Call It Belief

This isn’t new.  These divergent views of America, rooted in fundamental disagreement about the role of government, our responsibilities toward others, our sense of who is and who isn’t in our tribe — the divisions consuming us now have bedeviled the nation from the beginning.  They exploded the country in the 1860s, but had been threatening it since the founding.¹  Slavery was the embodiment of that divide, but those who say the war was about states’ rights aren’t entirely wrong (it’s when they use that to erase slavery from the equation that they go off the rails).  Because it wasn’t just slavery that the Southern landowners were desperate to protect, it was that whole agrarian myth of self-sufficiency, an aristocracy carefully balanced to insure that they and their kin remained at the top of the pyramid, where God had ordained they belong.  Would war have come anyway, or was something as evil as an economy built on slavery necessary to strike the spark? 

People have always preferred simple, binary explanations, but our twenty year slide into social media as the commons for debating politics and culture has made things immeasurably worse.  Few politicians are complex thinkers to begin with, but now those few are marginalized while the simpletons with clever thumbs dominate the discourse.  And in this age of easy instantaneous communication, everybody gets to play, in ways that were unimaginable forty years ago.  The crank on the barstool, ignorant of history, nursing his beer and complaining about the assholes in the government is now an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers cheering him on.

Every writer knows that as soon as you start to construct sentences, you lie.  You simplify.  You can’t help it.  What you leave out determines the thought as much as what you put in.  So we talk about the “two sides” of our fractious nation and fall into the misconception that slotting individual people into one or the other of the warring camps tells us everything we need to know.  It gives us a playing field on which we can identify our friends and our enemies.  The garish light from that abstraction reveals that our enemies are evil, set out to destroy all that is good about the country that we love.  We erase their individuality so that we can more easily see them as stick figures, allies or targets.  Am I telling you anything you didn’t already know?

I was raised with an allegiance to a particular idea of America.  That the United States is an expansive, welcoming country.  Give me your tired, your poor… We the People use government to accomplish those things that require banding together and pooling resources to achieve things that we believe are important for the benefit of all – it’s a view rooted in a belief that we have a fundamental moral responsibility, as members of this unprecedented nation, to care for each other, to use government to address inequalities of circumstance and inequalities that are the result of prejudices and bigotry in the past.  That the ideal of the nation is bigger, stronger, more important than the repeated failures.  I grew up believing that was the right way, the correct way, to view my country.  And that right-thinking people believed the same.

I was living in DC in 1984, reading the Washington Post every morning, watching as Reagan cruised to re-election, baffled at his success.  I was shocked one morning to read an interview with a young man just old enough to vote.  He said he was a staunch Reagan supporter because Reagan had “brought back those good old-fashioned American values – getting ahead and making money!”  I felt my worldview crack.  Old-fashioned American values?

While I was being raised with a certain sixties liberal view of America, others were being raised to have a primary allegiance to something more personal and concrete – family or heritage or culture.  Their sense of well-being is rooted in a set of norms and social arrangements that provide stability and a clear roadmap for the proper way to behave with each other.  It prioritizes order above all else, along with maximum freedom from governmental interference, relying on personal responsibility, grit and determination to sort the winners and the losers.  Self-reliance.  Its rewards are security and material success.  Often there is a patina of religion, used as a marker for determining whether or not someone is in the favored group.²

Is it possible to hold in one’s mind that both of these simplifications, these caricatures, may be equally true and equally false?  Is it possible to hold it in one’s heart?  Or is it inevitable, given human psychology, that we must each believe that those who see right and wrong so differently are confused and mistaken at best, but more probably fundamentally evil?  Is it possible to prove that one of these views is the right one?

Fact-checking is fruitless, and has no persuasive power.  We think we’re arguing about facts, but we’re mostly arguing about values and the opinions rooted in those values.³  So many people have lost trust in the institutions that were once generally relied on to verify facts.  On Next Door (the social media site for paranoid older people), someone points out that crime rates have fallen dramatically since the seventies.  Someone responds that they don’t believe it — in their experience, things are much worse.  Someone else says it just feels worse because of the unrelenting onslaught of 24 hour news; if you look at the statistics things are demonstrably better.  But this explanation fails for people who see no reason to trust the compilers of those official statistics.  Why should you trust them when it is well known (“everybody knows”) that the bureaucrats lie and manipulate the numbers in order to protect their positions of power?  “Do your own research” and you quickly find plenty of material to support whatever position you feel is right.  It’s those intuitive feelings, derived through the ooze of your own personal experiences, that you trust to lead you to the truth.

During the height of Covid hysteria, the anti-vaxxers on the Facebook groups devoted to auto-immune disorders⁴  were outraged. They were angry.  It’s self-evident that the scientists supporting mass vaccinations are lying.  They said the vaccines were safe, and yet there are hundreds of vaccine injuries.  How can you call them “safe” when there’s a whole government run registry devoted to tracking the harms that vaccines do so that they can pay off the victims while protecting big pharma?⁵  That the percentage of injuries might be tiny compared to the positive effects of vaccines was irrelevant to the binary assessment.  The vaccines were clearly not safe⁶, ergo, the vaccine proponents were lying.  What else were they lying about?

The Christianist who believes in the necessity of an idealized European ethnicity, which must be protected from an encroaching government and the hordes of non-European immigrants⁷ can’t be said to be “wrong” in the same sense as a flat-earther is wrong about the shape of the planet.  It’s a view that, if fully realized, would lead to continuing misery for the millions of people that the believers in my view of the US want to help rise, but for the Christianist in question, that may be sad, but it’s not their problem.   They believe it is morally wrong for the government to take from those who have more and give to those who have less.  Ultimately, people are responsible for what they do with the circumstances handed to them. Make better choices. The Christianist protects their own.⁸

The Moms4Liberty are absolutely right to fear books.  The more widely one reads, the more untenable the narrowness of their worldview becomes.⁹  To the Moms, this is all about protecting innocence.  They can’t see, they won’t see, that all education is indoctrination.¹⁰  What do you want your children to believe?  There is no such thing as teaching “just the facts”.  It is, for example, a fact that homosexual people exist.  How should that fact be handled in public schools?  Some people believe that homosexuality is a dangerous perversion.  Some people believe that homosexuality is a healthy expression of human wants and needs.  Which of these is “true” is much more a matter of values than of biology and, as such, it’s a dispute that can’t be adjudicated by reference to other facts.  Which do you want your children to believe?  Parents understand that the public schools play a critical role in which values children end up embracing.  They proclaim loudly that they want schools to just focus on the facts, but they’re deluding themselves. 

Now the schools are a battleground.  Religion based home schooling or privately funded parochial schools had been the primary refuge for those who felt that the public schools were inadequate or antagonistic to the values they wanted their children to embrace.  But as the political consensus has shifted, those who in the past would’ve stayed away from public schools are now determined to reshape them.  Because it’s not just their children’s values that are at stake.  It’s for the good of the country.

I recoil at the fantasy world the Christianists want to protect and preserve.  That teenagers in the 21^st century in America need to have their innocence protected by shielding them from exposure to anything that might make them uncomfortable or question the worldview their parents cling to so tightly strikes me as bizarre.  Dangerous for their own children and certainly for the children of others if they were to succeed in reshaping the schools to their vision of justice.  But, of course, I'm relying on the expertise of psychologists and educators, the people who’ve studied childhood development at length and in detail.  The expertise that the M4L Mom has soundly rejected because she sees it as indoctrination and sexualizing children.  So she sees the danger as exactly the reverse.  From what ground do I tell her that she’s wrong? 

MLK believed in a moral universe that “bends toward justice”.   But what if there is no moral universe? 

I don’t have a bible or a creed to resort to.  It’s true that I have read more widely than most, travelled more than many.  Explored creation with an open heart and mind.  All of these experiences, filtered through my own excess of empathy, guided by some fundamental values absorbed from my parents lead me to my judgments of right and wrong.  But dig as I might, I can’t find a bedrock to rest on that proves to my satisfaction that these values and this outlook is metaphysically right, that it exists in some true sense utterly outside of the actions and beliefs of individual human beings. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”  If only it were so.  But the truths that are self-evident to me turn out to be self-evidently perversions of truth to the woman down the block who is intently scouring YA lit for approving descriptions of homosexuality.

Trembling though it is, my belief remains rooted. Perhaps I do have faith after all.¹¹  The nuns tried to teach me that after the fall it was irrevocably in our natures to sin and that God would punish us for it.  This seemed ridiculously unfair to me and I refused to accept it.  Maybe I don’t believe in MLK’s moral universe, but I believe there is a moral imperative that rises in us nonetheless.  That when fear and selfishness drive us to hate and demonize, we have failed that moral responsibility.

I can’t prove that my conception of America is more correct than Mike Johnson’s.¹²   Does that weaken my devotion to my conception?  It does not.  Despite all of the divisions and rancor, I believe that this view, this sense of responsibility, this approach to morality, resonates more deeply with more people than the closed and defensive view of the Christianists and the MAGA devout.  That it is my moral responsibility to help care for the least of us and to fight for a country that embraces that responsibility.

I wish I had something more solid to hang it on, something rocklike and immoveable, something that would ease the nagging ache of doubt, but I don’t.  None of us do, although we are very good at fooling ourselves into it.  I’m left to live with the contradictions, that the horrific evils that so many seem so easily to impose on others, and that so many bystanders are so willing to accept, does not alter my trembling faith.

The wreckage that humans leave in their wake is monstrous. Our capacity for evil enough to stop one’s heart. I will not give in. I lay back, close my eyes, float on the uncertainty of my belief.  I find it justified in songs and symphonies, paintings and sculptures, plays and movies.  Those moments when the ecstasies of the heart blossom and my connections to others, to their hurts and hopes and fears rises in my chest, filling me up, expressing through tears my radical connection to the people around me.  That love and forgiveness, hope and humility, an acceptance of my own weakness, a determination of my own strength are sufficient.  Jesus said to Peter, flawed impatient frightened lying vain courageous Peter, on this rock I will build my church.  For so many reasons I can’t be a Christian,¹³ but when he comes up with a line like that, I can’t help but love the guy.  The humor, the tenderness, the reverence for what’s best in each of us without ignoring our weakness that’s embodied in this particular bit of the carpenter’s grand foolishness seems to me worthy of embrace.   Or, as Billy Joe (a great admirer and believer in Jesus) sings, “I’m just an old chunk of coal, But I’ll be a diamond someday.” 

1. Dr. Richardson points out that as early as 1838, in the first major address of his for which a copy exists, Abraham Lincoln was concerned about “the growing lawlessness in the country as men ignored the rule of law and acted on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence.”

2. All through history, religion has been used to indicate allegiance.  I’ve been reading about Vienna in the 1930s, when many Jews converted to Christianity as a way of publicly shifting their allegiance from the marginalized tribe to the dominant one.  An assimilation option not available to those whose exclusion is based on skin color.

3. In 2018 the PEW Research Center published a study showing how few people can readily distinguish between Fact statements and Opinion statements.

4. My transverse myelitis – inflammation of the spinal cord – for example.

5. National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

6. Another failure from a lack of a common definition of a word we all think we know the meaning of.

7. The “invasion” along the Texas/Mexico border.

8. Certainly not all libertarians or traditional conservatives identify as Christians or consider their faith to be the primary driver of their political positions.  But at the present time, those more secular versions have been subsumed under the banner of evangelical Christianity.

9. This is the reason university faculties skew liberal.

10. Liberals are no better at this.

11. I explored my lack of faith in an essay about a year ago.

12. Speaker of the House who proclaimed, to both acclaim and derision, that if you wanted to know how he would govern, you had only to look at the Bible. “Go pick up a Bible,... That’s my worldview.” Given all the contradictions and ambiguities in the Bible, I find this terrifying.

13. Starting with the fact that I don’t see Jesus as any more divine than the rest of us.