American Religion

Posted on September 20, 2002 in Citizenship IRC/Chat Liberty

I ran into the accusation that “Jews control the media” again. Since when are George W. Bush, Ted Turner, and Rupert Murdoch Jews? In responding to an Argentine friend, I had this to say:

Jews and Conservative Christians rule the American media. And not all Jews buy the cabal propaganda either. Sure, I’ve run into plenty of Jews who thought that practising their religion meant waving the blue and white for Israel. And I’ve met others who realize the shallowness of that.

How are these Jews different from Christian sellouts to the right? They dress different, say different prayers, but deep down they follow the same inner religion of materialism and hatred. The door to faith is open to them, but they prefer to keep sitting on their sofas and saying “I say I am good and that’s good enough for me.”

That’s the first precept of the real American religion that the mushy middle and the right follow: I say I am good and that’s good enough for me. The irony is that the religions they claim to follow don’t settle for that wimpy declaration of belief.

The people they punish most severely are the people who say “No, these things that you allow to happen are not good. So what are you going to do about it?”

I had been watching one chatter spend two hours running down a timetable of CIA interventions in Central America to the Jew who had attacked me a few weeks ago because I wasn’t buying the necessity of war with Iraq. Her argument against the facts reduced to “It’s unAmerican to think such things.” I argued that she

…wants a religion with no self-examination and no self questioning. It’s not Judaism — it’s the American religion.

The people who practice this aren’t being Jews or Christians or whatever first. They’re practicing the American faith which, conveniently, has as one of its tenets a mocking adherence to individuality ~as long as you don’t face off against the American military machine and its ways of violence~

The moment you stand up for your faith, argentino24, they hit you with their real selves, the materialistic ones who equivocate and lie and live in self-imposed ignorance so they don’t have to expend energy to make for change.

“Could this individualism change Emperor?” he asked.

I’ve seen individuals change.

If I didn’t think there was hope, I wouldn’t even attempt to describe what I see and dare the people who wallow in it to think that maybe they have a hand in evil. I know I do. I want to change that.

Shortly after this, one of the acolytes of the American Way quickly pointed out that we were observing a hiatus on “religious discussion”. I stopped and blogged, enduring the japes that “no one would read this anyways”. Maybe so. But I write as an act as faith just as the acolyte votes as an act of faith. There’s no difference. Such people say “And what do you do when you’re prayers aren’t answered?” I ask in return “What will you do if your vote is ignored as it was in 2000?” The acolyte, TaleWgnDg, remains a stubborn believer in the certainty of the American system. He believes that it will outlive George W. Bush.

But I, who have read history and who has seen first hand the disintegration of communities in former Yugoslavia, feel differently. We’re not so different from the Yugoslavs. When the national chairmanship rotated to Slobodon Milosevic, the careful construct that was the nation of the Southern Slavs fell apart. There were many who argued that all the Croats, the Makedonians, the Slovenes and the Bosnians had to do was wait out that presidency. But Milosevic began to move for Serbian hegemony in the nation just as Bush and Ashcroft push for a new facism here. Can we survive?

I return now to the issue of religion and politics with a reference to the blog my wife wrote yesterday as an addendum to the comments made by Jim Rovira of Locust Eater. She writes:

I remember showing up at one demonstration and suddenly finding the people around me shouting, “The answer is not pacifism, but revolutionary internationalism!” Not a chant that I had any sympathy with. And then I remember the one demonstration, in Berkeley, where I found myself beside a quiet man who held a sign saying to trust in God, and not in weapons. A Quaker….I know that there I found the one man in all the demonstration whose witness, as we Quakers say, spoke to my condition.

Laughter and belittlement is the price that anyone who wants to live her or his life despite the demands of believers in the state religion pay. States don’t need to use force to keep the masses in line: luxury suffices nicely. It is our fear of losing the too much that we already have that keeps us enthralled, chanting the shibboliths of a sick mass consciousness.

Whether George Bush steals another election, whether the people foolishly choose him to lead for four more years, whether the nation crumbles from the strain or whether the institutions keep with the same erractice determination they have in the past, we as people need something better than this civic religion we now have. The compassionate and courageous beliefs lived by the religious and the ethical hold, I think, the guides that will carry us away from tyranny and towards a community of liberated individuals.