The political left: People of Faith

"What's it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give."

Bert Bacharach, songwriter. Musical theme for the movie "Alfie," 1966

We are living in the Age of Faith.

Historian Will Durant termed the period from year 1000 to year 1300 as the Age of Faith, looking at the Catholic Church as the great unifying institution that gave structure to how people in Western Civilization understood reality: the Judeo-Christian tradition. Today in political speech we reference a "Faith Community" which combines the heirs to that tradition, or sometimes more broadly people observant of any religion, including Islam, Buddhism, anything. If you practice a religion, you are in it.

In the US, "people of faith" have a political interest in preserving their right to the "free exercise" of that faith, and a Bill of Rights Amendment back it up--within limits. A religion that permits--demands--a person smoke peyote, a controlled substance, is a gray area. A religion that demanded human sacrifice or killing strangers would be prohibited. You can pray, but you cannot murder.

Today an issue front and center is the right of a government to limit two First Amendment rights, the right of peaceable assembly and the free exercise of religion. Is a gathering of a hundred people, indoors in close quarters, a "peaceable assembly," even if it risks spreading a deadly virus within that group and to people outside it? Does it go from illegal to legal if the purpose of the assembly is to worship a God whose reality is assumed by a significant majority of the total population, and that gathering to pray and sing is a long-standing religious practice?

Love thy neighbor

State governors have been stopping those assemblies, including here in Oregon. They don't cite a "love your neighbor" justification and argue it on the basis of religion. They cite public health and safety--their police power. Some members of the faith community and their political supporters call it tyranny, an unfair and unjust abridgment of their rights to gather and worship freely. 

A political divide. People thinking about the political environment amid COVID conveniently divide the population between "people of faith" and everyone else, which generally means people who do worship in some organized community with a name, a doctrine, rituals--a brand--do not. It is believers vs. non-believers. They vote differently.

That is a false divide, according to Michael Trigoboff, who observed that everybody has to understand the world in some way. It is what humans do. Religion, properly understood, is a far wider and inclusive idea than just "Christianity" or "Judaism." Religion is a whole set of interlocking beliefs and values. It may look like mere politics, but an environmentalist is a "person of faith." He or she has a notion of the world and the space beyond, has a set of values, and practices that religion. The person who recycles and picks up litter can be considered carrying out a religious practice just as certainly as is a person kneeling and praying. 

Michael Trigoboff has written Guest Posts here, pushing against what he considers the new puritanism of "woke" politics. Today he puts that into the broader context of the human need for a religious belief system. He studied Computer Science at Rutgers University, had a long career in the private sector, and now teaches at Portland Community College.

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

I have felt for many years that one thing that might pull us together is something like a new religion.

Trigoboff,  recently

Doris Lessing once said that Christianity held the mind of The West in its grip for 1,000 years, and when that grip dissipated it left behind a religion-shaped hole in that mind which has since been filled by opportunistic belief systems that more or less matched the shape of that hole.

Marxism/Communism, for instance.

I was part of one of those, the 60s. The 60s was an actual religion which came to us in the form of music and psychedelic drugs. We hippies had “prophets“ like Ken Kesey, Ram Dass, and Jerry Garcia. Ram Dass once said that the 60s was such a secular era that LSD and the other psychedelics were the only way that God could manifest to us. Read Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin for an extensive description of this.

Grateful Dead concerts were basically “church.” Bill Graham once said that “The Dead aren’t the best at what they do, they’re the only ones who do what they do.“ Jerry Garcia was the “preacher,” a humble conduit for what was coming down to us from “up there.” There are lines from their song Stella Blue about Jerry’s role:

      All the years combine
     They melt into a dream
     A broken angel sings
     From a guitar

That “broken angel” and the other prophets swept up a lot of us, but clearly not the whole country.

In the 1990s, Michael Crichton pointed out that environmentalism had taken on aspects of a religion.

          "I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You cannot believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Trigoboff, NYC taxi driver

     Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

     There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Trigoboff in graduate school

     Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

     And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them."

Climate change/global warming is a related one: there was an initial state of grace/Garden of Eden (the state of the world in 1750); a fall from grac due to eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (the Industrial Revolution); the establishment of a dogma (“the science is settled”); the persecution of heretics (calling them “deniers,” implicitly associating them with Holocaust deniers, getting them fired as happened to former Oregon state climatologist George Taylor); and even the selling of “indulgences" (the Catholic Church used to allow sinners to pay the Church to have their sins forgiven — now we have carbon credits).

Woke-ness is a new religious phenomenon. People who disagree are treated as heretics. Woke Twitter mobs’ persecution of heretics is reminiscent of The Salem Witch Trials. Woke-ness is too divisive to bring the country together.

If we’re lucky, a newer unifying religion may come along and fill that hole in our collective consciousness. That’s what I’m hoping.