Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (17 page)

Well, no, of course it’s not dictatorship, even if it were going to happen, which it isn’t. Nobody’s going to put Michael Savage in jail. Nobody’s even going to take him off the radio, even though he’s plainly tetched. By this standard, the United States was a dictatorship in its public discourse from 1939 until 1987, and at least some of the people in the hall are old enough to remember some robust debates over things like civil rights and Vietnam that occurred while the airwaves were bound by the iron shackles of the Fairness Doctrine—which, even if it came back, which it won’t, would require only that, if a station wanted to broadcast Michael Savage, it also would have to find a mushy nonentity like Alan Colmes to achieve “balance.”

The lights come up and there’s some low murmuring as the crowd files out. The First Amendment, God love it, lives to fight another day in a country that’s grown bored with talking to itself. America’s always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.

I
n November
1784, the Virginia legislature was in an uproar. A proposal had come before it to support “teachers of the Christian religion” through a new general tax. No less a figure than Patrick Henry lent his voice to the proposal. His arguments will sound somewhat familiar: Henry maintained that this tax was needed because of the “moral decay” that had set in since Virginia disestablished the Anglican church in 1777 by adopting its own Bill of Rights. “Many influential men,” writes Ralph Ketchum, “… retained the hallowed ideas that religion was essential to the well-being of society and that the well-being of religion required state support.”

Nevertheless, since Virginia had relieved itself of an established church, the spiritual life of the Commonwealth had exploded. There were Baptists and Methodists flourishing, especially in the western parts of the state. The Presbyterians had gained in strength and numbers. All of these denominations howled in outrage at the notion that tax monies should be
sluiced off into the Episcopal Church. The issue so roiled the politics of the state that many of the people who’d supported the law lost their seats in a subsequent election. In June 1785, Mr. Madison took up his pen in opposition to the proposal.

His “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” is the most closely reasoned argument for a separation of church and state ever written. As Ketchum puts it, it is “a defense of freedom for the human mind worthy of Milton, Jefferson or Mill. The Remonstrance argued that government suffered when religion was established, and that religion suffered the closer it got to government, and that human liberty suffered in either case. Its phrases were clear and unequivocal.”

“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties,” Madison wrote. “… Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of only one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?”

Citizens had a right to follow any religion they wanted, Madison wrote. They had a right to follow no religion at all. The primacy of the individual conscience was paramount. His language was unsparing. Religion established by the state is of necessity corrupted. Madison “argues that religion will best support morality if it is free and pure, working up from its independent and spontaneous roots,” observes the historian Garry Wills. Moreover, Madison contends, the commingling of religion and government is inevitably a recipe for civic discord.

“Torrents of blood,” Madison wrote, “have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish
Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion.” He notes that simply proposing the bill has led to great disharmony. “What mischiefs may not be dreaded, should this enemy of public quiet be armed with the force of a law?”

As in all things, Madison had done his homework. He rooted his arguments in one of the oldest precedents in Christendom: the adoption by the Emperor Constantine of Christianity as the official religion of what had become a fractious Roman empire. Constantine had brought in Christianity not as a moral code, but as a tool to enforce political unity.

“He attempted to use Christianity as a means of bringing order to society,” writes the historian Charles Freeman. “… In many of his other laws, he maintained a traditional Roman brutality…. If a free woman had a sexual relationship with a male slave, both were to die, the slave by being burnt alive. Slaves who were found to be an accessory to the seduction of a young girl were to have molten metal poured down their throats. Christians played very little part in Constantine’s administration and the army remained pagan.”

This, Madison believed, was not a promising start for the notion of an established religion. “Madison agreed with [Joseph] Priestley and other Enlightenment figures that the purity of Christian belief and practice was corrupted when Constantine made it a state religion,” writes Garry Wills. “All the abuses of power through the Middle Ages reflected the entanglement of the spiritual with the worldly.” What nobody anticipated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they would meet inevitably in the heart of Idiot America.

Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat
Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking spaces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to fill the niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.

“MY
contention,” writes George Barna, a “church consultant,” in 1988, “is that the major problem plaguing the church is its failure to embrace a marketing orientation in what has become a market-driven environment.” This situation did not last long.

Today, suppliers of “Christian” products, up to and including the various churches themselves, have created a self-contained and profitable universe in which almost everything that was worthwhile about Christianity’s contact with the secular world has been cheapened and fashioned into tawdry souvenirs for the suckers. Sacred music has traded Gregorian chant, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Thomas Dorsey, and Mahalia Jackson for “worship anthems” sung by stubby white guys who look like they flunked the audition for Counting Crows. A literature that once produced C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton now sells millions of copies of the “Left Behind” series, written by Jerry Jenkins and the noisome political preacher Tim LaHaye, in which the end times occur and the Antichrist arrives in the person of one Nicolae Carpathia, so named, perhaps, because the authors didn’t think of calling him “Evil J. Transylvania.” Carpathia comes to power preaching a one-world government based in the United Nations, which, at least, proves that Jenkins and LaHaye have rooted their profitable Apocalypse in the American
conspiratorial tradition. As far as can be determined, however, Mr. Carpathia is not a Mason.

Anyway, he has a good run of it until Jesus comes back to earth and does a lot of bloody slaying and dismembering in and around the village of Megiddo, which has had enough trouble. (Jesus, it seems, has developed a talent for disemboweling people in the years since he left town.) The plot is preposterous. The characters all speak as though they learned English from the Ostrogoths. And the series is a genuine publishing phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies.

It has sold so well and so widely that
Time
put the authors on the cover, and the article inside the magazine did not find it at all necessary to point out that (a) Jenkins and LaHaye are peddling a fringe interpretation of Scripture rejected by most scholars; and (b) the whole scenario is absurd, no matter how many people believe it. Thousands of people ascending bodily to heaven? Antichrists from the UN with names like James Bond villains? Jesus chopping folks up in the sand? To call this medieval is to insult Thomas Aquinas; this is the kind of thing dreamed up by religious lunatics, dying of thirst in a cave in the Sinai.

Yes, the old Roman Catholics once sold off their saints piecemeal, and sometimes the saint’s finger you bought turned out to be a pig’s knuckle, but the vendors of holy relics were absolute pikers compared with those who traffic in the notion of an embattled elect surrounded by a scornful world. Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country’s politics. And religion has been sold there solely as a product.

Mr. Madison saw this coming. Political religion always has
been a sucker’s game for marks and prayerful mama’s boys, an ever vain search for a nonexistent pea hidden beneath the swindler’s overturned chalices. It exchanges the loaves and fish for the rigged wheel and the marked deck. It speaks not in tongues but in euphemisms. A politician discussing his religion now refers to himself as a “person of faith,” which tells you more about the politician’s balls than it does about his soul. He doesn’t have enough of the former to call himself “religious,” because that leads to the question of which religion and why he chooses to follow it and not one of the dozens of others, or none of them at all.

Such questions cause actual thought to break out, something that all modern politicians endeavor to avoid. So a politician becomes a “person of faith,” and good for him. So is the fan in the bleachers who roots for the Red Sox and so is the guy in Oregon who’s looking for Sasquatch. Torquemada was a person of faith. So were Marx and Lenin. So is almost any atheist. In its essential cowardice, the phrase means nothing. It’s a slogan. A sales pitch.

Consider the sad case of David Kuo, born-twice victim of his own sanctified bunco game. In his memoir,
Tempting Faith
, Kuo vividly describes his career as the last of the suckers. Kuo came to Washington to work for the second Bush administration on “faith-based” initiatives. The government would divert public money to religious charities, which were presumed to do a better job of confronting the nation’s social problems. An Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives would even be established within the executive branch, Mr. Madison thereby having been told exactly where he could stick his Remonstrance.

Kuo was sincere. At least on the surface, this was a God-drunk administration. There was regular Bible study. The staff came from evangelical diploma mills, and like hired like. (According
to a questionnaire obtained by the
Washington Post
, applicants to the Department of Justice were routinely asked whether they believed in God.) Kuo assumed his bosses were sincere as well, at least until it became plain to him that the program had a lot more of Boss Tweed than Beatitude to it. Kuo writes:

A fucking faith-based thing.

And why not? “Faith-based” is another dishonest term for a dishonest time. It’s a word for people too cowardly to call themselves religious and it is beloved by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith. It was eagerly adopted by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do either one, because it conforms to the Three Great Premises. It’s a cheap salesman’s term of art, something you’d use to pitch a television program or a breakfast cereal. It even sounds like an additive—“faith-based”—an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It’s camouflage under which religion is sold like smuggled goods in places where it doesn’t belong.

To call something “faith-based” for the purposes of hiding the clearly sectarian character of what you’re actually talking about is to admit that there really is no difference between what
went on at Lourdes and what went on at Roswell. In truth, the United States of America can be said to be “faith-based,” and one of the primary articles of that faith is that religion—in all its forms—should be kept out of the country’s secular institutions, both for religion’s own good and for the good of the institutions in question. Mr. Madison knew it in his bones. To invite religion into government is to invite discord and to establish the tyranny of the righteous. Now, today, in Idiot America, where everything is a marketplace, to sell religion through government is to invite discord and to establish the tyranny of fraud. The transaction becomes just another fucking faith-based thing.