What a delightfully condescending commentary piece from the BBC. It’s all about we simplistically religious Americans and our silly, superstitious way of dealing with complex, sophisticated problems. Oh, the shame of it.
How much better it would be if we could all be like this correspondant, Justin Webb, who doesn’t believe in God (his choice, of course), and who can’t recall ever talking about religion with anyone in all the years he worked in London. Even the folks at the church next door never talked about religion with him, just gardening.
Being a Washington correspondant, of course, he has to deal with the indignities and naivete of religion in America. Sure, we don’t have an official state church (like the UK does), but we sure do talk about God and stuff a lot. Silly Americans.
How different it is on this side of the Atlantic. The early settlers came here in part to practise their faiths as they saw fit. Since then the right to trumpet your religious affiliations – loud and clear – has been part of the warp and weft of American life.
And I am not talking about the Bible Belt – or about the loopy folk who live in log cabins in Idaho and Oregon and worry that the government is poisoning their water.
I am talking about Mr and Mrs Average in Normaltown, USA. Mr and Mrs Average share an uncomplicated faith with its roots in the puritanism of their forebears.
Yeah. Uncomplicated. Those droll, uncomplicated Americans, with their odd puritan roots. (Wonder where those roots came from?)
According to that faith there is such a thing as heaven – 86% of Americans, we are told by the pollsters, believe in heaven.
But much more striking to me, and much more pertinent to current world events, is the fact that 76% or three out of four people you meet on any American street believe in hell and the existence of Satan. They believe that the devil is out to get you. That evil is a force in the world – a force to be engaged in battle.
Whereas wise Europeans only believe in the unbiased, altruistic, and high moral stature of the UN Security Council, the wisdom and representation of the European Commission, and that France is a force in the world.
Much of that battle takes place in the form of prayer. Americans will talk of praying as if it were the most normal, rational thing to do.
What an odd attitude to take! I mean, you wouldn’t expect to see other folks doing that. Heck, looking back at all those Nobel Peace Prize winners of the last few decades — Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Eli Wiesel, the Dalai Lama among them — I’m sure that prayer would never, ever enter their minds as something either normal or rational.
Still, those queer duck Americans keep insisting on injecting religion into everything, and seeing various occurances as the work of God (or the Devil) in the world. Take the recent recovery of Elizabeth Smart.
During the last week a child who’d been missing for nine months has been found safe and well – the event was described routinely on the news media as a miracle. One broadcast had a caption reading “the power of prayer”.
In fact the child had been abducted and her abductor was recognised and captured. In rational old Britain the media circus following the finding of the child would have been focused on ways of preventing this happening again – on police errors in the investigation. Here, metaphorically, sometimes literally, they just sink to their knees.
Yeah, silly Americans, celebrating the return of a lost child, rather than looking at how it was that she hadn’t been found in the months since the abduction. Oh, wait, that’s happening, too. We just don’t mind being happy and exutant about it at the same time.
But it’s outwards signs (or assumed signs) of religious faith among political leaders that strikes the truly civilized British observer as so odd. Case in point being, of course, George Bush.
He is famously born again – at the age of 40 it was goodbye Jack Daniels and hello Jesus. He has never looked back.
Ah, how much better he, and we all, would be if he’d only stuck with that fine American bourbon rather than American religion.
(I always thought Jimmy Carter, the recent Nobel Peace Prize darling as mentioned above, was “famously born again,” too. But I guess he’s a good born-again type, who never talks about morality and religion, unlike Mr. Bush.)
So while there are plenty of rational people giving rational advice about policy matters in the Bush White House there is also a channel, an input, from on high.
The shame of it all! If only Bush were tuning into the Auntie Beeb instead of Brother Jesus!
Of course, even in the midst of such studied analysis, the writer (or was it the editors?) can’t help but throw in a few odd notes. Like this picture of Dick Cheney, sitting at a meeting table somewhere, pensive, his fingers laced. Now, most folks might think that was a picture of someone deep in thought — possibly in prayer, but more likely considering something that’s being said elsewhere in the meeting (glassware and someone sitting beside him are clearly visible), but not the BBC. Their caption?
It is not unusual to see people walking the White House corridors with a Bible in hand.
Not that the picture shows someone walking, or the White House, or corridors, or even a Bible.
But there are advantages to being self-deluded by such simple beliefs, according to Mr. Webb:
Having made the decision to fight the good fight – and have no doubt about it President Bush has made that decision – the nagging doubts, the rational fears, the worldly misgivings – all those things felt so strongly by post-religious Europeans – can be set aside.
Yeah, because I’m sure it’s all that simple. I’m sure that Bush never has a second thought. He just waves his hand, tells his staff that the Lord told him to “fight the good fight,” and trusts that it will all go smoothly, simply, and without complications from there. I’m sure he has no doubts, no fears, no misgivings — and certainly no cogitation that could be considered nagging, rational, or worldly.
Yeesh.
The religious nature of the Bush White House has been a concern among many. But here’s where Mr. Webb and I part company.
He considers any sign of religion to be (from the calm, centered, wise and rational post-religous European viewpoint) a sign of lack of intellectual rigor, of simple-mindedness and unsophistication. Never mind the long tradition of religious philosophy that we’ve inherited from Europe (including Britain). Bush is just as much of a naive dolt as Aquinas, Chesterton, Lewis, Buber, Bonhoeffer, Descartes, Erasmus, Kierkegaard, Barth, Tillich, Küng, Temple, Hume and all those other odd “religious” types who actually professed a faith, or even (gasp) talked about it in public.
Do I have concerns about religion in the Bush Administration? Sure. But it’s not that any of the members of the Administration are, in fact, religious. I worry more about their tolerance of other religious viewpoints.
Of course, I worry about that with Mr. Webb, too. But, then, he’s from the BBC. I can trust him to be above that sort of silly prejudice, right?
(via Andrea)