Political Fundamentalism and The Holy War Within Our Boundaries
In light of the President’s chaotic and anarchistic leadership through this last year, those who voted for him and who still support the thinking of the current administration seem to have suspended their understanding of American democracy in favor of something apparently more attractive. They are buying the con – bullshit coated in the same sort of primal sugar that hooks a six-year old into believing in heaven, hell, sin and salvation for the eternity of their lives.
And with what these supporters believe, they are fundamentalist in their grounding. That is, like religious fundamentalism, their thinking has self-imposed constraints that protect their beliefs and biases in the face of oppositional evidence and exposed deception. Because around 80 percent of Republicans support Trump, I will speak of Republicans as if they all fit the profile I’m referring to here. Please forgive me for this generalization.
Republicanism has become a religion. It is a faith-based religion, relying on faith in a Savior which requires suspension of reliance on evidence of fact, and is based on the myth of salvation, meaning that followers believe they will be saved from some sort of intolerable future. Conversion to this religion requires believing that the threat of such an intolerable future exists, similar to the way Evangelicals believe in Hell.
Thus, to get people to become believers and followers, the Savior has provided them with a clear and simple definition of that intolerable future, and in his role in saving them from it. He paints the picture of their country coming apart at the seams, and promises, in exchange for faith in him, to “drain the swamp”. He describes a future where the country is overrun with rapists and people who are more animal than human. He shoves listeners faces closer to the fire of a future where those animals take all the jobs away from we who built this country. His depiction of this intolerable future goes on and on, in detail and over time, in daily tweets and in actions that depict heroic bravery, albeit either not supported by reality, or actually horrific in impact.
To make it easy for people to become believers, he delineates an “us” and “them”. Clearly, the “us” are the good and right ones; the “them” are animals. For these Republicans, the “us” is white, Christian, well-off to relatively rich, conservative, Republican, and of course American. Anyone who is not those things is “them”, and provides the basis for the threat of some sort of intolerable future.
Trump is the Savior to the Republicans. Evangelicals turn the other cheek to his moral improprieties and dismantling of democracy because he feeds their faith by the promise of his policies. Republicans believe anything and everything he says and listen for clues between the lines for deeper principles of truth that support their need for salvation. If Trump calls immigrants animals, his followers believe all immigrants are animals. If he calls Muslims terrorists, his followers believe all Muslims are terrorists.
Religions give people permission to act in accord with their beliefs. They can be righteous, arrogantly so, can be elitist the way those of just about any religion can prefer being with and doing business with those who are of their religion and share their beliefs. They can feel justified in being bigoted, racist, nationalist, and intolerant of those who don’t fit the definition of “us”. They can say what they want, even if it represents a throwback in evolution, as long as it is in alignment with the Savior’s apparent values and obvious style.
Christianity, itself, was likely based on “fake news”, on hear-say. Yes, I can imagine word got out that there was a guy who walked on water, healed the sick, got the blind to see, brought back the dead, and came back from the dead, himself. And I can imagine, as one person passed the stories on to another, added to it was something like “how can you not believe he is the ‘Messiah’ given that this guy did all that?” Hear-say. Hear-say versus heresy. There were only a handful of people who had direct experience of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether those people actually witnessed Jesus doing “miracles” or not, people believed what they wanted to believe, influenced by a nice package consisting of the possibility of salvation and the power of entertainment – the drama of the stories – similar to how Trump entrances believers with his theatrics, hypocritical admonishment of the money-changers and power-brokers, and 4th-grade playground nicknaming of his adversaries. History is a map of the terrain of ignorance through time. There are those who thrive on misdirecting and manipulating, and those who thrive on being misdirected and manipulated.
While theology offers critical thinking about religions and religious beliefs, religious thinking is not an expression of intelligence. A difficulty in our current situation of Republicans seeing through the lens of their religious trance is two-fold: You can’t argue with ignorance and you can’t argue with people of faith. As a psychotherapist, I find it helpful to ask myself when I’m working with a client, at what age is this client’s behavior appropriate? This leads to a third difficulty: You can’t argue with the logic of a child. While these Trumpsters think they’re being saved, their Divine Parent may be assuring that all of us on the planet are going to hell in a hand basket.
© Jim Lehrman 2018, Paonia CO