When we argue with someone, and don’t resolve the argument, we’re likely to feel the other person is stupid. Or that they’re ignorant.
Then, we think they’re not just wrong, but deliberately and willfully wrong.
Finally, we assume there is something wrong with them. We dismiss them, and their arguments. The fight or flight response kicks in and the argument ends, not based on its merits but on who backs down.
We do this in our families. We do it at work. I know we also do it in our churches, our synagogues, our mosques and our temples. The trouble comes when we do it in our politics. It’s how we are killing our democracy.
Dismissing the humanity of our opponents may be a tenet of your faith, but when it becomes a tenet of your politics, there is no longer politics.
Faith is the one weird trick separating the politician from the autocrat.
The politician acts but is careful to never dismiss their adversary. Even enemies will feel heard, and in time made part of the greater whole. You’re wrong and I will prove it through action.
The autocrat dismisses the humanity of the other side before he acts. Those who disagree are bad people, they are not “us.” Whether the autocrat’s action is right or wrong is no longer the point. The point is that you either support the leader or you are no longer a citizen.
Just as religions excommunicate dissenters, so too can autocratic leaders. This impulse is built into many religious faiths. We join tribes, which become our fortress. Everyone outside is going to hell, and they deserve it.
Religious Tests as a Disease
The result can be Inquisitions, wars, holocausts. Or it can take what seems a benign form.
I saw it this weekend when I went out for a bike ride, in the Jehovah’s Witnesses standing beside the trail. They’re nice people, sweet people, whom I always acknowledge when I see them, but I know I am damned in their eyes. I am an outsider, a devil who will suffer for all of eternity, unless I submit to their specific faith.
The difference between the Witnesses and Trump is the difference between a cold and the early months of COVID. (This may be why Trumpies hate vaccines.)
America’s founders lived in a world where every colony had its own state religion, and outsiders were ruthlessly persecuted, even burned alive. So, they made a deal among themselves. Be as crazy as you want, just don’t use the power of government to force your crazy on the rest of us.
What we call the Religious Right has resented, resisted, and now overturned this deal. The use of government to impose a specific faith has been authorized. It means many of us are no longer full citizens in our states. In some states public schools have become religious madrasas.
This attitude that you must submit your mind to remain American is now in full flower in Washington.
Why They Love Trump
I’m not anti-religious. Many of us need God desperately. Prisoners, those locked in poverty, those suffering abuse, the more huddled among our masses, they need their faith, and no one should deny it, whatever it is. The trouble comes when they seek to impose their faith on the rest of us, something that is common in our world.
Democracy is not compatible with religious tests.
Trumpism is the result of willfully ignoring our history. We ask, why do religious leaders love this bastard the way they do? It’s because he gives them power over those outside their churches. He enables their worst impulses, even promotes them, so that they may create religious tests for the rest of us. Then he wraps it in the flag, literally wraps its arms around it, making it clear that those who refuse to submit aren’t Americans, that they are other, anathema, and that we may be killed as ruthlessly as Hitler killed Jews, and as many faith-based governments kill those of other faiths today.
We are all susceptible to the dehumanization of others, of our families, of our neighbors, and of our political opponents. Americans are especially susceptible, thanks to our Puritan heritage, and our genius for creating entirely new religions that make bigotry so very American.
In America, fascism is called Americanism. It is wrapped in our flag, as it always has been, and its adherents carry a cross with which they beat the rest of us.
