Continuing the thought from yesterday’s post, in his book American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America, the ever-provocative Chris Hedges writes about attending a political rally disguised as a Christian crusade, designed to incite the masses to “take back America.” Hedges explores the profoundly anti-Christian sentiments underlying movements such as these, and indeed, of talk radio of every stripe.
A moral obligation, Freud wrote, only increases with our affection for an individual. In this room, the commandment to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is twisted, in ways Freud could understand, to “Love your fellow Christians as yourself.” Loving one’s neighbor presupposes a bond, a shared sense of belonging, but it was a presupposition Freud pointed out was absurd. “If this grandiose commandment had run ‘love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves thee,’ I should not take exception to it, “he wrote. Loving a stranger, Freud said, was counter to human nature: “If he is a stranger to me…it will be hard for me to love him.” And those outside the Christian community are effectively made strangers. They are no longer worthy of being loved. The distinction creates a world where there are only two types of people. There are godly men and women who advance Christian values, and there are nonbelievers – many of them liberal Christians – who peddle the filth and evil of secular humanism. This dividing line is nothing other than the distinction between human and nonhuman, between the worthy and those unworthy of life, between saved and unsaved, between friend and foe.
In rallies like those in Johnson’s Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised characteristics inherent in the godless. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, the message goes, are no longer human beings. They are types. This new, exclusive community fosters rigidity, conformity and intolerance. In this new binary world segments of the human race are disqualified from moral and ethical consideration. And because fundamentalist followers live in binary universe, they are incapable of seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers to create a Christian America, then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. This belief system negates the possibility of the ethical life. It fails to grasp that goodness must be sought outside the self and that the best defense against evil is to seek it within. When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight. It is only by grasping our own capacity for evil, our own darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay. When evil is purely external, then moral purification always entails the eradication of others.
One of my favorite movies of 2008 was Doubt, the big-screen adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s Tony-award winning play, staring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. In the most tragic line in the movie, we hear Streep’s character, Sister Beauvier, coldly say to Father Flynn, played by Hoffman, “I have no sympathy for you. I know you are invulnerable to true regret.” What would happen if we dared to not use that as the starting point from which we look at others, if we decided to make every effort to live peaceably with all men and love our neighbors as ourselves, to see others as made in the image of God? Maybe we would come closer to living as if the Kingdom of God were a present reality, not only a not-yet, but also a now.