The Vital Threat to the American Way

It is time for all Americans to stop pretending that Trump is something that he isn't. Donald Trump is nothing less than a dire threat to everything that our country has always said that it stands for. Yes, we've always been at least a bit hypocritical when we say what we stand for, our reality always falling far short of our expressed ideals; but that is no reason for us to give up on trying to make our ideals our reality. Donald Trump is the most severe threat to the American way in a very long time, and it's time we figured that out.

Donald Trump is first of all a threat to the rule of law. The rule of law is perhaps the most foundational American principle. Everything else we value depends on it. Trump sees the independent, nonpolitical operation of the law not as a foundational value but as a threat to his wealth and his power. His efforts to get Attorney General Sessions to "un-recuse" himself from the Russia investigation is a blatant attempt to obstruct justice. He wants Sessions in charge of the Russia investigation for one reason and one reason only: He wants Sessions to rein in Mueller and protect Trump from the legal consequences of that investigation, which will almost certainly show that Trump's campaign conspired with Russian operatives to influence the 2016 presidential election in violation of the law and that Trump obstructed justice in an attempt to avoid the legal consequences of that conspiracy. In the pardons Trump has issued he has sounded a "dog whistle" to people who know the facts about that conspiracy, signaling to them that if they keep quiet and/or lie to protect him he will pardon them. Trump is thus even using the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency to obstruct justice. I fear that there is nothing he will not do to save his own skin.

The policies that his administration pursues of tax breaks for the ultras-rich and deregulation so that polluters can more freely pollute and destroy the environment are reprehensible and contradict the supposed American values of equality and concern for generations that come after us. Trump is a racist and a misogynist. He works against the supposed American value of racial and gender equality at every turn. Trump and his administration want to return the world to the ways of the 1890s when industrial capitalists made immense amounts of money at the expense of the poverty and misery of huge numbers of people, explicit racism and legal discrimination, and the subjugation of women to the whims of men. 

As I once wrote in an essay on this blog Trump is an American fascist. He whips up an unfounded and immoral hatred of immigrants in the way Hitler whipped up an unfounded and immoral hatred of the Jews, and he does it for the same reason. Fascists always need an enemy on whom to blame people's problems. It matters not at all that the enemy chosen is not responsible for those problems. It matters only that the fascist leader can give frightened people an enemy to hate. Hitler did it with the Jews. Trump does it with immigrants, and he throws in such supposedly un-American people as Muslims as people he calls on us to hate as well. Hitler's hatred of the Jews led to the Holocaust. I can only pray that Trump's hatred of immigrants, especially non-white, non-Christian immigrants, will not lead to a similar tragedy in our land.

Trump is not just another bad president. We've had lots of bad presidents, but we've never before put a true American fascist in the White House. Not even Richard Nixon was the kind of fascist Trump is. We have put a fascist in the White House, and we need to do everything we can without violence to put an end to his destruction of American values. Yet we all just go on about our ordinary lives. We watch television news with its advertisements about the embarrassment of bad breath as if our very way of life were not threatened by the man in the White House. Well, folks, our way of life is threatened by the man in the White House, beginning with his threat to the rule of law seen in his attacks on Attorney General Sessions, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Mueller investigation. I wish I knew how to get rid of Trump, Pence, and the spineless Republicans in Congress who won't stand up to them, but I don't. We face the most severe threat to the American way of governance and of life that we have faced perhaps since the Civil War, and I don't know what to do about it. I don't think the Democrats take the threat that Donald Trump represents sufficiently seriously. I think most Americans are unaware of just how dire a threat to us Trump is. (But then most Germans didn't realize how dire a threat Hitler was to them until it was too late.) I look at our political realities today and fall into despair. We are in serious, serious trouble. May God help us to find a way out of it.

Reflections on Vladimir Putin

Reflections on Vladimir Putin

In the United States today it is practically mandatory to despise Russian President Vladimir Putin (unless of course you love authoritarian rulers the way Donald Trump does). For most Americans Putin is simply a bad guy, an authoritarian ruler who suppresses or even murders his political opponents, takes territory from sovereign nations, engages in foreign military activity in support of murderous dictators, and meddles in American presidential elections. I do not mean to suggest by anything I say here that those things aren’t true of Vladimir Putin. They pretty much are true. Yet I think most Americans misunderstand Putin because they approach him only with American understandings of history and of politics. Yet Russia’s history and politics are very different from America’s. If we are going to understand Putin we need to understand him in his Russian context not in our American one. Here I wish to offer an explanation of Putin that takes his Russian context seriously as a way of explaining him a bit better than most Americans can or do. Explain, not justify. Explain, neither approve nor condemn. What I am about here isn’t passing judgment on Putin. It is merely trying to offer a better understanding of him than most Americans have.

The primary reason why so many Americans have so much trouble understanding Vladimir Putin is that they do not understand how different Russian history is from American or western European history. Here are some foundational facts about Russian history that we must understand if we are to understand Putin. We start with the truth that Russia did not participate in most of the major movements in western European history that shaped the western world. In the west great, more or less independent thinkers began to appear at least by the high middle ages. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave the west towering geniuses like Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas. They developed their complex theologies in a context free from political domination. Russia produced nothing like them before its encounter with the west in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries introduced some western thinking to the upper levels of Russian society.

In the west there were always institutions and people who resisted the claims of secular rulers to absolute authority. In particular, the Roman Catholic Church conducted a centuries long struggle against the claims of secular rulers to authority over the church. The Church even functioned like a secular ruler itself. It ruled parts of Italy as a secular power as well as a religious one. Vatican City is a last remaining remnant of what were once much greater papal lands. In its acting as a secular power the Church came into direct conflict with other secular powers. The Roman Catholic Church never submitted willingly to rule by secular governments. There were no, or virtually no, parallel developments in Russia. No institutions independent of the government developed before at least the nineteenth century.¹ The Russian Orthodox Church was always subservient to the Grand Princes of Moscow or to the tsars those princes became. It always saw itself as a bulwark of state power, not a power center in its own right opposed to the state. Indeed, in 1721, Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, abolished the Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a collective body presided over by an Over Procurator who was appointed by the tsar not the church. That system of institutional subservience of the Church to the state lasted until 1918, after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, when the Church reestablished the Moscow Patriarchate as the highest authority in the church. Any Russians who opposed the tsarist government never had any institutions separate from the state within which to work the way opponents of secular regimes did in the west.

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries radically transformed the way west Europeans (and Euro-Americans) thought. It emphasized human reason as the source of truth. It led to the development, not always peaceful, of more or less democratic state structures in Great Britain and (eventually) in France and elsewhere in western Europe. It elevated the thinking individual as a primary source of knowledge. It produced documents like the US Constitution with its guarantees of individual rights and freedoms. Nothing like that ever happened in Russia. Yes, Catherine the Great and other Russian rulers toyed with the great philosophers of the Enlightenment. Yes, western Europe’s scientific revolution which was part of the Enlightenment had some effect in Russia. Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711 – 1765) was the first great Russian scientist. Moscow State University is named after him. Yet Enlightenment rationalism with its emphasis on the individual and modern European science penetrated only the top layer of Russian society. They had no significant effect on the masses of the Russian people.

By the dawn of the twentieth century essentially all of the countries of western Europe, with a few exceptions, had developed at least nominally democratic political systems that provided at least some legal protection for the rights of a citizen. So had the United States regardless of how limited those legal protections of the individual were for Black, Native, female, and other Americans. Nothing even remotely comparable ever developed in Russia. Only in the 1860s did Tsar Alexander II introduce some limited reforms that moved a short distance toward recognizing the rights of the people. He abolished the serfdom that had kept most Russians tied to the land, although he did it in a way that made the emancipation of the serfs burdensome on them financially and less liberating that at first it seemed to be. He introduced the jury system into Russian law. He created local legislative bodies called zemstvos that had some say in local administration without in any way compromising autocracy. None of those reforms created anything like a western political system. The tsar still ruled absolutely. After the Revolution of 1905, the first Russian revolution of the twentieth century but hardly the last, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to create a national Duma, a national legislative body that still hardly impinged upon the autonomous rule of the tsar. When the catastrophe of World War I hit, Russia was so politically and economically backward that the old system collapsed under its own dead weight. Then Lenin and his Bolsheviks took power. They had to fight a civil war to consolidate that power, but by the 1920s Russia was firmly in the grips of Soviet communism.

Soviet communism of course never allowed the creation of anything like western democracy, and it had no respect for the rights of the individual person. Various Soviet constitutions contained provisions like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, elections for political office, and other democratic institutions and individual freedoms, but those freedoms existed only on paper. A Soviet citizen couldn’t use them as a defense when charged with a crime. They created no effective rein on the power of the Communist Party and the state it controlled. The Soviet Union became one of most brutally repressive regimes known to human history, rivaling Hitler and Nazi Germany in its brutality toward its own citizens.

Enter Mikhail Gorbachev. He became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March, 1985. He tried to reform the Soviet system in the direction of limited market freedoms and individual rights. His policy of “glasnost” (literally “voiceness”) gave Soviet citizens freedoms they had never had before. Works were published in Russia that previously had been banned, including eventually Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Gorbachev had no desire to destroy the Soviet Union, but his reforms acted like a boy pulling his thumb out of a dike. The personal freedoms he introduced led to widespread opposition not just to Gorbachev but to the whole notion of Communist rule. He failed to reform the economy in ways that benefited ordinary people. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. What replaced it came to be Vladimir Putin.

Putin was born in what was then Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) in 1952. After graduating from Leningrad State University he joined the KGB (komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopostnosti—The Committee on State Security), the main Soviet intelligence agency and secret police force. From 1985 to 1990 he served as a low ranking KGB officer in Dresden in what was then Soviet controlled East Germany. With the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse he returned to Leningrad and became an important aide to Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak had a reputation as something of a liberal, but he eventually fell from power in Leningrad. Putin wound up in Moscow working for the government of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first more or less democratically elected president. He rose through the ranks of Yeltsin’s government, and on July 25, 1998, he was appointed Director of the FSB, the successor institution to the KGB in the Russian Federation. On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin Acting Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin announced that he wanted Putin to succeed him as President. Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on December 31, 1999, and Putin became Acting President. On March 26, 2000, Putin won his first election as President. He has more or less ruled Russia ever since.

Putin’s rise to power in Russia is a bit hard to understand. It seems more like it is something that happened to him than something he brought about himself. It seems probable that Yeltsin chose him as his successor primarily because Putin was seen as a nonentity, essentially a nobody despite the high offices he had held. Nothing I have read about him suggests that he sought the highest office in Russia or that he did much of anything to engineer his reaching that position. He didn’t turn down higher offices when they were offered, but it isn’t clear that he ever sought such offices. He was, and is, very much a Soviet man, a functionary of the old system who became the leader of post-Soviet Russia.

Putin’s rule of Russia is characterized by developments that are firmly grounded in Russian history. Among them are a return to some of the repressive ways of the Soviet Union and an economy dominated by extremely wealthy men whose success they owe almost exclusively to the Kremlin. These two dynamics of contemporary Russia have made Putin both immensely powerful and immensely wealthy. Under Putin the Russian government has cracked down on opposition leaders and movements. Take Aleksei Navalny as an example. He is the most prominent opposition political leader in Russia today. The Kremlin had him convicted on trumped up charges of fraud and thus blocked him from running in the recent presidential election against Putin. Other opposition leaders have been murdered, one on a bridge just outside the Kremlin. The Russian government has cooperated with the Russian Orthodox Church in passing anti-gay laws that make Russia one of the hardest places to be LGBT. Russia today isn’t as oppressive as the Soviet Union was, but it is hardly a model of democracy and freedom.

Under Putin the Russian economy has come to be dominated by a small number of extremely wealthy men. We usually call them the “oligarchs.” They are all close to Putin because you can’t get to be an oligarch without being close to Putin. The Russian government owns substantial portions of the country’s industry, especially the gas and oil industry on which so much of the economy depends. We don’t know exactly how much Putin has enriched himself during his time running Russia, but some estimates make him one of the richest men in the world.

Beyond those factors of his rule Putin has undertaken a more aggressive foreign and military policy than post-Soviet Russia had before him (or indeed than the Soviet Union had for quite some time). He occupied the Crimean Peninsula, taking it from Ukraine.² He has engaged the Russian military in the civil war in Syria in support of Russia’s ally Assad. Internally he essentially leveled Chechnya, a semi-autonomous region in southern Russia, to end a militant independence movement there. He has made threatening moves toward the Baltic republics that used to be part of the USSR. He has engaged in military actions in the independent nations of Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, all former Soviet Socialist Republics.

All of these things about Putin and post-Soviet Russia trouble people in the west. At least some of them are indeed troubling, but before we judge we must understand them in the Russian historical context not the western one. Primarily what we must understand is that it is not at all surprising that the government of post-Soviet Russia is not truly democratic and does not respect what we consider to be the individual rights of its people. History determines much in this world, and Russia has no history of either democratic institutions or governmental respect for individual liberties. Russia flirted with democracy and individual rights immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, but it did that in a context that provides no fertile soil in which they can take root and prosper. Russia has no significant history of institutions that stand in opposition to the state. During the Soviet period that only institution there was whose aims were different from those of the state was the Russian Orthodox Church. As I noted above, the Russian Orthodox Church has a long history of supporting state power not resisting is. That was true even in the Soviet period of Russian history. That the post-Soviet Russian state would oppose the development of political, social, economic, or other institutions that it did not control was virtually a certainty given Russia’s history.

Then there is the loss (or at least the weakening) of Russia’s imperial status. Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. Given the enormous scope of the tragedies of the twentieth century most of us find that assertion hard to understand, but the Soviet Union was essentially the old Russian Empire in communist guise. Russia has been at least a regional imperial power since the eighteenth century. The Soviets made it a world power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia was no longer a world power, and it lost much of what had been its empire. All fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics that had made up the USSR became independent nations. Some of them have joined NATO, the western military alliance formed specifically to oppose the Soviet Union. With the end of the Soviet Union Russia suffered a huge loss of prestige and power. One of the main things Putin is about is restoring that prestige and power.³ That the post-Soviet Russian government and most Russian people would want to restore that prestige and power was as virtual a certainty as was the relatively undemocratic nature of that government.

I intend none of this as a justification for anything Putin has done and is doing. He has essentially made himself a new Russian tsar. That status of his is threatened by a term limits provision of the Russian constitution, and it will be interesting to see how he handles that limitation in 2024 when his current term expires. However he handles it, the important point for us westerners to understand is that Putin is acting entirely in accordance with the main outlines of Russian history. Putin is both a Russian man and a Soviet man. That he is Russian is obvious. He was born in Russia to a Russian family and has lived elsewhere only for a few years during his work with the KGB. That he is Soviet is perhaps less obvious; but he was born in the Soviet Union, grew up and was educated in the Soviet Union, and served in the Soviet Union’s primary intelligence agency. As a Soviet man he was indoctrinated into a Marxist-Leninist ideology that condemns western representative democracy as a sham and a tool of economic exploitation. As a Soviet man he served in the government of what he, correctly, knew to be a major world power. He learned how to work and prosper within a system that was undemocratic and oppressive in the extreme. He learned how to manipulate the levers of power in that system for his own purposes. He can hardly be anything other than a Russian Soviet man.

Because he is a Russian Soviet man, nothing about what he has done and is doing should come as a surprise to us. Given his historical context it would be remarkable if he acted much differently than he does. We don’t have to approve of him or his actions, but we do need to understand them. That means we must understand them within the Russian historical context. Putin is an predictable embodiment of that context. We would do well to keep that truth in mind as we seek to deal with him and his Russia.

1With the possible exception of the Old Believers. There was a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century that created a group called the Old Believers, which was and is an Orthodox sect opposed to the established Russian Orthodox Church. Under the tsars it came into conflict with the tsarist government in a way the established church never did. The Old Believers sect, however, was never big enough to change Russian history in any significant way.

2See my post on this blog “A Historical Perspective on Russia and Ukraine” for a discussion of Russia’s annexation of Crimea set in its proper historical context.

3I once heard President Obama refer to Russia as a “regional power.” I wonder if he said that intentionally as a slap across Putin’s face or if he even understood how that remark would be taken in Russia as an insult, for surely Putin and many other Russians took it as precisely that.

How America Ends

How America Ends

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have had this thought, and I don’t claim that it’s original to me. Still, the other day something came to me with unusual clarity. I thought: The American republic will not end because it is conquered from the outside by a foreign power. There is no power in the world that can conquer the USA militarily, at least not without being utterly destroyed themselves by American military might. No, it isn’t hostile foreign powers that we need to fear. Rather, the American republic will end as a republic when the American electorate becomes so fearful and so ignorant that it votes into office politicians who will end it. We have a good example of how that happens in the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic in Germany. Hitler didn’t take power by force. He wasn’t put in power by a foreign army. Rather, his Nazi party won so many electoral contests that the President of the country had no option but to appoint Hitler chancellor. He and his thugs then dismantled the republican structure of the country and created a brutal single party dictatorship in its place. That something much like that could happen in the US is the thing we have most to fear. It is in all probability how the American republic will end.

We are not to the point where it is likely to happen anytime soon. Still, we see the beginnings of it happening in the presidential administration of Donald Trump. Trump consistently and vigorously assails two institutions that are essential to the maintenance of any democratic system, namely, a free press and the country’s law enforcement agencies. When the free American press reports the truth about Trump and his minions he screams “fake news.” He threatens to cancel the White House press credentials of media outlets that criticize him. He calls the people of America’s intelligence agencies Nazis. He bellows about corruption in the Department of Justice and the FBI, corruption that simply does not exist. He says that the Mueller investigation into his campaign and administration is a plot by Democrats upset about losing the 2016 presidential election when the truth is that that investigation is led by Republicans. Moreover, recent press reports say that the Department of Justice began investigating Trump before the 2016 election but intentionally made nothing about that investigation public for fear of influencing the election against Trump. No dictator, not even a would-be dictator like Trump, can live with a free press and independent law enforcement agencies. Trump would abolish them both and replace them with toadying servants rather than independent professionals if he could.

He can’t do what he would like to do for three reasons. First, his approval ratings with the American public aren’t high enough. Polling never shows his favorable rating to be above about forty percent at most. That forty percent of Americans support him is itself a chilling statistic and a cause for great concern, but it isn’t enough so that he can really slap restrictions on the press and put sycophantic yes people in charge of the Department of Justice and the FBI. Second, the minority of the American electorate that made him president hasn’t sent enough like-minded fascists to Congress so that Trump could get legislation muzzling the press and castrating the DOJ and FBI passed. Third, though he has appointed several reactionary federal judges and gotten the Senate to confirm them, he hasn’t yet packed the Supreme Court or the other federal courts with his followers to eliminate the federal courts as a barrier to his dictatorial or at least authoritarian desires. So far we have only the beginnings of a reactionary movement that seeks to dismantle American democracy. It isn’t yet strong enough to make its desired results reality.

The movement against democracy in the US isn’t strong enough to do that yet, but the important word in that sentence is “yet.” The movement that would do it has begun among us, and it achieved a result in the last presidential election that no one thought was possible. The election of Donald Trump as president is a result not of an enlightened citizenry voting intelligently, it is a result of fear and anger over a world that is changing before the eyes of those who used to run it. Blue collar, relatively uneducated Americans used to vote for reasonable candidates and reasonable policies. Vast numbers of them no longer do. At least in the presidential election of 2016 a great many of them voted their fear not their hope. They voted their hatred not their commitment to justice. They voted for an impossible return to the past rather than for constructive policies that would actually improve their lives. They voted their racism and their sexism not their commitment to equal rights. These unsophisticated voters who put Trump in office are a fertile field for fascism. In 2016 they voted for a sort of toned down American version of fascism. When will they no longer be satisfied with Trump’s soft fascism and vote instead for a candidate committed to hard fascism, to real European style fascism? There really isn’t any way to know, but the election of Donald Trump puts us all on notice. Fascism is alive and growing among us. If we can’t stop it, it will be how America ends.

Dear World: I'm Sorry

Dear World: I’m Sorry

I did not vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States. A majority of the voters in the 2016 American presidential election did not vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States. Nonetheless, he became President of the United States. He became president because of the arcane workings of our Electoral College, in which small, conservative states have disproportionate power. His election was, sadly, legal under our system, as badly as that system needs to be brought up to contemporary standards of fairness. Only something a bit less than forty percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president. That as many Americans approve of him as do is itself a sorry commentary on the state of the American soul and is itself worthy of serious contemplation. Perhaps I will undertake that contemplation at another time. Today I just want to say to the world: I’m sorry. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States was not my doing, but it was my country’s doing. We made a man president who not only has not one single qualification for being president but who is emotionally unstable and who as president is doing immense damage to our nation and to you, the people of the rest of the world. Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accords. He pulled the US out of the Iranian nuclear deal. He pulled us out of the Trans Pacific Partnership. His administration is doing everything it can to speed up the destruction of the earth through our human greed and indifference toward future generations. He has made the warmonger John Bolton his National Security Advisor, and I fear that a war with Iran for the benefit of Israel may be the result. He and his people disparage immigrants, never mind that this country was built by immigrants. He calls white supremacists decent people. He mocks people with disabilities. He is a racist, a misogynist, and a homophobe. He represents all of the worst angels and instincts of the dominant American culture. His throwback ideology of “America First” tells the rest of the world we don’t give a damn about your wellbeing, your job is only to make things better for us. Donald Trump is a disgrace to my country. He is an American fascist, as I wrote in an earlier post on this blog. He is personally immoral and politically destructive. He is easily the worst president in American history, and we are probably stuck with him until January, 2021, at least.

So dear world, I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you that Trump is not as bad as you think he is, but if anything he is worse than any of us think he is. You cannot expect anything constructive out of us as long as he is president. If there is to be any peace in the world, you’ll have to bring it about. As long as Trump is president we won’t. If there is to be care for the earth, you’ll have to exercise it. As long as Trump is president we won’t. If there is to be care for the poor of the world, you’ll have to provide it. As long as Trump is president we won’t. Perhaps in the past some of you looked to us for leadership in the world. Perhaps you saw us as a power that at least sometimes worked for peace and for the wellbeing of the world’s people. You can look to us for that leadership no more. As long as Trump is president we won’t provide it. You can look at us as a power that sometimes works for peace and for the wellbeing of the world’s people no more. As long as Trump is president we won’t provide leadership and we won’t work for the wellbeing of the world’s people. And for that I apologize.

Oh how I wish it were not so. I long for the days when my country was at least respectable in the world. For the days when many people of the world saw us as a beacon of liberty and opportunity. We never were the land of liberty and opportunity in the way many of you saw us, but we were that to at least some extent. We are that no longer. We are led by a fascist president and his toadies in Congress. Nearly half of our people constitute an ignorant, bigoted rooting section for Trump’s American fascism. The only hope I can retain comes from the knowledge that in November, 2018, we may be able to clip Trump’s wings a bit by giving the Democrats a majority in at least one of the two houses of Congress and that in 2020 we can end the nightmare by voting Trump out of office. Yet I must say to you that if we Americans fail to do those two things please turn your backs on us. We won’t deserve to regain your respect or your support. Those of us Americans who react to Trump with despair and disgust will have to look to you for the maintenance of decent human values in the world. We may have to look to you for a place to live that doesn’t destroy our souls the way Trumpism destroys souls.

So please accept my apology for what my country has done and is doing. I didn’t elect Trump. Most of us didn’t elect Trump and don’t support him. But there he is in all his ugliness. For that I am so very sorry. Please forgive us.

Why Religion?

Why Religion?

I recently watched a program on PBS about the rise of early civilizations. One of the themes of the program was that religion arose when civilization arose, that is, when humans made the transition from being hunter gatherers to being settled agriculturalists. The experts the program had talking about this phenomenon were mostly archaeologists not experts in religion. They stressed the way in which religion functions to stabilize societies, how it acts as a unifying theme in cultures that holds people together by giving them common beliefs and common commitments. They also stressed how the rulers of ancient civilizations, especially Egypt, used religion to legitimate their rule by giving it divine authorization. The program didn’t limit its secular explanations of religion to ancient times. It showed the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, massive and impressive on the outside, beautiful on the inside. It explained that some Sultan or other had built this mosque during a time when the Ottoman Empire was suffering military defeats on both its western and eastern borders. It said he built the mosque to distract people from the empire’s problems and to show that Islam was still vital. It didn’t in any way suggest that perhaps the Sultan or his people had spiritual reasons for building it, that perhaps they built it as expression of their commitment to Islam and to the God with Whom Islam connects its people. The program showed so-called “whirling dervishes,” devotees of Sufi Islam who dance in a circular motion to induce a trance-like state of connection with the divine. It showed some of the men who practice this kind of Islam saying that in this practice they get closer to one another and feel a connection to the group. It made little or no mention of how the practitioners of Sufi Islam find a connection not just with each other but with God. This program’s consideration of the religion was done entirely from a secular perspective.

Now, I don’t mean here to deny that religion has functioned in those secular ways across human civilizations. It has, and in some places it still does. Yet this PBS program completely overlooked a deeper truth about why human beings develop and practice religions and in many cases devote their entire lives to them. The program focused on the political and social functions of religion while ignoring or at least minimizing any actual spiritual truth that religions express. In the views of the academic archaeologists that the program used, spiritual experience and yearning played no role in the rise of religion. Yet we know that there is more to religion than its possible political and social ramifications. Theologians and philosophers today know that a yearning for connection with the transcendent, spiritual element of reality is a universal human characteristic. Every human culture we know of has had a way of expressing that yearning. Every human culture has had a religion. That is, it has had a system of symbols, myths, and rituals through which the people of the culture have sought connection with a dimension of reality beyond the physical plane in which we live. Human religion is grounded at least as much in this universal human striving for connection with the beyond as it is any social or political function religion may serve.

Indeed, is it not clear that human religion is more grounded in that striving than it is in any social or political function? Consider this reality. Religion survives in human cultures even when the ruling forces of a culture are dead sent against religion and committed to eliminating it from a country’s life. That was the situation in the Soviet Union. Most of the former Russian Empire was under Communist rule beginning in 1917 (or at least beginning by the end of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup of that year) until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Soviet Communism was expressly and aggressively atheistic. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have destroyed religion altogether if it could have. Churches and other places of worship were closed in huge numbers. The clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious institutions were infiltrated and compromised by the Soviet state security services (the KGB and its predecessors). It was illegal to take children to church. It was illegal for any church to seek converts. When I was doing research in the Soviet Union during the 1975-76 academic year all we heard about the Russian Orthodox Church was that only old women attended its services. Yet there seemed to be generation after generation of old women going to church. People continued to have their children baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, Vladimir Putin was baptized as an infant. Beyond that, the Easter service I attended at the St. Sergius Holy Trinity Monastery outside Moscow in 1976 was heavily attended, and not only by old women. Perhaps part of the attachment some people felt to Russian Orthodoxy had more to do with the fact that it was the only truly Russian institution that remained in Soviet Russia, but surely there was more to it than that. Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, and other religious traditions survived decades of restrictions and hostile propaganda against them because religions arise from and answer a basic human existential longing, the longing for connection with the transcendent reality we call God, a reality of which humans across time and physical location have sensed and longed to connect with.

Let me use my own Christian experience as another example of the persistence of faith and how it has nothing to do with propping up human systems. I am a man of faith. I have devoted the last twenty plus years of my life to getting a seminary education and serving as pastor of two small Christian churches. I can assure that I did not do that because I wanted to support the social, economic, and political power structures in my country. I believe that those structures must be broadly redesigned from the ground up if we are ever going to approach anything like equity in our national life. To me, Christianity challenges the injustices of American life at the deepest level. Jesus Christ calls us to care for the least of these not the wealthiest of these. Jesus Christ calls us to radical justice, radical nonviolence, and radical commitment to a transformed world in which the last are first, the first are last, the peacemakers are blessed, the poor are filled with good things, and the rich are sent empty away. None of that adds up to cement for unjust and oppressive social, political, and economic systems. None of that adds up to a prop for the powers that be. I am Christian because I find a powerful, transformative connection with God in the myths, symbols, and rituals of the Christian faith. My commitment to Jesus’ teachings of peace and justice flows from that connection. I am no support for the powers that be. My version of the Christian faith, which I share with millions of other Christians today, is no support for the powers that be. My Christian faith calls me to, in the words of Walter Wink, engage the powers for the purpose of transforming the world.

So that program I saw on PBS, interesting as it was, totally missed the mark on the meaning of religion. Yes, religion can be conservative, although to me the phrase conservative Christian is an oxymoron. Yes, after it became the established religion of the Roman Empire Christianity abandoned most of Jesus’ teachings about life in this life and diverted people’s attention to how to get to the next life, something about which Jesus said virtually nothing. Yes, power structures have often used religion to prop up their regimes by convincing people that they rule by divine right. Yet the undeniable truth of Christianity is that they don’t rule by divine right at all. In all of the world’s great religions properly understood God sides with the poor and the oppressed. God calls us to radical transformation of the unjust systems of the world. And in all of those great religions and in myriad smaller ones people find an authentic connection with God. They experience the power of God in their lives. They find hope, courage, and peace in the teachings of their religion. None of that has anything to do with holding oppressive societies together. It is rather the beginning of their undoing. I just hope that the next PBS program I see that seeks to explain religion does a better job of it than that one I saw the other day.