Do You Have To Be A Racist To Be A Libertarian?

Dr Rand Paul's assessment of the public accommodations provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has proven to be a narrative blessed or damned with very long legs. It is a story which just won't go away as the news cycles roll along.

As the Geek parses the manifold repetitions of the Sin Of Rand Paul, it appears to him that, despite the protestations that no one really, really believes that the Kentucky ophthalmologist, Tea Party adherent and Republican senatorial nominee is a racist, the subtext holds to the contrary. In a more inclusive way. The implication or, at least, the inference the reader is encouraged to draw, is any person who subscribes to libertarian ideas in the raw must harbor racist inclinations deep in his heart of hearts.

Dr Paul in what was obviously a moment of politically damaging candor suggested that the employment of the cudgel of federal legislation in the interest of compelling any and all private enterprises offering any sort of accommodation to the public must admit all comers without regard to, inter alia, race was an arguably illegitimate extension of the interstate commerce act. This implies that the free operation of the market would be not only the more constitutionally correct but, ultimately, the more effective way of countering prejudice in the general public.

To many minds the Paul interpretation constitutes a rejection of the basic truth: In 1964 too many Americans were too blighted by racial prejudice to assure that the market could possibly operate in a color-blind way. That was the case in 1964. It is possible that without the policeman's truncheon of the Civil Rights Act, the same dynamic would continue to apply today.

The truth of the two contending propositions will, of course, never be known as history is a one way street. In a real sense the truth doesn't matter. Congress' moving finger, having written the law, has moved on to write others. Others which are predicated upon the interstate commerce clause. Others that may, as Dr Paul argued with respect to the Civil Rights Act, stretch the intent of the authors of the Constitution beyond all recognition.

The Paul Interpretation says nothing about race, per se. It says a great deal about the fundamental tension which has emerged in an evermore unmistakable way between the role and integrity of the market on the one hand and the power of the government to compel acceptance of whatever policy dictate occupies governmental attention at any particular moment.

The Paul Interpretation does not seek to roll the calender back to the days of Jim Crow. Rather, an honest appraisal of Dr Paul's comment demands that one question the legitimate limits a government may place upon the individual's sovereignty, on the individual's right to determine what will be done with or on property of his owning. Further, Dr Paul calls into question the right of the central government to rule by what is essentially legislative fiat; its legitimate authority to use the interstate commerce clause to give Constitutional color to any enactment it might make.

There are very real grounds to doubt the constitutionality of the many, varied, and quite extensive ways in which Congress has used the interstate commerce clause as a great and highly elastic rug under which any amount of all types of legislative dirt might be swept. Even the several critical Supreme Court decisions which have provided judicial blessing to the extensive use of the interstate commerce clause do not make the usage either constitutional or legitimate.

(Before going on, full-disclosure-in-blogging requires the Geek to admit that he has been refused entry to facilities offering public accommodation for reasons ranging from his Apache ancestor inspired long braids, to the presence of aesthetically disturbing scars on his chest, abdomen, and arms--this at a public beach in southern California the year after the Civil Rights Act was passed.)

The market is a notoriously inefficient mechanism. It is driven by any number of motives, many of them emotional and irrational and base in the exteme. The only thing positive which may be said about the marketplace is that the results of its morass of transactions, its flurry of emotions, irrationalities, and base motives as well as those of a contrary sort far surpass in providing benefits to people any other system yet contrived by fertile minds over the years.

In 1964 and today there are any number of Americans who would deny service, refuse the custom or patronage of potential customers, because of matters extrinsic to the proposed transaction. People would be turned away because of race, ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or even aesthetics. Landlords would reject potential tenants. Shopkeepers would refuse to sell. Restaurant owners to dish up the hash. Hotel owners to provide beds for sleep. The list of potential discriminatory acts is well neigh onto endless.

On the other side of affairs, customers have always had the untrammeled right to refuse their custom to any particular purveyor. Potential patrons have never been denied the free right to refuse patronage. No Congress has ever used the interstate commerce clause to compel buyers to buy, the hungry to go to any particular beanery, the tired to rest their weary heads at any given hotel.

In that sense the playing field of the marketplace has never been level. Indeed, it does not overly sharpen the point to note that the rights of all of us, any of us, to refuse to shop, eat, sleep at any specific offerer of those goods and service has always existed as a sovereign means to compel socially necessary outcomes such as an end to race based business practices.

Imagine for a moment that instead of passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government and other levels of sympathetic government had used their combined powers of the "bully pulpit" to encourage citizens to put the ideals of this nation into practice by patronizing only those who offer public accommodation without consideration of race. Imagine a media blitz that went on for weeks, months, not only portraying the ideals involved but the human tragedies, great and small, which resulted from racist practices and emphasized the power of the individual making choices of where to shop, where to eat, where to sleep, where to go to the movies, what club to join--or quit. The powers of persuasion historically have outweighed in effectiveness the powers of compulsion--even if the process is both longer and messier.

The marketplace is not the sole creature of those who own businesses. It is the creature of all of us who make the decisions on what to buy as well as what to sell, where to eat as well as what to serve, where to sleep as well as what bed to place in the room. In short, the customer is equal owner of the market along with the seller. Buyers who use their freedom to choose finally hold the whip hand. That is provided the government in well-intentioned acts does not short circuit the process.

This is what Dr Paul's comment was actually pointing at. It is for this reason that the Geek sees his criticism of the Civil Rights Act as both well taken and an important launching pad for a free wheeling examination of the ways in which Congress and Supreme Court (and Presidents) have stretched the interstate commerce act far from its narrowly constructed goal of assuring that the central government did nothing to interfere with trade among the several states and did whatever it could to facilitate and encourage that trade and the marketplace in which trade occurred.

Instead of acting to facilitate trade, expand the marketplace, the central government in recent decades has used the interstate commerce clause to restrict freedom. The interstate commerce clause has been used to prohibit farmers from growing certain crops in designated amounts even for personal use; it has restricted the rights of businesses to conduct business; it has even been used most recently as the basis for requiring Americans to buy a certain category of product in a given amount under penalty of law.

Dr Paul in common with libertarians generally seeks to restore the marketplace to its initial pride of place by inhibiting the imperial pretensions of politicians who would use the interstate commerce clause to cover any of an endless multitude of sins. All Dr Paul and his fellow libertarians are asking of the rest of us is for We the People to use our power of choice in the political marketplace. Nothing else. But, that is more than enough.

Palin Gets Some History Right

The Geek likes Sarah Palin. It's not as if he would vote for her should she run for president. He wouldn't. The reason is not that she is a woman. Nor is it her position on abortion. It is not even that she went to a no-name, generic university.

Rather it is her lack of experience relevant to the office of president. Having been the gov of Alaska just doesn't cut it.

Sometimes lack of experience matters as the less than spectacular presidencies of such under qualified occupants of the Oval as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and the current incumbent demonstrate all too well. Ms Palin belongs in the same category.

She does have some truly admirable qualities. Chief among them is her often demonstrated ability to jump back into the fray after one more undeserved attack by members of the self-appointed elites, the hoi oligoi of our country. Anther is her capacity to have unadulterated fun before an audience. With this comes her unmatched skill at turning attacks back on those who berate her. (Remember the billingsgate which came after a photo showed she had written notes to herself on the palm of her hand?)

Many of these features she shares with the Republican icon, Ronald Reagan. She also holds a deep seated faith in both herself and the American people in common with Mr Reagan. That is a very important and vastly underrated factor in her successes to date as it was thirty years ago when Reagan bested the dour, pinched, think-small Jimmy Carter.

Now, Ms Palin has added yet one more aspect to her public persona which gets the thumbs-up from the Geek. She can actually get aspects of American history right. Better, the getting-it-right is on an area of our history too often overlooked or willfully ignored by the proponents of feminism over the past forty years.

In her speech to the Susan B. Anthony List convention over the weekend, Ms Palin correctly noted the existence of an older, more robust form of feminism which was a hallmark of the American frontier, the American West, the farmlands of this country for many, many, generations. She characterized this earlier American feminism as "gun-toting" and "tough."

Her word choice is accurate. So also was her observation that the men of the frontier, the West, and the more-than-slightly demanding grain-belt-to-be, so appreciated the fact that the women in their lives were tough, competent, and quite willing to carry their end of the log that the right of women to vote and hold public office came first to the states of the West.

During the Nineteenth Century the status and role of women were sharply demarcated between the urban based "cult of domesticity" which characterized the civilized, long-settled regions of the East Coast, tidewater South, and portions of the Midwest and the callus-handed, sunburned women behind plows, wagons, and guns on the frontier and in the West.

In the East the rise of industrialism, the splitting of work from home, and the relative peace and prosperity meant that society, particularly the overly polite society of the new middle class, could afford the luxury of putting half the population into comfortable purdah. In the West, on the frontier, and in the very hard pressed urban working class, the consigning of women to a segregated pedestal, a civilized sort of harem, was prohibited by the stern demands of life, of survival.

While Ms Palin, unfortunately, does not include the legions, the generations of immigrant and working class women who lived lives of a rigor which can be scarcely imagined today from her ode to "pioneer" women, she at least properly gives credit to the rugged women who raised families, spent hours staring at the south end of north bound mules, chopped wood, drew water, and, on more than a few occasions, fought Indians. From the days of earliest settlement, when the "frontier" was found only a couple of miles in from the Atlantic Ocean on to the years just before World War II, women carried their end of uncountable logs along with the men in their lives. Life, not just its quality but its very continuance demanded equality of effort, equality of sacrifice, equality of ability.

Raised as he was in the lingering culture of the Apache as well as the far from dead frontier ethos of New Mexico, the Geek has always been very well aware that success of the most basic unit of society--the committed relationship of man and woman--depended upon fundamental equality. It is only by the meshing of complementary capacities that individual weaknesses can be countered for the benefit of the unit. The more demanding the context of life becomes, the recognition of essential equality likewise emerges as ever more critical.

Ms Palin makes specific reference to the sort of feminism found in the faculty lounges of Eastern universities and compares it with the more blunt, more robust sort imposed by the nature of life in the West or on the frontier. Her comparison was both apt and amusing.

As the Geek listened to the plaints and wails of his feminist co-workers at a couple of different universities back East he always made a mental comparison of just how little basis existed for the lamentations of these successful albeit spoiled products of the suburban middle class when considered in conjunction with the routine "sufferings" of women in the New Mexico Territory only a century earlier. How many of these damsels in distress could have done what women of the New Mexico Territory did after the Apache had burned down the house, wounded, or killed their man, despoiled the crops, run off with the cattle and other indigenous amusements?

Or, how real were the complaints and resentments of the faculty feminists faced with the purported abuses of the pale penis people in comparison with those undergone by the wives of miners as the Pinkerton agents and state militiamen opened fire to break the strike? It is all well and good to end the lingering disabilities imposed primarily on the women of the more civilized eastern US as part of the "cult of domesticity," but at the same time it must be acknowledged that these disabilities were accepted by women of an earlier day as a sign of the stability, prosperity, and security of urban middle class existence.

In the ruder, cruder, far more raw life of the urban working class, the new immigrant, the sod-busting farmer of the Great Plains, the Western miner, rancher, logger, the degree of inequality inherent to life was far, far less because inequality like the failure of a man to cherish, respect, and celebrate the woman in his life would be tantamount to a collective suicide note. Coming as she does from Western roots and an Alaskan context, Ms Palin intuitively understands and appreciates this as she does the vast historical gulf between the ladies of the eastern urban middle class and the women of the West.

Congratulations to you, Ms Palin. It is easier now to understand why you have been repeatedly viewed and described as "the wrong sort of woman" by the Ladies of the Lounge. The Geek won't vote for you, Ms Palin, but he appreciates your valuable history lesson.

Gordon Brown's Real Message

In the heat of his election campaign British PM Gordon Brown pulled a verbal boner which surpassed even the American King of Gaffes, Joe Biden. In his car shortly after leaving an encounter with a life-long Labor supporter who had the unmitigated temerity to question Brown's position on immigration, the short-fused Scot was caught on a mic he thought was dead. He said of the person, "that woman is a bigot."

The key word was not "bigot" but rather, "that woman." The real problem was not contained in his words, but in his tone of voice. He uttered his complaint in a way which can be best, most accurately characterized as, how-dare-that-peasant-question-me! By his tone, by the wordview made manifest in it, Mr Brown showed the key defining characteristic of a member in good standing of the hoi oligoi, the Elite.

It is most important to understand that the tone--and the worldview--characterizes all members of that monstrous regiment, the Elite, regardless of the details of political orientation. Left and Right, these self-appointed, anointed by none but each other, the folks of the hoi oligoi feel nothing but fear, loathing, and contempt for the rest of us, the hoi polloi, the (to revert for a moment to that hoary phrase of the Communists) "toiling masses," the common man and woman.

Whether pundits, politicians, preachers, professors, business "leaders," or professional "experts," whether people of the political Left or the Right, all these individuals are united by a belief in their own competence to run the lives of others. They share another commonality: All are convinced that those of us who are not by virtue of birth, position, education (defined as the ability to jump successfully though the artificial hoops of academic "excellence") or the specious metrics of financial success or occupation of a corner office are of the lower orders, in need of guidance, supervision, or even outright custody by our "betters."

To put affairs bluntly: A person enlists in the Elite by thinking that he or she has the ability to tell others how best to run their lives. There may be no rational basis for this, but it is quite comforting to think that one is superior to the vast array of lesser sorts cluttering the human landscape.

As soon as a person comes to hold this most false of hallucinatory gods that person commences a life which is predicated by a constant fear of the masses of peasants. Since fear is unpleasant to experience, particularly as a constant feature, the emotion is covered by a mask of loathing, contempt.

Mr Brown probably believed in all honesty that the grandmotherly sort, Mrs Duffy, really is a "bigot." Who but a "bigot"could question the PM about current and proposed British immigration policy? That is obvious--at least in the World According To Brown. Only a "bigot" who was motivated solely by racist hatred of Africans, East Indians, and Pakistanis.

In addition to the Brown-presumed sin of "bigotry," Mrs Duffy had committed a far greater transgression. She had questioned the Labor Party leader,the PM, a certified member of the Elite. Next thing, Ms Duffy and her neighbors amongst the peasantry would be exhibiting mass unrest, coming after Mr Brown and others of his Elite ilk with pitchforks and torches.

That cannot be allowed!

The fear, contempt, loathing showed by Mr Brown have also been all too evident in the rantings of assorted members of the American Elite about the uppity peasants of the Tea Party movement, the racist xenophobes of the Arizona state legislature, and others who cling to their guns and Bibles. Those many,many commentators who rail against the self-organizing groups collected under the Tea Party banner are simply showing the global anxiety which must be felt at the thought that the peasants have found their pitchforks, torches--and voices.

That cannot be allowed!

The current patron saint (female division) of the Tea Party (and others of the peasant persuasion,) Sarah Palin is universally vilified by the people and instruments of the hoi oligoi simply because she is "not the right sort, don't you know." She did not go to the "right" school(s); she does not hold appropriately "upscale" attitudes; she doesn't act in ways, or use the vocabulary approved by the domestic Elite. She is dangerous--a potential icon for the classic David painting, Liberty Leading the People.

That cannot be allowed!

The assorted denizens of the Christian Right who wish so fervently and work so diligently to conscript the State as the enforcement agent of their vision of moral correctness are no different in having proclaimed their sole ability to tell all of us how to live our lives. They are no different in fearing the "peasants" and covering their fear with loathing and contempt. They are convinced that without the firm, stern hand of their (state imposed and enforced) moral views, the peasants will cheerfully go to hell in a bucket.

That cannot be allowed!

United in fear, united in feeling both contempt for and loathing of the hoi polloi, always contending (and believing) that they are acting for the greater good of those of us who are trapped in the vast swamp of peasantry, the Elite seek to limit, control, diminish, marginalize and make permanent dependents each and every one of us. To question the purity of the Elite's motives, to doubt the brilliance and correctness of their decisions and actions is an act of extreme insubordination.

That cannot be allowed!

Sit down, keep quiet, bow your head to our wisdom, thank us for our generosity, stand in awe of all we are doing for you. That is proper peasant behavior, a proper peasant way to understand life. A proper peasant way to show one knows one's place.

When Mrs Duffy asked her questions, she did not act in the approved manner of subordination, submission. Mr Brown simply responded, when he thought it was safe, in the proper way of an insulted, threatened ME (Member of the Elite.) Other MEs would have done the same--and have.

That should not be allowed!

There Is A New Need For The Christian "Right"

Regardless of one's position on hot button issues such as the teaching of evolution in public schools or women's reproductive freedom and rights, one has to admire the dedication and tenacity of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist communities as well as other Christians to the perceived requirement of their faith. In publicly witnessing the tenets of their belief system these people have run very real risks ranging from physical oppression to social ostracism.

Various concomitants of the recurrent acts of witness--including the murder of physicians, the bombing of clinics, the harassment of children--have called the Evangelicals and their fellows into deserved but overly broad disrepute. The failures of excess, the demonstrated impotence of the Christian "Right" in national elections, the overblown rhetoric, the seeming rejection of the discoveries of science whether in biology or astrophysics should not be taken as an indictment of the "Right" nor a sign that the people who constitute this assemblage are either marginal to the American experience or lack relevance to the challenges confronting the nation and its state today.

As a secularist historian the Geek appreciates (in the intelligence community usage of the word) a fundamental reality which eludes many of his occupational coworkers. The various denominations which conjointly comprise the so-called Christian "Right" are not as individuals let alone witnesses to a particular confession are not marginal to the American past.

The faith(s) represented by Evangelical and Fundamentalist denominations constitute vital components of the warp and woof of the American tapestry. Whether any of the hoi oligoi are comfortable with the notion, there is no way that the crucial role played by Protestant Christian beliefs in the evolution of the US from the days of the colonies forward can be denied, ignored, or minimized.

As they have been, they remain--central to all that constitutes the American nation. The power and persistence of their beliefs, which have been reinforced by the seeming successes of the secularists before the courts and in the public square, gives these individuals and the churches in which they congregate a unique cohesiveness and capacity to render service to the nation.

Notice carefully, the Geek wrote "nation" not "state": the artifact created by the politically active component of society called the polity. The greatest impact enjoyed by Christian denominations historically has been when it has acted in keeping with the prophetic role. When standing aloof from politics per se, when not seeking to directly employ the state as its functionary, the Christian denominations, particularly those which now are covered by the pejorative appellation, "Right," have had very real impact on how society perceived events, actions, policies. These perceptions, in turn, informed the acts of the polity.

The power of faith must never be underestimated. This commonplace applies just as well to those religiously motivated individuals and groups hostile to the US as a state and Americans as a nation--such as the Islamists and their armed twin, the jihadi--as it does to their most natural and potent opponents--Christians.

It is both pathetic and tragic that the secularists of our nation are so driven by the fear of seeming to assert some sort of cultural superiority that they dare not even name accurately those who wage war upon us in the name of a specific religion. Equally if not more pathetic is the reluctance of adherents of "mainstream" denominations to speak a religious truth--that the attacks upon our people and our land are made by worshipers of one particular faith, one specific view of God.

In order to protect successfully not only our territory and our people but our values, aspirations, view of the world, it is necessary both to explicitly identify the nature and character of our enemy and muster the will to defeat the ideas, words, and acts of this enemy. To do this strongly enough, often enough, requires a depth of conviction, a certainty of belief beyond the reach of all too many Americans. To do this requires a willingness to accept vilification, epithets, false and maligning accusations.

In short, to do this--to name the enemy and describe what moves the enemy and, thus, what must move us if we are to survive and more--demands prophetic actions rooted in a prophetic faith bolstered by a prophetic tradition.

The people, the denominations, the confessions grouped together under the Christian "Right" is the only visible candidate to fill the awesome void described. There is no doubt but these folk know what they believe in, know who they are and where they stand in the order of the universe. There is equally no doubt but these people understand better than many just what we are fighting.

More importantly, perhaps, the members of the Christian "Right" have shown again and again that they possess the fortitude necessary for the prophetic role. The faith imbued moral courage of these people inspires respect even within the minds of those who have opposed the political positions taken by the "Right."

Moral example causes emulation. A prophet by the courage and firmness of his argument, his stance, his goal both deserves and gains adherents. No prophet--Biblical or otherwise--has stood alone for long. Presence, perseverance, and patience are words that prophets have lived by from the long-ago of ancient Israel down to the battle for minds and votes which has been and is being carried out around the country in furtherance of faith-rooted ideas.

There is a new, very pressing mission for the Christian "Right." The people under this flag of faith are central to any American success in the very long war with the jihadi and the Islamists. Faith must be countered, finally, not simply with physical means, with Predators, M-4s, elections and money. Faith must be countered by faith.

This in no way means an updated Crusade. It means simply that someone must take the lead in showing, telling, witnessing to the truth that while the American state, has not and is not explicitly Christian, the American nation was predominately based upon and informed by the traditions, values, aspirations, and, yes, the faith of Christianity.

Regardless of just how diverse the American nation may be or become in its component faiths, the nation as a totality, in its very intellectual structure, its mythic underpinnings is and will remain into the foreseeable future a Protestant Christian one. Even as resolute a secularist as the Geek must admit this, even find joy in it, or be guilty of intellectual dishonesty.

The people of the Christian "Right" know all of this. That is why they are the people in our midst best equipped in all ways to witness to and for us in our confrontation with the True Believers whose view of their religion demands our destruction. It is to be hoped the Christian "Right" sees the need, takes up the cause, becomes the essential prophet, perhaps even one with honor in "his own house and land."

Look Out! Here Comes The Christian "Right"

The term "right" has been used for years to describe, usually pejoratively, Christians, typically of an Evangelical or Fundamentalist orientation, whose political stance and actions are fully informed by their faith. Whether the linkage of the term with its connotations of broad spectrum conservatism is accurate can be debated and should in any event not be employed to imply that people in this area are hidebound reactionaries opposed to all the manifold changes which have occurred in American society, culture, and politics.

The negative image of Evangelicals and, even more, Fundamentalists, is rooted in the media driven wake of the famed Scopes "monkey trial" of the 1920s. The facile pen of H.L. Mencken and his legion of emulators spread a highly influential and not justified portrayal of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist opponents of the Darwin-Wallace evolutionary hypothesis as a slavering mob of pointy-headed cretins who lacked the cranial capacity to understand science but possessed an emotional attachment to the Bible as the inerrant word of Truth which surpassed rational analysis.

The urban sophisticates of the hoi oligoi had a good laugh at the expense of these Christians, which lasted from that time down to the present. The laughter has been as inapposite as the original Mencken caricature.

From the Thirties on to the Sixties, opinion surveys, social observations, and political actions alike showed clearly that the majority of Americans were Christian. The Christianity was broad but not particularly deep. During the years when the slogan, "The family that prays together, stays together," was heard often and loud, most American commitment to religion was more of a civic nature than a matter of deep and abiding faith. The belief in and invocation of God were considered such key definers of "the American way," that the words, "Under God" were inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance to provide a bright, shining line separating us from them--the Soviet and other Communists.

At the time when President Eisenhower famously declared that the American experiment made no sense unless it was rooted in a deep belief in God regardless of whatever particular belief or god might be involved, the word "Communist" was almost invariably preceded by the word, "godless." God was the great dividing line between the US, the American people, the values, and aspirations which bolstered both on the one hand and the globe girdling "commies" on the other.

The general view was simply that no true, real American would lack a belief in God, preferably but not necessarily one of a Protestant Christian hue. In a show of inclusiveness, the term "Judeo-Christian" was introduced. While any number of hatchets were employed to split the theological hairs contained in this circumlocution, most Americans simply nodded in agreement. Consensus existed: Real Americans believed in God, subscribed to Judeo-Christian values, and acted accordingly. Since no "commie" could do either and be true to their secular faith it followed that no real American could be a "commie." "Commies" were, by definition, heaved out of the All-American club.

"Judeo-Christian" values, or, at least the various confessions which clustered under that flag, were seen as the custodians of American moral values. These, as pronounced from pulpits beyond counting focused primarily upon two areas. One was loyalty to the nation, the state, and the government. The other was (drum roll, please) sex.

Unlike the much maligned Puritans who, believing as they did in the inherently "fallen" nature of humankind, understood that pre-marital sex was to be expected, the Americans of the mid-century years exhibited a preoccupation with sexual morals which bordered on the obsessive. The Evangelicals and Fundamentalists were in no way outstanding in their positions or preachings on sexual matters in American life.

The sexual focus of the time, the fifteen years separating the end of WW II and the coming of Camelot, was on pre-marital conduct with a penumbra of concerns involving the portrayal of sex in film and on TV, teenage dating, inter-faith dating, public displays of affection, and, perish the thought, divorce. A married couple in a (gasp!) double bed, teenagers holding hands, the changing styles of dancing, and the emergence of rock and roll as the music of youthful choice or the presence of a (shock!) divorcee in polite society could raise many a ministerial brow, cause more than a few denunciations from pulpit and pundit alike.

Conspicuous by absence were abortion (illegal,) birth-control (hidden or non-existent until the advent of the "Pill" in the opening days of the Sixties) evolution (absent in most high school and many college textbooks) as well as identifiable Evangelicals or Fundamentalists other than the redoubtably acceptable figure of Billy Graham. Present however in public views of religion, Christianity specifically, were the heroic figures of martyrs to the faith in Communist countries. The figure of the imprisoned Christian suffering for the faith in the dungeons of the Soviet Union, the satellites of Eastern Europe, were stock characters in the us-versus-them morality play which was a constant sub-text of the Cold War.

So pervasive and potent was the image of the suffering Christian that it was employed with great success by one Tom Dooley, MD who served as a medical officer in the Navy and was present during the evacuation of people fleeing the Communist government of the Viet Minh in North Vietnam following the French defeat there. Dr Dooley later admitted that the horrifying picture of tortured Catholics bleeding from their many stigmata was pure fiction, but that admission came years later, well after the picture had served well in ginning up support within the US for the notion of siding with Saigon against Hanoi regardless of either American national interest or the realities of Vietnamese politics and society.

The image of Christians willing to suffer the most horrific of deprivations and torments in order to keep their faith proved to be both widespread and long lasting in effect. It became a very central (and unacknowledged) portion of the new culture of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity which would emerge in ever greater power and definition in the Sixties and beyond.

The sense of being victims for faith at the hands of the "secularists" started in the early Sixties. In part, as previously mentioned, the sense of embattlement came as a consequence of Warren court decisions on the question of prayer in the public schools. In part, it was rooted in the changes in sexual behavior which were lumped together under the term, "the sexual revolution." And, in part, a part which is as important as it is unreferenced, the sense of being shoved to the back of the values bus emerged with revisions in public school curricula following the Soviet success with Sputnik.

American education was rapidly tried and convicted as having failed to produce people as competent in science and technology as the system in the Soviet Union. Within the mass of changes demanded or recommended in the post-Sputnik period of tooth-gnashing, hair-pulling, and chest-beating, there was one proposed by a collection of anthropologists and educators called Man: A Course of Study (MACOS.)

MACOS was an effort in both multi-culturalism and cultural relativism intended for use in both primary and secondary schools with the intent of showing American kids what constituted a "culture" as well as the general meaning of the term. The goal was to inspire a sense of just how all humans were bound together by the requirements for group and individual survival. One of its main points, perhaps the main one, was simply that no society, no culture was inherently either superior or inferior to any other.

The Law of Unintended Consequences came into immediate application. More than the creeping re-emergence of the Darwinian New Synthesis now ably reinforced by the discovery and description of the mechanism of heredity, DNA, it was MACOS which roused both the interest and ire of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist community. Taken to its logical (and probably intended) conclusion, MACOS denied any pride of place to Christianity or societies which found all or most of their roots in the Christian heritage.

Coupled with the nationalism which typified Americans (as it does most folk, most places, most of the time), the Christian Evangelical critique of MACOS caught hold on schoolboards throughout the country with the result that few systems had the political will to institute the program in any significant way. It is important that the inchoate campaign against MACOS waged from more than a few pulpits became the basis for the later programs of opposition to the teaching of the New Synthesis.

The Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who opposed MACOS and celebrated each victory against it overlooked that the major reason for the multi-cultural, cultural relativist program resided not in its denial of a privileged position for Christianity or the Judeo-Christian tradition per se, but rather in its implicit assault upon nationalism. The affinity of Americans for the American nation as the being the best was the major reason for the repeated rejection of MACOS.

This is evident in the relative failure of later Evangelical and Fundamentalist efforts to kill off the New Synthesis for once and all. While most Americans reject the notion that humans emerged from earlier forms of life (surveys show we are exceeded only by the Turks for wholesale rejection of a purely biological explanation for the emergence of humankind), the Darwinian knife does not cut so painfully close to the nationalist bone as did MACOS.

The Supreme Court came to the rescue of the Evangelical/Fundamentalist community, which would have been condemned to return to the political shadows and perhaps even lose their new found identification as victims--martyrs for the faith--at the hands of the secularists. The rescue was the decision in Roe v Wade thirty-seven years ago.

The matter of abortion had been edging out of the dark alley throughout the Sixties. In a number of messy, incomplete, and confusing legal decisions as well as political actions at the state level, abortion had been increasingly legitimized almost without anyone beyond the immediate battlelines noticing. All that changed with Roe v Wade.

The issue of abortion was propelled instantly into the forefront of public consciousness. It was an issue perfect for those Americans, primarily Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Roman Catholics who had become evermore perturbed by the changes in sexual behavior and gender roles which exploded during that great decade of tumult, the Sixties. The legalization by a few men on the Supreme Court of "the murder of the unborn" was the perfect dividing line between the (secularist or semi-apostate Christians) "victimizers" and the upholders-onto-death of Christian morality, the witnesses and potential martyrs to the demands of faith.

Enter the Christian "Right."

America--The Christian Nation

Let's get down to basics. Americans may be living in a Christian nation. That does not mean the US is a Christian state. This is the critical distinction which must be made whenever the role of Christianity in the past and present of the US is considered.

A nation is simply a collection of people bound together by a common geography; a shared set of defining values, folkways, and customs; tied by shared history; linked by economic, social, and cultural transactions; communicating in a common tongue; and cemented by a universal set of defining myths--beliefs about present and past which are not necessarily objectively true but are subjectively real and powerful. At base a nation is a society.

The state is the organized structure for performing actions on behalf of the nation as instructed by the society acting politically, as a polity. The state is an abstraction. It is a mix of institutions, structures, and their activities which transcends transient personalities and the winds of evanescent fads and foibles. In principle, the state exists to protect, defend, and advance the interests and well-being of the nation against other states as well as those who would seek to rip the mechanisms of state from the control of the nation acting as polity.

As a result, it is necessary to separate nation from state when discussing the impact of religion except in those discrete areas where religiously informed perceptions and beliefs abroad in the nation serve as predicates for the actions of the state. Some of these junctures are easy to identify with precision. Others are not. Still others are, in the language of psychology, "overdetermined."

At the outset it is important to acknowledge that Americans are a very religious people currently. This was underscored today with a Rasmussen poll. The folks with the automated telephone poll found that eighty percent of Americans consider religion to be important in their daily lives. Fifty-seven percent of those responding see religion as "very important."

Look at the results in a more detailed way. Eighty-two percent of evangelical Christians held their faith to be very important in daily life. So did sixty-five percent of all other Protestants, forty-six percent of Catholics, and thirty-seven percent of those belonging to all other faiths. It is to be regretted that the "other faiths" was not broken down by confession given that Americans represent all religions found around the globe.

When one considers the strong hold which faith exercises upon evangelical Christians--and presumably those of a fundamentalist persuasion generally--it is not surprising that it is from this area of religious belief comes the strongest assertions that the US is and always has been a uniquely Christian nation--and state. In pursuing this contention evangelicals have warped American history to meet their desires.

One, particularly egregious, example of this unfortunate tendency toward rhetorical overkill comes from a book written by Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (1981.) Schaeffer, who is both the founder of the evangelical training camp, L'Abri, and a prime theological mover behind the anti-choice movement of the Eighties, proves in this book that history was not taught at his alma mater, Faith Theological Seminary.

Schaeffer would have us believe that the real, honest-to-gosh intellectual prime mover of the American War of Independence was a Scots cleric named Samuel Rutherford. The theological musings of Rutherford were transmitted to the Americans by John Witherspoon the president of Princeton, at that time primarily a divinity school.

Undoubtedly the news that the movement to independence, the war which gained that goal, as well as the Constitution which ultimately came as the capstone were fabricated in the mind of Mr Rutherford would shock the diverse personalities directly involved in these endeavors. The collection of semi-professional revolutionaries, cynical, practical men of politics and idealists with a decent bank account who drove the new state into existence were undoubted well acquainted with both the French and Scottish enlightenment thinking. Most, if not all, were Christians, at least nominally. But, as documents, actions, and politics all show clearly the ideas which underpinned the move to and through independence to the making of a workable constitution were drawn from diverse sources, both ancient and (for the day) contemporary. And, the same words and deeds demonstrate that the men of the revolutionary and early federal period were creative and well understood the human terrain of the thirteen components of the new United States.

Since the Enlightenment was rooted in the Christian basis of Europe, the ideas of the writers of the period whether French, Scots, English, or Colonial reflected values and ideas which were of a clearly Christian nature--including those appropriated by Christian authors from earlier sources. The Enlightenment was not a break from the past. Neither was it the self-conscious desire of most of the thinkers of the day to expunge clearly identifiable Christian ideas and values from the intellectual heritage of Europe.

Neither the thinkers of the Enlightenment nor the practical men of the American War of Independence were seeking to outlaw in some Orwellian way the ideas, values, and concepts which were Christian in basis and nature. Thus it was utterly inevitable and quite unremarkable that Christian notions were rampant during and after the War of Independence and inform at least significant portions of both the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

This reality (as well as historical honesty) precludes the need for the sort of gross exaggeration engaged in by Francis Schaeffer and others of the evangelical community. Christian compatable ideas were organic to the time, place, and thoughts. There is no need to artificially enhance their influence or presence.

The language of the Founders was not devoid of Christian terms and ideas if for no other reason than the awareness within this group of politicians that Americans of the day were notably Christian in belief and posture. The Christian foundations of the colonial experiences were well understood as was the potential for religiously based and motivated hatred, discrimination, and violence.

The recognition that religion, particularly the intramural conflicts which had marred both British and colonial history with blood, was a prime reason behind both the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and its clone in the Bill of Rights. Jefferson, Madison, and others not only feared the social and politically dislocative effects of religious passions but held the belief that free exercise of conscience made for freer men and freer beliefs. In short, prohibiting an intertwining of faith and state benefited citizen, state, and faith alike.

Christian beliefs were worn rather lightly by most Americans during the second half of the Eighteenth century but became both higher profile and more deeply influential following the Second Great Awakening of the early Nineteenth century. Driven by the new denominations, the Methodists particularly but with the Baptists in a close second, waves of camp meetings and revivals blew religious conversions, born again experiences, and the impact of faith on quotidian life to a new high.

Following the Second Great Awakening, faith was used as part and parcel of the splitting of American life (other than on the farm) into the separate spheres of male and female concerns. Increasingly, Christian doctrine and Biblical passages were invoked by both slaveholder and abolitionist to justify their positions. Faith, in a real sense, drove politics as the century rolled on.

Protestant Christianity became more deeply involved in politics even as the last religious tests for office holding, jury duty, and giving testimony in court fell by the wayside. In the fifth decade of the century the Protestant monopoly was seriously challenged by the influx of Catholics from the famine in Ireland. It was also challenged indirectly but with longer lasting results by the Mexican War and its outcome--the expansion of the US into the Spanish colonized areas of the southwest and California.

(It deserves mentioning that Schaeffer thinks that the exalted governmental edifice of Rutherford went to hell in a bucket starting in the 1840s. The Geek does not agree.)

Protestants responded to the perceived Catholic challenge in ways which were, to put it kindly, unseemly. Anti-Catholic prejudice in the guise of "nativism" sought to enlist, or, better, draft the state in its service. A political party, The Order of the Star Spangled Banner, like its predecessor the Anti-Masonic Party in New York state, had as its chief goal the use of state mechanisms to secure a privileged position vis a vis the Catholics in perpetuity. While the Know-Nothings of the Order faded, their campaign entered mainstream American politics and stayed there for generations.

Women, who were conceived of as the custodians of faith based morality in the schemata of the time, sought to draft the mechanisms of the state in assorted campaigns of moral improvement even though women lacked direct political power being voteless. The most notable and longest lived as well as ultimately most disastrous of these was the war on "ardent spirits" which ultimately brought the "noble experiment" of prohibition in the next century. Along with being anti-booze the ladies of the day sought to end pornography. That campaign was also long lived, unsuccessful, and harmful to rights of free expression far beyond the area of dirty pictures.

Looking at the Nineteenth century as a whole, the record of faith based efforts to compel the state to serve faith rooted ideology was spotty to say the least. Both sides on the slavery issue used Bible and preacher in support of opposing positions. On booze and porn the outcome was more bad than good. In the areas of education and penal reform as in that of child labor faith communities scored successes, partial, incomplete, but successes nonetheless.

Throughout the century as was noted by virtually all European observers Americans took their religion, their Protestant Christian religion hot, heavy, and seriously. The American people, it was universally conceded, were uniquely religious. The vast array of voluntary, church based charities stood as a testament to this, a testament which deserved emulation in Europe.

A disinterested historian can conclude only that as long as Christian faith was expressed within the nation, within the people, it was a laudable and successful expression which did much good for many and very little evil to anyone. Only when sincere people of faith attempted to co-opt the machinery of state for a particular purpose did the bad outweigh the good.

The American people to and into the Twentieth century were neither religious zealots nor sanctimonious hypocrites. By and large they took their several belief systems seriously but did not let them impede the often questionable activities of commercial and business life or the equally questionable practice of politics, particularly those of a local sort. Bluntly, Americans believed, even believed deeply, but wore the constraints implied by religion lightly, if at all.

The almost formalistic nature of most but not all American communities of faith in the Mauve decade and beyond was severely tested by the rapid and dramatic changes in the demographics of the US. Some people of faith became convinced that the US envisioned by the Founders could not survive under the pressures of urbanization, industrialization, and floods of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

To survive some people of great faith argued, the Americans and their state must get back to basics. Or, more properly, must get down to the Fundamentals.

(And so it is water drawing and wood hewing time once more for the Geek. But, he is happy enough with this walk through history to keep on with it in the next post. He hopes readers [if any] see it the same way.)

No Truce In the Culture(?) Wars

It has been a week of popes and pedophiles, Muslims and cartoons on television, a week where Christianity has been challenged once again in the US. A bad week, perhaps, for those of a religious orientation.

The past week has been a good one, however, if you like the longest war in American history. That would be the many conflicts linked by a term, "culture war." This war raged on unnamed for decades, even generations.

It was given its name belatedly, very much so, when it was declared by Profound Philosopher Patrick Buchanan at the Republican National Convention a decade ago. The clash of worldviews between religionists and secularists to say nothing of skirmishing between confessions as well as rhetorical firefights of a more intramural nature between denominations and factions within a particular confession are older than the American Republic. And, that does not require tracing the Jesus Wars back to Europe. Nope, we can confine the battlefield to the land which would become and became the US of A.

What makes the wars of, about, and over religion so enjoyable in the US is the embedded freedom of conscience which was unique to this country and some of its constituent colonial progenitors. A free conscience, one which is not governed by the dictates, fiats, and limitations of the State is one which can give full expression not only to faith but allow the fruits of faith to spread their seeds on the fields of state policy.

Similarly, a free conscience which is not forced to mouth acceptance of and compliance with the dogmas, doctrine, and rituals of a state approved religion is one which can reject all religions with complete impunity. Religionists of all stripes as well as secularists both hard and soft can follow the dictates of the inner voice. Because religion is voluntary, because belief is not a subject of official approval or opprobrium as it has been and continues to be in so much of the world, we are able, even encouraged, not only to believe but to talk and act in the public square according to them.

Or, at least, that has been the case.

Religion has fallen on hard times in recent years. For forty or so years now religiously predicated words have been increasingly marginalized in public discourse. Increasingly, religion has been defined as a purely "private" matter which should not be mentioned in the public square. An exception has been carved out for ritualistic "god talk" by public figures during the course of political campaigns or, on some occasions, as a liturgical constituent of formal events.

In part, the decreased status accorded religion in the public square can be placed correctly at the feet of the Supreme Court. The issue of church-state separation had not proven particularly vexing to Americans before the late 1950s and the early years of the next decade.

The role of religion in the public square had been governed by a sort of gentlemen's agreement rooted in the historical reality that Americans were and had always been a primarily Protestant Christian bunch. The grudging acceptance of Catholics and a (relatively) microscopic number of Jews into the American square did little to perturb the equanimity with which most Americans viewed the close association of religion and religiously derived views in normal political and social affairs.

It came as a shock when the Court dramatically raised the height of the wall separating church and state in a series of decisions involving the relation of religion and public education. Arguably these decisions (characterized then and now by Christian spokesmen as "tossing God out of the public schools) can be seen as having been exercises in overkill. Perhaps even Madison, the proponent of the most absolute barriers between communities of faith and the political state, would have found them such.

Only Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, and the strongest proponent of total and complete separation of church and state would have applauded the Supreme Court's holdings in the array of church-school decisions in the early and mid '60s. To the majority of Americans at the time the question was, "What's all the fuss about? A few prayers never hurt anyone."

To Americans who held a religious faith closely and powerfully, the Warren Court decisions were a deeply wounding blow to their vision of America as a Christian nation. The later decisions of the Court most importantly that in Roe v. Wade did the same to an even greater degree. In a real sense the Warren Court fired the opening salvos in the modern day "culture war."

At the same time the context in which religion existed in the US continued to change, and change with ever greater rapidity. Earlier changes in context brought about by scientific discoveries had been assimilated by most Americans even when the new scientific knowledge seemed to challenge deeply held Biblically rooted beliefs.

For example, if one looks at a selection of curricula and textbooks used in biology courses in both public colleges and high schools for the decades following the Civil War, one quickly finds that evolution and later, genetics, entered the classroom without any controversy. Laws such as that passed in Tennessee were exercises which, if not without purpose, were without effect. The governor of Tennessee who signed into law the enactment which later brought about the most famed non-event in American legal history, the Scopes "monkey trial," said that he believed the law would have no effect, would not be enforced and put no teacher at risk--otherwise he would not have signed it.

Far from being the mortal blow to the presumed yokels of Tennessee and elsewhere which the Scopes trial was believed to have been, it resulted in the slow, almost insensible removal of any reference to evolution from high school and some college level texts over the next three decades. Evolution was banned from the classrooms of most of the US not by the actions of any presumably backward looking fundamentalist Christian, but by the fear on the part of publishers that another media circus of the Scopes trial variety would involve one of their products.

Only in the years following the shock of Sputnik and the educational reforms which ensued did evolution come back to school, bringing in its train the political protestations of fundamentalist and other evangelical Christians. This dynamic must be viewed in the context of other sweeping and deeply disturbing changes in the American social and cultural landscape including integration, very rapid technological and economic transformations, the impact of an unpopular war, and global anxiety over the Cold War and the possibility it would turn mushroom hot.

Christians, particularly those who hewed to the evangelical and fundamentalist positions, were not solely, or, perhaps, even chiefly responsible for the start of the expel Darwin movement, much as they became the later exploiters of the issue. Arguably, the civil rights movement, the Great Society programs, the anti-war demonstrations, and the growth of hair on the heads of young American men and the use of the "Pill" by young American women were much more culpable.

Ah, yes, the inevitable invocation of the most universal of laws, the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The same applies to other features of the "culture war" which escalated rapidly during the dull, dismal years of the Seventies: pornography, the status of women, and, most of all, abortion rights.

The myth map of America, a map each and every person carries deep in the basement of the mind, was being challenged each and every day by very real, very disturbing changes in quotidian life. Events did not mesh with the myth map. Something was wrong! To many the wrong was to be found in Americans having abandoned their Christian foundation. And, to many of these, it was obvious: a house without a foundation cannot stand.

It was time to get back to our basics, these folks announced in terms which were not at all uncertain.

(To be continued in the next post. The sun is going west at a high rate of knots and the Geek has to cut some wood for cooking and heating tonight. Such is life off the grid in mountains which are both high and cold even as the heat of summer looms--at least on the calender.)