Mood:
on fireIn light of the recent speech by Mitt Romney (and Mike Huckabee's mysterious allegiances), I found this quotation chilling:
"We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls."
This is a quotation about choosing Christian-identity pluralism over multiculturalism. It's chilling because its source is Adolf Hitler and the "different" faiths he legitimated were limited to Catholicism and Protestantism. It is disturbing, too, because Hitler sought to re-ground German identity in newly minted racist myths about the national past, sought to ground German identity not in the freedom of changing ideas or actual folk tradition, but in the exclusive orthodoxy of genetics (a form of biological fundamentalism). This is remarkably parallel to what the Book of Mormon accomplishes with American history through its doctrines of British Israelism (though I do not equate the intentions of Hitler and Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, nor suggest that Romney is Hitlerian).
The quotation is chilling because there are echoes of it in all the contemporary efforts to define America as a "Christian Nation" and erase its longstanding excursive, deist and functionallly multicultural past. This is an effort in which politicans and beleaguered Christian denominations--either losing members or gaining them through ludicrous identification with victim status--are uniting forces. The reason they have to unite is that they are vastly outnumbered, and the people either do not vote or do not get authentic tallies of their votes.
Look around you, no matter where you are (and I am in the Bible belt): the "Christian Nation" is a political, media and academic construct. It does not exist.
American folk religion is grounded in freedom. Ours is the most radically anti-authoritarian constellation of folk religions in the history of the world. They will become moreso.
The majority of Americans may be nominally Christian--but they are not churchgoers, hymn-singers, Bible-readers, nor religiously motivated voters. They are manifestly functionally secular and have a more deist orientation to a less elaborated God than the God of the Bible. The have functioned in this mode since the founding of Jamestown--a commercial, not religious, functionally multicultural venture extolled as the Founding Colony until the Civil War, when Christian holy warriors decided to find national ancestors in the theocracies of New England. They won by invading, shaming and imposing their religion on the American South. They were able to win that public relations battle only because of the moral depravity of slavery that had grown with the South's agrarian commerical structure. The "war on terror" and the proclamations of a "war of civilizations" do the same thing: isolate a negative trait and use it to justify violent suppression of the other. This makes the actor self-righteous and the other demonically unhuman--a pattern that should send up red flags in all observers.
All things southern, including the founding of our culture, were irrationally identified with slavery and aggressively suppressed in order to impose cultural homogenity and enrich the emerging industrial classes of the urban north. It's in those northern cities where black ethnic traditions and white southern dialects were aggressively suppressed and a contrived homogenity imposed through the always-false construct of "mainline" denominationalism and the mis-use of the concept of "cult" (before the early twentieth century, we referred to "sects," not "cults"). Multiculturalism was most real in the close confines of the urban poor, among displaced southerners and immigrants. Those who feared contact with the other were unable to flee West, like Mormons, or take shelter in a clean, suburban High Church. In those urban contexts, the fire of actual religious liberty, freely exercised, was carried largely by black Americans, poor whites, women preachers, Pentecostals, Jews and occultists. That is the army that really made our religious freedom possible--not the one that marched under "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" nor the one that was sequestered on the reservations. We weren't yet universal in application, but we were undeniably functionally multicultural.
This roots of this country's post-European culture were planted by overly-aggressive treasure seekers in Jamestown, Virginia, not by Puritan authoritarians off course in Massachusetts. Despite its many flaws, this country has been an unprecedented haven for excursive religions and autonomous gnosis, both of which continue to proliferate and enrich the world. That's the historical reality and it's the reality today. Really look around you. If you see a "Christian Nation," go a little further down the road, at least to the closest big burg, or find another website. If you still see Christian hegemony, I suggest that you're inhabiting a nightmare and might want to wake up to greet your fellow citizens and true allies.
Christian Dominonists are a small minority, but so were true Nazi loyalists. There are real dangers. There is no shortage of politicians and investors who are willing to bastardize religion for personal domination. There are dangers from craven politicians and strategists like the atheist Karl Rove, who are willing to use religion to unite frightened and poorly informed people in an orgy of fear--especially when, as we're told, the margins of victory are so slight and the migrations of small groups decisive. This manipulation is being done in contrived rhetoric against "terrorism" and against "multiculturalism". Terrorism exists, but it was created and encouraged by the same sorts of crass manipulators, here and in the Middle East, who want to unite constituencies through fear in order to gain personal wealth and power or fulfill a egomaniacal religious fantasy that no majority will ever share. Both these attempts at false unity--from Osama and from George W.--are grounded in the problems of Abrahamic authoritarianism and the ease with which popular sentiment is jerked around by modern media and calculated misinformation. They are grounded in the substitution of dogma for direct experience, books and tradition for the Living God. They are made possible only when true democracy is suppressed, only when the sacredness of universal freedom is denied.
American culture is our ally and the ally of Paganism. Paganism will flower here, and through true liberty will transform this culture and many others. Freedom allows direct spiritual experience. Direct spiritual experience undermines all forms of fundamentalism, all forms of authoritarianism, all forms of static tradition. When people achieve the kind of insight that allows personal authority and true freedom, the vast majority of them will leave Abrahamic religions behind. Common Pagan spiritual experience is not truly marginal or unusual--when more people are freed from the shackels of dogma and social expectation, few will freely choose the Christian faith. It is not satisfying and it does not deliver what it promises; its orthodoxies are manifestly false.
Back to the seed quotation from Hitler: There's a very interesting, well-sourced article on Fortean Times about the Nazis and Christmas (which has one of the most disturbing paintings at the heading that I've ever seen--minimalist, in a sense--just a hand and a tree--but extremely creepy).
This article also provides good information for answering charges that the Hitler regime had Neo-Pagan/anti-Christian agendae. This is an ill-informed "guilt by association" fallacy that is often levelled against contemporary American Pagans and modern Nordic faiths. Though it excludes neither Pagan nor Christian, the truth about the Nazi orientation to religion and so-called "folk" identity is much more complex. The article includes these two quotations from Hitler, in reference to Himmler:
"What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the Church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave…"
And on Himmler's archæological digs:
"Why do we have to call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when we were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is digging up these villages… and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds."
And here's the gist of the author's conclusions:
"In response to these points, we should note that there was never wholesale Party support for the openly anti-Christian agendas of a Rosenberg or a Heydrich or a universal embracing of the neo-pagan theatricals of Himmler and the SS. Instead, the two Confessions continued to exist, suffering differing degrees of interference and persecution, and many Nazis continued to practise Christianity in the way they always had, but with an added awareness of the huge ideological potential that appropriating elements of religion offered to the regime. "
The article is worth reading. It provides valuable insights into the way cultural forms, religious identity, and nationalism intersect and are sometimes crassly manipulated. True freedom is the only antidote to the pathological egos of those who would manipulate the most sacred things for power and money. It's a head's up to those of us who know we're free and would like to stay that way--true peoples of Goddess, true peoples of God, truly free people.
***And to go along with this, here's an article that explains why the truth is increasingly invisible... Are we being deliberately divided? Maybe not, but a divided people are easier for a minority to conquer.
