative in character—excluding rather than including. Ideological alignment involves a calculated cherry-picking of faith documents, such as the Bible. For example, to justify homophobia and thereby a plethora of antigay civil rights actions, from DOMA to state constitutional amendments that enshrine homophobic prejudice, ideologues often cite the Bible. Leviticus 18:22 is popular; it can be translated, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable” (New International Version). While they adopt this passage (through a willful misreading) as justification for homophobia, these same ideologues completely ignore other literal admonitions in Leviticus, such as:

19:26. “Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it.” 

19:27. “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.” 

19:28. “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.” 

19:31.  “Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them.” 

19:33. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.”

So, if taken literally, the Bible would admonish true believers to avoid rare steaks, haircuts and shaves, tattoos, and spiritualists (presumably of the ilk routinely consulted by Nancy Reagan during her husband’s presidency). And what about all those anti-immigration laws that ill treat foreigners residing among us? But, of course, these strictures do not accord with Christianist ideology, and so they are ignored—faith falsified to serve political ends.

It is no great leap from falsification of one’s central religious documents to the falsification of other historic documents, such as the Constitution, which, if read honestly, contravenes the secular ideology that accompanies Christianism. The founding documents of American democracy provide numerous examples of ignorant, willfully ignorant, or malignly ignorant reading to suit ideological ends. The furor over Second Amendment rights is an example.

The amendment to the Constitution, as ratified by the states, reads:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The amendment speaks to weapons in the context of an organized defensive military cohort. It was never intended, nor can it be legitimately construed, to provide justification for maintaining a personal arsenal, as indeed rightwing ideologues, including several Supreme Court justices, have averred. Thus faith in the founding documents also has been ideologically falsified to suit political ends.

Neither Christianity nor our American system of governance—if democracy is to be preserved—are well served by ideological falsification of faith, whether religious or secular. The essential understanding that this is the path on which the Radical Right is determined to set the United States is not yet pervasive enough in our society to provoke a necessary counter-movement to prevent the loss of freedom and democracy as we know them.

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Sullivan, A. (2006, May 7). My problem with Christianity. Time. http://www.time.com/time. Accessed April 8, 2011.