Letters to the Editor
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Re internet porn and fundamentalism
lots of people are perfectly capable of consuming lots of internet porn and at the same time espousing a fundamentalist puritan theocracy, in fact I think the two can sometimes be related. Have you noticed what a high percentage of male anti porn activists turn out to be child molesters, not all of them I guess, so far as we know.
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Somehow America Can't Break Free of the Religious Pendulum Effect
Hear that rush of feet scrambling for religious guidance? It might seem alarming, and for a period, the zealots may actually do some serious damage. But if you live long enough, those feet will one day head in another secular direction. They're simply part of an odd American ritual of swaying towards and then swinging away from religion. Call it the Religious Pendulum Effect if you need a name. If there were a chart accounting for this Effect it would look something like a Jackson Pollock painting: lines crossing lines on top of lines, heading in all sorts of directions back and forth.
It's such a mess, few experts have made sense of the matter. On the one hand you constantly hear, "This country was founded on religion." On the other hand, you hear that there was an early allegiance to religion that significantly eroded because God was found to be dead, or had never existed in the first place. Too often the issue has been polarized and made far more confusing than it needs to be. The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between the two views.
First, the Puritans, who found themselves at odds with Locke's emphasis on property and the Scottish Enlightenment's emphasis on humankind's natural goodness (contra Original Sin) arrived on these shores. But not long after, the discourse circulating throughout the influential salons of Europe, particularly d'Hollbach's rebuke of religion (No need of theology, only reason) and Hume's Skepticism, floated across the pond where, as a sweet ether, it was inhaled by the founding fathers, particularly Jefferson and Franklin. Though most of the founding fathers had Church affiliations, they were unavoidably inspired by good old Enlightenment Deism (basically: God created the world and then went on vacation).
Second, the founders were, to a great extent, cafeteria-style believers, and thus disenchanted by the historic reputation of God as cop. Their cosmological notions varied, and were, at times, confused. Jefferson, for instance, believed that deists were monotheists. Nonetheless, as a group they found liberty attractive enough and so allowed Jefferson to slip the phrase, "the pursuit of happiness" into the Declaration. Subsequently, it was so widely absorbed that its true significance was overlooked. The pursuit of happiness in ancient Catholicism, and today in many parts of the world, was and is equivalent to a grave sin. Alone, it's a key indicator of how far the founding fathers had distanced themselves from traditionally religious values.
So, yes, God was reverentially included in the documents, but not as a meddling, intrusive force - not the Hebrew or Catholic God, but a lite, more Protestant sort of God not remotely interested in tracking down witches or peering through keyholes for infractions in the bedroom. In a letter to von Humboldt, Jefferson clarified his perspective: "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."
(Rumsfeld and company, along with their fundamentalist followers, recently tried to prove Jefferson wrong in Iraq, but their odds were prohibitive from the beginning. For those keeping score: Jefferson 1 Neocons 0.)
Despite the country's Deist governmental origins, nearly all institutional life - from banking to the finest universities - were religiously oriented until at least the late 1800s when William James began teaching psychology at Harvard, which preempted (and conflicted with) theology. The subject of Darwinian evolution furthered the tilt towards secularism. What Emerson began matured into a shift in values that paved the way for the Roaring 20s. And yet, there were the polar opposites - the Prohibitionists eager to shut down the devil's workshop. Unfortunately, an accommodation - cultural moderation - was never firmly established so the pendulum kept swinging, back and forth.
Then, WWII imposed the kind of restrictions akin to religious rules - sacrifice, duty, fidelity, etc. Afterwards, however, a secular explosion was inevitable, since, like the founding fathers, the soldiers had come home with European ideas on their mind. By then universities, and many public institutions had shed their traditional, overt religious affiliations. And Reverend Hugh Hefner was preaching his gospel of liberty to the masses. "The acids of modernity," Walter Lippman wrote, had subordinated religious influence. The Secular Empire was in full swing. Yet since it was built largely on refuting the legitimacy of religiosity, rather than allowing for a mutual sense of legitimacy, a reactive response was inevitable. The pendulum was bound to swing back, especially since the outer reaches of civility were being tested by extreme secularists.
Since 1980, with the ascension of Reagan, who relied heavily on fundamentalists looking to restore a sense of legitimacy to religion in the public sphere, the Republicans have solidified a politically productive association with what're now called church-based groups. And it was only a matter of time before they demanded payback, i.e., prayer in school, the 10 commandments in court buildings and the use of the words - Merry Christmas - on each and every holiday card mailed in the U.S. What's next? Roe v. Wade? Torturing gays? In some believers' minds we already have a Crusade going on.
As depressing as these times are, you can bet on one thing. Until America breaks the cycle of the Religious Pendulum Effect, the pendulum, regardless of which way its swinging (secular or religious), it's going to swing too far. And you may curse the day a sinner is paraded out in front of church and placed in a bag of ashes, but realize when you see such an event: here is a martyr for the secular cause. For on that day, when the religious right has become more corrupt than all the champagne toting sinners in all the titty bars in America, they will have lost the right to act wrong, and will once again be consigned to the arena of cultural obscurity. And at the rate they're going, we don't have long to go.