Christianizing politics

On Tuesday I discussed religious claims about morality in America.  The modern American Christianist movement ("Christianist" means fundamentalist evangelicals and hard-line Catholics, not all Christians) is not only morally preachy but politically active as well, working to take control of as much of the government as possible so that they can use it to enforce their taboo system on the whole society.  As we have now begun to see, they have succeeded in doing exactly that with the Supreme Court.  Along the way, they made themselves a major player within the Republican party and eventually the dominant element within that party, so that it too is now largely another instrument they can use to further their agenda, though more traditional Republican politicians retain some power too.  Clearly the Christianists are quite effective players in the game of politics.

Yet as we've all seen, this take-over has been accompanied by some bizarre and disturbing phenomena on the right, unprecedented in American politics.  To begin with, consider Trump's "big lie" that the 2020 election was stolen from him by various machinations, and the widespread support for it among Republican politicians and the party's voting base.  (Trump is not a Christianist, but they were and are by far his most fervent supporters, and he found it advisable to curry favor with them while in office -- as any future Republican president will as well.)  The "evidence" supporting the stolen-election lie ranges from fatuous to nonexistent; it has been tested in court dozens of times, sometimes before judges Trump appointed, and never once found to have any merit.  It's a desperate confetti of willful misinterpretations of snatches of video, ignorance of how ballot-counting works, paranoid conspiracy theories, and random stuff that's completely made up.

But that's exactly how religion works.  Belief in the literal reality of Noah's ark, rejection of evolution and modern geology, etc depend on exactly the same kind of thinking.  Willful misunderstanding of basic science like the second law of thermodynamics, claims that evolution is a "random process", a made-up distinction between "micro-evolution" and speciation, constant references to a few particular discoveries that supposedly contradict evolution -- they have been cultivating this kind of "thinking" for generations, ever since modern science started to overthrow the Biblical version of reality.

So of course it's easy to adapt the same kind of thinking as needed to support any other narrative they feel it necessary to defend.  Trump's election lie.  The whole edifice of anti-vax drivel.  Baroque conspiracy theories like QAnon.  None of those beliefs are, themselves, Christian, but the mental gyrations that support them evolved in the bizarre anti-reality environment of Biblical-literalist Christianity, and have now been re-purposed to serve the same function in other contexts.

There is also the matter of overt, systematic attacks on democracy.  Endless gimmicks to make voting more difficult.  Legal arguments to empower state legislatures to set aside the will of the voters and choose presidential electors all by themselves.  Schemes to install partisan ideologues as poll workers and vote-counters.  Talk of repealing the Seventeenth Amendment so that state legislatures, not voters, would choose senators.

But why would we expect a party dominated by Biblical literalists to have any respect for democracy?  The whole concept of democracy and representative government is part of our Greco-Roman heritage, the true root and core of Western civilization, to which the Bible and its values are completely antithetical.  "Democracy" is from Greek demos kratein, "the people rule"; Greek democracy involved settling most questions by referendum of all voters, something not practical for a large population, but it established the principle that the will of the people is the true basis of legitimate government ("the people" meant only adult non-slave males, but that was true even of our own modern democracies until less than two centuries ago).  "Republic" is from Latin res publica, "the affairs of the people", and the Roman republic did eventually establish some representation, with real power, for the plebs or common people.  There are other examples of representative democracy having deep roots in the West, such as Iceland's Althingi, which dates back to the tenth century.

But there's no trace of democracy in the Bible.  It glorifies the rule of an absolute, supernatural tyrant, all-knowing and all-powerful and even immortal, who is declared to be all-good, all-loving, and absolutely just, even when ordering acts of genocide or ethnic cleansing, or flooding the whole world in a fit of temper.  The will of the people is irrelevant -- the will of God is the basis of legitimacy, and the role of the people is to obey or be punished.  It's a totalitarian vision to turn Stalin green with envy.

Now that the Christianists have succeeded in using the Republican party to achieve some real power, they are simply acting in accordance with that ideal.  It does not matter that large majorities of Americans support same-sex marriage or the right of women to choose abortion.  The will of the people is irrelevant.  The taboo system is the will of God and must be enforced by government power.  The role of the people is to obey or be punished.

Political parties and the whole left-vs-right thing are the superficial side of politics -- what's visible on the surface.  The real struggle, underneath all that, is religious and cultural.

This is a religious movement which makes a virtue of believing what one is told to believe, regardless of evidence, and even fabricating or willfully misunderstanding evidence; and has an utterly totalitarian, top-down conception of what makes law and government legitimate.  Why would anyone be surprised that their politics reflects that?