Seeking to Understand

Religion and politics have always been intertwined - at least here in America and within my lifetime. Since it’s a political season, that means the issue of how religion influences a voter has been coming up a lot recently - including among the people that frequent my newest coffee shop haunt.

This coffee shop is quite different from the place I have been going to most of the summer. This one is about a block away from a bible college and just a couple more blocks from an ordinary private (Catholic-y) college. It is built into an old house, plays soft, often jazzy music, and has a muted TV perpetually tuned to MSNBC. The old place was more “mainstream,” loudly playing pop music from an XM station, and has grown increasingly sterile/chain-line under the new management. Oh, and it is situated in a strip mall.

The customers at each place are… very different.

Part of the allure of hanging out and working in coffee shops, for me, is to overhear what other people are talking about. (Well, that and the shear habit of it…) This place has a whole new clientele with a whole new set of hot topics - most of them educational, religious, or political but wrapped in edu-religious language.

This brings me to a conversation I overheard here yesterday. I was alone at a table, coding like a madman on a top-secret application that has me learning way too much about music, when a young guy in his mid twenties and sporting a soul patch on his chin sits down at the nearby couch. He seemed innocent enough - he’s had a Mac, an iPod touch, and seemed the usual kind of hipster you see hanging out in coffee shops. Then the girls arrived…

“Did you register to vote?” he immediately asks one of them. This is a good start, I figured, here’s a hip young Mac-using, iPod-listening dude trying to get his fellow generation to go vote. Awesome. I tuned in…

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m all ready to go.”

“Great! Wow. I don’t feel like I know a lot about McCain yet, but I do know that Obama is a scary guy. He’s not really, like, Christian, ya know? He wants abortion to be legal and that’s way wrong. I think he just like, uses fancy language to try to convince people that are smart or like, convince otherwise smart people into thinking he’s innocent and not a bad guy when he really is an atheist and wants everyone to be atheists and give atheism legitimacy. It’d be pretty terrible if he got elected. I feel like, well, McCain is a family guy and has actual Christian values. Obama doesn’t, he just says he does or says he does in ways that make people think he does. And, well, even if he got elected, he can’t get us, can he? I mean, God’s people wouldn’t be affected by what he says or does, of course, but it’s like, why should he get to mislead everyone else who still needs to meet God? I listen to a lot of preachers, like on podcasts and stuff, and McCain really is a better person and it’s scary what Obama would do…”

Stunning.

That’s not a direct quote, of course, but that was the gist of the initial conversation - where he just talked and talked and talked to this girl and she couldn’t do or say anything more than nod or maybe “mhm” now and then. It wasn’t entirely obvious if she agreed with him, but she certainly wasn’t going to disagree with him. He, however, seemed pretty sure she was in total agreement and that seemed to empower him more.

(As I listened to them longer, I discovered he was a Christian musician of some sort.. getting a start and touring, still doing self-publishing of his CDs, etc. The girls hanging with him were, essentially, groupies from the nearby bible college - where he apparently had recently played a gig. He even asked me later about my new MacBook Pro and if I thought it was awesome and worth it, etc. As a person, he seems to be a good guy - you can just feel it - but that doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about…)

How does this happen to people? And, even more confusingly, how can a Christian bible professor (whom I overheard talking a couple days prior) be an Obama man when this Christian singer, who performed at the very same *bible* school the professor *teaches* at, be at such odds with each other?

The dude had said something else, later, which helped shed some light on why, perhaps, there’s so many people who will believe amazingly inaccurate things with no evidence whatsoever. The comment isn’t important (it had to do with, essentially, believing something was true because he read it online on some website he couldn’t recall - I wish I was making that up). What struck me was, here was a guy who seemed terribly nice, friendly, easy to talk to. You could tell, though, that anyone who might have tried to counter him on his politics or his religious ideas would have been shot down in the most polite of ways. In fact, he had a way about him… almost as if you didn’t have strong convictions yourself, he could probably have you believing things his way - all without you even noticing. Dangerous and powerful. Perhaps he’ll run a mega-church someday…

And that was the revelation - he is apparently trusting (and persuasive) to a fault. At some point in his life, someone he respected (probably his parents) told him he could trust person A. And he did. Then person A told him he could trust person B. And person B told him he could trust person C, etc. A chain of trusted authorities built up in his mind - and only those authorities can be trusted to tell him whom else to trust. With his religious orientation, I would guess he was told he could always trust Republicans, preachers, Christian musicians, the bible, and any books, radio shows, tv shows, movies, products, etc. endorsed by Republicans, preachers, and Christian musicians. It’s not a great leap, since they all refer to and endorse each other, that they are all right and that their religious interpretations are right and that their politics are right and that everyone else is, at best, misguided because they fall outside this chain of trust.

The Christian pop culture is a cult of multiple personalities. They all believe and echo each other in ways that just serve to reinforce their own ideas by citing each other as evidence of correctness and mental rigor. God, Jesus, and the bible become nothing more than talking points in their world and they only know as much about them as they are told they should know by their trusted sources. This is even true with the people in this world who actually *read* the bible, as they reinterpret the parts they are told to reinterpret and believe verbatim the parts they are told are not up for human analysis.

This is why it is impossible to reason with a pop Christian fundamentalist about their beliefs or their facts - you are not in their authority chain. You will get nowhere.

Ironically, I think Jesus knew this about the people in his own time. He suggested you bring the faith to everyone, but (as far as I know) he didn’t say you should cram it down their throats and force them to believe. He knew that wouldn’t work. He himself wasn’t in everyone’s authority chain at the time. He left it up to the person to act themselves. It was their choice to believe or not after hearing his message and seeing his miracles. Believe, do the right things, God loves you, and you’ll probably get in to heaven when you die. Don’t believe, don’t do the right things, God still loves you, but your heavenly odds don’t look so good… Take it or leave it.

The fundamentalist brand of Christianity that seems to infect the religious side of the political debate is the same brand of people who will never ever believe that Jesus is, essentially, the world’s most influential hippy. He was a dude who eschewed material wealth, told rich people getting to heaven was harder for them, told rich people to share their wealth by giving it away and trusting him and God with their lives, to be fair, to help the poor, to be nice to and help your neighbors, to be forgiving, to let God do the judging, to be compassionate about the faults of yourself and fellow humans, to give to Cesar what is Cesar’s, obey the law unless it conflicts with God’s laws, etc. He was a peace-loving, wine-sharing, donkey-riding socialist hippy reformist Jew.

And yet somehow, huge numbers of the group that most claims to believe and live by the message and lessons of Jesus are, under the oft-times pleasant surface, the least tolerant, most closed-minded, outspoken, judgmental people around if you aren’t in their closed sub-society. Politically, they seem attracted to the Republican party like flies to manure. They constantly buzz around the speeches and on the TV channels distracting everyone else from the real issues that need deliberation by insisting that a candidate’s religious beliefs must exactly match their own before anything else matters in the slightest.

Sometimes I think that if there ever is the prophesied second coming of Jesus, he’d show up, toss his hands in the air and say, “Well God, looks like this planet is bust.” There won’t be the hoped-for rapture of the fundamentalist faithful because there won’t be anyone left who remembers what the point of his first visit actually was. (Thought experiement: What if this already happened?)

It isn’t that religion is bad or believers are bad or Christians are bad or that Republicans or Democrats are bad - it’s just that people are lazy. Thinking is apparently hard and a lot of people simply avoid ever doing much of it. They may not believe they are avoiding it, though, because they convince themselves that analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each American Idol singer or football player is comparable to thinking about foreign policy. They believe that deciding where to eat for lunch is a hard choice that must be reasoned about and carefully examined - do I want my chicken wrapped in paper or served on a plate? If you ever accuse someone of not thinking, chances are quite good that they will get very defensive - they think all the time, dang it! Just look at all those channels they carefully chose NOT to watch!

This is why, I think, the Christian bible professor ends up supporting Obama while the Christian singer feels Obama is an atheist, abortion-loving evil socialist. The professor is a thinker who examines his faith and his facts and doesn’t automatically believe what any so-called authority may say. The singer is a Christian because he was told that was the way to be and he doesn’t like Obama because he was told to not like him by a trusted source.

I’m not saying that voting Obama is smart or the right thing to do. Only you can decide that for yourself. It’s just a reflection of the kind of campaigns both candidates ran. Obama’s ads often ask you to think about his plans, examine his ideas, and consider giving him a shot at the big office. He does this by telling you what he’d try to do, what he believes, what he thinks the problems that need fixing are, etc.

McCain tells you to just go ahead and trust him, that he’s experienced and knows what’s best for you and your family. He just says those things over and over. He implies that the reason you should trust him is because he’s experienced and knows other experienced people. He implies that he’s experienced by insisting Obama isn’t. It’s circular reasoning, in the end. He became his own authority chain, and others who live by authority must assume that a self-referential authority chain is the most pure of all. How could it not be?

In the mail every day this week Melody and I have received anti-Obama flyers from the state’s Republican Party. Not a one of them had a picture of McCain or Palin - only Obama, Biden, and sometimes even celebrities. Every single day they have been trying to tell us that Obama is scary, so McCain is safe. McCain is safe because he’s not Obama - and Obama is scary! McCain is the implied right choice - and often not even mentioned by name! (Incidentally, we didn’t receive a single Obama/Democrat mailing.)

The political divide in this country has little to do with “conservative” vs. “liberal” or even “Christian” vs. “everyone else” and everything to do with the difference of reception to being told what to think vs. being asked what to think about. I think what we’re seeing with the polls and Obama’s slight lead is that more people are starting to wonder if they should think more for themselves and not implicitly trust their old chains of authority. They’re thinking about thinking and this is causing them to pick the guy who says it’s okay to think for yourself (as long as you vote for him…) vs. the guy who says to not think, but trust in his authority (so therefore, you have no choice but to vote for him). They aren’t all that politically different, in the end. America is a generally conservative country when compared to the likes of Europe (for example). Obama wants to fix healthcare, so does McCain. The details are different, but all their fundamental talking point issues are the same. (Besides, being president, neither would have the authority to do 95% of what they both talk about doing anyway.) What’s different is how each candidate treats the voter. I think Obama/Biden market to the voters as if they are adults, whereas McCain/Palin’s marketing treats them like children.

I’m not a child.