Latimer on Law & Politics

A Columbus Day Reflection on Christianity and Corporatism in America

                         A Columbus Day Reflection on Christianity and Corporatism in America

               

               Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."  At this the man's face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth. Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!" . . . - Mark 10:21-23

               

               There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.  - Acts 4:34-35

 

                Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. . . . . -Jesus, Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:43-44

 

                                         Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.

                                                                       - Jesus, Beatitudes, Matt. 5:9

 

                   We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

                                             - Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America

               

                  For decades, ever since the so-called "Reagan Revolution" circa 1980, we've heard the hard core right wing bleating constantly about how America is a "Christian nation," which to them means we have to punish gay people for being who they are, teach Creationist nonsense in the public schools as if it were science, force public school students to pray -or at best sit silently through prayer led by a public employee who, during that school time, should be teaching things like math, reading and science. 

              Above all, we must never spend any tax moneys to help the poor and the infirm, but instead must devote vast sums of money to the defense industry to protect the American way of life by developing insanely destructive weapons capable of annihilating the human race and, most recently after the fall of the Soviet empire and "Godless Communism,"  making war against the "evil" Islamic world.  Real Christian American patriots must always have an enemy, an evil bogeyman, in order to prove to themselves, to the world and to God how pious they are.

             The scariest among them are those who believe that Bush's oil wars in the Middle East, in "Babylon,"  are  necessary precursors to the Second Coming of the Messiah.  Some of them have cast Saddam Hussein literally as the anti-Christ, and they eagerly await a full scale conflagration, i.e. Armageddon as predicted in the Book of Revelation.  At that time they, and only they, will be "raptured" up to Heaven, as predicted in the Bible.

             Others on the wingnut religious right define their patriotic American Christianity in terms of reviving the Crusades which, like today's invasions of countries possessing large oil reserves, were more about seizing other peoples' wealth than anything Jesus ever taught, despite all the pious rhetoric about democracy and Christian values.

             In recent times, Columbus has been vilified by some on the left for opening up the Americas for colonial exploitation under the aegis of the Spanish crown.  And he was indeed seeking to find a western route to India for the purpose of opening new avenues for trade in silks, spices and gold.   As every schoolboy knows, that's why Native Americans are still referred to as "Indians" by many whites, and the white man's treatment of the Native American peoples, beginning in Columbus' time, has been driven by anything but Christian values and principles -certainly not those uttered by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount.

            Columbus was a devout Catholic, however, and his avowed, larger purpose was not simply economic betterment for his patrons, but to also outflank the Islamic peoples that stood between Europe and East Asia, i.e. the followers of  "Mohamet," in order to spread Christianity in the far East.  Today's melding of professed Christian beliefs with rank economic ambition and exploitation of weaker peoples is therefore nothing new.  Nor is the demonization of Islam, the world's other great monotheistic religion that competes both theologically and geo-politically with the Judeo-Christian tradition.   

            In ages past, however, that melding of the state with the church was both direct and explicit in Catholic nations where royal authority was said to be based on a "divine right."  Catholic monarchs like Ferdinand and Isabella, believed themselves to be answerable to God, whose word was made known to them by the Pope in Rome. The Papal imprimatur was the cornerstone for political legitimacy of European monarchs for over a thousand years until the Reformation, and even then it remained so in strictly Catholic nations like Spain.

            It is therefore understandable how, as a man of his time, Columbus might honestly have believed he was doing God's work, first by seeking a western route to India, and then by subjugating the more primitive natives he found in America.  But, today, we are more than two-hundred years into the great social and political experiment we call the United States of America, and given both our revolutionary history and the democratic ideals  embodied in our determinedly secular Constitution, we should know better.

            After the Reformation, the close connection between Christianity and the exercise of colonial power continued in other European nations with Protestant majorities, like Holland and England.  In Holland, there was the Dutch Reformed Church which followed and provided the moral basis for the Dutch mercantile ambitions and exploitation of New World peoples, purchasing the Island of Manhattan for a chest full of shiny baubles, for example, from natives who had no concept of private property.

            In England, Henry VIII replaced the Catholic hierarchy with the hierarchical Church of England, and most of the British colonists who subsequently settled on America's Atlantic seaboard came here for religious reasons, to find freedom to preach and practice Christian doctrines that differed from the Church of England.  The Puritans, forbears of today's Congregationalists, settled in Massachusetts and northern New England. 

            The Baptists, led by Roger Williams, left Massachusetts to escape the rigid theocracy of the Puritan regime and established the area still officially known as Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations.  The Quakers found religious freedom in Pennsylvania, and English Catholics did the same in Maryland. In some colonies, like coastal Virginia, the Church of England followed the colonists as the official church among the landed gentry like Washington.

            Then, in the late Eighteenth Century, a rabble of revolutionaries in the British American colonies, banded together to overthrow the legitimate royal government.  The catalyst was taxation, not the collection of taxes per se, but the fact that the colonists were being taxed without having any representation in Parliament where such issues could be debated. 

              The Boston Tea Party was an act of domestic terrorism, with the armed invasion of ships moored in Boston Harbor and the destruction of valuable cargoes. It was meant to make a political statement, not that taxes were too high, or were being used erroneously, but simply to protest that the colonists were being taxed without having any say in the matter.  They were basically protesting Parliament's highhanded arrogance, an arrogance akin to the GOP's exclusion of Democrats from meaningful Congressional debate under DeLay's leadership during Bush's first six years in office when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

              The American revolutionaries were in many cases nominal Christians, although many of the more prominent ones like Franklin, Jefferson and Washington were Deists who accepted Christ's moral teaching but questioned his divinity,  precursors of today's Unitarian-Universalists.  They were also intellectuals attuned to the most current, and strange, "European ideas" about mankind and society which we refer to as the Enlightenment.  The Americans like Jefferson tended to be "warm Deists" who believed in a benign Creator, while European thinkers were cold Deists who believed in an indifferent Creator, but neither school can be thought of as being doctrinally Christian.

              Because of their belief in Enlightenment principles, such as the individual's right to life, liberty and freedom to choose the path to happiness, the founding fathers who framed the Constitution saw fit to devise a system of checks and balances among three branches of government.  A decade later, under Jefferson's leadership, they added the first ten amendments to the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights.  In the very first sentence of the First Amendment, they provided for both complete religious freedom and the separation of government and religion.  Thus, far from creating a "Christian" nation as the religious right claims today, the framers determinedly established a secular democratic republic based on the primacy of the individual.

            In America today, we don't have a Ferdinand and Isabella seeking to subjugate and exploit other peoples to enrich their coffers, perhaps in a sincere belief that was the way to spread the word of Jesus across the wide world.  Instead, we have corporations, insurance giants like AIG, oil oligopolies like Exxon-Mobil and the vast amorphous financial engine referred to as Wall Street who seek political dominance in America in order to advance their economic interests both in the United States and in worldwide markets through "globalization."   

            We have also witnessed an unprecedented ascendancy of the corporate elite over the past eight years of GOP control of government, an ascendancy that ended in 2008 due in large part to the ideological excesses of the corporate American right opposed to governmental regulation and taxation per se on principle.  But it wasn't that ideology that enabled the GOP to do this, it was the cynical appeal to the religious right on those so-called "values" issues like school prayer, creationism, abortion, gay rights, et cetera, that gave the Republicans the votes needed to win elections at the national level, thus creating an unholy alliance between the corporate elite and Christian fundamentalists, largely from the Southern Baptist Convention, who believe in biblical inerrancy.

           The Southern Baptists separated from the church founded by Roger Williams over the issue of slavery, and they justified slavery based on selective readings from both the Old Testament and the New Testament which referred to it as it was practiced in biblical times.  This schism continued during and after Reconstruction, as the Southern Baptists continued to justify racial segregation through Jim Crow laws. 

            The Southern Baptists have been joined in recent times by other Bible-based Christian sects in the South and Mid-West to create the political phenomenon known as the Bible Belt which today votes heavily Republican because the GOP cynically panders to them on the socially conservative and economically meaningless "values" issues, in order to maintain the corporate elite's political ascendancy as, basically, an oligarchy.

            This was the basis of Nixon's 1968 "Southern Strategy," and it was perfected in 1980 by Ronald Reagan who opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where a white mob got away with murdering three civil rights workers who were helping poor blacks register to vote.  There, Reagan expressly avowed his belief in "states rights," which everyone but the scarecrow in the cornfield understood to mean Jim Crow segregation, but he also blended this in with issues important to the American corporate elite such as taxation, welfare and "federal regulation."

           That odd-couple marriage of the corporate elite and the religious right, based on pandering to the most intolerant and ignorant religious and social impulses,  remains the basis of the GOP's popular support, which over the past eight years allowed corporate interests to control both the economy, through regulatory and tax policy, and foreign policy focused chiefly on controlling and exploiting global markets and economic resources worldwide.  The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, focused on seizing Saddam's oil reserves while Bush himself espoused his messianic "Christian" beliefs, is a clear example of this, and it's enabled by the religious right's highly selective reading of Scripture.

              During slavery and Jim Crow, the Southern churches selected isolated biblical passages which mentioned slavery to support the South's economic dependence on slavery.  Today, they read passages from Matthew and the Book of Revelation to support a Christian "holy war" in the mid-East that serves American corporate interests in an attempt to seize petroleum resources there.  In their "values" driven support of the GOP's corporate base, and its agenda of greed and unrestrained capitalism, the  American religious right simply ignores Jesus' message, as reported by Mark, that a camel may more easily pass through a needle's eye than a rich man, i.e. a person who values money above all else, may pass into Heaven.

             Thus, today, we are saddled with armed conflicts on two fronts, costing thousands of human lives, devouring our tax dollars and increasing our massive trillion dollar debt, all benefiting only the defense contractors and petroleum industry, while the national economy itself is teetering due to the GOP's deregulation of the financial markets and reckless tax cuts for the rich.  Personal bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures have reached record highs, individual savings and retirement accounts have been wiped out and unemployment is verging on ten percent. 

              Of course, to the diehard GOP ideological media hacks, it's all Obama's fault, or it's all Barney Frank's fault or Nancy Pelosi's fault because, like the Bible, free market capitalist ideology is infallible.  Pay no attention to the man behind the crash of 2008, and its real causes, because like Reagan once said in a Freudian slip,  "facts are stupid things," meaning that they usually contradict the fundamentals of his conservative ideology.

             So, Columbus gets a pass from me, despite his mangling of Jesus' true message to the world, because he was honestly acting as a Christian and a European of his time, serving a monarchy which he sincerely believed was established by divine ordination and was acting as the agent of God here on Earth.  He didn't know any better, and he had no reason to based on the cultural and political norms of his time.  But today's corporatist Republicans have no such excuse for invading other peoples and trying to steal their resources, like the Iraqi oil reserves, while pandering to the religious right on conservative social values to maintain control of the national government.

            Today's Republican faithful thus  not only mangle Jesus' message as did Columbus, but they do so by violating and eroding our secular Constitutional principles, principles based on those strange  European ideas of the Enlightenment, ideas for which our founding fathers risked their lives and fortunes to pass along to us as their social and political posterity.