July 4: The Powers Rejoice

 

July 4: The Powers Rejoice

 

July 4. Independence Day. The big national day in the United States. We “celebrate” the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 (more or less), 1776. American flags fly everywhere. The military struts its stuff. Military jets zoom over baseball stadiums. Bands play martial music. Towns, especially small town, have July 4 parades. On July 4 we’re all supposed to be patriots celebrating the country most of us just happened to have been born in. Hurray for the red, white, and blue! (Those are also the colors of Russia’s flag, but never mind). Pointing out anything that’s wrong with this country is gauche. On this day it’s just not done. Today we act like this country actually were what it claims to be, and we don’t stop to realize that it has never been what it claims to be at all.

On July 4 our great tradition is to make things explode. Firecrackers mostly, and fireworks both legal and illegal. When we can’t get them elsewhere, we go to an Indian reservation and buy M80s, huge firecrackers that as near as I can tall are like a quarter stick of dynamite. They go bang real loud. We may go to a professional fireworks display. Many of us do, but mostly we like setting things off at home to terrify the neighborhood’s dogs and combat veterans with PTSD. We spend enormous amounts of money on things that are gone in a manner of seconds at most. We start fires, mostly inadvertently. We overwhelm medical first responders and fill our emergency rooms with our injuries. We love fireworks that make a high-pitched squeal as they go up, the more it hurts the ears of very person and every pet who hears it the better. Because our culture so glorifies the military, we celebrate America with fire crackers that sound like gunshots and fireworks that sound like bombs as though gunshots and bombs were good things of which our country can be proud, never mind that their only purpose is to maim or kill human beings.

And of course we never stop seriously to think about what it is we’re celebrating. We say we’re celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but clearly that’s not all that we’re celebrating. Most countries have some day dedicated to celebrating themselves. In France it’s July 14. In Canada it’s July 1. In Russia it’s November 7, or at least it was in Soviet times. In the United States it’s July 4. On that date Americans celebrate their country more than they celebrate some event that happened once a long time ago for other people.

And of course we never stop seriously to think about whether our celebration is appropriate or not. Here’s the truth of our July 4 celebrations. We are celebrating not our country’s reality but our country’s foundational myth. Few of us realize it, but our country does indeed have a foundational myth. It is a story about the United States that functions to connect the country’s people with the country’s political and economic culture. That story says the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It says the country is a land of freedom and equality, the arsenal of democracy, a shining city on a hill, and a beacon to the rest of the world showing what a country should be. Our national myth includes the statement in the Declaration of Independence that it is “self-evident“ that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” It makes a great deal of the way the United States Constitution says that “WE THE PEOPLE” create our own government. It believes the words of the poem on the Statue of Liberty about our receiving huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Our national myth tells us that we are the free, blessed citizens of the greatest country the world has ever seen.

And as is true of all myths that connect people to something human, something finite, it just isn’t so. There are truths about this country that, if not quite self-evident, are certainly undeniable. This country, as diverse as it now is, was founded by white Europeans. Essentially every one of them was a racist. Essentially every one of them believed that people of color were less than white people, that they were indeed subhuman. The Europeans and ancestors of Europeans who founded this country believed that Black people and Native Americans had no inherent worth as human beings. They enslaved Black people. They drove Native Americans from land those people had occupied for millennia. They had no qualms about doing either of these diabolical things because they did not believe the people to whom they were doing them had any rights inalienable or otherwise. They took the word “Men” in the Declaration of Independence literally. Women had essentially no legal rights at all in the early centuries of this country. They couldn’t vote, and that was in some ways the least of what they couldn’t do. Yes, of course white men realized that women were necessary for reproduction and that they could be used for sexual pleasure. But the obvious, God-given moral equality of women with men wasn’t obvious at all to these founding “fathers.” By “Men” the founding fathers (there were no true founding mothers) didn’t even mean all white males. They meant white, landowning males. They meant white males with money or real property. The land of the free? Well, some of these men were free, but well over one half of the population was not because it consisted of women, indentured servants, and slaves, some of who were obviously not free and none of whom had what we would call true freedom.

All of those “original sins” of the United States have, in one form or another, characterized this country and its dominant culture from 1619 when white British men imported the first kidnapped and enslaved African human beings into this country to the present day. Sure. The forms of some of these sins have changed, and some of them aren’t as dominant among us as they once were. We no longer have slavery, and least not in any outright, legal form. But the dominant culture of this country is still rotten to the core with racism. Our benighted Supreme Court apparently thinks that we’ve outgrown racism and we need take no further affirmative steps to overcome it, but they couldn’t be more wrong. The statistics on imprisonment along with many others show that whites are still the dominant so-called race in this country. They show more particularly that white males are the dominant demographic in this country. Yes, women can vote, though there was no national law enabling them to do so until 1920, three hundred years after the first Europeans landed on what became the Atlantic coast of the United States and more than that after Spanish Europeans occupied what became the American Southwest.

Women can vote, and some have broken through the glass ceiling that privileged white males construct to keep women down. But women are still paid less than men for the same work. There are women in positions of authority and responsibility in government at all levels, but the percentage of the people who are in those positions who are women is much lower than the percentage of the population that women make up. Today we have a woman vice president, and that is a very good thing. But we’ve never had a woman president, and the fact that it took until 2020 for the country to elect a woman to the second highest political position in the land is simply appalling. Male privilege is still very much with us. It is a big part of what makes American culture so appallingly sinful.

Yes, we have laws intended to protect the environment from the ravages human beings keep inflicting on it. Those laws have done some good. People are exposed to fewer toxic chemicals than they were even thirty or forty years ago. The air in our major cities is significantly cleaner than it used to be. But nearly one half of our population supports politicians who want to repeal most if not all environmental regulations because those regulations, these people believe, interfere with their making more money. Everyone with a brain knows that the earth’s atmosphere is warming and that we humans are at least part of the reason, if not the entire reason, that it is. We know what’s causing it—greenhouse gases. We know how to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas we put into the atmosphere, but we don’t do it in any truly meaningful way. We don’t do it because whenever some governmental agencies tries to do it, it gets hit with cries of socialism (supposedly a bad thing), government overreach, and governmental authoritarianism all because stopping or even reducing our emission of greenhouse gases into the environment means some people could not continue to make money the old fashioned way, by exploiting the hell out of the earth and to hell with whoever comes after us.

The so-called “American Revolution,” to the extent that it was a revolution at all, was a capitalist revolution concocted and run by men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slave owners both. The American rebellion against the British was to a certain extent a fight for political autonomy. The desire for political autonomy, however, arose from Americans’ disgust with British taxation of various sorts. That taxation kept people with money from earning more money, so those people led the country into war against a power they believed was responsible for limiting their ability to make more money. Money has been the driving force in American history and culture ever since. Today we say we are a democracy in which everyone has an equal vote. But then the Supreme Court voids a congressional attempt to limit the role of money in American politics. It says giving money to politicians is a form of free speech that cannot be prohibited or severely restricted. The result? It’s easier today than it has been at times in the past for the wealthy to control the United States government, and control it they do. Money makes American democracy a sham. It aways has, and it always will.

Then there’s our country’s glorification of the military. This country’s history is soaked in blood. The blood of enslaved Africans. The blood of Native Americans. The blood of Americans of all sorts shed in our country’s seemingly nonstop wars. The Declaration of Independence that we celebrate on July 4 was part of a war thirteen British colonies fought against the British with an unknown but high number of people killed and maimed. In 1860 the country started to fall apart as southern, slave-owning states seceded from the union to preserve slavery. The North and the South fought what is still the American war with the highest number of casualties, something like 750,000 dead. Wars waged by the white United States government against Native Americans existed from the very beginnings of European settlement until the end of the nineteenth century. We have not fought a war against a foreign power that invaded our country since the War of 1812, over two hundred years ago. Yet we fight an endless string of wars in other parts of the world supposedly to “defend American freedom.” Never mind that the country has fought no such war since at least the end of Civil War one hundred fifty-eight years ago. The United States spends nearly as much on its military annually as the rest of the world combined, and fact that truly is obscene. We live in the most military-crazy country on earth or at least in one of them.

I paint quite a horrendous picture of the United States, don’t I? Yes I do, but the question that arises for me out of that picture is not “am I right?” which I know I am, but “How did things get to be this way?” How can so many Americans not see that on July 4 they are celebrating a satanic myth not the truth? How can so many Americans celebrate on July 4? All that celebrating just doesn’t make sense. Sure. There are some things about this country to celebrate. We certainly are freer and better off in essentially every way than are the people of North Korea and various other places in the world. As much as Donald Trump would like to become one, we are not ruled by a dictator for life the way places like Turkmenistan are.

None of that, however, obviates any of the truth of the things I have said here about my country. So I return to my foundational question: How did things get to be this way? There is, I am convinced, only one profound answer to that question. That answer is, “The powers.” I’ve written about the powers before, and every time I have I have gladly acknowledged that my understanding of them comes from one source, the late Walter Wink. I gladly acknowledge my debt to Wink again here. By “the powers” I don’t mean the US and China. I don’t mean any human person or institution. Rather, the powers are the spiritual force behind everything that is. Every institution has its power. There is a spiritual power behind every institution that makes the institution behave the way it does. Institutional racism is a good example of the work of the powers. The statistics make it abundantly clear that the American criminal law system treats Black defendants worse than it treats white defendants who are charged with the same crimes. It convicts them more often. It sentences them to longer jail terms. Yet few if any people who work in the criminal law system consider themselves to be racists, nor do they intentionally treat defendants differently because of the defendant’s race. The disproportionate outcomes are there nonetheless. How can that be? The answer is that each institution is controlled more by its “power” than it is by the people who appear to control it. The institution’s spirit exists apart from any people who staff the institution.

And here’s a most important truth about the powers that be. They are part of God’s creation, and they are “fallen.” That is, they work not for the divine purposes for which God created them but for more destructive ends. They are responsible for everything that is wrong in the world. That truth doesn’t relieve all of us of our duty to do God’s work in the world. It just means that as we do we are resisting not just obvious things like national governments but the spiritual powers behind everything that is. Transforming the world involves transforming the world’s institutions of course. More importantly and profoundly, it means countering the fallen spirits that move every one of the world’s institutions. The powers that be always work toward death. That’s because they do not function the way God intends them to function any more than most of us humans do. The powers, however, are more powerful than any human. We all do their work, most of us totally unaware that that’s what we’re doing.

The United States of America has its power in this sense, or rather, it has many of them. They all work against life. They all work against the things that this country says it stands for—democracy, justice, equality, peace, and so on. They are responsible for the way this country’s reality is so radically different from its myth. They are why we insist we are a land of equal opportunity for all when in reality we are nothing of the sort. They are why we say we stand for peace when we have an enormous military that engages in violence and the threat of violence all over the world. Our country’s powers are as fallen as are any other powers, and they work to move our country in the direction of violence, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, and all of the other ills that so plague us. They are why a man as completely unqualified politically and despicable personally as Donald Trump could become president. The whole phenomenon of Trumpism makes little sense if we look at it only from a materialistic perspective. Seen from the perspective of the powers, however, Trumpism is not hard to explain. It represents the victory of fallen powers over the good that God calls us to do.

So, on July 4 each year, the powers rejoice. They rejoice in their victory over decency, justice, and peace in the way this country actually operates. They rejoice that nearly all Americans fall into their trap of patriotism, where they celebrate that which the powers make them believe is real but that in truth is not real at all. They rejoice that our celebrations are so militaristic, for the dominance of the military in American culture is one of their biggest victories. They rejoice in the way most Americans think that racism is conquered when they just say they’re not racist when in fact our claim not to be racist works to hide our true racism not to overcome it. They rejoice that Americans think Trumpism arises from grievances privileged Americans have and do not realize that it isn’t the supposed grievances that are the problem, it is the disordered reaction to material conditions that the powers create that is the problem. They rejoice that so many Americans operate out of fear not out of rational thought. They rejoice that so many Americans think violence solves problems, be it the personal violence of gun ownership or the national violence of the military. They rejoice as they see nearly every American come into step with them, celebrating a false myth of American reality and being oblivious to actual American truth.

A few of us get it. I believe that I get it. I can’t tell you why I and others get it when the vast majority of Americans don’t. I just know that it has always been true that a few people have gotten it in every age in every place. The true prophets of ancient Israel got it. Jesus of course got it. Paul got it. The saints of every culture and every faith tradition have gotten it. None of us gets it perfectly. We are all human after all, and we all function within a world dominated by the powers. I say we get it, but I must admit that we get it only partially. Most of us stand for some things that are right from God’s perspective, but none of us truly stands for everything that is right.

Those of us who get it, mostly at least, must speak out. We must cry out. We must shout it from the rooftops. Your Independence Day celebrations are a farce! They are the work of the powers getting you to celebrate what isn’t true and ignore what is. They have you thinking that the American myth is American reality, and they have you celebrating that which they make you think is true rather than what actually is. The powers rejoice that our July 4 celebrations reenforce our commitment not to American reality but to the American myth. They rejoice that through our July 4 celebrations we perpetuate that demonic myth. It’s not demonic because what it says is bad. What it says is actually very good. It’s demonic because it leads Americans by the hundreds of millions to live in a land of false beliefs about their nation and to ignore all of the shortcomings of their nation’s reality.

So this year on July 4, I will not celebrate. I will not claim to be a patriot, not because I am not one but because the powers have so corrupted the concept of patriotism. I will not set off fireworks. In fact my wife, our dog, and I are fleeing to Canada to get away from them. On this July 4 I will meditate on the functioning of the powers in my country. I will mourn the way they work for evil and keep most Americans from seeing the evil they create. I will mourn the way the powers work for death not for life, for oppression not for freedom, for white straight male privilege not for true equality. This July 4 the powers will rejoice. I will not.