CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM’S LIES

By Ruth A. Sheets

This Sunday is Pentecost, the “end” of the holiest part of the Christian calendar.  The “season” began back in February with Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent, passed through Easter in April, then closes 50 days after Easter.  This year, as a United Church of Christ minister, I have been thinking a lot about Christianity during this special period.  More and more conservative Christian groups are claiming that the problems this nation is facing are due to people not living rightly.  For those people, Christian Nationalists, “rightly” means doing things the way “we conservative Christians” say they should.  Why?  My question to them, why should what you think is “right” impact me and the rest of the people in America who may not agree with your notion of “right?” 

Last week I read a book I found enlightening as well as disturbing, and quite relevant to my ponderings.  The book is one every American should read if they can.  It is The Founding Myth, Why Christian Nationalism is Unamerican by Andrew L. Seidel & Susan Jacoby.  The book’s premise, too many “religious” Americans believe this nation was founded on Christian principles when there is far more evidenced that this is not true.  Evangelical Christians (mostly white) and many Roman Catholics hold extreme conservative beliefs, particularly related to “the 10 Commandments,” sex and gender, and forcing people who don’t share their beliefs to follow them anyway.  That is simply put, unamerican, unconstitutional, undemocratic, but alas, when one is convinced of their own righteousness, everything is on the table and everyone is in their sights.

The authors bring up a point I have known since my college days, there are several (4 at least) versions of the Ten Commandments and it is a bit arbitrary which ones they decided to pick.  When did the “Ten Commandments” hit the political scene?  It happened during the 1950s And the “Red Scare,” not at our founding as the religious right would have us believe.    A paranoid legislator with too much power, Joseph McCarthy saw Communists around every corner, under every chair and bed and would even hold up blank folders claiming he had lists of Communists in our government.  To prove, I guess, that our leaders weren’t among those Communists, a whole lot of unamerican actions were taken.  “In God We Trust” was printed on our money, the words “under God” were added to the “Pledge of Allegiance,” and an opening arose for presidents to say “God bless America” at the end of speeches.  By the way for years, “god” was not in the oath of office either. 

There were some Christians among the founders, but they represented a lot of different perspectives.  Even John Adams who was pretty religious did not want any religion either established or given privilege in the nation.  George Washington rarely attended church services, seldom mentioned God in any of his writings or public addresses.  Jefferson and Franklin were at best Deists and neither considered Christianity any kind of influence in developing the Constitution (which does not mention a higher being) and begins with We the People of the United States.   

So what is going on here?  It seems to me that conservative Christians, mostly white people, are using their religion to front for their racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, and xenophobia.  They often get very angry when someone points out that something they have said or done is racist, sexist, or the rest.  They jump into religion so they can claim, “god is against what those ‘woke’ people stand for.”  They are rarely asked what they mean by “woke.”  Interviewers don’t ask them to explain their words or actions, “if it is not racist, sexist, homo/transphobic, what is it?”  It is as though those white conservative Christians are so holy they can’t be challenged even though they are working hard to eliminate rights that are guaranteed to all Americans through our Constitution.

I think of those “worshippers” as “pseudo-Christians.  They pick from the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures those passages they are comfortable with to try to force on others and ignore such  sayings as “love your enemies and do good to those who hurt you.”  Or rather, they distort them to mean, “we should do whatever it takes to stop them because that is really what god wants.  They are really enemies of god, you know.”  In other words, they know better than their god what “He” wants (always “He” because women are just an afterthought.  They ignore the verses in Genesis that say that man and women were created equal.  So, men are supposed to be the masters of the world and women must go along with whatever nonsense, whatever violence, whatever ignorance men decide.  Male supremacy, if even thought of at all may have been the belief of the founders, but they didn’t put that into the Constitution.  At the time “men” was considered to mean “men and women,” linguistically.   

One major problem we have is the extreme deference to religion our conservative national leaders have.  The words “god, faith, and “religious freedom” are tossed about regularly.  In this case, “god” is their god and “faith” is their faith.  “Religious freedom” means freedom for them to discriminate, to dismiss, to hurt anyone they claim their religion demands they exclude and harm.  Our Supreme Court, you know, the supposed highest court in the land has too many members who think their religious beliefs supersede the rights of the American people.  No one who is in business should be able to refuse service to customers unless those people are committing a real crime against them, not just being LGBTQ or Black, or an immigrant, or whatever excuse they come up with.  The SC is OK with such discrimination if someone just says, “My faith says I shouldn’t do it.”  One’s faith should be irrelevant.  If your faith is so exclusive, you should not be in business, but that uber-religious conservative court has decided that it’s OK to discriminate as long as you blame it on god.  Hey, if a plaintiff’s god supposedly doesn’t like abortion, no problem, we’ll let the scared, misogynistic, white mostly male legislators in the pseudo-Christian states put women’s lives and ability to decide for themselves at risk “for god, of course.”

One’s religion should never be a weapon, although it often has been used that way.  If one looks beneath the religious shield the folks wielding religion are holding, there is always a real reason.  It usually is power or fear of losing power, revenge (that’s a big one), economics (enslave people to do the work you don’t want to pay people to do for you while claiming it’s god’s will).  Those leaders always carry with them a high opinion of themselves, their abilities, and their value.  They surround themselves with people (mostly sycophantic men and a few women, who will do whatever is commanded for the crumbs of religious reminders that doing it will win them a place in heaven, the ability to do harm to others in god’s name, or some other such potent bribery.  This phenomenon is not restricted to Christianity.  Other religions and political entities like Fascists, Communists, and emperors whose religion is themselves actively participate too.

These forced religious and pseudo-religious practices should never be part of a democracy, but fear is opening more and more democracies around the world to them.  In India, the current Prime Minister wants a Hindu-nationalism where Hindus can do pretty much whatever they want to Muslims and other religious and non-religious groups within the society, even allowing barbaric anti-women and marriage outside the faith laws to be passed and brutally employed to enforce male and religious supremacy.  Hungary is well on its way to creating a pseudo-religious nation where only white Hungarians with certain religious beliefs are welcome and will be treated as citizens.  China and Russia have already made their versions of Communism straightjacket the people into doing only what the men at the top say they should, even to the point of arresting comedians who say things the thin-skinned leaders don’t like. 

We the People of the United States should be able to do better.  We can stop bending over backward to accommodate the religious right whose purpose is to bring this nation to its knees so they can enforce their own brand of Christianity on a people that does not want it and know it is unconstitutional.  The question is, how can we get Americans to care enough to stand up for real religious freedom, that is freedom to worship as one pleases as long as it does not interfere with anyone else’s life without their uncoerced permission.  It is also the freedom to not have a religion or believe in god, any god.  That is what our founders actually wanted.  It’s time we live that and not the myth of our being a Christian nation.  We aren’t and were never that. 

MOTHERS!! GOTTA LOVE ‘EM

By Ruth A. Sheets

Mother’s Day is coming up and a lot of commercial attention is focused on mothers.  All sorts of gifts are proposed as tokens we sons, daughters, offspring of mothers can present to our mothers in appreciation for their role in our lives.  And, mothers dutifully tell us “Ah you didn’t have to do that.”  Maybe we didn’t have to, but we want to.  

Gifts plus words of gratitude are well-deserved for mothers having given birth to us or having chosen to bring us into their family.  Mothers often have the primary responsibility for the children:  preparing food, doing laundry, seeing that they are at school every day, helping with homework, remembering birthdays and holidays, keeping children as neat and clean as the children will permit, disinfecting scraped knees, keeping track of time online, at least occasional cleaning of kids’ rooms, attending parent-teacher conferences, and more.  That’s practically a full-time job and often on top of a paid job.

Every mom approaches the challenges of parenthood with their own style, worldview, and moral principles.  Some highly value education, so try to instill that value in the children.  Some mothers are animal people, so want their children to have a pet to care for (often ending up caring for the  pet herself).  Some mothers are helicopter parents who monitor every single thing their children do and stand up for them even on the job.  Other mothers believe in independence and encourage their children to take some risks and learn about the world with only a little motherly interference.  Some mothers are crafty and make all kinds of things for their children while others find crafts and handwork tedious and prefer to purchase or scrounge whatever their children need.  Some mothers are patient beyond comprehension, while others yell a lot to get things done.  In short, mothers are as diverse as human beings can be.  Mothers want success for their children and that success is interpreted in many different ways. 

Mothers are and have been everywhere in the world, but their role has seldom been described prior to modern times.  I suspect that absence in a lot of the historical records is because what women did was so basic and was done all the time, it was rarely noticed.  Or maybe, since most of the recorders of history were men, they had no idea what mothers or any other women did, particularly when men were not at home.  

It was easy for men to not see women’s work as in any way significant because men saw women as bodies that through male action, produced babies and hands that did work men needed done.  Common images of the female life cycle included the maiden, the mother, and the crone.  The maiden was a pure girl just awaiting her turn to be a mother (the true role of womankind).  The crone, the post-child-bearing woman, supposedly mourned the loss of her ability to bear more children, but had some wisdom to impart, that is if she were not accused of witchcraft or some other crime. 

I believe motherhood is one of the greatest roles any human being can have.  And, that anyone of child-bearing age has the right to decide whether or not to be a mother.  We can do that now in ways women couldn’t in the past without risk.  We understand how babies are made and how to stop making one if a potential mother is not prepared.  No child should be carrying and giving birth to a child, anywhere.  If a woman chooses motherhood, the whole society should be supporting her in that choice and throughout her offspring’s childhood.

I am grateful I live in an age when I could choose not to be a mother.  For a variety of reasons motherhood would not have worked for me or any child I would have had.  I was lucky I did not get hit with the peer pressure to produce a baby or a mother pleading for grandchildren.  Other women (and girls) have not been so lucky.

It is possible to identify which cultures value mothers and women in general.  In those societies, women hold positions in nearly every place in society.  Accommodations are made, through law, for pregnant women and mothers.  Men in general are not terrified that women will “take over” and render them impotent.  Ours is not one of those societies.

In America, We the People have permitted old mostly white men to determine who will be a mother, or rather, who must be a mother.  Not many corporations and businesses of any size accommodate mothers with child care, maternal and paternal leave, sick leave, or anything else.  Men and a few of their female surrogates are working to stop access to birth control too.  There is no logical reason, so one must understand it as being about power, male power over females (and everyone else who is not white and male.  Why are we permitting this?

I think it has a lot to do with a greater awareness of what mothers do and can accomplish.  That seems to scare men.  Mothers often seamlessly move from task to task, seeing that the children are up, have breakfast, are off to school or even dropped off by Mom on her way to work.  She makes sure they are supervised if her job hours are longer than school hours, comes home, prepares dinner, watches over evening activities like homework, TV and/or online time, and bedtime, sometimes with Dad’s help, but often not.   On days off from her “real” job, she shops, cleans the house, does laundry (OK, sometimes she does that at night after the kids are asleep unless she needs to take it to the laundromat).  Mom is expected to attend parent-teacher conferences, take the kids to the library, sports events, dance or music classes, make sure they are getting all the services they are entitled to related to their health and education, and so on, while also being an outstanding employee. 

This is not a plug for women to do more, to be super-women.  It is a reason we need to do some serious honoring of mothers this Mother’s Day and planning for how we as a nation can support mothers more effectively. 

Each mom has her special skills that touch and enhance the lives of her family.  One thing all mothers have in common is their love for their children.  Sometimes poverty, war, massive stress, addiction, and other factors intervene, keeping mothers from being the loving parents they want to be, but love is what they intend.

Maybe that is the most important gift a mother can give her children, love.  Love can make parental mistakes less problematic.  Love can let a child who for some reason does not “fit in,” have a safe place to be, a safe person to lean on.  Mother-love can support a child through tough times:  sickness, fear, loss of a friend or family member. 

This Mother’s Day, we each should take some time to think about the mother who raised us, the kind of person she is or was, and what we learned from her about life and how to live it well, with integrity.  She had flaws, of course, but she taught us things that made life possible.  What we did or do with that  learning is up to us.  God bless our mothers.  Happy Mother’s Day!

WHAT’S UP WITH REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS THESE DAYS?

By Ruth A. Sheets

Nearly every couple of days in the past few months, maybe way longer, news comes of another law being passed in a red state legislature and quickly signed by its governor that can and should be described as mean, even cruel.  I can’t help but wonder what is going on that red legislatures have become instruments of social warfare wielded by state governors with the state’s citizens the targets.

A lot of that social warfare has been going on in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis just has to nudge the state conservative legislators and it will be law, whatever DeSantis wants for his own personal vengeance, fear and hatred of the other, and some as yet, unidentified reasons.     These are not laws that are needed, as DeSantis claims.  They are laws of personal and political grievance.  The mostly white men among Florida’s conservative legislators don’t seem to have a problem with advancing the DeSantis fearmongering and hatred.

One would expect in a vulnerable state like Florida, the legislature’s attention would be on planning to cope with global warming, improving health care for the people of Florida, considering needed modifications to farming and fruit industries, preparing for the huge seaweed mat heading toward the coast, countering flooding challenges, or ending Florida’s food insecurity, the real problems facing the people of Florida.  Why would any legislature neglect the real problems to serve their governor’s whims?  That’s the question! 

I have been pondering for several years, since Trump was “elected” president, that any semblance of concern for the American people on the part of the Republican party seems to have drifted into oblivion.  It appears cleaving oneself to Donald Trump as leader requires sacrificing one’s moral compass, caring little or nothing for the people one is supposed to be serving, and finding ways to use cruelty to achieve questionable goals, goals which are rarely if ever stated, but must be present since so many Republicans have latched onto them.

The current targets of Republican legislatures, women of child-bearing age, the LGBTQ community and transgender youth in particular, Black citizens, asylum-seekers, public schools, and minority voters do not deserve this Republican vitriol.  I do wonder how Republican legislators get away with it and keep getting elected.  Here are a few potentials I am currently contemplating.

1. Voting suppression has been underway in the former Confederacy and Confederate wannabee states for a long time.  There is still a lot of resentment concerning the 1865 loss.  There is some kind of romance tied to the “Southern cause” that feeds a whole lot of ugly attitudes and behaviors.  Gotta still blame certain groups for the loss.

2. The current business world is obsessed with fascism, controlling other people,  making employees accept whatever pay bosses say is what workers deserve, and the unwillingness to pay their fair share of taxes.  This led to huge wealth in the hands of a few and many of them finance conservative white Republican legislators at all levels, as long as they do what the rich white guys want.

3. Evidence has shown that children are vulnerable to  indoctrination.  Republicans see that as an avenue for gaining power when they know the things they stand for are unpopular.  Go after the schools, public schools, of course, and dictate what is taught there under pain of dismissal, even arrest.  Few real teachers want to teach only what Republicans want taught if they have a choice. 

4. Book banning is a selling point for Republicans because one does not even have to have read the books they want to ban.  It just has to have a suggestive title, cover art, or author of color.  

5. Conservatives are obsessed with sex in all its forms.  Can’t teach sex and no discussions of menstruation for girls, I guess because ignorance for girls is bliss.  Getting teens pregnant works well for Republicans too.  Hey, in 13 years or so, those forced birth children can fill the factories of the legislators’ donors.

6. Evangelical and Roman Catholic Christianity in the United States has taken a turn toward support of fascism (which they call religion), claiming god tells them that people who don’t look like them, experience the world like them, and believe what they do are to be suppressed.  There is a history for them to follow.  1920s and 1930s Italy and Germany come quickly to mind.

7. Perhaps, when a political party chooses to follow a leader who has no moral compass, its leaders will see as acceptable, even valuable;  grabbing women’s bodies without consent; openly voicing racism and misogyny and expecting people to see it as normal; being uninformed and lying as often as possible, even tens of thousands of times, knowing they will rarely be challenged on the lies; inciting, supporting, or participating in an insurrection and 28 months later still not charged for it; stealing secret documents if you can get away with it, lying about having them, then claiming to have the right to them, expecting no charges.   It seems political bad behavior is the way to go to get power and attention and to avoid accountability, and Republicans are practicing every day. 

8. Red states have been heavily gerrymandered and the Supreme Court has said “OK, as long as it is political.”  (Gerrymandering is always political SC conservatives!)  So, the state legislatures have Republican supermajorities because the state’s people have been groomed to vote only “R” despite the fact those super majorities have done little to nothing to help them and have no intention of changing.

9. Hurting people works for a lot of folks as long as the targets are not themselves and their friends and families.  Since many white people in the red states have only white straight friends (or it seems that way), passing “bathroom” bills that force people to use the bathrooms of their birth gender, keeping trans girls from playing girls’ sports, denying care for transgender kids and youth, making drag shows illegal, keeping trans adults from getting care, taking over cities whose populations are mostly Black, make sense to them.  What happens when those targeted groups find ways to make the pain less, figure out how to get around Republican bullying?  Will Republican legislators move to inflict greater pain?  Will they trump up more crimes they can charge members of those “hated” groups with?  Richard Nixon and his team did it through their “war on drugs” aimed  at “Hippies and Black Americans” (part of his “Southern strategy”).

10. Hate, fear, anger, and resentment are powerful emotions that get adrenalin going.  Maybe people who have schooled themselves to feel very little can get high on those negative emotions.  To be truly effective, they need to be directed toward someone the person can convince himself/herself deserves their hatred.  Following up the hit of adrenalin, they can move to passing bills that will in some way hurt that target.  I suspect a broad smile lights up their faces as they enter their votes to inflict what the Republican legislators see as righteous pain.

11. Republican legislators, at least some of them know what they are doing is wrong, or at least they have a tiny twinge in the back of their mind that it is unamerican, unconstitutional, but they do it anyway.  When one of their target groups dares to challenge them, they will make the person(s) pay.  We saw that in Tennessee when the Assembly voted to expel 2 Black representatives for standing with protesters at the Assembly’s inaction related to gun violence after 6 gun deaths at a school not far from the state Capitol.  The Black legislators were reinstated by their cities.  Then, Montana did the same when the transgender representative dared to tell them their bad actions would cause harm to trans youth among whom there is already a high suicide rate.  She was silenced and is now suing because the action of the legislature is unconstitutional, first amendment, that free speech thing.

12. Our Federal government Republicans are also behaving badly, holding our economy hostage so they can seriously cut programs that serve disadvantaged people:  elderly, poor, disabled, American veterans.  That is shameful, but they are on a roll and will do as much damage as they can before the people stop them.  I just hope it isn’t so much damage that it cannot be repaired.   

This legislative violence started out with the goal of doing harm to the groups they planned to target.  Some groups were added later, like trans kids, but the writing, as they say was on the wall.  Each law has ancestors which took away bits of citizens’ rights.  Legislatures required Black drug users greater sentences than white ones using the same drugs; they put all kinds of conditions on abortion, who could get one, how long they would have to wait, the kind of invasive procedures would have to be done to the woman first, what kind of facility could house abortion providers, parental consent, etc.  Despite the Constitution giving every citizen the right to vote at age 18 and up, states began chipping away at those voting rights:  need I.D.s the Republican legislators would approve, voting locations limited in districts that are heavily minority or Democratic, permitting only specific people to use mail-in or absentee ballots and somehow those privileged people would have to deliver the ballots themselves, gerrymandering became very precise, surgically cutting up districts to give Republicans advantages they did not deserve, you get the idea.  

These ancestor laws have morphed into what is going on in the red states.  Texas and a couple of other states are incentivizing citizens to rat on people they think are getting or helping someone to get abortions and some state legislatures want to execute women for having abortions (sound like Russia, China, North Korea)!  They are also threatening anyone who crosses state lines to get an abortion.  (can we say “obsessed?”)  For those same red states, being transgender is a crime and parents who help their desperate children get trans care are abusers, criminals.

Colleges and universities are not allowed to make their fragile white students uncomfortable learning about diversity because, let’s see, white people want to pretend they are the only people on Earth who matter?   Everyone else is a potential servant or slave? 

I think, as I have for a long time now that conservative white people are scared, scared all the time.  They know in their “heart of hearts” they are no better than anyone else, which is why they have to keep feeding themselves with the Fox Not Nearly News lies.  They need to hang together in legislatures and pass appalling laws that will hurt those people they know are just as good as they are.  They warp Christianity to fit their equally warped world view, essentially creating god in their own image. 

All this effort by bigots like DeSantis and the other conservative white legislators and governors have one slight upside.  Democrats and independents are starting to wake up to the fascist laws that are descending on us.  People are talking to each other trying to figure out how to do an intervention to treat Republican insanity. 

Republicans no longer can be considered a worthy political party.  They lost that position when they let their racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, pseudo-Christianity take over their thoughts and actions.  I can honestly say, “these are not good people, even if they themselves don’t realize it.”  I hope a lot more Americans will come to see that and vote them out of office.  We all must do whatever is necessary to get registered to vote and swear an oath to ourselves that we will vote in every election and vote for people who care about us and this nation.  That would be a start.  There are lots of people out here to help.  Call out Uncle John or Aunt Mary when they make racist, sexist or other unkind remarks and remind them that we’re all people of equal value, even them.  We can make things better.  In fact, we have to before global warming makes us all irrelevant.