Religion and Power

I wish Newsweek hadn’t recently proclaimed the death of American Christianity on their cover… that always makes them so whiny.

it’s more like looking for a needle in a haystack in a minefield while being fired upon, while also staying alert for exploding needles

Touch a person where they hurt, and they will fairly often scream, “religion”. So much of our pain derives from out attempts to be right with God that it seems like nations should consider imposing strict controls on the practice, much as they license and regulate driving, drugs, guns and other activities too dangerous for children and idiots.

But what am I saying? Of course nations regulate religion and other belief systems, and the Chinese Government’s attempts to co-opt Tibetan Buddhism are not essentially different from Saudi Arabia’s promotion of its preferred flavor of Islamic Fundamentalism or the nexus of money, false piety, and guaranteed votes that we in America are pleased to call the “Religious Right”. In these cases, and in all such cases, the irreducible formula is always the same; the sincere eternal aspirations of the many are made to serve the temporal ambitions of the cynical few.

That being the case—and who am I to dispute the entire corpus of human history?—one is tempted to suggest that as a general rule legitimate religion must always be out of favor with the State, must always be found among a society’s persecuted minorities. So societal disapproval can be seen as a necessary prerequisite of genuine spiritual intrusion, but necessary is not necessarily sufficient; mere persecution does not make a Christ of a Koresh and execution by the State, though a promising start, is not in every case the seal of God’s anointed. Sometimes the slaughter of innocents is simply a case of mistaken identity, or overly broad application of a common lead based pesticide.

So for the seeker of Truth or God or Spirit or some other Capitalized Noun the situation is somewhat more difficult than looking for a needle in a haystack; it’s more like looking for a needle in a haystack in a minefield while being fired upon, while also staying alert for exploding needles. Forced to search in society’s lunatic fringe by the nature of power, but impelled back to the center by the mandates of love, the sincere spiritual aspirant is fairly often paranoid, manic, frantic and exhausted, and not the kind of person who automatically inspires trust. He or she might even be impoverished, the certain mark of a pariah in our culture.

But here’s the thing; these hopelessly marginalized individuals seem to inspire inordinate dread in the halls of power. Their living room meetings are spied on, their leaders are assassinated by useful idiots with tenuous military connections, their movements are discredited by vicious propaganda… in some ways, they are the ones who seem to have power, while governments are reduced to the bullying tactics of the weak. It’s a puzzling situation, and I don’t know what to make of it. But the next time I happen across some lunatic explaining the evils of fluoride, or a UFO cult member, or a didgeridoo playing swami… well, I may not sign up for whatever program she’s offering, but I’ll probably give her a listen.

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Tagged as: belief systems, conspiracy, religion