A Letter to the Religious Right

Nearly forty years ago Jerry Falwell Sr. emerged on the national stage, a happy warrior and leader of a movement that would become the Moral Majority. It was a movement that seemed at once to stand outside, over and above, what it considered to be a degenerating culture, demanding that it reform itself. At the same time, it was engaged, with its feet planted firmly on the ground and determined to win over not just the hearts and minds of the public, but seats in the House and the Senate.
   Even for those of us who couldn’t quite get on board with their agenda, Falwell’s movement was difficult to criticize. Here were Christians who took their faith seriously enough to take it, as it were, to the streets. I was 20 in 1980. I had been raised in a Methodist church and religious faith has always been important to me, something I have never quite relinquished even during slack periods when doubt and indifference overtake me. I was a “deacon” of the ecumenical church at my small liberal arts school. I thought briefly of going into the ministry (a bad idea Im very glad I never acted on) and thought more seriously about studying academic theology (something I wish to this day I had done).
   As a Methodist I absorbed the ethic of doing good works (“Do all the good that you can, wherever you can, whenever you can.”) As a college student I thrilled to my undergraduate dose of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Christianity I was attracted to was concerned with social justice. The historical Jesus I knew was the Jesus whose concern was always the poor, outcasts, the marginalized, including women (especially widows who had it very bad in his day). It continues to be baffling, in fact, how anyone can read the gospels and come away with any other portrait. It was a faith that claimed for Christ the whole of human experience, the repair of the world so that the community of man would mirror the Kingdom of God, nothing less. The faith of Falwell and the religious right, in contrast, seemed to takes its stand on a narrow beachhead of personal salvation and private behavior, still more narrowly circumscribed to the area of sexuality. It seemed, and seems to me now, an enormous retreat.
   But Falwell and his movement made its mark and it clearly resonated with millions who felt that the values that had built America were being shuffled off.  It captured the attention of Ronald Reagan, and was a vital component of the conservative Republican revival. In any social history of late 20^th century America, the “religious right” had earned a chapter all to themselves.
   In time, there would be slips in the façade that seemed to confirm what some of us thought of the movement—as when Falwell suggested that the 9/11 attacks were America’s retribution for a culture of abortion and homosexuality. Now, in the aftermath of the ugliest political campaign in our history, a humiliation of international proportions in which you the public leaders of the “religious right” fell (with some notable exceptions) one by one into line with Donald Trump—today I and people like me, of every shade of faith and skepticism, wonder, quite literally, how you look yourselves in the mirror.
   Where does one begin? It ought to be entirely sufficient to mention simply that the candidate you backed has exhibited—not just during his campaign, but throughout his adult life and career in the public eye—every sort of behavior that decent parents admonish their children to avoid. A loudmouth, a braggart, a bully, a crybaby who is insulted easily, yet easily and breezily insults, a compulsive liar. And you know the laundry list of recent revelations—the jilting of contractors and employees, the claims against Trump University, the bankruptcies, the failed casinos and businesses—you know the list and you ignored it all. Of course, there is the famous Access Hollywood tape that captured your candidate’s distinctive style with women; that’s the one that caused Paul Ryan and other Republicans to be (briefly) shocked, shocked, and prompted Ralph “Family Values” Reed to pronounce Trump—using that conscienceless, value-free label so emblematic of baby-boomer moral neutrality—“inappropriate.”
   But honest to God, who is so sweetly naïve as to have been honestly surprised to learn that this man is a coarse, crude, vulgar reptilian? Boys will be boys—right?—and now the episode barely registers (a measure, itself, of political degeneracy). But some things do stand out and retain their capacity to take the breath away (at least for those of us capable of shock and shame). Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter is one—perhaps because it was captured on video and replays itself in the mind like a traumatic memory. Maybe you take your lead from Ann (“Godless: The Church of Liberalism”) Coulter who rationalized that Trump was merely mimicking a “generic retard.”
   Is that how you explain this to your children?
   Or take Trump’s astonishingly, brazenly dishonest description of an altercation that took place, late in the campaign, during a rally at which President Obama was speaking. A veteran stood up and began heckling the president; predictably, some people in the crowd booed, attempting to silence him. But Obama lightly scolded the crowd and insisted the man, who served the country, had a right to have his say. The exchange was, of course, videotaped and can be viewed online.
   Later at his own rally—also, of course, videotaped and easily accessible--Trump described the exchange saying the President was “screaming” at the veteran, and called Obama’s behavior a “disgrace.” 
   Spend even just a minute or two to meditate on this: Trump made a patently false, publicly defamatory pronouncement about the President’s behavior during a rally that he knew (as all of us know now about virtually everything that doesn’t happen in the deepest warrens of our own homes) would be videotaped and widely available on the web. He made this statement (at a rally he also knew was being recorded) either not knowing what the President actually said or did; or he made it knowing exactly what the President said and did, and lied anyways. In either case--and this is really the important thing--he didn't care.   

   Do you care? Evidently not. Are you ashamed of not caring? I guess not. Does it matter to you what this behavior, when it is endorsed or overlooked by moralists such as you, does to the entire understanding of public truth? Evidently not.

   Spare me, spare all of us, your prevarications about Hillary Clinton. Drop it. There are countless ways you might have approached this travesty of a campaign without endorsing Mrs. Clinton and salvaged your integrity.

“We the public leaders of the contemporary Christian conservative political movement (the so-called `religious right’) urge Americans of faith to vote their conscience. However, we feel obligated to state that this entire campaign, and these candidates—both of them—are the rotten fruit of a political culture that is shot to pieces. This ruin has been a long-time in the making, with blame to go around on all sides (however much we as conservatives may feel that the great bulk of blame lay on the other side) and is ultimately rooted in a larger, broader culture degeneration which the founders of our political movement first began to point to nearly 40 years ago. Whatever the outcome of this election, Christians of all shades of belief must come together afterward to work to repair our democratic Republic.”

But no. Listen to William “Book of Virtues” Bennet on Fox News who said that Republicans who opposed Trump “suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.” How else to translate this except as follows: manners, civility, the norms of civilized discourse, are all an elitist affectation, unrelated to the substance of our politics, and irrelevant in judging the fitness of any candidate.

   On that note, by the way, would any of you dare to look anyone in the eye and say that your candidate would have been as gracious in defeat as Hillary Clinton was, and as Barack Obama, who endured eight years of nihilistic obstruction, continues to be? Right…Don’t even bother. Just move on and let that one go.  
   Mr. “Death of Outrage” Bennet was clearly cashing in on the current stock, lately risen so high, around the notion that “elitism”—which evidently includes commonplace and traditionally understood instincts toward civility and truth-saying—is what afflicts our politics. Yet nowhere among the conservative media outlets have I read anything remotely as sympathetic to Trump’s supporters as Larissa Macfarquhar’s article, “In Trump Country,” in The New Yorker—that citadel of the Manhattan literary and intellectual elite.  Read it--there is not a trace of that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension that sometimes characterizes liberal-left attitudes toward the underclass; it is an authentically sympathetic, even admiring, portrait of Trump supporters in rural West Virginia.
   By the way, I believe that your candidate should—as Mrs. Clinton suggested—be given a chance, despite my foreboding. He’s big on infrastructure (name a candidate who isn't) and everyone will smile if gets some bridges repaired. And, let us acknowledge: the man likes to build things. The nation needs a grand project (the interstate highway system, the Apollo space mission) to inspire it again.  So maybe your candidate will incite some clever entrepreneurs and engineers to throw a great string of gondolas across the West Virginia mountains, creating a monumental statewide park that will attract millions of tourists, hikers and campers to that beautiful state, employing tens of thousands of state residents and helping to rekindle a national awareness of Appalachian history and culture. And maybe he will couple this great national project with a massive infusion of public dollars for mental health and substance abuse treatment to battle the off-the-charts opioid epidemic there. 
   (I just made that up sitting at the laptop. You tell us what the New York City real estate mogul with the trophy wives intends to do for those people in Larissa Macfarquhar’s portrait.)
   Maybe he will be successful, or less disastrous than some of us fear. Perhaps inertia and the stuck forces everywhere (inertia plus stuck forces = “reality”) will rein in the man’s crazier impulses. Perhaps he won’t launch a nuclear war on a whim when he has a bad hair day and can’t find his I-phone. Perhaps someone sane will urge him to give the heave-ho to the unsanitary figures around him (Roger Stone, Steve Bannon). Maybe he will surprise us all, and all of the drama on Facebook and Broadway theaters will be shown to be so much foolishness.  Perhaps, who knows, your man will end up someday engraved on the side of Mt. Rushmore, his trousers down, seated on the crapper and studying his I-phone, his brow furrowed in mid-tweet—a final, enduring, case-closing rebuke to elites everywhere: This is who we are, get over it.
   Or not. Where will you hide your shame when it becomes clear that those tiny bones he tossed to the working class during the campaign will be all they will ever get, as your man stocks his cabinet with billionaire businessmen? Shamelessness. That’s the key to getting by for the next four years with your candidate who was forced to shell out millions to striving regular folks defrauded in his “University,” and as the revelations about his many conflicted interests emerge. Reach for the most shameless excuses as his curious crush on Vladimir Putin evolves, with ominous consequences for the NATO alliance and the Baltic states you would otherwise be howling at Democrats for having “lost.” Shamelessness is what will enable you to hold your head up when the peculiar childishness of this man’s temperament begins to unnerve the closed circle around him, and he careens from one drama to the next, punctuating the reality show with angry, semi-literate tweets composed at 3 am and aimed at whoever has not—in the Trump parlance strikingly reminiscent of a first-grader coming home from school in tears—been “nice” to him.
   Shamelessness, no need to hide anything. After all, you hold all the cards. The executive branch, both houses of Congress, a majority of governorships and state legislatures—all this along with your gerrymandered congressional districts, your multi-million-dollar megaphone at Fox News, the Koch Brothers, and legions of one-percenters determined keep employed those legislators in Congress whom Garrison Keillor called “Christian pirates with their hands on the tax levers.”
   Many of us—whose patriotism you would readily impugn if it was advantageous to do so—do indeed feel profoundly afraid for our country. Resentment toward our fellow citizens who voted for Donald Trump is not the way out, but for you, the leaders of a movement that has claimed for 40 years to champion the cause of character, integrity and values in our politics, there will be no forgetting and no forgiveness.
   There is a tremendous liberation that comes with finally seeing things as they are, at finally seeing you and your “movement” in all its naked shamelessness for what it is. Moreover, some of us will hold on to an assurance that, in fact, you are not the future. Now when the attendant of the man of God had risen early and gone out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was circling the city. And his servant said to him, "Alas, my master! What shall we do?" He answered, “Fear not, for there are more of us than there are of them.”
   There are more of us than there are of you. Here is the nub of what I have to say: you will never, ever again lecture Americans about the need for character and integrity in our leaders without being met by the rolling thunder of derisive laughter followed by the silence of contemptuous disregard. You have won another battle, congratulations. You have lost your war.

Road Trip: Hills, Voices, Mysticism, Candidates and Letting Go

“When I’m in California, I feel like something bad is going to happen, because there’s so much empty space. Here it’s cozy. If you believe the mountains are yours, like most West Virginians do, when you get back to these mountains you feel comfortable again. You feel at ease….When I see the mountains, it’s like they’re embracing me.”

 

I spent what felt like a lot of time driving through West Virginia this weekend on a 13-hour road trip from Washington, D.C. to Columbus, Ohio and back (six and a half hours each way), and found myself thinking about this comment. It’s from a lovely article by Larissa Macfarquhar in a recent New Yorker Magazine, a deeply sympathetic and informative portrait of Donald Trump supporters in a small town in southern West Virginia. It’s a highly descriptive statement; the hills in that country are so compressed together they do seem to make you feel enclosed. (During my first exposure to rural West Virginia on school trip when I was 12, I remember then being impressed by exactly this feature, and being rather scared of it; from suburban Washington, it was for me startling different and made me feel cut-off, entombed possibly in a vale of mist and shadows, and it exacerbated, perhaps, the lonely homesickness I was feeling on my first extended time away from home.) The crowded hills leave no space for the kind of expansiveness that one normally associates with a landscape, but create instead the characteristic hollows or ‘hollers.’ When fogs fills the hollers it becomes a world folded in on itself, shrouded, as it were, in its own distinctive self-history; it is out of this haunted landscape that the “high lonesome” sound of bluegrass was born. These impressions, and others I gathered 35 years ago when I took a bus trip across the country and then, a few years later, drove across the country, have caused me to think more than once about the effect of landscape on one’s perceptions of the world.

On this weekend I was driving between northern Virginia and Columbus, Ohio, and back the tops of the trees all over the hills were touched with the beginning of autumn.  Bright color, but still only dappled—one can imagine a careful child’s sponge painting, the reds and yellows and orange crenellated, and lots of greenery still carpeting the lower reaches of the ancient hills. In another two weeks it will be a riot.

******

Listening to the radio for six-and-a-half hours on a Sunday drive through the near-midwest and Appalachia is an interesting experience. A social historian, listening to a tape years later, might draw some interesting inferences about our country. Country music, “classic” rock stations, preachers of every stripe. Oddly, a large number of preachers with Scottish or Irish accents. Preachers relating (not explicitly, but still transparently) the meaning of being Christian to the importance of not voting for Hillary Clinton. Football games broadcast through static. A commercial in which an avid sounding 20-something fellow opens with, “I’d like to talk about an issue of grave social importance—condom use.” It was an advertisement for Trojan.

There is also a station I have lighted on many times driving through the East Coast mountain region—We Are One Body: WAUB, operated (according to the station’s website) by the diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, out of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. There are no commercials, but the station does rely on contributions and there are occasional solicitations for donations.  It is otherwise a continuous reflection on Catholic Christianity hosted—most of the time I have ever tuned in—by the kindest sounding, most soft spoken, most brotherly young man, reflecting either on Scripture or very often on arcane doctrine of the Church. (I have heard him reflect—he doesn’t really “expound” the way preachers and pundits do—on the meaning of specific paragraphs and nuances of obscure Papal proclamations.) If there is a political or doctrinal inflection in one direction or another along the familiar cultural fault lines, I haven’t detected it. Certainly, the station would be appealing to the most orthodox Catholic; it is appealing to me, a non-Catholic skeptic. The website states that the station is “catechetical and contemplative” and “the programming is intended to present the life of the Church in a way that makes the Mystical Body of Christ more apparent.” (Catechetical and contemplative or not, the Brothers behind We Are One Body are living fully in the digital age. The website offers a downloadable App, and several venues for listening online at http://www.waob.org/.) The reflections are interspersed with Gregorian chant, a musical form well suited to contemplation and especially resonant driving alone through those old, old hills, and with periods of silence. A radio station that promotes periods of silence. I think it’s a concept that should catch on.

Somewhere else on the radio dial, far away from We Are One Body, a devout, exasperated Catholic was asked what the Church could do about the fact that young people—“Millennials”—were drifting away from the Church. He grumbled about the intellectual vacuity of what he termed “the atheist idea” and seemed to believe that the way to get young people back in the pews was to argue them back. I would like to have told him he would do just as well to go outside and beat his head against a rock.

But it has occurred to me later that in fact the Catholic Church has an enormous gift that could draw in many of the disaffected—namely this rich, rich inheritance of contemplative mysticism, of which We Are One Body is a such a charming representative for motorists driving 65 miles an hour across the Interstate highways of the Appalachian mountain range. (Protestants, having no such inheritance, are left with offering to the un-churched these ubiquitous folk and “alternative” worship services with the rock band and the theatrical trappings.) If Catholic parishes began thinking about creative ways to offer the Church’s ancient treasure of contemplative mysticism to their communities I believe they would find young followers. Actually, I think young people might eat it up. 

It is not, after all, the life of the Spirit that young people (and others) are fleeing from in their flight from the Church (and from religion in general); it is rather from what I would broadly call—by way of shorthand—“clericalism,” the deification of little men in robes and vestments, the perfumed odor of pharisaical righteousness, the itchy, obsessive preoccupation (inherent, it seems, in every orthodox religion) with what everyone is doing with their poor, sad sexual organs, and the habit of most organized religions and many “religious” people to fabricate a God who conveniently just happens to look (and vote) as they do.

On the Sunday I was driving, the young Brother was reflecting on the Incarnation, the distinctiveness of the Christian belief that Jesus was God made flesh, and the need to meditate on this most paradoxical of all doctrines—that Jesus was fully man and yet also God.  

******

When I wasn’t listening to We Are One Body, or trolling the airwaves for music that wasn’t deeply depressing, I hung around the high upper 80s on the radio dial where, if you are close enough to a major city, you can pick up public radio. West Virginia public radio is quite good. There was a lengthy interview with J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Vance’s book sounds fascinating—he sounds like an interesting and likable man, with a rather tortured family history—and its garnered a lot of attention, in part, Vance acknowledges, because of the election, which has focused attention on poor working class whites. (In this, his book has been joined by the way, by “White Trash: The 400-year Old Untold History of Class in America.”)

But about this particular “meme”—Donald Trump and the white working class. Among the countless things that anger me about this election and Trump’s ascendancy, perhaps this is the most infuriating: while it is certainly true that white working class men are almost entirely voting (or saying they will vote, or showing up at rallies) for Donald Trump, there is absolutely no way in the world he could have come this far in an election on that demographic alone. (Leave aside the preposterous delusion—bewildering to all those who see Trump for what he transparently is—that the New York real estate tycoon is some kind of honest broker for poor white working class people, or that he could give a damn about the West Virginians depicted in Larissa Macfarquhar's New Yorker article.)

The Trump phenomenon, in fact, is fed by legions of invertebrate Republican "leaders" at all levels, the usual low-IQ loud mouths in conservative media , and many, many perfectly comfortable American men and women whose jobs are not endangered and have never been anything but elaborately privileged, even judging by American standards, let alone the standards of how most of the rest of the world lives.

When I reflect on this and this sad and miserable election, I think of a profoundly sorrowful statement by Garrison Keillor. “If we elect this man president we are not the country we think we are….The churches should close their doors.”

 

*****

My trip took me through Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia again and Western Maryland before coming into the mad traffic of the greater D.C. area.

The drive out from D.C. on Friday was miserable—it took at least two-and-a-half hours in northbound traffic to get as far as I might have gotten normally in one hour, and it rained the rest of the way. I had hoped to get to Columbus that night, but thought it better to stop for the night. I was visiting my daughter in college. We had a lovely time with her mother on Saturday, ignoring the Parents Weekend organized events and doing our own thing. But on Sunday I was impatient and crabby (I had a fuming fit standing in line at the Panera because a couple in front of us took too long placing their order) and eager—why? For what reason?—to get on the road.

I think my daughter was embarrassed for me at my immaturity. Or I was embarrassed for myself. Actually, she’s an adult and the necessary steps of separating she began as a teenager are all but completed. I doubt she gives me a lot of thought when she doesn’t absolutely have to. I haven’t quite let go of her—being her father has been the only aspect of my life in which I unquestionably knew what I was doing. All the rest of it, I have been making it up as I go along, a blind man groping along in the dark. I should let go of her, but I don’t know exactly what’s next.

It reminds me of a story I like a lot, “To Know a Woman,” by Amos Oz. The novel is a favorite of mine—I don’t read a lot of fiction—but I will admit it is a strange one. A lot of readers who love Amos Oz are stumped by it, understandably. Yoel Ravid is a middle aged Israeli, recently retired from the Mossad, the nation’s storied intelligence service. His wife has died in circumstances that are slightly mysterious, possibly involving a neighbor with whom she may have been having an affair. His teenage daughter seems to have some incompletely defined illness—which may or may not involve a certain amount of deliberate playacting on her part. Yoel’s relationship with her is scratchy, but not much more so than that of most fathers and teenage girls.  He is befriended by a middle-aged real estate agent, an odd fellow, a bit of a playboy whose admiration for Yoel is ever so vaguely erotic, something like a schoolboy crush.

The story is told in short, terse chapters in which not a lot happens. There is an atmosphere of tense uncertainty throughout, of frustrated action, of something being always uncannily “off,” not quite right—an ambience with which I somehow feel quite at home. Yoel’s is a keen intelligence, far seeing and penetrating, but hobbled by ambivalence—or rather, by a preternatural caution. He’s a cautious man by training (I am one by nature) and like me he wants to make the next step in his midlife a right one.

There is a pleasant, convalescent tenor to the resolution of the story, a relaxation—like a clenched fist slowly uncramping—of the low-grade anxiety that grips the story throughout, a sense of things out-of-balance suddenly righting themselves. Uncertainties are not so much resolved as let go of, as when Yoel (admonished by his daughter’s precocious boyfriend) agrees that he must let his daughter go and breathe on her own. For himself, Yoel is an observer, and he finds late in life a sudden pleasure in observing, only observing for its own sake and nothing more.  

Well, it’s a long drive back home from Columbus, not a fun one necessarily and I wasn’t wrong to be impatient, regardless of what my daughter thinks. On the other hand, I have always experienced driving to be somewhat meditative and as I found myself paying attention to those hills and valleys and the voices on the radio, and meditating on these observations as I wrote them over the following week since my return, I felt in a similar way that this too is who I am, an observer, whatever else may come as I grow old. Maybe that is all I will ever be.

It is not a bad fate. “Since he was capable of observing, Yoel grew fond of observing in silence. ... And if it was necessary to focus the gaze and remain on the lookout for hours and days, even for years, well there was no finer thing that this to do.”