Print this post.July 3, 2011
Editor’s Prefatory Note:
Buster Keaton as a doughboy who singlehandedly apprehends a German battalion in WWI. The feat is reminiscent of Sgt. York's true exploits in the Great War. America's participation in the Great War, and Woodrow Wilson's prominent role in the conclusion of hostilities, served to confirm the emergent role of the United States as an ambitious world power. Religion has served to sell Americans their country's imperial adventures, but it is capitalism' inexorable dynamic that has really dictated the policy.
As a former influential fundamentalist, the author of this essay, Frank Schaeffer, certainly knows what he’s talking about, but some of his assumptions are a bit too linear, like a file of dominoes, to be taken at face value. Perhaps this is an instance of taking the logic of events to absurd lengths. For example, was the religiosity of a priggish Woodrow Wilson, who sent enough “doughboys” to tip the scales in WWI, the decisive factor in making Germany more amenable to seeking peace with the Russians, and thereby facilitating the overthrow of the Czar? Germany desperately needed peace with the Russians to concentrate its forces on the Western front, so Lenin was trusted to deliver a prompt peace, even if that entailed revolution, but the Czarist regime was in its last legs anyhow. History moves in complex ways, apparently far more complex than Schaeffer would admit.
Of course, there’s no doubt that dumb religiosity (is there any other kind?) has been and continues to be the bane of America from inception, a highly toxic miasma that by semi-conscious manipulation has now evolved into a form of self-idolatry. As well, there’s little doubt about the damage done to humanity by religion, so it’s undeniable that the nations that have the most religion-driven governments are also likely to enter into many conflicts that perhaps could have been avoided by conventional diplomacy. But, while the record of religion—always interwoven with the intrigues of princes— as a factor in baleful human affairs is horrendous until the arrival of modernity, it is also clear that some of the nations that have contributed the most to the bloody messes of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries were (and are) predominantly secular entities.
Who can doubt in this frame of reference the long shadow of bloody imperialist meddling cast by Britain—a coldly pragmatic nation—during most of the 19th century, a role repeated and amplified by the US in the 20th and beyond? As well, was Germany, one of the main “disturbers” of the colonial status quo established by Britain and France and chief cause of international mischief –the initiator of two world wars–in the last 100 years, a collectivity driven by fanatical religiosity? A bloodless burgher’s religiosity can hardly be seen as the overriding force behind such grand mobilizations. Instead, we may posit that the real religion of Germany was, and perhaps still is, a stubborn form of imperial nationalism, the thinking of itself as a “master race” preordained to rule the world, something akin to Israel’s ancient notion of “the chosen people”, a terrain of chauvinist vanity where America, even without factoring religion, weighs in as an all-time sensational contender.
In the end we could argue the chief flaw in Frank Schaeffer’s argument is the almost total absence of class analysis to explain history. For while it is perfectly possible to read on the surface of world events the fingerprints of religion in the course of global human misery since at least the 16th century (vide expansionist Catholic Spain, for example), the undercurrents impelled by class forces—in our time the dynamics of the global ruling capitalist class—are the real motor of history. This, Schaeffer certainly doesn’t touch..
Ironically, a fact that suggests a strong connection between class-rooted self-interest and war is the trajectory of non-capitalist nations during the last century and a half. For while the British, French, and finally Americans repeatedly invaded on flimsy pretext some nations literally a world away from their shores, and, in the case of America, cynically surrounded their main ideological adversaries with forward military outposts capable of nuclear attack, neither the Soviets nor China—reputed by their ideological enemies to have the equivalents of “state religions”— ever launched a war of aggression, per se, and to a fair mind, their incursions into other nations’ territories followed a logic of legitimate self-defense..The Soviet Union, as is well documented, had the highest casualty rate in World War II, 26 million, surely an all-time historical record, not to mention the destruction of much of its painfully built infrastructure. To visualize the devastation, it helps to acknowledge that the death toll virtually wiped out the equivalent populations of both Texas and California at the time. Within that frame of reference the American reader should ask: How paranoid would WE be if we had undergone a devastation of THAT mind-boggling magnitude? If we have unleashed practically a police state and rain death on a lengthening list of hapless nations after the loss of less than 3,000 victims on 9/11 (an attack that some have argued we richly deserved given the sheer perfidy of our foreign policy), what kind of neurotic hyperdefensive aggressive posture would the United States have embraced in the wake of the kind of losses suffered by the Soviet Union? Out of sheer decency, should we not admit that the Soviets—keenly aware of the capitalist West’s nonstop intrigue to topple their revolutionary process—and the horrid cost of WWII were justified in setting up a buffer zone? In fact, although we have a de facto buffer zone in the providential existence of two much weaker powers on our borders, a strategic blessing further reinforced by the US mainland being essentially “an island” impregnable to classical landmass invasions, we still maintain a war apparatus far larger than that of all nations on earth combined, and dot the map with insidious bases that not even the Pentagon can count..In sum, this is an interesting and provocative essay (hence we publish it), but mainly because it correctly points to America and Israel, two utterly self-righteous nations, as dangerous sources of contemporary conflagrations, and the only nations, along with their NATO accomplices, to wage brutal wars of aggression (with impunity, so far…). So when you read this piece, keep in mind that the overall analysis, seductive and well grounded at times, also suffers from the weaknesses outlined above.—Patrice Greanville
The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a “chosen” people is the root of almost all our troubles. The earth bursts with life. Far right exclusionary religion bursts with death. If there is a creator of life He/She/It must hate fundamentalist religion.
The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and/or those whose identity is most religion-based, are the world’s greatest troublemakers. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and the state of Israel come to mind.
If the rest of the human race could find a time machine to roll back the clock and make a world where these countries/city states had never existed we’d live in a better world. Just take one example of religion’s baleful influence: President Woodrow Wilson’s messianic religion-inspired intervention in World War One. “My life would not be worth living” Wilson wrote, “if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple.” (Letter to Nancy Toy, 1915.)
Wilson’s religious views were the driving force in his political career, informing his quest for world peace. And like all fanatics he decided to achieve this “peace” through war. The devout Woodrow Wilson upset fellow Presbyterians as he moved the nation toward entering World War One, including William Jennings Bryan, who quit as secretary of state in protest.
What did Wilson’s religious idealism actually achieve? Germany’s loss of World War One led to the rise of Hitler, and the Second World War. Wilson picked sides between two equally tarnished nationalistically-inspired colonial contenders and weighed in. So Wilson set the stage for the rise of Hitler and World War Two. With no World War Two there would be no Israel because there would have been no holocaust. Zionism would have simply become a forgotten quirk. And there would have been no Cold War either, maybe not even a Soviet Union.
The twentieth century began with wars rooted in religion and nationalism and ended as the century of wars rooted in ideological atheism led by the likes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Now the twenty first century seems to be shaping up to be the age of renewed wars of religion led by fundamentalist fanatics on all sides who believe in the divine destinies of their nations and/or religions.
These fanatics – they are all of the far right – have ranged from the Ayatollah Khomeinito George W Bush, from the far right leaders of the state of Israel to far right American fundamentalist like Michelle Bachmann who – if she and her fellow travelers have their way – would replace the Constitution and Bill of Rights with the Bible and turn America into a (Reconstructionist) theocracy.
The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a “chosen” people is the root of almost all our troubles. So is the lunacy of believing in “Truth” revealed through one special prophet to one special peoples and/or tribe, be they Jews, Muslims or American Evangelical Christians, or conservative Roman Catholics who believe in the special primacy of their popes.
Eliminate willful self-serving tribal religious delusion from the globe and there might be hope for the survival of the human race. Combine tribalism and religious conviction with nukes and the “right” to exploit the earth and disaster looms.
It’s no accident that the most dangerous cultures today are also the most religiously observant societies. The ultra-religiously observant USA embraces perpetual war as a way of life. With our notion of “exceptionalism,” we fear the “other” who might challenge our notion of having been chosen by God for some special task.
Like the USA the state of Israel has become an intransigent provocation to the world as it slides inexorably toward becoming the next apartheid state taking up oppression based on race and tribe where South Africa left off. Israel is the place where a demographic minority of the “chosen” already represses (and/or has expelled) the majority of the “un-chosen.”
As for the ultra religious state of Pakistan it was actually founded on self-aware religious difference! Pakistan is now the leading exporter of terror worldwide alongside Iran. Both Iran and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are the purveyors of terror. And both countries (when not busy condemning people to death for the crime of heresy etc.,) see themselves as having special prophetic religious destinies.
The Saudis – “keepers of the Holy Places” — don’t need nukes because they have oil. They threaten destruction to the rest of us every bit as catastrophic as war by funding terror, not to mention exporting the most intolerant forms of Islam worldwide into tens of thousands of madrassas.
If Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and the USA just went away, or had never existed, and/or changed their essential neuroses and accepted a role of “ordinary” nations filled with just folks or saw their religions as a way, not the way, the world would take a giant step toward peace.
But to admit this, let alone to say it publicly, is to court the condemnation of being anti-Semitic, and/or anti-Islamic, anti-Catholic and/or anti-Christian, even anti-American”…which is a little ironic because the sort of right wing religious Americans who fancy themselves as “pro-American” and “pro-Israel” regularly get our men and women in uniform killed and maimed by starting wars of choice. So who is the patriot here?
Let’s get one thing straight: Iran, the USA, Israel, Pakistan, the Vatican and Saudi Arabia aren’t special, except in the religion-addled brains of the members of their religious right wings and ruling elites. They’re just geographical areas like any others filled with ordinary people like any others, no better and no worse.
Someday these “special” and “chosen” countries will cease to exist as will all nation states. Someday they will not even be remembered because all things pass from time into oblivion, nor will their “holy” books and “holy” places exist forever, simple geology will take care of that. What makes them dangerous today is their shared religious delusion that they are somehow essential and eternal.
The delusion is this: “We’re chosen, special and enlightened, and only we have The Truth.”
Birds of a feather
So it is no coincidence that the USA has a “special” relationship with Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and special “respect” for the Vatican and a soft spot for religion in general, for instance giving religion tax deductions. And thus it is no coincidence we are at war without end.
Certainty is a killer. And tolerance of certainty is, by nature, intolerant when it comes to results.
For instance; we tolerate Zionism and Christian Zionism and so messed with the Middle East, because we picked sides in a religious war and decided to back one “chosen people” (Jews) over another “chosen people” (Muslims). This picking of sides between two equally ridiculous pre-science claims to divine selection is the real — and only — reason for 9/11 and all that’s followed.
America needlessly meddled in a tribal religious Middle Eastern war of religion and has paid and is paying the consequences.
Meanwhile the world’s most pressing problems, from global warming to endless wars relate to the self-“chosen” nations and tribes and countries. Of course China and India et al are involved in global warming too, mostly because they imitated the West. Of course others start wars too. But I’m talking about first causes of war and threatened global destruction.
If and when we’re plunged into capitalist/consumer global ecological destruction chances are future generations – if any – will have right wing fundamentalist religion of all kinds to thank for “justifying” the rape of the earth.
And if and when we’re plunged into an age of nuclear terror, lose Washington DC or New York or London chances are that the fateful moment will be rooted in Middle Eastern/American tribal-religious war. We’ll have the states of Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and/or the USA to blame for putting humanity on a collision course with reality.
The Jews gave us a book that commands the “dominion” of the earth. The Muslims picked up this theme in their book and predicted the dominion of their one and only “true” religion over the earth, a global “caliphate” that — for instance — the Pakistani extremists and Iranian “holy men” in charge of their nukes (or soon to be in charge of their nukes) are working to implement with the same religious ferocity as that displayed by the Israeli “settlers” as they “justify” stealing another Semitic tribe’s land.
Meanwhile along with American Evangelicals, the Vatican still holds out a misogynistic/homophobic vision of “progress” and still claims that it and it alone is God’s special envoy on earth. The very existence of such exclusivist claims – we’ll go to heaven, it’s hell for the rest of you! — is a threat to human survival.
And the United States, the inventor of the bomb, the only country to ever use it, is the granddaddy of the exploitation of the earth in the name of economic growth, as something “given” by God to us as “natural” and “right.” And now we Americans run a worldwide war making machine par excellence, sure that we are the “good guys.”
The Wilsonian ideological perspective –advocacy of “the spread of democracy,” the spread of Capitalism,in favor of intervention to help create “peace” and the “spread freedom,” is rooted in an older religious tradition: we’re special a “city set on a hill.” This insanity goes back to the very religious foundation of the American colonies that were peopled by Calvinist cranks from England and Holland who thought that they were too good, too theologically pure and too “chosen” to co-exist the likes of ordinary folks. So they left those bad folks behind and soon were burning Pequot Indians to death in the name of their Old Testament “God.”
That same intolerant Puritan inheritance drives us today and divides America into “Real Americans” as Sarah Palin calls herself and her followers, and everyone else. This is the “saved” and “lost” model of theology directly applied to politics. Result? We “Real Americans” believe we’re so special that we can and should police the world!
The “holy books” all the religious cultures mentioned here follow are compendiums of Bronze Age tribal self-serving myths, adopted and updated by ignorant tribes in order to try to make sense of their places in the universe pre-science. Today they are the source of war and the rape of the earth.
It’s time to stop being polite about the religions that are motivating the self-deluding right wing Israelis, the self-deluding right wing Saudis and the self-deluding right wing Iranians, Americans and popes. They may all hate each other, but below the surface they all share one dreadful and silly conviction: the unfounded belief that they and they alone (and their tribes) are morally right and that the rest of us are the “other” to be suppressed, converted or sometimes killed. And they all say God is on their side.
If there is a God – I happen to believe there is, but I could be wrong — a creator, a force responsible for the magnificent diversity of nature and human aspiration, then that actual God, by definition, must despise exclusive-type religion and tribalism and the black and white world of “in” or “out” and “saved” and “lost.”
Guessing what God might actually be like by what we see around us, He, She or It is big, generous, non-ideological, wonderful and all encompassing. Just open your eyes to the earth below and heavens above and try to reconcile what you see, hear and feel with petty popes, Ayatollahs and preachers or the books they call “holy”!
If there is no creator (and who can say there is or isn’t?) then nature’s diversity and adaptability is a silent and powerful rebuke to exclusivity. Put it this way; the Rockies don’t know they’re part of an “exceptional” country and the Negev desert doesn’t know it was “given” to anyone! Nor do the sands of Medina know that they’re “holy” much less does the dust of Iran’s “holy city” of Qom know it’s “sacred,” or the plaster under the paint in the Sistine Chapel know it’s “owned” by the Vatican and the “one true church!”
The religions and tribalism of those who threaten the world the most – Iran, the state of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Vatican and the USA — is small, inward looking and backward. It’s time to tell the truth and say that maybe it is possible to love God – if there is such an entity — but it’s not possible to love God and love the sort of tribal exclusionary religions that are taking us all down.
Author’s Bio: Frank Schaeffer is a New York Times best selling author. He is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/fundamentalist childhood, an acclaimed writer who overcame severe dyslexia, a home-schooled and self-taught documentary movie director, a feature film director and producer of four low budget Hollywood features Frank has described as “pretty terrible.” Frank’s nonfiction includes “Keeping Faith-A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps” and AWOL-The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes From Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country.” Frank’s latest book is, “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.”
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3 comments
Thank you for republishing my essay, and your kind words about it. I agree that I left out something very important as you well state here:
“In the end we could argue the chief flaw in Frank Schaeffer’s argument is the almost total absence of class analysis to explain history. For while it is perfectly possible to read on the surface of world events the fingerprints of religion in the course of global human misery since at least the 16th century (vide expansionist Catholic Spain, for example), the undercurrents impelled by class forces—in our time the dynamics of the global ruling capitalist class—are the real motor of history. This, Schaeffer certainly doesn’t touch.”
Of course the far right/Republican union-busting going on right now makes your point again and again. In my new book Sex, Mom and God I say the following re the religious right:
“The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their
“stand” against government had played into the hands of people
who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people
could be sold products. By the twenty-first century, Ma and Pa
No-name were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion is Murder!”
sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some godforsaken
mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and
have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at
Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Koch Industries, Exxon,
and Halliburton who were laughing.”
.
We appreciate Frank’s contributions to a saner and more peaceful world, and we especially distinguish the forcefulness of his assaults on the criminal status quo and the out-and-out Rightwingers who have no shame in proclaiming as desirable some of the most immoral, selfish, and disgusting policies on record. And while many liberals are mealy-mouthed in the defense of socially just policies, Schaeffer is anything but. When it comes to the right thing to do, he has a fire in his belly and he shows it. —The Editors
Schaeffer’s book [Crazy for God] is illuminating about the almost total immersion into fundamentalist doctrine that he received from an extremely strong-willed pair of parents. In the process he overcame many difficulties, including physical issues, and now, in his maturity he has become an agnostic—the signature (IMO) of all true thinking people. His journey from fundamentalist precepts to progressivism is valuable to society as he is nothing if not a fighter for what he believes. Speaking—and I admit—as an independent Marxist, I only wish he did apply Marxian insight to his analyses; they would become doubly effective. In that I think the editor was correct. In any case, I wish him well in his journey of (applied) morality.
Sandor Moreira
Sao Paulo, Bresil