******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times Op-Ed, Aug. 31, 2019
Why People Hate Religion
By Timothy Egan
You don’t hear much about Sister Norma Pimentel in the secular press.
She’s not a wacko, a hypocrite, a sexual predator or a political
operative. Her life’s work, she says, is guided by seeing “the presence
of God” in migrant children in the shelter she oversees in the Rio
Grande Valley — vulnerable souls that her president would otherwise put
in cages.
What you hear about is the phonies, the charlatans who wave Bibles, the
theatrically pious, and they are legion. Vice President Mike Pence wears
his faith like a fluorescent orange vest. But when he visited the border
this summer and saw human beings crammed like cordwood in the Texas
heat, that faith was invisible.
“Trump Orders Pence to Find Passage in Bible Where Jesus Tells People to
Get the Hell Out.” Though a satirical headline, from the comic writer
Andy Borowitz, the above could pass for any day in Trump world.
Pence is the chief bootlicker to a president who now sees himself in
messianic terms, a president who tweets a description of himself as “the
second coming of God.” As hard as it is to see God Part II boasting
about grabbing a woman’s genitals, paying hush money to a porn actress,
or calling neo-Nazis “very fine people,” millions of overtly religious
Americans believe in some version of Jesus Trump, Superstar.
What you hear about are the modern Savonarolas. In Indiana this summer,
Archbishop Charles C. Thompson stripped a Jesuit prep school of its
Catholic identity for refusing to fire a gay, married teacher. The same
threat loomed over another Indianapolis school, until it ousted a
beloved teacher with 13 years of service. He was fired for getting
married to another man — a legal, civil action.
The archbishop claimed he was upholding Catholic teaching, an example of
the kind of selective moral policing that infuriates good people of faith.
Catholic teaching also frowns on divorce. But when a divorced teacher,
at the same school where the gay teacher was fired, remarried without a
church-sanctioned annulment and posted her status on Facebook as a dare,
the archbishop did nothing. For this is a road that leads to
thrice-married, politically connected Catholics like Newt Gingrich,
whose wife Callista (with whom Gingrich carried on an adulterous affair
before getting married) is now Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican.
Archbishop Thompson says he tries to be “Christ-centered” in his
decisions. If so, he should cite words from Christ condemning
homosexuality, any words; there are none. That may be one reason a
healthy majority of Catholics are in favor of same-sex marriage, despite
what their spiritual sentries tell them.
Religious hypocrites are an easy and eternal mark. The French Revolution
was driven in part by the revulsion of starving peasants toward the
overfed clerics who had taken vows of poverty. The Protestant
Reformation took flight on disgust at a church in Rome that sold
passages to heaven, enriching men who had multiple mistresses after
taking vows of chastity.
White evangelical Christians, the rotting core of Trump’s base, profess
to be guided by biblical imperatives. They’re not. Their religion is
Play-Doh. They have become more like Trump, not the other way around.
It’s a devil’s pact, to use words they would understand.
In one of the most explicit passages of the New Testament, Christ says
people will be judged by how they treat the hungry, the poor, the least
among us. And yet, only 25 percent of white evangelicals say their
country has some responsibility to take in refugees.
Evangelicals give cover to an amoral president because they believe God
is using him to advance their causes. “There has never been anyone who
has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than
Donald J. Trump,” said Ralph Reed at a meeting of professed Christian
activists earlier this summer.
But what really thrills them is when Trump bullies and belittles their
opponents, as counterintuitive as that may seem. Evangelicals “love the
meanest parts” of Trump, the Christian writer Ben Howe argues in his new
book, “The Immoral Majority.” Older white Christians rouse to Trump’s
toxicity because he’s taking their side. It’s tribal, primal and vindictive.
So, yes, people hate religion when the loudest proponents of religion
are shown to be mercenaries for a leader who debases everything he
touches. And yes, young people are leaving the pews in droves because
too often the person facing them in those pews is a fraud.
They hate religion because, at a moment to stand up and be counted on
the right side of history, religion is used as moral cover for
despicable behavior. This is not new to our age. Hitler got a pass from
the Vatican until very late in the war.
Still, we are “prisoners of hope,” as Archbishop Desmond Tutu loves to
say. And if you’re looking for hope in the midnight of the American
soul, look no further than Sister Pimentel’s shelter for hundreds of
desperate children in McAllen, Texas.
Growing up, Sister Pimentel was going to be an artist, she says, until
she felt a strong tug on her soul; it compelled her to a lifetime of
selfless service. Faith is not that complicated. Religion always is.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com