Off Limits, but We Need to Talk About It
by Bob Topper
1285 words
A recent Washington Post headline read “Democrats face a reckoning and a long rebuilding. There’s no quick fix.” The criticism is universal and deserved. But other factors influenced the outcome of this election: a press that normalized Trumps behavior; biased news organizations, especially Fox who admittedly lied to viewers, and an unregulated digital media, which spread mountains of misinformation and disinformation.
One crucial factor that frequently escapes notice is the role that religion plays in modern politics. It cannot be overlooked. To fully appreciate its impact, it is helpful to view our political divide as a struggle between rational thought and fairly widespread Christian belief.
In The Delusions of Crowds, author William Bernstein comments, “The current polarization of American society cannot be fully understood without a working knowledge of the… dispensationalist [End Times] narrative,” which predicts a period of “Tribulation,” the second coming of Christ and the “Rapture” by which righteous Christians ascend to heaven.
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 39 percent of US adults believe that humanity is presently living in the End Times. Thirty-nine percent. This includes half of US Christians. The turnout in this election was 66 percent. Trump and Harris essentially split that vote. At 39 percent, there are more than enough End Times believers to account for all of Trump’s backers, and, as the images of the January 6 insurrection show, Christian fundamentalists go to extreme lengths to support Trump.
This election outcome might be better understood when viewed as a case of mass hysteria. There is no way to know the degree to which dispensationalism influenced this election, but hysteria, driven by End Times anxiety, answers the most agonizing question; why did the American people elect a man so devoid of character–a convicted felon, proud sex abuser, and documented liar–president?
Fundamentalists see the world as a battle between good and evil, between God and the devil, between the righteousness of Christian belief and the evils of rational liberalism. Trump’s campaign rhetoric played on those fears labeling Democrats demonic, the devil, and the evil within. In this drama, the defects in Donald Trump’s character pale to insignificance, for he is an instrument of the Lord, and the Lord works in mysterious ways.
There is not a modicum of factual evidence to support this thinking. So, it is rejected by rational humanists and Democrats.
Christianization of the Republican Party
In 1994 conservative Republican Barry Goldwater worried that the Christian fundamentalists would take over his party:
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
Twenty-five years earlier, evangelical preachers including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, became active in the Republican party. They railed against abortion, and gay relationships. An enraged Falwell bellowed, “We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism…. our battle is with Satan himself.” Sound familiar?
Traditional Republicans would not embrace the evangelical’s rhetoric but welcomed their support. Today the Christian right has overwhelmed the party. The conservative values of Goldwater, and the core American values of freedom, equality and democracy, are no longer important to the Party’s identity or its mission. They are not Christian aspirations. Goldwater’s fears have been fully realized. His party has become the Christian Theocratic masquerading as Republican. It is time to take the mask off.
In Goldwater’s era there were two rational parties who shared a common purpose, and valued facts and scientific evidence. They were able to debate and compromise. They had serious disagreements, but found common ground and agreed on important legislation, like the Civil Rights Act, which confirmed freedom and equality, and they created important government entities like the Environmental Protection Agency to protect our health and natural resources.
With the Christian right’s takeover, the pragmatism of Eisenhower, Dirkson, Dole, and McCain became a thing of the past, and compromise has become nearly impossible. Take for example speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, who is a dispensationalist. Believing that we are living in the End Times he sees climate legislation as a useless exercise and therefore sees no reason to compromise. A government that prefers fantasy to fact cannot succeed. As Goldwater warned, it is “a terrible damn problem.”
With the appointments of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, the Supreme Court also favors extremist Christian belief, and no longer relies on evidence. Roe v. Wade, for example, was a rational decision. There was no evidence to support the belief that personhood begins at conception or any other time prior to viability. So, the court rightfully concluded that, until viability, only a woman could make this subjective determination. Accordingly, the court made freedom of choice a constitutional right.
Writing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, Alito took the irrational view that the lack of evidence was of no consequence. What mattered to him, and his fellow like-minded Christian justices, was what people wanted to believe, and he tuned the matter over to the states to be voted upon as though the issue was simply a matter of popularity.
What we must talk about
Because we have honored the separation of church and state and respected one another’s privacy, criticizing religious belief has been off limits. But now that a religious faction has become a political party, accommodation is no longer acceptable, especially when their beliefs conflict with our core values, freedom, equality, and democracy.
Every American has an obligation to protect and defend the Constitution and the values it ensures. When a religion attacks the very heart of our nation’s founding principles, criticism cannot be off limits. Just as thinking Americans would reject Wahhabi Sharia law, we should reject any other religious version of supplanting our legal system. And when religious beliefs render our representative democracy incapable of governance we must fight back.
Presidents, Senators, and members of the House swear an oath to defend and protect the Constitution. There are no exceptions. Yet we have had a president, senators and congresspeople like Hawley and Greene who openly call for declaring America a Christian Nation, a clear violation of the Constitution and their oath. This conflict cannot be reconciled, and violations must be condemned.
Christ’s message of love and peace has been a driving force for good in society. But the belief that we are living in the End-Times is especially dangerous and has to be challenged. Arguably, it decided this election. Moreover, one of the “Tribulations” predicts a great war, presumably nuclear. If government officials, like Johnson, resign themselves to an inevitable “doom’s day,” they will do nothing to prevent it.
Thirty-nine percent of our fellow Americans believing we are in the End Times cannot be taken lightly, for it is delusional. The End Times is a biblical myth no different than the Garden of Eden, Noah and the Arc, or Jonah and the Whale. Good Christians may revere these myths, but they must accept that they are fantasies, just as they accept the fact that earth orbits the sun, not the other way around. Fortunately, many do.
The problems we face are real. Solutions will come from realists who make rational decisions based on science and facts. Fantasies and superstitious fears will only perpetuate them. Anyone who doubts that should consider the tragic outcomes of religious fanaticism throughout history from the Inquisition to Heaven’s Gate, and then compare the well-being of people living in liberal democracies to those living in the theocratic and autocratic nations, especially those in the Middle East.
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Bob Topper, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a retired engineer.
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