A Kind of Republican You Will No Longer Find: Example 1

On the day that I am posting this, Donald Trump is visiting Tulsa for his first big rally leading up to the 2020 Election. VP Mike Pence is going to wander around Greenwood, the district in Tulsa where, 99 years ago, whites massacred blacks and destroyed one of the most prosperous black communities in the United States. Pence, an evangelical Christian, is going to meditate on how wonderful a peacemaker and reconciler Trump is, and how all black people should love Him no matter what He says or does. Thus far, as of two hours ago, no violence has erupted, despite the expectations of the white racists that blacks would massacre white people or at least destroy their businesses. Al Sharpton spoke at a rally last night, but the associated demonstrations were peaceful and positive—a Juneteenth celebration of black progress, rather than a violent blast against ongoing white racism. I will keep you posted about what happens next.

(Photo from Radio KWGS website)

There are many moderate Republicans who are ashamed of Trump, but Trump is such a powerful voice of hatred that these moderate Republicans maintain their silence and fall in line behind Him.

But this has not always been the case. There was a time when the Republican Party was not as full of hatred as it is today. I have fond memories of Republicans who, even though I now believe they were wrong, were constructive. I will share their stories with you in the next two essays.

When I was in fifth grade, it became abundantly clear to me that I needed glasses. The teacher wrote test questions on the board for us to answer, and I could not read them, nor would the teacher allow me to approach the board. A straight-A student, I was a little upset, though my final grade was hardly affected by it.

I got my glasses in sixth grade. The optometrist who examined me and prescribed them was James O. Miller of Exeter, California. I almost immediately revered him. He was a practitioner, not a scientist, but he found all aspects of science fascinating. He got most of it from a little magazine, The Griffith Observer, published by the Griffith Observatory, to which Miller was drawn by his interest in optics. Dr. Miller explained everything to me, even though I was just a little kid. He drew a diagram to show me what caused my nearsightedness (the focus from the lens was not on the retina). In a larger measure than I probably realize, he set me on the path of becoming a scientist.

Dr. Miller was a staunch Republican back in the days when Richard Nixon was running for president and Ronald Reagan was governor of California. One of my eye checkup appointments was during the 1968 Republican convention. He had the radio on in his office, and his assistant, as instructed, told him who the VP nominee was. He had never heard of Spiro Agnew. (Have you?) Miller was also what we would today call a Quiverfull Christian. He had so many kids that they had their own basketball team. I am not making this up. He joined bus trips to Sacramento to lobby for conservative causes. I was on one of those buses with him.

But his Christian views would be almost unrecognizable by modern evangelicals. Like Loren Wilkinson in a previous essay, Dr. Miller considered everything in the natural world to be joyous evidence of God and something that Christians should protect and cherish. Most modern evangelicals consider the Gaia Hypothesis to be paganism, but when Dr. Miller told me about it, he said, “I never saw such clear evidence of God in my life.” Christians like Miller are now rare, or at least obscure.

James Miller died of a sudden heart attack while he was jogging. He was enjoying health and nature until the last moment.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part five. The Political Cynic.

I grew up hearing about the lofty ideals of democracy, as enshrined in the American Constitution. I grew up thinking that politicians were actually statesmen who really wanted to do the right thing for their fellow citizens, who entrusted them with leadership. As incredible as it may sound, I actually believed this when I was a kid. It was not hard to feel this way. I first became aware of the world during the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I remember where I was when the news of his assassination was broadcast. I was a first-grader, who heard it from the sixth-graders in my elementary school. I ran home for lunch and my mom confirmed the news. In upcoming years, I listened to recordings of Kennedy’s speeches, and they were very stirring. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That’s the most famous line. But even better is this one: “Here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.” His assassination made me revere political leaders even more, since the official story (which nobody really believes anymore) was that the assassination was entirely conceived by a deranged man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

And I still revere Kennedy, even though revelations have come out since his death about some bad things he did, such as cheating on his wife. Even during the Vietnam War, I trusted our politicians to be telling the truth that North Vietnamese communism really was a threat to world peace and that we had to stop it, sort of, advance and retreat, advance and retreat, in which corporations that supplied the military got very rich over a war that seemed to never end and which was supported by an endless supply of federal dollars and conscripted lives.

Then came Watergate. I had been enthusiastic about Nixon, and I felt betrayed. I felt good about Gerald Ford, who took his place (the only president to not have been elected), because he projected an image of being clean. He said, “The national nightmare is over.” In Japan, which I visited about the time Ford took office, they referred to Gerald Ford as “Mr. Clean,” because Ford did resemble a little bit the white white white janitor on the cleaning supply boxes and bottles.

The presidency of Jimmy Carter was almost boring because of its lack of scandal. To this day, Carter remains about the only clean politician of which most of us can think. Then came Ronald Reagan, who inspired everyone with his words, but then did whatever the hell he wanted to, whether it was legal or not. He sold armaments to Iran, whom he had labeled an enemy of freedom, in order to get money to supply to “Contra” terrorists in Nicaragua so that they could kill civilians. Reagan once said, “I don’t like having to consult a committee of 545 every time I want to do something.” This committee, of course, was Congress, and he was required to obey them by this little tiny document that you may have heard of, the Constitution.

The rest of the story you probably know. I have filled in the 1960s through 1980s for my younger readers. Particularly noteworthy was the administration of George W. Bush, which was so filled with conservative corruption that John W. Dean (a Republican and Watergate whistleblower) wrote a book about it, Conservatives without Conscience. (Donald Trump recently called Dean a rat.)

It is even worse today. Not just the corruption, which we have always had, except for brief shining Camelot moments. But today the powerful conservatives are leading America in a direction of totalitarianism, and even a revival of respect for Nazis. Dean quotes Professor Bob Altemeyer: “If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that [Nazi sympathizer] David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state.” White supremacist Richard Spencer was taken seriously by Steve Bannon, who was the national security advisor for Donald Trump. Trump said that the white supremacists in Charlottesville and the diverse people who protested against them both deserved equal respect and equal blame, even though the only person killed was a young woman, by a car driven very fast into a crowd by a white supremacist. Trump said that the Congressmen who had not clapped for him at his State of the Union address were committing“treason.”  The link is to the Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, to show that Trump’s outrageous statement was taken seriously overseas.

In the political arena, then, it appears that the facts support a cynical point of view on the national level. On the state level (I live in Oklahoma), the legislature for a long time refused to allow public school teachers to receive a living wage, and instead of trying to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, they spend their time trying to enact creationist laws. The purpose of the state of Oklahoma, they think, is to make oil companies more profitable, even if it means the poverty and disease of the state residents. Is it any different in your state? Probably not.

I think I have made my point: cynicism is the only realistic summary of the political world. There is probably nothing you can reasonably imagine that can even come close to the reality of that world, only a little bit of whose corruption is visible to outsiders.

Clearly, the momentum of politics right now is toward Trump demanding, and getting, personal adoration. And slightly fewer than half of Americans are eager to give it to Him.

But we can’t stop on such a depressing note. Otherwise you will be exactly like the miserable man I described in an earlier essay. But knowledge is power. As a cynic, you know that politics is thoroughly corrupt. The practical result is that you know it is hopeless, utterly hopeless, to try to solve any of our major problems by working through existing political channels. At least, cynicism can keep you from wasting a lot of time and resources, only to get your heart stomped into a quivering mass of protoplasm on the Rotunda floor. Find something else to do to make the world better. But, as a good cynic, you should not expect any of your efforts to make a difference in the end.

This will leave you lots of time to do things that make the world better and that you enjoy. I mean, WWGCD? What would George Carlin do? Take, for example, the fact that Trump used a ceremony that supposedly honored the Navaho Code Talkers as a chance to insult both liberals and Native Americans by calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and by holding the ceremony right underneath the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who broke the law in order to steal Native American land in the 1830s. What can you do in the face of such an insult from the highest office in the land? Humor, of course. A political cartoonist depicted a Native American saying to Trump, “You could learn a thing or two from us. We know how to run casinos that don’t go bankrupt.”

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part five.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates. The third is that the Bible calls for the oppression of women, which facilitates criminal violence toward women.

All of Sparks’s claims rest upon one assumption: that Christian fundamentalists have a significant effect on the way our nation and government operate. The news, every day, gives evidence of this. But Sparks refers specifically to Christian nationalism, the Christians who believe that the United States is God’s special nation today. But is this view reflected in the general opinion of Americans today?

Apparently, the answer is, yes. A generalized poll asked people from several countries if they thought their culture was superior to others. Forty-nine (49) percent of Americans agreed, much higher than the 27 percent of French who thought French culture to be superior to others. We believe in our national superiority more than any other country does about theirs.

Christian nationalists also believe that, without God—indeed without their particular version of God—you cannot have morality. The poll results including the following, in agreement with the claim that you have to be religious to be moral:

            United States: 49 percent

            Germany: 47 percent

            U.K.: 33 percent

            Spain: 19 percent

            France: 15 percent

Is this correlation or causation? If causation, then it means that Americans think themselves superior to others, and think that religion is necessary for morality, and that these patterns are caused by our overwhelming percentage of Christian citizens. While we cannot know if it is causation, it is very clear that Christian fundamentalists are trying their best to make it causation.

The fact that the Bible Belt states have high levels of crime and poverty may also be an example of correlation without causation. It would be difficult to prove that fundamentalist Christianity makes such states as Oklahoma, where I live, so poor and crime-ridden. Is it possible, instead, that people in depressed southern states turn to religion as a solace for their problems? But one thing is clear: fundamentalism has not made these states richer or better places to live.

And within America, it is the most religious presidents, based on church attendance and professed belief, that have been the most socially immoral. Sparks identifies Nixon, Johnson, and George W. Bush as very religious. All three of them used false information to justify American military action. An exception is Jimmy Carter, who is very devout. As commentators have pointed out, he is 200 years old and still building houses for poor people. But Carter is the one president that Christian fundamentalists hate the most.

This is nothing new. Andrew Jackson read his Bible daily, attended church, but as any Native American can tell you, he was an evil man. He defied the Constitution to drive away natives from their homelands. His religious views made him very happy to be a slaveholder, unlike the agonized Jefferson who wished he could free his slaves.

Sparks could not have guessed how bad it would get. Christian fundamentalists virtually worship Donald Trump, who put a painting of Andrew Jackson up in the Oval Office.

Sparks presented numerous specific hypotheses regarding the Christianity-crime connection. I was expecting her to present figures and tables to test those hypotheses. She presented numerous references, but I would like to have seen numbers to back up the hypotheses.

Sparks concludes that there is no point in arguing with fundamentalists. They believe that the process of reasoning is ungodly. And, especially in the Trump era, their power is increasing. They are polarizing themselves from all the rest of us deliberately and strongly. They present themselves as being a persecuted minority. They are doing this specifically to destroy any possibility of dialog: you cannot reason with or show compassion to your persecutor. This means, I believe, that under the right circumstances fundamentalists will burst forth in violence.

I hope Elicka Peterson Sparks and I are wrong, but fear that we are not.

An Easter Message

Happy Easter, everybody, believer and skeptic alike. To Christians, Easter is a time to proclaim the victory of specific doctrinal beliefs. To those of us of a more general spirituality, it is a time to reaffirm the (at least temporary) victory of life over death.

But let me tell you one thing the Easter story is not. It is not a time to proclaim the unassailable rectitude of the Republican Party. If Jesus rose, it was His victory, not that of Republicans.

This seems so obvious that you may wonder why I need to say it. Let me tell you a memory from about 1973. I was a high school kid reading the Letters to the Editor section of the Fresno Bee newspaper. One letter told the story of how the crowds praised Jesus as he entered Jerusalem, and within a few days they were calling for His death. The writer then drew a comparison between Jesus and Richard Nixon. Americans, the writer said, praised Nixon when he won his 1972 election as president. Then, within a little more than a year, they were turning against him because of the Watergate scandal. The writer said that people turning against Nixon was just as unreasonable and unholy as people turning against Jesus.

This really happened. You can’t make stuff like this up.