3 March 2005
Phoebe sent me the attached. Not a happy read, and it's long. It appears to be an article digested from Hugh Urban's Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration: The Gentleman, The Prince and The Simulacrum. It does, however, seem to outline accurately what is going on and how it has come about to be. I think the Bush election, selection, coup or regime – whatever one wishes to call it – will come to be recognized as the turning point in American history – something akin to the moment the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. Superficially, under Augustus and his successors, the state kept its republican trappings and institutions, and not that the Republic had not had its own difficulties, flaws and corruptions, but the imperial state was unlike anything that had preceded. And what the Empire did allow was the demise of paganism and the rise of a questionable religion that was as equally concerned – if not more so – with extending monopolistic control. We know that the Church won – an inevitability in the eyes of concerned Americans today who blame 911 on the moral corruption that liberal America had sunk to and that was exemplified by a President who, even in the Oval Office, could not keep it in his trousers. The Romans were decadence par excellence; it was not surprising therefore that God through his Church triumphed over them.
What we need to face squarely, I'm afraid, is that we pagans and secularists – and liberals as well – have lost. At this stage of the game, the `opposition' has conquered. They have worked harder, they are infinitely better organised, they have forged a coalition between sympathetic factions, and they have seized the prize – all this while we are still wondering what to do, wondering how did we miss out, wondering how can so many be so blind. But I am beginning to question how blind all those who support the Bush cohort really are. Just because they do not agree with us or share the same values, this does not betoken that they are stupid or, even, corrupt. They know what they want – a Christian world, and they know how to go about getting it. And maybe there is nothing we can do about it. Maybe we have already lost. Ask most any American Christian, and he/she will tell you that they have indeed already won.
The one difference I can discern between the demise of the Roman Empire to the Church from the current ascent of the Religious Right is that Christianity arose as a reaction to the perceived decadence of the Romans. This was a religious response – one that even then was surprisingly successful against the odds that it faced. Today, by contrast, there is no new Christianity to come out of the secular/hedonistic morass that it abhors. Although that being said, the Church Triumphant, the Evangelical and Fundamentalist victory that might just become the equivalent of Christianity as a whole, might itself be the `new Christianity' to come out of the `liberal evils' that characterised so much of the second half of the twentieth century. But I still wish not.
How many Great Awakenings has America already had? What number is this one? Is it not time – somehow – to have a Pagan Awakening? By this last, I mean a rise of pagan and secular ethics that – again somehow – can catch the wider imagination. Call these ethics humanistic or humanitarian if you will, but the reason I stress `pagan' is that secular ethics alone do not mobilise people. There needs to be a spiritual impetus as foundational to get the whole thing to move.
It need not be said, but I will if only to prevent any possible understanding, that I consider ecology and environmental protection as vital parts of any viable humanistic/humanitarian ethics and spiritual insight. The earth is our sacred support in all our endeavour. It is at least the least of our duties to honour her.
I will grant that, as a rule, sustainable resources are not a priority for the Christian agenda and, especially, the Bush Administration that harnesses the former's sense of moral outrage so effectively. The sooner the apocalypse can occur, the sooner there will be the New Jerusalem and the return of Christ. And maybe the Christians might pull it off, that is, create world havoc and cataclysmic destruction. Whether they get their Second Coming as a result is really an academic question. Even if this were to be the case, I will still with every ounce left of my spirit reject their God as inauthentic, anti-human and profoundly immoral.
It is fascinating and refreshing to experience Europe as increasingly a secular mind. Here it is that the EEU is protecting civil and human rights – not only protecting but extending. Of course it is not all roses here, but it is as if Europe is emerging as the counterbalance to what America has become and is becoming. On its own, however, it cannot and will not be enough. To end the American hegemony and reduce America to its proper size – if not to its constitutional and originally sacred role – there must be something more than simply secularisation and advance in legal rights. In a word, there must be an awakening of spiritual imagination. And whatever we prefer to call this `spiritual imagination', it has to galvanise our consciousness, our dreams and our concrete applications.
Pace amoreque deorum,
Michael