April 5, 2005

George Bush and the new America

By Harry Cook
Ashland

George Bush and his evangelical persuasion are taking us on a wild theological ride. From faith to reason has been a long haul, but Bush is taking us back to faith almost overnight..

It has taken several hundred years for society to climb from being faith-based and governed by the church and king to the modern world based upon representative government and reason. It seems utterly incomprehensible that anyone would want to reverse that trend. Yet that is precisely Bush’s intentions as he proudly boasts of his faith-based leadership and ultimate reliance on divinely guided instinct for his political decision making.

Blind faith in Church doctrine was a prerequisite for membership in the church in the Middle Ages. This was in an era in which life centered around the church. Every person, from birth to death lived in a strait-jacket of church dogma, religious ritualism and obligations. By being a faithful member one might hope for eternal salvation. Excommunication guaranteed permanent roasting on hot coals.

The point here is that faith and unquestioning obedience to the church was fully accepted as part of God’s natural order before the Reformation.

However, the recovery of the scientific works of Aristotle in the 12th century introduced church fathers to the ideals of ancient Greece and its vision of a life based upon the uninhibited search for truth in all matters through reason.

But the Greek spirit of questioning and inquiry was in direct conflict with existing medieval institutions of feudalism and church doctrine, which were based upon the unquestioning acceptance of authority and church precepts.

Nevertheless, many church fathers were greatly impressed by Aristotle and this, along with other basic changes in society in politics, science, economics and population growth, led to a general intellectual awakening that was aptly called the “Enlightenment.”

The “Enlightenment” was the basis for the renaissance and reformation in the 14th to 17th centuries as medieval institutions began to dissolve into the modern political and economic institutions of representative government and capitalism.

Enlightenment values — regard for reason, open-mindedness, the scientific method, tolerance, respect for the sciences — dominated society for a few decades.

But in the late 20th century for various reasons a fundamentalist movement directly opposing Enlightenment values began to take hold.

The essence of fundamentalism is that religious truth is the only truth, and religious truth is found in the Bible. The Bible is God’s word and, as unambiguously interpreted by charismatic preachers (who drive around in Rolls Royces) is absolute and inerrant.

Applied to politics, any issues that fundamentalist preachers deem contrary to the teaching of the Bible (evolution and abortion, for example) are ruled out of bounds to reason or dissent. You don’t argue with God.

In fundamentalist thinking the Bible would and should replace the Constitution as our basic political institution. The Constitution calls for a political process of representative government and reasoned debate. The point of a free press is to promote informed debate. The very reason for separation of church and state is just this, to substitute reason for religious conviction that is based upon divinely inspired revelation or someone’s Biblical interpretation.

All of this would be nothing more than amusing academics, if it were not that we now have a president who fully embraces fundamentalist thinking.

With conservative Republicans, led by the new George Bush, in full control of all branches of government (including conservative courts that will interpret the Constitution) and strongly beholden to the rapidly growing fundamentalist movement, we seem on the way to a new America that would be unrecognizable to the founding fathers.