One Nation Under John (Frum, That Is)

In a previous post I described American evangelicalism as a patriotic cargo cult. As such, it has become a key component of the dysfunctional and harmful response of a people who are stressed by the emergence of a world they can no longer control to their liking. Therefore, in order to understand the ways in which many elements of mainstream white American society are responding to the changes now descending upon that society, one must understand mainstream American evangelicalism. To help further that understanding, I think it is good to examine the “cargo cult” characteristics of modern American evangelicalism.

What then is a cargo cult? According to Wikipedia, it is “a Melanesian millenarian movement encompassing a diverse range of practices and occurring in the wake of contact with the commercial networks of colonizing societies. The name derives from the belief that various ritualistic acts will lead to a bestowing of material wealth (“cargo”).” (Emphasis mine.) The story from several sources is that cargo cults arise among indigenous populations when those populations come under stress due to the arrival of members of a colonizing nation which possesses superior technology. This arrival results in a loss of local control of the distribution of resources among the indigenous peoples, with a corresponding loss of status of those members of indigenous societies who controlled the flow of wealth in their societies. The response of the indigenous peoples, and especially of their leaders, is to enact rituals designed to invoke the aid of the supernatural as they understand it, in order to regain access to control of resources and to gain control of access to the goods – the “cargo” – which the colonizers had brought.

Examples of this sort of ritual sprang up in Vanuatu and other South Pacific islands during and after World War 2, when the locals observed the arrival of U.S. military forces replete with cargoes of canned foods, medicines, clothing, metal tools, radios, airplanes, large ships, other assorted military hardware, and the like. After the war ended, the servicemen left, taking their “cargo” with them, and the natives, who had grown used to benefiting from some of the crumbs of that “cargo”, began to enact various rituals designed to mimic the things which they believed the Americans had done to bring that cargo to the islands in the first place. Such rituals included (links to images) villagers marching in drills with American flags and wooden replicas of rifles while building dirt airstrips and wooden replicas of control towers and radios in order to attract the “cargo” back to their islands. Some went so far as to build life-sized wooden replicas of cargo airplanes.

Control of the flows of material resources had been the foundation of the identity and prestige of the “big men” who ruled indigenous South Pacific societies before their contact with First World colonialists. Therefore also, the regaining of control of flows of material resources and of access to advanced “cargo” was the center and foundation of the indigenous cargo cults. To put it baldly, the cargo cults and the society from which they sprang were thoroughly materialist. However, the cargo cult practitioners enacted their rituals in almost complete ignorance of the true nature of the cargo they sought, or of the means by which it was actually delivered, being acquainted only with the outward “rituals” (talking on a radio, filling out paperwork, etc.) by which the foreigners obtained their “cargo.”

Mainstream American evangelicalism shares a large number of characteristics with the Melanesian cargo cults. First, it is dominated and ruled by “big men” (and a few “big women”) for whom the ability to rule groups of people, and to control the flows of material resources among those groups of people, is a foundational part of their identity. Second, it depends on certain rituals which are performed in order to invoke continued access to material wealth – that is, “cargo.” Third, it is both ignorant and willfully blind – ignorant of the God Whom it claims to worship, and of the true nature of supernatural realities; and willfully blind to the true nature of the means by which it has obtained its cargo.

To understand this, we must first look at the creed of modern mainstream white American evangelicalism. As I stated in a previous post, the majority of White American evangelicals believe that the United States is a nation chosen and founded directly by God, who, according to them, has decreed that the United States of America is specially chosen to rule the entire earth and all of its peoples. Therefore, God has condoned whatever means and methods the people of the United States have used in order to assert, expand and maintain that rule. This is why the hymns of Francis Scott Key are such a favorite among many American evangelicals. This is why they not only give thanks for the founding of the nation every Thanksgiving, but they expect everyone else to be just as appreciative of the nation's founding – including the surviving members of the Native American peoples they exterminated and the descendants of African slaves who are now being oppressed, imprisoned, and in many cases killed without just cause by the dominant members of American society.

Because of their strong materialism, most of them believe strongly that material prosperity is one of the surest signs of God's blessing upon the nation. As I have already said, they therefore engage in various rituals in order to secure that continued “blessing.” For the majority of American evangelicals, the rituals consist of public verbal opposition to certain sexual sins (although what these people do behind closed doors often belies their public verbal opposition), public proclamation of patriotism, public proclamation of “faith” in Jesus Christ, voting for the "right" political agenda, and public proclamation of faith in capitalism, the “free market,” and American exceptionalism. Note that the public proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ usually does not come with any attempt, public or private, to actually do what He has commanded. Nevertheless, most White American evangelicals believe that if the majority of the nation follows this simple ritual, God will continue to bless America with an abundance of “cargo.” Some American evangelicals try to add to the ritual, such as the "Christian Reconstructionists" who are trying to impose the Old Testament law on the United States. Their reasoning is that because God promised to bless Israel with material abundance if they kept the Law perfectly, the way to secure an endless supply of “cargo” for the United States is for this nation to keep the Law perfectly – and to avoid intermarrying with “inferior races,” by the way. 

Perceptive individuals can see the problems with this approach. The first problem is the assumption that one can secure material blessings by keeping the Law perfectly. It is true that in the Old Testament, God promised material abundance to Israel if only they kept the whole Law. But Israel didn't keep the Law – indeed, they couldn't, because they were sinners, as are we all. And that points out the second problem, namely, the mistake people make when they associate wholeness of life solely with having lots of material possessions. The truth is that people who have an abundance of possessions, yet are not whole on the inside, always make a mess out of their abundance. This is why it is impossible for mortal, fallen human beings to make a Heaven on earth. Thus the definition of blessedness changes in the New Testament, from “Blessed are those with lots of cargo,” to “Blessed are those who learn to be Christ-like and love their neighbors, even though they themselves are poor and afflicted.” (Matthew 5:1-12; Luke 6:20-26; Acts 14:22) Our present earthly lives are thus transformed from an opportunity to acquire lots of cargo to an opportunity to allow God to make us whole on the inside – even in the midst of deeply contrary circumstances.

This is the spiritual, supernatural reality that mainstream American evangelicals refuse to understand. And they are willfully blind to the true nature of the means by which they have obtained and continue to obtain their cargo. The Good Book calls those means evil. Evil can be viewed as a rejection of wholeness and an embracing of inner spiritual disease. And both the Old and New Testaments teach that there are consequences for evil. But just as the Melanesian cargo cultists did not understand the true nature of the realities they were trying to invoke, so American evangelicals are, by and large, willfully ignorant of the reality of the consequences which their actions have begun to invoke.  Because these actions are the result of a choice to do evil, those who have chosen them have chosen to be evil. 

As I have previously written, the beginnings of damnation almost always start with the manifestation of the earthly, natural consequences of choosing to do evil. As the evil continues, those natural consequences propagate and expand throughout the entire lives of those who have chosen to be evil. Consider a crystal subjected to mechanical stress.

Misfit dislocations in a silicon crystal under stress.  Image courtesy of http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis.

In response to the stress, the crystal will exhibit strain, defined by the people who work for Noah Webster as “deformation of a material body under the action of applied forces.” That strain will usually manifest itself as microscopic and submicroscopic dislocations which propagate throughout the crystal as the stress placed on it increases. The propagation is usually nonlinear and often seemingly stochastic – that is, it cannot be traced out in advance. Yet from the beginning of strain to the point of ultimate fracture, the propagation of dislocations in the crystal can be traced to a single root cause – namely, the application of a mechanical stress.

So it is with the propagation of the earthly, natural consequences of evil. The propagation is usually nonlinear and often seemingly stochastic, yet it can be accurately traced to root causes by those who are willing to look at things honestly. (However, magical thinking blinds people so that they do not see the root causes.) Over the last year, we have begun to see a few examples of the propagation of those consequences in mainstream America, and in mainstream American evangelicalism.

That propagation is first intrapersonal. We are now seeing the culmination of a long American tradition of viewing freedom as the ability to do whatever one wants without regard to how one's actions affect others. One of the ways that “freedom” is being manifested is in an explosion of addictions of various kinds. White America has lost its ability to self-regulate, to delay gratification, to say no to unhealthy cravings. This nation is having to face the fact of its addictions to mind-altering substances such as prescription painkillers, prescription psychiatric drugs, alcohol, and homemade psychotropics such as crystal meth. Indeed, the protagonist in a recent very popular TV series is a “meth-maker.” In the religious realm, the addiction to, ahem, “chemicals”, has included Rush Limbaugh, a man who frequently and loudly proclaimed his belief in God. But it goes beyond addiction to drugs to include addiction to sex. Here we enter a “target-rich environment” when discussing famous evangelicals who have recently fallen from grace.   (Here's a link to information about a former pastor who dabbled in both drugs and sexual sin.)

And there is the ever-increasing addiction to violence. According to a recent study, there are over 300 million guns of various kinds in the hands of private citizens in the United States. (See this also.)  The vast majority of those guns have been bought and are owned by White citizens. (However, the vast majority of people convicted for gun crimes in this country are Black. How can that be? Methinks more than a few police departments, prosecutors and district attorneys in this country are guilty of scapegoating.)

Which brings us to the second realm of propagation, namely, the interpersonal. It is because mainstream American society has lost its ability to self-regulate that we are witnessing an explosion of violence – especially gun-related violence. The gun-related violence is especially prevalent in cases of domestic or intimate partner abuse. (See this also.)  But it is also a factor in the many suicides which take place in this country. And it is a factor in the increasingly violent adolescent real-life “games” which grown men are playing with each other in this country. For instance, most may not know this, but in May of this year, there was a massive shootout between two rival White biker gangs in Texas. I believe at least nine people died, and a number were injured, including a few cops. This is just one of the many shooting sprees which have taken place in this country over the last two or three decades. Yet one of the things most dear to mainstream American evangelicals is “the right to keep and bear arms.” (Look up “Christian militia” sometime and see where that takes you.) And we haven't even scratched the surface of the violence which this nation has inflicted on other nations, or the alienation which has resulted from this violence.

Violence is also being done to relationships, even where the violence is not physical. For the consequence of choosing to do evil is that the evil person becomes injurious and repulsive to those who know him. This is the reason for the absolutely horrible rate of transmission of evangelical values from one generation to the next among White evangelicals, many of whose children are now choosing to identify themselves as "spiritual, but not religious." But this is no surprise, because many American evangelicals have made themselves so nasty that increasingly, no one wants to be like them. In fact, in 19 states, white American evangelicals are now no longer a majority of the population.  Some of these states are among the most populous states in the Union.

Lastly, there is the third realm of propagation, namely, the nonhuman. By this I mean especially the world in which we live, including the atmosphere we breathe and the biosphere which sustains our earthly lives. American evangelicals (along with the rest of the world) are about to receive in full the consequences of the magical thinking in which they indulged in order to justify trying to get an ever-expanding, never-ending stream of “cargo” out of a finite planet. Case in point: regarding climate change, Americans, including evangelicals are about to suffer the consequences which they had been able until now to inflict solely on other nations. This year – so far, the hottest year globally on record – has seen heat waves in India and Pakistan which killed over 4,000 people. Agencies such as the NOAA are predicting that due to the storage of heat in the Earth's oceans from this year's excessive temperatures, next year is likely to be moderately to significantly hotter. That means that many people in the United States may be subjected to killing temperatures next summer. These phenomena, along with other phenomena predicted by the Limits to Growth studies of the 1970's, are not the supernatural, “black-swan” judgments of a “cargo-cult” god whom we cannot hope to understand, but the natural consequences this nation has brought on itslf – consequences allowed by a God who wants to use these consequences to teach us that, “not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15)

When National Narcissism Meets Unforgiving Nature

This week I have three things to share.  First, I'd like to introduce you to Walk On, a blog written by Jesse Curtis.  Mr. Curtis is currently a PhD student at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  His research focus is American history, and the roles which American exceptionalism and racism have played in that history.  He has particular insights into the role which American evangelicals have played in fostering and maintaining that exceptionalism and racism.

I am glad to have discovered his blog, because I believe that an accurate understanding of the present-day dysfunctional mainstream American mindset must of necessity include an accurate understanding of the ways in which white American evangelicalism and its leaders have contributed to the creation of that mindset.  I am a Christian - a Biblically orthodox Christian - and yet I hereby declare my belief that present-day white American evangelicalism is deeply dysfunctional, and that in many ways it amounts to no more than a patriotic cargo cult.  (One of these days, I will explain the ways in which the term "cargo cult" accurately describes American evangelicalism - unless someone wants to beat me to the punch.)

The nature of American evangelicalism and its impact on American society explains not only the dysfunctional ways in which the U.S. interacts with the non-white and the foreign-born.  It also explains why the U.S. is responding in such a dysfunctional way to the limits now being imposed on it by resource depletion and environmental degradation - the original subjects of my blog.  Along those lines, I present you with two reposts of articles describing the collision of national narcissism and unforgiving nature: "The Congress Created Dust Bowl," and "The Death of the Central Valley."  Enjoy.

Busy as a Cat With A Long Tail...

Blogging is hard work, if it is to be done right.  What is required for an intelligent blog is strong subject matter, well-thought, well-researched and well-presented.  This takes time.

Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of time right now, and won't have that kind of time for the next several weeks with the possible exception of the end of this month and maybe Labor Day weekend.  So unfortunately, posting will be a bit light while I finish a graduate school project.  (Also, I gotta work and pay my bills!) 

However, I can offer you some reposts of essays and interviews I have done over the last few years.  If you haven't seen them before, I hope you enjoy them.  Also, I've noticed a number of visits from people outside the U.S.  To those of you from Russia, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Britain, a big "Thank You" for your readership.

And now for this week's re-post, I have selected, "An Inmate's View of Federal Prison."  The subject matter, while grim, should be informative. 

What Are Police Made Of?

The ongoing unraveling of American society is like a play written by a criminally insane person.  As such, it can provoke strong emotions in those who are forced to suffer through it.  Yet one way of coping is to look at it as a play, and at yourself, the observer or unwilling participant, as an entertainment critic of sorts.  Then it becomes possible to cultivate the detachment necessary for a calm, objective critique of the play, the various actors, and the roles they fill.  Such a perspective can also guide you in exploring ways to escape the part that has been forced upon you.

This week's post will examine the role of the police in present-day American society, and will give you some idea of how likely you are to be cast as a bad guy by them, try as you might to fill another role.  Such information might be of interest to readers, since as of today, July 3, 2015, police in the United States have killed 558 people this year, not to mention those who have been non-fatally maimed or injured by police, among whom is Walter William DeLeon, a middle-aged construction worker who was shot and critically injured by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department last month when he waved a towel at a patrol car in order to flag it down.  This is, of course, in addition to the numerous well-publicized stories of police murders of unarmed citizens, especially citizens of color, in 2014 and earlier, and the ongoing police terrorizing of unarmed citizens in places like McKinney, Texas.

So what, exactly, are police made of these days?  What kind of person is it who gravitates toward police work?  What kind of job do policemen have?  What sort of person does the typical police job produce?  In his book, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck described the link between characteristics of individual humans and characteristics of groups formed by individual humans.  He wrote, "For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals - except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect.  Why this is so - why the behavior of groups is strikingly immature - why they are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of their parts - is a question beyond my capacity to answer..."  My post today will not attempt to answer that question definitively, but will hopefully illuminate some key elements of police as a group, and of what is known as "police culture" here in the U.S.

What kind of person is the typical police recruit?  The answer to that question depends on whom you ask.  In Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, authors Skolnick and Fyfe write, "However skeptically police may be viewed by outsiders, police often identify themselves as a moral force, protecting innocent and productive members of the public...The typical police recruit is white, physically fit and agile, of the lower-middle or working class, male, in his twenties, and with some college education..."  However, what attracts potential recruits are often advertisements and videos which increasingly glamorize legal opportunities to use lethal violence rather than serving as a "moral force" in one's community. (See this also, where a former cop says, "...if anyone says they didn't get into law enforcement to drive a police car fast, with the lights and sirens, and come screeching into a parking lot sideways and jump out and tackle a guy, they're lying to you...")

When a person becomes a cadet, what kind of training do they receive?  Again, the answer depends on whom you ask, but it seems clear that mediation and nonviolent conflict resolution isn't very high on the list of things taught.  In fact, Dallas Police Chief David Brown publicly admitted that "Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest.  They have a 'don't retreat' mentality.  They feel like they're warriors and they can't back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is."  By contrast, Dale Brown, who is not a policeman, has founded the very successful Threat Management Center in Detroit, whose specialty is "...tactical psychology, tactical law and tactical skills, to teach communities and corporations how to properly manage human threats and create non-violent outcomes..." (Emphasis added).  The Threat Management Center has been in operation since 1995, and boasts an impressive string of accomplishments.

What kind of person does a typical cadet become once he or she is hired to a police force?  Here again, it depends on whom you ask.  However, there is a large number of independent studies of various issues among police officers, issues which would be called crimes or serious dysfunction if they were observed among the general population.  For instance, at least 25 percent of police officers are alcoholics.  (See this and this also.)  Of these, a substantial number drive while intoxicated and on duty.  Between 25 and 40 percent of police officers are guilty of at least one incident of domestic violence (OIDV) against their spouses or children.  (See this, this, this and this.)  In many cases, the domestic violence is ongoing.  Here is a link describing officer-perpetrated domestic violence from the point of view of the victims and their children.  Please read it carefully and note how difficult it is for women abused by police husbands to do anything about their situation.  Note also how right-wing politicians have recently made things more difficult for the victims.  Lastly, illicit drug use other than alcohol is a growing problem among law enforcement officers - especially the use of performance-enhancing athletic drugs like steroids.  (See this, this, this, and this.)  No comprehensive, liar-proof studies have yet been undertaken to quantify steroid use among cops, but there is a flood of anecdotal evidence.  And some authorities have proposed a link between the use of performance-enhancing drugs and aggression or unprovoked rage (AKA "'roid rage").  (Remember that the next time Officer Friendly pulls you over.)  Note also the widespread accounts of sexual assaults commited by police.  (See this, this and this.)

The police response to the exposure of such symptoms of dysfunction falls into one of two categories.  First, there's the attempt to excuse such behavior by protesting that police work is inherently very dangerous, and that police are just reacting to the stress that naturally comes with the job.  However, a look at actual statistics reveals a very different story.  According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund Preliminary 2014 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Report, there were 126 law enforcement fatalities in the United States in 2014.  Of these, 62 fatalities were the direct result of "felonious incidents," while traffic accidents claimed 49 officers.  27 officers died of other causes, including 24 heart attack deaths.  However, there are now more than 900,000 sworn police officers in the U.S.  You do the math, but when I did, I found that a police officer has less than one chance in 10,000 of being killed by a criminal in the U.S.  Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not even list police work among the occupations with the highest fatal work injury rates in 2013.  So we can't blame dysfunctional policing on the "inherently dangerous and stressful" nature of police work, because there really isn't much danger - especially if a police officer is not a hothead or loose cannon.

The second response to dysfunction is to try to cover it up, to sweep things under a fraternal rug of police secrecy.  This is an inherent part of police culture.  Many of the links I have cited, including especially the links to scholarly PDF's, document the ways in which secretive, fraternal police culture is a huge impediment to dealing with problems like substance abuse and domestic violence among the police.  The very culture which is created to shield police from the repercussions of their actual mission prevent police from being held to account when they harm people outside of their actual mission.  The very mindset created to enable police to carry out their actual mission in American society is so powerful that it can't be easily turned off or toned down by police once they are off duty.

What is the actual mission of American police?  Again, I will cite M. Scott Peck and People of the Lie.  In the chapter titled, "My Lai: An Examination of Group Evil," Peck describes the American soldiers who carried out the 1968 My Lai massacre as a self-selected group of "specialists".  They were self-selected in that they were all in Vietnam during a time in which Americans who fought in the Vietnam war were all volunteers.  My Lai happened in 1968, over a year and a half before President Nixon instituted the draft in order to supply fresh American combatants to Vietnam.  They were specialized in their training and mission, which was to kill and destroy Vietnamese people who did not want America in Vietnam.  They were under stress, being in a foreign country many of whose citizens were at best ambivalent toward American involvement, and finding themselves part of a larger military machine which was beginning to suffer serious failures as a result of failing to grasp the realities of the situation on the ground in Vietnam in 1968.  Their specialization had been deliberately engineered by their superiors to make them cold-bloodedly destructive, to make them regress to childish reliance on the approval of those superiors, and to insulate them from seeing the larger picture of what they were doing to those human beings targeted as "the enemy" by their superiors.

In this, these soldiers were very much like the typical members of a police force, of whom Peck wrote, "One does not become a policeman by accident.  It is only because particular kinds of people want to become policemen that they apply for the job in the first place.  A young man of lower-middle-class origins who is both aggressive and conventional, for instance, would be quite likely to seek a position on the force..."  Of such specialized groups as volunteer soldiers and police officers, Peck writes, "From these examples, we can discern three general principles...First, the specialized group inevitably develops a group character that is self-reinforcing.  Second, specialized groups are...prone to narcissism...Finally, the society at large...employs specific types of people to perform its specialized roles..."    One of those specialized roles is to attack those who are different from the idealized image of society at large which is promoted by the leaders of society.  For those who differ from that idealized image pose an intolerable threat to that image by their mere existence.   Peck says, "Evil ...[is] the use of political power to destroy others for the purpose of defending or preserving one's sick self."  That is why police in McKinney, Texas threatened to use deadly force against a pool party of African-American pre-adolescent girls last month.  That is why one newly graduated police cadet said that he would have shot the girls had he been present.  But if you are reading this and you are not Black or Latino, do you think you're safe?  Consider the 70-year old White woman who was slammed face-first into the ground by a Florida policeman.  The police in America have turned into one of the outworkings of the damnation of this country.

Resilience Counterpunches

Many of my recent posts have chronicled the bad news that is the unraveling of the mainstream American psyche, and the ways in which certain elements of mainstream America are taking out their dysfunction on minorities and people of color.  But all is not bad news.  In minority communities, there is a growing awareness of steps which these communities can take to become more resilient.  I'll give just two examples. 

First, there is the educational clinic about which I wrote several months ago.  I am one of the tutors for that clinic.  We (the tutors) are planning a solar energy science activity for the kids at the apartment complex we visit.  Specifically, we are planning to build solar ovens.  Our aim is to provide enough materials so that kids from five or six households can construct the ovens.  As for the ovens, they are not just some science-fair craft that is good for nothing more than melting chocolate.  Rather, these ovens will be the real deal, capable of cooking some serious food.  The design for these ovens was invented by Maria Telkes, an appropriate technology pioneer of the 20th century.  We obtained the design for the ovens from Engineers Without Borders.  We are planning to build the ovens over four sessions with the kids.  Next to their apartment complex is a large vacant lot with plenty of sunshine where they can try the ovens out.  I'll try to take and post some pictures or video of the project as it progresses.  We will also teach the kids the theory of operation of the ovens and use that teaching to further strengthen their math skills.

Second, there is the Detroit Water Brigade, a grassroots organization which has arisen in response to the Detroit city government shutoff of water to tens of thousands of Detroit residents.  Not only is the Detroit Water Brigade involved in providing water bill assistance and collection of drinking water, but they are also teaching residents the basics of rainwater harvesting.  Such efforts are geared toward enabling large numbers of Detroit residents to adapt to life without a utility system which is not only aging and increasingly unreliable, but which has been turned into a weapon against them.  If anyone wants to help, you can send donations to them, or to the Detroit Water Project.

I am sure that there are many other initiatives springing up, but I haven't had time to research them all.  As I hear of them, I will keep you all posted.  Stay tuned...

A Replacement for the "War On Drugs"?

I found out this week that two Georgia women have recently been charged with violations of newly enacted state statutes restricting abortion.  One of the women was the woman who had the abortion; the other was a nurse who allegedly provided an abortifacient drug to the woman who had the abortion.  In addition, a woman in Indiana was recently sentenced to 40 years in prison (see this also) for allegedly taking an abortifacient drug which resulted in the termination of her pregnancy.  This happened in spite of the fact that the toxicologist for the state where she was tried testified that he could not find evidence of abortion drugs in the woman's system.

Neither of the women charged with aborting their pregnancies is white.

I must confess that upon reading their stories, I was struck by mixed emotions.  In describing those emotions, I think I may wind up writing a post that will offend just about everyone who reads it.  First, however, let me say that as a Christian, I am obliged to follow the orders of my Boss.  His Word says that the unjust taking of a life is murder.  Therefore, I am opposed to abortion.

However, I see another side of the story in the case of Purvi Patel.  Whether you believe abortion is evil or not, if you're a decent human being, you must admit that convicting women of crimes they didn't commit and throwing them in prison for decades afterward is also evil.  The fact that women in certain states are now being threatened with such a prospect is unsettling.  The fact that two women who recently became showcases for this threat are nonwhite is more unsettling.  I am thinking that in the Midwest and the South, the "war on drugs" - currently being de-fanged by the passage of laws in various states which decriminalize drug use - may be replaced by a war on miscarrying women of color - oops, I mean, abortion.  Women of color who miscarry may thus find themselves targets regardless of the circumstances of the miscarriages.

It all makes me think of the following quote from People of the Lie: "[The narcissism of the evil]...is a brand of narcissism so total that they seem to lack, in whole or in part, [the] capacity for empathy...We can see, then, that their narcissism makes the evil dangerous not only because it motivates them to scapegoat others but also because it deprives them of the restraint that results from empathy and respect for others.  In addition to the fact that the evil need victims to sacrifice to their narcissism, their narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims as well.  As it gives them the motive for murder, so it also renders them insensitive to the act of killing.  The blindness of the narcissist to others can extend even beyond a lack of empathy; narcissists may not "see" others at all."  In quoting M. Scott Peck, I realize that I may turn the stomachs of some of those who are familiar with the failings of his private life.  To such I apologetically offer the following suggestion: Regard Mr. Peck in the same way that you might regard the prophet Balaam, or the donkey on which Balaam rode - flawed instruments whom God used to deliver a message that perhaps the messengers had not conceived.  In this quote, Mr. Peck hits it out of the ballpark in describing the role which scapegoats serve for the narcissist.

The current leadership of the American right wing is accurately characterized as narcissistic.  Unable to face their own evil, they look constantly for scapegoats on whom they can project their own dysfunction.  This is seen in the punishments meted out to the scapegoats for their "transgressions" - a kind of justice not meant to restore or to heal, but to destroy.  So if a woman of color has a miscarriage, or even an abortion, the aim of white supremacist justice is not to heal or to restore, but to destroy with draconian punishments - even as the supremacist leaders give themselves a pass for their own evil behavior. 

As they used the "War on Drugs," so the narcissistic elite may use a "war on abortion" as a means of continuing to scapegoat the nonwhite, the non-English, the foreign-born.  And in many parts of the United States, those doing the scapegoating won't even be that sophisticated; they'll simply continue to send the police to storm homes where people of color live, in order to shoot unarmed people of color without cause.  In this year alone, the body count has reached 506 people. In this year alone, an impressive number of murderers in police uniforms have escaped becoming victims of the criminal justice system of which they are a part.  Among them is Joseph Weekley, a Detroit SWAT officer who shot a 7 year old African American girl to death as she was sleeping in bed when he sprayed her house with submachine-gun fire. 

The Demise of The Right Cross

Now we come again to a theme which we have explored in previous posts on this blog, namely, the role and purpose of American civil religion in American narcissism. This week's post will compare that religion with the thing for which it is often mistaken in this country, namely Biblical Christianity. I will be quoting a fair amount of Scripture, and I'll get a bit theologically “heavy” at times, so if some of you feel like bailing out on this post, I'll not take it personally. But hey, you've come along for the ride this far, so why not ride a little more with me? (Some may wonder how my posts of the last several months are related to the original theme of this blog. I'll get around to explaining that sooner or later.)

Let me begin by quoting the New American Standard translation of 1 Peter 1:1 – “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who reside as aliens, scattered...” The King James Bible renders the verse thus: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia,...(etc)” In my opinion, the King James rendering is rather sleepy. The wording of the New American Standard translation is here more evocative: “To those who reside as aliens, scattered...” In other words, a chief characteristic of those whom Peter is addressing is that in the earthly places where these people reside, they reside as aliens – as a people apart, a culture apart. This is a chief characteristic of such people wherever on earth they reside. They are “expatriados” (Spanish, RV 1960 translation), “extranjeros” (foreign, alien) (1 Pedro 2:11), “пришельцам, рассеянным” (1-е Петра 1:1). Among the meanings of рассеянным are “dispersed,” and “broadcast” (as seed). This lines up quite nicely with the way the Lord characterizes His people as seed sown in diverse places in His parable in Matthew 13:24-43, and the way in which the lifestyle of the Lord's people is to be a declaration that they are strangers and pilgrims on earth, as stated in Hebrews 11:13-16.

Thus, those who call themselves Christians are to live as strangers in whatever society they happen to be embedded. They are to seek a Kingdom which is to come, having become citizens of a Kingdom which is not from here (from earth, that is) as it says in John 18:36. This is how the early Church conducted itself in the Roman Empire in the days from the first century until the day that Augustine conferred earthly secular political power on the Church. Note that I did not say that the Church is to have no effect on the society in which it is embedded. Rather, the Church is to have a profound effect, realized by the active doing of good in the larger society.

But according to Scripture, what the Church is not called to do is to try to build an earthly kingdom, using earthly, temporal power or laws to create a “Christian” nation. There are reasons for that, some of which I explored in a post I wrote many moons ago. I'll expand on one of those reasons in today's post.

If the Church is not called to create earthly “Christian” kingdoms by earthly, secular, temporal means, why do so many well-placed American evangelicals insist on trying to “baptize” Uncle Sam? Moreover, where did they get the notion that the United States of America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles? And are those who say they want to “bring the nation back to Christian ideals” saying that they want to take us “back” to a place where we've never been?

If you try to find the roots of the “Christian” principles on which this nation was founded, you will find that a fair number of the Founding Fathers were not orthodox fundamentalist Christians.  Thomas Jefferson is a notable example of a non-fundamentalist, and late in his life he published a book titled, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, in which he removed all references to the supernatural or the Divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In fact, Jefferson valued Christ only for His teachings and believed that the writers of the New Testament were ignorant and superstitious men. Jefferson was also on friendly terms with Joseph Priestly, the founder of Unitarianism.  A solid majority of the Founding Fathers were against the use of the state to impose any religious creed, dogma or observance on the citizens of the United States.  (See this and this.)  Many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, and a significant minority of the generals and statesmen of early America were Freemasons.

It can thus be argued that in the early United States, there was very little effort made to cast this nation as a “Christian” nation. There are a few notable exceptions when it comes to those whom the nation wished to venerate as heroes. For instance, a number of larger-than-life stories about George Washington were the fabrications of a man named Mason Weems , whose account of Washington has been thoroughly debunked by a number of historians. It can also be argued that the United States of the 1800's was certainly “Christ-haunted” (but in a way that even Flannery O'Connor  might not have imagined), yet certainly not Christian in the main. Later in the 19th century, there were efforts by denominational leaders to make the government and tokens of the United States more explicitly “Christian.” Thus, during the Civil War, the words, “In God We Trust” were added to American currency, among other minor victories.

But a Princeton historian argues that it was not until the early decades of the 20th century that religious activists in the United States really began a concerted push to cast the United States as a “Christian” nation. In his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Kevin Kruse  argues that the notion of the United States as a Christian nation founded on Christian principles was the product of an intense marketing and propaganda effort on the part of big businessmen and government figures from the 1930's onward, to produce a perception in a nation suffering the effects of the greed of these authority figures that patriotism was the same thing as godliness. They used religion as a weapon to stave off the welfare state (and to protect the wealthy from having to give up some of their riches to help the poor). In the process they enlisted prominent religious figures such as Billy Graham and prominent denominations whose de facto interest lay in maintaining a certain social and political status quo.

In the process, American fundamentalism (and the American evangelicalism into which it later evolved) became a sort of loosely organized, fractious, yet de facto state church. This state church performed (and still performs) many of the same functions historically performed by state churches in European history, namely, to bless, sanction and promulgate the imperial ambitions of the secular state that supports it. (You may not know this, but during World War 1, religious leaders in both Germany and England goaded their populations to slaughter – Germany with its “Gott strafe England!” and the Anglican Church with its calls for a “holy war.”)

As with all state churches, therefore, the current American evangelical church is called “Christian,” but does not look like 1 Peter 1:1. (If you bring me an animal that can't climb trees, but does howl at emergency vehicles, lifts its hind leg when relieving itself, barks and chases postal workers, should I believe you if you tell me it's a cat?) The American evangelical church has become merely another weapon of those who strive for secular earthly power. As a young adult, I once read a science fiction novel by Larry Niven in which one of two men in a brawl picked up a cat and attempted to use it as a weapon against the other man by swinging it at the other man's head. So Christianity and the Bible are being used today in the United States by people who want to maintain a last vestige of earthly supremacy, as they were used to build that supremacy and hegemony in the first place – sometimes by missionaries who were spies and servants of the earthly empires which sent them (see this and this and this for instance), and sometimes by missionaries who preached to conquered natives the duty of turning the other cheek and of not looking for rewards in this earthly life while the missionaries celebrated every holiday of their home countries in which their home countries refused to turn the other cheek.

To see the way in which American evangelicalism has become a dog whistle for those who seek earthly supremacy, we need look no further than the most recent evangelical scandal which has blown up like ordnance cooking off in a fire. Let me introduce you to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their nineteen children. They are a wealthy white family who are part of a couple of rather wacky “Christian” movements in the United States, one of which is the Quiverfull movement and the other of which is the “Christian Patriarchy” movement. I'll leave it to you to look up the information on these movements, but I'll summarize them as movements led by men who want to restore white male privilege and domination over family life, and ultimately over both the United States and the world – “all for Jesus, of course!” Jim Bob is also actively involved in Arkansas state politics.

One characteristic of the leaders of such movements is that they always hold themselves and their families up as models of people who have done everything right, who have followed all the rules, and who therefore have earned the right to demand that the rest of us submit to them. So Jim Bob and Michelle used their family and their religious profession as a weapon, to the point of insinuating themselves onto network television with a “reality” TV series called “19 Kids and Counting,” which began airing on 19 September 2008. The only trouble with the series (and with their perfect image) is that in 2002 and 2003, their eldest son Josh molested (or is that sexually assaulted?) a number of underage girls, and that the Duggar family covered this up with the help of the Arkansas state police. Josh also sued the Arkansas DHS in 2007 to block their investigation of these incidents. And in 2013, Josh became the executive director of the legislative action arm of the Family Research Council, a conservative “Christian” organization founded by James Dobson.

Now I don't intend to get on a soap box to denounce Josh Duggar's sin. We are all sinful. But what really makes me angry is the way in which this hypocrite and his hypocritical family continue to try to use their religion as a weapon in what is actually very much like a barroom brawl, just as the cat was used in the story I mentioned. The de facto state church of America is a hypocritical entity composed of people who use religion to try to secure earthly dominion for themselves, yet they can't keep their own rules. They love the doctrine of justification by faith when they can apply it to themselves, but they reject the need of personal repentance in the same way that children will sometimes refuse meat and vegetables in order to chow down on dessert. But they are quite willing to shove all sorts of rules and obligations down the throats of the people over whom they wish to exercise dominion – among whom are all nonwhite people and all women.

The trouble for them is that they are now in decline.  (See this and this.) Their leaders would say that this is because they haven't been effective in communicating their message, but they might want to consider that the reason is that they don't practice what the Good Book preaches. They are not the salt of the earth. They are unwilling to repent of their own greed and selfishness; therefore, they are unable to call a nation to repentance over its greed and selfishness – greed and selfishness manifested in oppression of the poor, the foreign-born, the non-white, the citizens of other nations; oppression also manifested in the endless calls to war so that the United States can “liberate” property (land and natural resources) which rightfully belongs to people other than Americans while destroying the earth with its outlandish per capita consumption. In short, American evangelicals have become distasteful people to be around. Thus their children are choosing to separate from them and their religion.

But this does not mean that the true Church is in decline or in trouble, or that Christianity is about to disappear from the United States. Rather, the immigrant church is quite strong here. And immigrant Christians, especially those from poorer countries, are much quicker than many American evangelicals to remember what it means to be a stranger and a pilgrim. Therefore, they have much to teach us. One immigrant Christian, a man named Soong-Chan Rah, wrote a book with a rather provocative title, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity.  His book caused a bit of narcissistic injury among some American evangelical leaders, but that's okay, they'll get over it.

If you are thinking of going to church tomorrow, you might therefore try out an immigrant church. Many of them have headphones and translators for English-speaking visitors. The Hispanic churches are friendly and welcoming, as are the Karen (Myanmar) churches. The Vietnamese churches can also be quite welcoming. The Ethiopian (Oromo) churches are good, although they can be very, VERY LOUD!!! (Dude, step away from the mic!) If you go to a Russian or Slavic church, they are more formal, so be sure to dress in your Sunday best, because for them, Church Is Serious. When you go, be sure to listen for the differences in worldview which exist between their preachers and the vast majority of American evangelical preachers. You'll be intrigued.