I am relieved.
Now that a week has passed, and people have processed things a little, I can admit publicly what I have to date only said to a few close friends.
I am relieved at the outcome of the election.
This is not to say I am pleased ….
(Elizabeth Scalia, Moses and the Gipper and the End of America, First Things blog) This is Scalia’s contribution to the emerging (or am I just noticing it?) train of thought among truly conservative Christians (i.e., those who aren’t just GOP party hacks) that cultural and spiritual health depends in part on gimlet-eyed political realism:
This election has shattered, finally the illusion that if “good conservatives just keep fighting,” somehow “another Reagan” was going to come along and restore the “shining city on a hill”. For too long I have watched friends remain enthralled to the notion that a single man or woman equipped with rhetorical skills, a bit of spine, and right-thinking would be able to resurrect what is remembered by some modern conservatives as a golden age.
It’s not coming back because half the country didn’t want it, or didn’t even recognize what it had and therefore won’t miss it, and because for young adults and the generations coming up the backbone of conservative theory—rugged individualism, privacy, minimal government—is a complete non-sequitur; it does not compute.
(Emphasis in original) Where she turns then, about why it does not compute, is a new connecting-of-dots to me.
I know that the Holocaust caused many Jews to lose their faith in God. I like to think that my faith is like that of Job: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” (Job 13:15. But I’ve never felt He was elsewhere, or inattentive, let alone complicit, as barbarians slew my children, parents, or spouse.
Some Religious Right “faith” shatters way too easily, though:
Earlier in the week, I had an exchange with an overwrought woman who declared herself “done with God” because she had prayed for a GOP victory and felt abandoned. It became clear that the “shining city on the hill” meant everything to her; “America is not supposed to end,” she said. When I suggested that such pride might have played a part in this defeat—that Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land because of pride, and the GOP is no Moses—she railed again. When I asked her what she could worship in the nation’s stead, she replied, “nothing.”
That sort of immature faith will not sustain us through the difficult times ahead.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I gave up on Santa Claus when he didn’t bring me the pony for Xmas. A few decades later, Bo Derek didn’t show up on Christmas Eve, either. Life is just full of proofs that the [expletive deleted] Genie in the bottle isn’t real. I’ve long suspected such stupidity of some on the Religious Right. This just puts it very starkly.
My opinion of a faith that Barack Obama’s re-election can shatter cannot be expressed in a family-friendly blog.
Scalia’s is a powerful, powerful column that’s going into my “clip and save” folder.
Speaking of the Holocaust, Roger Forsgren writes:
Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps. Someone measured the size and weight of a human corpse to determine how many could be stacked and efficiently incinerated within a crematorium. Someone sketched out on a drafting table the decontamination showers, complete with the fake hot-water spigots used to lull and deceive doomed prisoners. Someone, very well educated, designed the rooftop openings and considered their optimum placement for the cyanide pellets to be dropped among the naked, helpless men, women, and children below. This person was an engineer, an architect, or a technician. This person went home at night, perhaps laughed and played with his children, went to church on Sunday, and kissed his wife goodbye each morning.
The technical professions occupy a unique place in modern society. Engineers and architects possess skills most others lack — skills that allow them to transform dreams of design into reality. Engineers can convert a dry, infertile valley into farmland by constructing a dam to provide irrigation; they have made man fly; and architects have constructed buildings that reach thousands of feet into the sky. But these same technical gifts alone, in the absence of a sense of morality and a capacity for critical thought and judgment, can also make reality of nightmares. Ferdinand Porsche, the engineer who designed the Volkswagen — an automobile that revolutionized personal travel for the common man — also designed a terrifying battle tank that helped kill millions of Russians on the Eastern Front. Wernher von Braun, who would later design the Saturn V rocket that brought American astronauts to the Moon, designed the V-2 rockets with which the Nazis terrorized Antwerp and London in the waning months of the Second World War ….
(Roger Forsgren, The Architecture of Evil) How can you not read on? It’s the story of Albert Speer, Hitler’s Chief Architect.
I’m not, it should be clear, a friend of just any old “religion.” American Exceptionalism or City on a Hill, for instance, rank somewhere below Unitarian Universalism. Yet this was a bit comforting:
Speer makes little mention in his autobiography of any religious or spiritual influences other than the fact that as a young man, he formed a sort of pantheistic “closeness with nature” that allowed him a sense of solitude while “escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated.” Speer’s family was Protestant but did not attend church. In a letter written years later to his daughter while serving his sentence at Spandau Prison, Speer suggested that he and his wife attended church mainly to please his wife’s family, and that “when your mother and I did leave the church, it was in reaction to the political opposition of the churches to Hitler — I suppose it was a sort of statement of loyalty.”
Here’s Elizabeth Scalia’s overwrought woman before the election. Or her spiritual sister. Or something.
H/T @jameybennett
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 