Political Division, Danger, and the Cross We Bear

 Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here in River City

I knew we were in trouble in the months leading up to the 2000 Presidential election when I drove past a new billboard put up at the intersection of two Michigan highways just south of town. The billboard read IN GOD WE TRUST: BUSH/CHENEY 2000, and the word WE was underlined, just as it is in this paragraph. I didn’t know how we were in trouble then, or how much, or how bad things would get over the next 20 years, but I uttered “uh-oh” as I drove by that day.

I searched Google images for a picture of that billboard as I started writing this piece the other day. I couldn’t find it, but I did find a 2004 version with the same basic message. Both messages hit a chord that resonates deeply in a community like mine, going beyond political platform, poll numbers, and even space for reasoned debate. The message: voting for the Bush/Cheney ticket was voting for Christianity, or (on the flip side),

Christians who voted against the Republican ticket voted against their very faith.

Religion used as a political wedge signals to people that their vote during those elections (and since) wasn’t about politics but instead was about much deeper core issues of identity and doctrine. An appeal to faith does not appeal to reason, to data, or to policy. Faith is an exercise of belief, rooted in identity, and for many it provides unshakeable answers where there is no earthly proof. Human history is full of countless, terrible, bloody events that took place all over the globe when people were motivated to protect and advance the faith, sometimes this faith, sometimes that one, and while the United States has plenty of its own examples of those terrible events, it also enshrined into its founding document the idea that there would be a separation of Church and State, a vital protection for both Church and State and the people who belong to both. These billboards and their messages of choosing sides threatened that separation, that protection.

I also immediately recognized who those billboards targeted: they were aimed at my friends, coworkers, neighbors, and even members of my own family. I knew that for so many of them faith was unassailable, off limits to question, discussion, and reconsideration. And this populist appeal came on the heels of other messages in popular culture that pushed back against the emerging zeitgeist of the information age and the communication age, selling America on an alternative message that thinking, purpose, deliberation, and informed action are a fool’s errand, a waste of time, to be avoided as much as possible, represented so perfectly in the Why Ask Why campaign from Budweiser: don’t think, don’t question, don’t worry about it, go with your basest instincts and belch away any uncomfortable feeling that happens to bubble up in the gut.

Now Friends, Let Me Tell You What I Mean

The Bush/Cheney campaign strategy so completely succeeded in making religion and religious identity core signals to voters that political party identification became synonymous with whether you were for God or against God.  By the time Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 there was a full-on culture war, and religion was the theater of operations. McCain and Palin against Obama and Biden, and the faithful were picking sides. The arguments were getting ugly and more personal, even in my own family. A particularly nasty exchange with one of my own siblings in 2008 led to a year of estrangement and 13 years (and running) of not talking about it again. The topic: was Barack Obama the fraud that Right-Wing media declared him to be. Meanwhile the Internet was as old as a teenage driver and just as reckless. Internet V2 was fueling the explosive growth of social media companies enough for a small startup like The Facebook in 2003 to become a global juggernaut with 1 billion users by the end of Obama’s first term. Division had found it greatest amplifier and the Why Ask Why culture found its perfect audience.

Back in my small town the impact was just as divisive and dangerous, but wrapped in comfortable ritual and people we knew well, like at the annual Memorial Day parade and ceremony held downtown at the memorial dedicated to local soldiers killed in foreign wars. It’s the biggest annual event in a town of 850, where each year several hundred come to the city park to listen to the high school band, prayers, the Mayor, a keynote speaker, a rifle salute, a song tribute, and finally Taps, played on trumpet by a player from the school band to end the ceremony in a tribute that’s always moving, no matter the skill of the kid on the horn.

In recent years at the ceremony the language of the prayers has blended more and more into the language of patriotism, and it has been hard to separate when the pastor is talking about the sacrifice of the military dead laying down their lives for us, and when he’s referring to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross at Calvary; indeed, the suggestion and more and more the appeal is one and the same: the Cross

has become the flag, and the flag has become the Cross in the blended messages of faith and patriotism. One year the keynote speaker, a well-known and well respected community leader, a veteran and head of a beautiful family, an avowed Christian, spoke with forceful, direct, open assertion that this country is a Christian country and honoring the sacrifice of dead American soldiers was one and the same a duty of faith and patriotism, that he served his country because it is a Christian nation. Not only was there no space for the separation of Church and State in his message of duty, his message was that Church and State are one. Several hundred people clapped along as he spoke, sang along to a local vocalist belting out Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”, and bowed their heads in prayer when the pastor of the local church made sure Jesus was one of the soldiers remembered and honored as the patriotic songs played and the Stars and Stripes waved at half-staff in the springtime breeze. Jesus. America. More and more they were one in the same.

When I was a kid I loved the golden rule of my Catholic education, the one about loving others as I want to be loved in return, and I adored the Christ I encountered as part of a Trinity of love and compassion and mystery. There have been times even as an adult when I have sought that Christ again, the one I learned about in my childhood, from CCD and First Communion classes, from the example of family members who lived their entire lives as the body of that Christ. But I detest and utterly reject the Christ of political division, the S.O.B. of a blue-eyed messiah who is not a vessel of love and peace, but rather a political and social totem, the original golden calf, a greasy-little mobster who can get you a seat at the best table in the restaurant with the right bribe or who can rough someone up in the alley just to teach him a lesson. I hope the churches who worship that Christ go out of business and never open their doors again, because those churches sold their souls for political power, and it wasn’t to Heaven. The Christ I admire and love and have sought so many times in my life is the Christ who loved the peacemakers and fought those who abused power, not the other way around. The other Christ, well, the hell with Him and his divisive politics.  

I suspect it was hard for some to read the words "I detest and utterly reject the Christ" because it was hard for me to write them. But it's come to that. I cannot follow that Christ and I cannot think of any who do as anything but fools or worse. The expected return on that position is the "well-what-about" ism that is the plague of honest reckoning. I understand there are non-negotiable issues of faith for some, such as those who are pure in their pro-life position. I get it. But I'm not really talking to those folks. I'm talking to the ones who are pro-life the same way they the are pro trickle-down economics: because it's an advantageous political stance and not really anything more. Both Church and State are big enough to handle honest differences in theology or philosophy, but we have to be smart enough to tell the difference when it's the wolf wrapped in sheep's clothing.

Friends, the Idle Brain is the Devil’s Playground

Perhaps most problematic about the messages that grew out of the 2000 Bush/Cheney billboard was what was implied in the underlined WE. To have a WE means there must also be a NOT WE, a THEY, or in the language of the dangerous speech that leads to political and social violence, an OTHER.  Radio personalities, thought leaders, and talking heads on 24-hour news cycles made sure the fire of this division was always stoked, and by the time Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 the country was divided by a new Mason-Dixon Line of Red vs. Blue, with a political, social, and cultural divide that became hostile, and that made room for even older hatreds to crawl out of history’s cellar.

I am familiar with historical hatreds because I study the Holocaust and genocide, periods of history when WE versus the OTHER turns deadly. I do not make comparisons lightly and generally actively work against any attempt to make comparisons to the Holocaust, but in studies of media and politics, the science of propaganda was settled more than 20 years before World War 2, when popular propagandists like Walter Lippman wrote in Public Opinion (1922) that "the ignorant or ill-educated meant larger and larger opportunities for both demagogic and public-spirited propagandists to make headway by using fictions and myths, utopian ideals, and 'the noble lie.' Governments on both sides of World War 2 used propaganda efforts, including famously the Nazi government that cloaked its agenda of hatred and world domination in creating the Aryan WE with appeals to Christian imagery and language, and the OTHER who presented a threat to Aryans, to Germany, to the world, and to Jesus on the Cross. Religion could be used to motivate, to justify, to mobilize, to destroy, even against the foundational teachings of a religion that has love and compassion and concern for the stranger as its golden rule.

On January 6 the trouble I felt was coming our way back in 2000 finally arrived in its full ugliness when armed insurrectionists stormed the United States Capital to attempt to overthrow a free and fair election, leading to the immediate deaths of five people (and two more police suicides to follow), that had Americans (in the name of patriotic servitude to a demagogue) beating police officers to permanent disfigurement, even death, that installed a noose and gallows outside the building where hundreds searched inside for government officials to apprehend and perhaps assassinate.

It was the end of a story arc that began 20 years ago with the insistence that there is a patriotic Christian WE in this country that does not question the story it has been told, that carries out its duty without question, reason, or critical thought, that would choose violence against other humans and the foundational texts and principles of both faith and country in the service of a strong man demagogue. January 6 was not the end result of the November, 2020 election: forces in this country spent the last 20 years creating and fortifying a division that made January 6 possible.

Heed that Warning Before It’s Too Late

When I am confused about where to go next, I often find my mind searching backwards, not ahead. The answer about where to go next is often most clearly outlined in the lessons of the past. In this case, I am thinking about my personal past and the lessons about God and country I learned from my grandmother. She was dedicated to both, a servant of both—working the polls each election day all of my life, and serving Communion on the altar at mass as Eucharistic Minister. But she kept them separated, twin pillars deeply rooted at her foundation. It was a joke in my family between my brothers and I about which party grandma belonged to. My Republican brother was sure Grandma was Republican based on her strong Catholic faith; after all, Catholics like my Grandmother were strictly Pro-Life. My Democrat brother was sure Grandma was a Democrat, also based on her strong Catholic faith; after all, Catholics like my Grandmother were dedicated to feeding the hungry and tending to the sick and the poor. But Grandma wouldn’t tell us. It was her private business who she voted for (she insisted), and for years she resisted any effort to reduce either her faith or her politics down to the pettiness of our bickering, good natured as it was.

My grandma knew something and taught me something worth remembering, and I suspect it’s a lesson forgotten in too many other American homes. The United States of America is made stronger when there is separation of Church and State, when good people of all religions feel safe to pursue life, liberty, and happiness without faith as a marker of being a WE or an OTHER. And faith is made stronger when the foundations of that faith aren’t shaped into political messaging, manipulated and contorted into political propaganda that serves a political party, power, message, or man.

At the intersection just south of town there are new billboards. They change all the time. And I still drive through the intersection every day on my way to work on my way home. Recently the billboard was a PSA for good parenting. Before that it was an advertisement for tax services from H&R Block. Life goes on. It will. But it’s also true that our next 20-year track is underway, and we begin 2021 and the next twenty years having had an armed insurrection storm the US Capital and a deadly clash between police officers and Americans who would overturn a free and fair election. Where do we go from here? The past tells us clearly that more danger is ahead, unless we learn from it, unless we think about it and indeed ask Why, and unless we underline the ONE NATION part of our pledge, letting the UNDER GOD part be separated again as intended, where separate matters of Church and State are freedoms, not divisions that undermine both.