posted October 05, 2004 10:53 PM              

Why do so many Americans dismiss the evidence that the occupation of Iraq has gone disastrously wrong? Because the US has a long tradition of putting faith before facts. Jonathan Raban on George Bush's debt to the Puritans

Wednesday October 6, 2004
The Guardian

In the secular, liberal, top-left-hand corner of the US where I live, the prevailing mood was one not far short of despair as incredulity mounted that the daily avalanche of bad news from Baghdad, Fallujah, Tikrit, Samarra, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Kufa, Ramadi, Baquba and elsewhere was apparently failing to make any significant dent in Bush's poll numbers, or expose his claim that freedom and democracy are on the march in Iraq as a blithe and cynical fiction. What would it take? people asked: How many more American and Iraqi deaths? When would it sink in that the occupation of Iraq is a bloody catastrophe? Why was the electorate so unmoved by the abundant empirical evidence that the administration's policy in the Middle East wantonly endangers America as it endangers the wider world? Kerry's performance in the first presidential debate brought a much-needed lift of spirits to this neck of the woods, but the Democratic candidate is up against something more formidable than the person of George Bush: he has to deal with the unquiet spirit of American puritanism and its long and complicated legacy.
Last Monday, on the school run, I caught an interview on NPR's Morning Edition with the grieving family of a sergeant in the Oregon National Guard who was killed in Iraq on September 13. Here's what Sergeant Ben Isenberg's dad said: "This war is not about Iraqis and Americans, or oil: this is a spiritual war. The people who don't understand that just need to dig into their Bible and read about it. It's predicted, it's predestined. Benjamin understood that the president is a very devouted [sic] Christian. Ben understood that the calling was to go because the president had the knowledge, and understood what was going on, and it's far deeper than we as people can ever really know. We don't get the information that the president gets."

In context it's clear that by "information" he wasn't talking about the stuff that passes from the CIA to the White House. This information comes from the guy whom Bush likes to call his "higher Father". As the president said in the closing lines of his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last month, "We have a calling from beyond the stars ..." - a claim that in some societies might lead to a visit from the men in white coats, but in America, among the faithful, is met with rapturous applause.

Every Bush speech is richly encrypted with covert Biblical allusions and other secret handshakes with his fundamentalist listeners, but one need not be a fundamentalist to warm to this sort of religiose rhetoric, for it is every bit as much of an "American" thing as it is a "Christian" one. Rationalist liberals, tone-deaf to its appeal, make a serious mistake in their assumption that facts-on-the-ground, in Iraq or in the domestic US, can readily explode what the Bush administration has managed to project as a matter not of reason but of faith.

Faith, as Mark Twain's apocryphal schoolboy said, "is believing what you know ain't so". Faith always contradicts the visible evidence, like the putrefying body or the fossil in the rock - obstacles put in our way to test the mettle of our belief and reveal the inadequacy of our merely sublunar knowledge. Ben Isenberg's father was certain of this: "It's far deeper than we as people can ever really know."

No culture in the world has elevated "faith", in and of itself, with or without specific religious beliefs, to the status it enjoys in the United States. Faith - in God, or the future, or the seemingly impossible, which is the core of the American Dream - is a moral good in its own right. In no other culture is the word "dream" so cemented into everyday political language, for in America dreams are not idle, they are items of faith, visions that transcend the depressing available evidence and portend the glorious future as if it were indeed "predicted . . . predestined", as Isenberg's father saw the war on Iraq.

When Americans tell their own history at the grade-school, storybook level, they conveniently forget the earliest and most successful colony of tobacco-aristocrats in Virginia (a bunch of degenerate smokers) and instead trace themselves back to the zealous theocrats in tall black hats who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and whose first harvest is celebrated in the all-American orgy of Thanksgiving. The names of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, which put into the James River in 1607, have little resonance now, but everyone knows about the 1620 voyage of the Mayflower and its Pilgrim Fathers because the Puritans, who have never gone out of date, left behind a peculiarly American philosophy of the miraculous power of faith and hard labour, along with a dangerously uplifting vision of America's rightful place in the world. In a sermon of 1651, Peter Bulkeley laid out the essential rhetorical frame of Bush's foreign policy: "We are as a city set upon a hill, in the open view of all the earth, the eyes of the world are upon us because we profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with God ... Let us study so to walk that this may be our excellency and dignity among the nations of the world among which we live; that they may be constrained to say of us, only this people is wise, a holy and blessed people ... We are the seed that the Lord hath blessed." The sting in that exclusive only has been lately felt by almost every foreign ambassador to the UN who's had to listen to Bush or Powell lecturing the assembly on America's historic moral exceptionalism.

It was axiomatic to Puritan belief that the city on the hill had been raised in a land previously inhabited by devils whose spirits still walked abroad, conspiring against the holy, wise, and blessed citizens. At the time of the Salem witch trials in 1693, Cotton Mather struck exactly the same note as Bush strikes when he speaks of al-Qaida.

"The devil is now making one attempt more upon us; an attempt more difficult, more surprising, more snarled with unintelligible circumstances than any we have hitherto encountered; an attempt so critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy halcyon days, with all the vultures of hell trodden under our feet." A "horrible plot" had been detected, "which if it were not seasonably uncovered would probably blow up and pull down all the churches in the country." More than 21 witches "have confessed that they have signed unto a book, which the devil showed them, and engaged in his hellish design of bewitching and ruining our land."

While the Virginia colony brought 18th-century rationalism to America, and supplied four of its first five presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe), the New England puritans of Massachusetts gave Americans an intensely dramatic and emotional sense of their peculiar predicament. They were an exception among nations, uniquely favoured by Providence. They alone enjoyed the liberty to walk with God according to their own lights. They were a people of faith beleaguered on all sides by wicked spirits. Cleaving to their faith, they must distrust "imperfect reason" (Mather's phrase) as a means of discerning the mystery of creation and the visible world around them. Not least, the Puritan plain style (Mather warned writers of "muses no better than harlots" and of prose "stuck with as many jewels as the gown of a Russian ambassador"), which owed much to the teaching of Peter Ramus, the French philosopher and rhetorician, made these ideas accessible to the least educated, and gave them the unvarnished vigour that they still have today. The remarkable survival of this 17th-century worldview in 21st-century America has as much to do with style as with theological substance: people who would now find Jefferson or Madison hard going could easily thrill to the words of Mather, John Winthrop, the rollicking hellfire poet Michael Wigglesworth, or the poet of domestic sublimity Anne Bradstreet.

The Puritans live! And the shrewd men of the Bush administration have expertly hotwired the president to the galvanic energy-source of Puritan tradition. It's as if America, since 9/11, has been reconstituted as a colonial New England village: walled-in behind a stockade to keep out Indians (who were seen as in thrall to the devil); centred on its meeting house in whose elevated pulpit stands Bush, the plain-spun preacher, a figure of nearly totalitarian authority in the community of saints. The brave young men of the village are out in the wilderness, doing the Lord's work, fighting wicked spirits who would otherwise be inside the stockade, burning down Main Street and the meeting house. That, at least, is how the presidential handlers have tried to paint things, and, given the continuing power of the American Puritan tradition, it's not very surprising that a likely electoral majority have gratefully accepted the picture at its face value: that the proportions are all wrong (the world's remaining superpower simply won't fit into the space of a pious, beleaguered village) doesn't matter, for the administration has successfully tapped into a toxic national mythos.

Faith rules. After a faltering start to his presidency, Bush found his role in the aftermath of the attacks of September 2001 as America's pastor-in-chief. His inarticulacy without a script was an earnest of his humility and sincerity, his dogmatic certitude a measure of his godly inspiration. "His way of preaching was very plain," as Mather wrote of John Eliot of Roxbury, Massachusetts, "He did not starve [the people] with empty and windy Speculations." Confronted a couple of weeks ago with the CIA's grim forecast of mounting unrest and possible civil war in Iraq, Bush airily said, "they were just guessing". The president doesn't guess. As he intimates to his congregation on every possible occasion, his intelligence is leaked to him by He Who Holds the Stars in His Right Hand.

To doubt is to succumb to temptation by the wicked spirits. In the New Testament, empiricism gets a bad press in the person of poor Thomas Didymus, and Christ's rebuke: "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." That the facts on the ground in Iraq are in clear contradiction of all Bush's claims about the flowering of liberty and democracy there is merely one of those tests of faith to which all true believers are subject. Of course we can't see it, but that makes the miracle only more marvellous, its very invisibility an inspiring moral challenge for the faithful.

In last Thursday's debate with Kerry at the University of Miami, Bush appeared petulant and bemused (especially in the reaction shots that were shown by the networks in defiance of the rules agreed by the Commission on Presidential Debates) to find himself there at all. There's no space in the meeting house for two rival pulpits, and Pastor Bush, for the first time since his election, if that's the right term for what happened in 2000, had to endure standing on an equal footing with an upstart congregant who was the spitting image of Doubting Thomas. There was a note of wounded incredulity in Bush's voice when he said of Kerry that "He changes positions on something as fundamental as what you believe in your core, in your heart of hearts, is right in Iraq." O faithless Kerry! - apostate! - unbeliever! In Bush's Puritan theology, to change one's mind in the face of overwhelming evidence is tantamount to denying the very God who rules your "heart of hearts". How can my belief be wrong if He placed it there?

Yet debates - even ones as stilted as those agreed between the campaigns this year - are rational exercises with an inbuilt bias favouring reason over faith. Unsurprisingly, the rationalist on Thursday beat the preacher at the rationalist's own game, and in my own political neighbourhood there was hardly less elation that evening than if the Seattle Mariners had carried off the World Series. But a debate is a very different thing from an election, and if Kerry did manage to win on November 2, it would be a surprising triumph of cold reason over hot religious mythology.

No more classic American sentiment has ever been put into a foreigner's mouth than when the New York lyricist Joe Darion made Don Quixote sing, in Man of La Mancha, "To dream the impossible dream,/ To fight the unbeatable foe,/ To bear with unbearable sorrow,/ To run where the brave dare not go." Only an entrenched belief in one's own exceptionalism and a wonder-working Providence could justify such otherwise self-evidently futile activities. With Bush, we're now dreaming an impossible dream and fighting an unbeatable foe, and tens of millions of Americans - enough, quite probably, to give Bush a second term - believe that is the right, because it's the American thing to do.

Tony Blair has lately given the impression that he's been channelling the same source (Almighty God and/or Karl Rove) who inspires the rhetoric of Bush, but in Britain there is no rich mulch of popular national tradition in which Blair's words can take root. The historic connection between the Labour party of Keir Hardie's time and the Methodist church is something altogether different from the great folk memory of the embattled God-fearing city on the hill that stirs deep in the American imagination. When Bush plays the faith card, he summons powerful ancient ghosts. When Blair tries to bring off the same trick, he merely calls attention to his conscience, his private religious beliefs, awakening no echoes in the land of mild, secularised Anglicanism where to speak of one's own intimacy with God's purpose is to place oneself in the embarrassing company of the man in the ragged overcoat, haranguing a non-existent audience from a soapbox at Speakers Corner - which, come to think of it, is a convenient short stroll from the Blair family's new quarters in Connaught Square.

posted October 08, 2004 02:43 AM            

what a Messianic complex.

I don't care what people believe as individuals, what their personal beliefs are ... but, as President of the U.S. or a member of Congress ... this kind of fundamentalist expression is scary. I mean, he's not just the crazy guy that lives down the street who thinks God communicates to him, through the dregs of his tea leaves, that he has to "spread the word" to save the world; the Pres. and these politicians have a little more sway and influence than that guy.
I don't care if Bush is open about his Christianity. But anybody who feels that they are on some kind of mission "from God" is a bit of an extremist and the odds are, quite delusional, not because it absolultely can't happen but simply because it's likely uncommon and, if you were on such a "mission", you'd probably not be as openly aware, proud, and arrogant about it.
Forgive me but the whole "Left Behind" series, doom, destruction, and the "end of days" kind of thing never has appealed to me much.

posted October 08, 2004 04:23 AM            

There is alot more to reckon with when you can sit there and even read some notable passages that makes up(for the most part)strong emissions of the activities being played out the we today seem to be witnessing as evident events. But if those who think to themselves maybe (just really maybe) truely believe that they are doing the will of God by bringing out the Apocalypse and literally use it as a tool and squeeze every drop obligation to Christ, Allah, Yahweh, what have you, in order to recieve "the glorious Rapture", what makes them so sure that they can even earn they're way to Heaven by bringing about the total destruction of every living creature that dwells on this earth and set the world into flame when it was God himself on many occasions warned us that these things will happen?

So accurately to most that have watched and listened for the signs to manifest to existance for the past 2 to 3 thousands years, the question only remains to me as in "Why would God even bother to tell us about these things if he was to destroy our physical being and save us onto his kingdom in the first place, why couldn't he just let it happen and make this out to just be some 'big surprise'?" and "Who are we for him to feel the need or obligation to warn us, when it is he/she that is the almighty that we are not even worthy to carry his sandal straps, but it is like he/she is asking our permission to take away for what he has made?"! There indeed is alot more that is in the word of God that I even feel that even the Pope and/or even his highest Bishops will not even reveal to the public and close worshipers of the faith and it showed that much when Pope John Paul II desplayed his detest for the war in Iraq to George W Bush from his first and last visit to the Vatican, Bush gave his gift to the Pope and has never returned since!

Yes, there is alot more that is yet to be seen and all we can do is watch, but I'll tell anybody this much, what anybody has ever read, heard or seen the whole picture of it all will not be fully revealed until it has unfolded to it's fullest extent!

Only the daemons of this world are in possession of human faces!

posted October 08, 2004 11:36 AM            

quote:

---

There was a note of wounded incredulity in Bush's voice when he said of Kerry that "He changes positions on something as fundamental as what you believe in your core, in your heart of hearts, is right in Iraq." O faithless Kerry! - apostate! - unbeliever! In Bush's Puritan theology, to change one's mind in the face of overwhelming evidence is tantamount to denying the very God who rules your "heart of hearts". How can my belief be wrong if He placed it there?

---

I certainly don't want a leader who can't change his mind in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary...

posted October 08, 2004 02:48 PM            

I have ideas and leanings about Jerusalem and the whole God/Jesus concept, too, you know. But geez, I'm not a fanatic like some of these people. I don't have a problem with people believing what they like at all, don't get me wrong. But believing in something and pushing your beliefs onto other people's realities is a more than just a bit extreme and, imo, quite inappropriate.

I still can't believe that religion causes such a fuss ... well, rather, the intolerance of other people's religious/spiritual choices.

Terrorists and tyrrants and whatever is another thing entirely ... I don't care if they're bombing the heck out of someone or something because "their" God told them to. It's wrong. Still, I can't see much right in somebody stepping in and killing off the terrorists and tyrrants because now "their" God is telling them to either.

Seeing as how so many people are receiving messages from "God", the world certainly is in an awful state of affairs right now.

Geez, now I see how the Greeks believed that there were so many different Gods and Goddesses "playing dice" with our lives and that life on Earth changed as the whims of the Gods and Goddesses did ... surely it's not so far fetched a concept if everyone believes they're working on their own God's orders.

posted October 10, 2004 07:50 PM            

We don't need the Apocalypse to give ourselves relief from the hardships that we so often seem to have in our daily live and I don't think that these time have ever been anyworse then anyother time that humanity has ever been faced with, I mean look at the time that the scriptures have been writen, men and women were barbaric, human sacrefices were made to what god they were worshiping, people were slaughtering eachother from left and right, from any direction, there were no policemen and the soldiers were always getting cheated, so the ones they have fought(in any previous war of battle)they would end up joining they're enimies anyway for a better way for themselves and yes, "Only the strong survived", do you think that the ones that want to bring forth to what the prophets have to say is going to bring us any closer to world peace, I highly doubt it!

The thing here is this, we've been warned for a reason and I don't believe that this was all written for the purpose of the end to be inevitable by any means, but rather I think this was written for the purpose to make absolute sure that we know what is there to see in the times of the so-called end to put a stop to it, before it gets worse, it will not get better if it becomes a success!

posted October 18, 2004 02:18 PM            

Look out or John Kerry and the Pope will establish a Catholic theocracy here in America.

Monday, Oct. 18, 2004 11:23 a.m. EDT
Kerry Finds 'Faith' in Closing Days

John Kerry is suddenly finding religion and wants to be the second U.S. president to be a Catholic.

The Democrat presidential candidate who is now openly discussing his Roman Catholicism also continues to oppose the church and favor abortion rights.

Monday's Washington Post reports that Kerry is "evolving from a reserved Catholic reluctant to discuss faith in the public square into a Democratic preacher of sorts who speaks freely and sometimes forcefully about religion on the hustings."

From the pulpit to the pastures, the Post explains, Kerry is increasingly spreading a more spiritual message.

He's visiting local churches, as he did over the weekend in Ohio, to expound on the alleged "political" lessons taught by Saint James and Saint Paul in the Bible, and to launch a political attack on the president.

"Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come," Kerry told the congregation at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio, yesterday. "'Tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home."

According to the Post, he told his listeners that he wasn't there to preach but then went ahead to give a homily on the Good Samaritan, "the emptiness of a faith devoid of deeds and God's high calling to love one another" – before using the pulpit to attack President Bush over Social Security and jobs.

In a statement later issued by his campaign Kerry cited the New Testament's Epistle of St. James [the Post erroneously called it the "Book of James"], which condemns faith without works, as a means of damning the president for allegedly failing to help the suffering people of Darfur, Sudan. "Words without deeds are meaningless – especially when people are dying every day."

During the final debate Kerry spoke of his Catholic faith, which, despite his defiance of his Church's stands against abortion and embryonic stem cell research, he claims guides his ideology and life.

"My faith affects everything that I do, in truth," Kerry said during the debate last week in Tempe, Ariz. The candidate is planning to further elaborate on faith, family and values in a speech this week, aides told the Post.

Kerry previously had avoided discussing his faith, the Post says, noting that he had resisted pressure from his aides and allies to discuss his faith more widely, restricting any religious utterances to appearances before black churches on Sundays.

In an interview with the Washington Post during the Democratic primaries, the newspaper reported his hesitancy to discuss religion, steering the conversation toward his belief that Bush was blurring the lines between church and state in dangerous ways. This from a candidate who now routinely gives political sermons from pulpits.

"So what prompted the change?" the Post asked.

A top Kerry aide told the paper that Kerry has simply "grown more comfortable publicly 'opening up' about God and faith." It's all part of Kerry's desire to share more about his life and experiences. Kerry now likes to say there are three great teachers in life: parents, schoolteachers and God.

Others, however, have a more cynical attitude about Kerry's newly disclosed faith. It's all about politics, they say.

Friends told the Post that Kerry has "gained a deeper appreciation of how voters in many of the battleground states - from Hispanic Catholics in New Mexico to evangelical Christians in rural Ohio - seek candidates of faith, or at least desire reassurance that their president shares most of their values."

For Kerry, in religious faith as in politics, the Post notes, it all comes down to siding with liberals in the church over the more orthodox conservatives.

Kerry, for example, has broken with "some" Catholic leaders [such as the pope, as well as Canon Law] who explain that it is a sin for a politician to support the killing of the unborn.

"I see deeds and I see a whole lot of things that, when you add them up, make you wonder about the public words about values versus the public deeds and works that show values," Kerry said at the Baptist church.

This, aides told the Post, is Kerry's way of calling into question Bush's commitment to the teachings of the New Testament. In what has become a familiar refrain of Kerry's sermons, he told the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate God's calling to help the least of America's people.

"This," he said, "is how you reach the kingdom of Heaven."

Hopefully, with a stopover at the White House.

posted October 18, 2004 04:35 PM              

Sunday, October 17, 2004

If you're a conservative Christian, and you're still undecided, please consider that evangelical Christians who hope to call this country to a higher moral standard are on the verge of undermining their own legitimacy.

I am a Christian, and I am alarmed. One of the values we hold most dearly is "truth." It is a foundational value, upon which all other values rest. If we don't have truth, we have built our house on shifting sand.
When President Clinton looked into the camera and said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," we discerned what he was saying and were justifiably outraged.

Just a few years later, President Bush looked the world in the eye and said there was "clear evidence" of peril in Iraq, the result of which "could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Even then, the evidence was not so clear at all. And yet President Bush invoked this false image, intending to frighten people into going to war.

Clinton's untruth brought scorn and derision only upon himself. But Bush's untruth plunged this nation into an unnecessary war, killing thousands of innocents and costing all of us the good will of people and governments around the world. Who will ever trust this president again? The Bush administration is so far from deserving our trust this year that one conservative, writing for the Web site LewRockwell.com <http://LewRockwell.com/>, calls this administration "The Truth Killers."

President Bush kills the truth either because he misunderstands it, or because he deliberately misleads.

When John Kerry says he wants to wage a war on terror that is sensitive to the needs of our allies, President Bush's translation is that Kerry wants to be sensitive to terrorists. Christians who applaud this statement only heap judgment upon themselves.

When Kerry says he will make certain that his foreign policies will meet a global test for legitimacy, the Bush translation is that Kerry "wants to subject the defense of this country to the approval of other nations." Again, not true.

The cornerstone message of the Bush campaign, concerning the $87 billion Iraq appropriation vote, would be laughable if it weren't so sad. Most U.S. senators voted against that same appropriation before they voted for it. President Bush has repeatedly used the fact that Kerry did virtually the same thing to portray him as indecisive and weak. Republican Christians, who evidently don't know how the Senate works, are moved by this shallow characterization.

President Bush has governed and gone to war through policies that deliberately suppress the truth. Christians who support a president who engages in this kind of subterfuge have already judged themselves guilty of the very thing they ought to stand against.

John Kerry may not support all the things that evangelical Christians would support. But his testimony in 1971 focused on holding the leaders of his day accountable for a misbegotten war, another truth that has been suppressed, and he is doing the same thing today. He deserves an honest look from honest Christians, and I intend to vote for him on Nov. 2.

********************************************
Love,
Rainbow

posted October 18, 2004 05:51 PM            

It is verrrrry sinister.