Only the old-timers among us can remember a world before ours, where white Christian males reigned with impunity and everyone else knew their place. By the 1960s that world had begun to crumble, and its former rulers were thrust into a bewildering new reality. Women, minorities, gays, even Muslims began talking and acting like their equals. Music, movies, and the nightly news depicted an America they no longer recognized, and which no longer seemed to recognize them . . .
And now it’s our turn.
I’m not exactly a “white Christian male,” but speaking as a white male raised on Bible stories, I count among life’s great joys the rich variety of people I encounter in the course of a day. Catching the eye of an African-American bookstore browser, an Asian post-office clerk, an Arab or Latinx stranger on the sidewalk, speaking directly to each particular person who returns my glance – even a simple “Good morning!” – fills me with appreciation for the endless and amazing diversity of humankind. And when they respond in kind, it overflows.
What a blessing to live in a place where people are free to claim the identity they choose, whether rooted in tradition or altogether original! What a marvel to walk out my door each morning into a swirl of cultures and languages and religions from everywhere on Earth! Tattoos and nose-rings, saris and dashikis, tie-dyes and sweatsuits, faces of every color under the sun, greeting one another with smiles of mutual respect!
This is the world I live in: deeply scarred by its violent past, teetering on the brink of a perilous future, yet multifaceted, inclusive, pluralistic, vibrant and alive. And this is the world Donald Trump has pledged to demolish and replace with the nostalgic myth of The World Before, that once-upon-a-time when America used to be Great.
Inclusivity, of course, includes conservatives as well as liberals. I can understand why some people are baffled by the proliferation of pronouns, alarmed that a trans female uses the same restroom as their school-age daughter, disturbed by a pumped-up hiphop or heavy metal anthem, offended by a stand-up comic’s reliance on profanity, upset at overt sexuality on television and casual sex between strangers.
If these cultural expressions strike some people not as positive signs of tolerance for diversity, but as evidence of moral decline, I get it. I’m not comfortable with some of them myself. But to me, that discomfort is simply a trade-off for our society’s commitment to individual freedom – the price of the richness I exult in. Despite war, corruption, racism, and the global resurgence of the Right, with every generation I see humanity slowly evolving toward an expanded acceptance of difference and our individual right to be ourselves.
The Rise of a New World Culture
To me, the truly dangerous trade-off of our individualistic age is the freedom to consume without limit, which threatens not just social norms but the continued viability of civilized life. That’s the cultural threat I prioritized in voting for Kamala. But I can understand why others identify as “white” and “Christian” rather than as citizens of the planet, and vote accordingly. That too is an inevitable trade-off of individualism.
Yes, our permissive society permits not only rampant consumerism but domestic abuse, homelessness, human trafficking and other evils. But it has also opened space for the emancipation of women, interracial and same-sex relationships, dialogue between faith traditions, resistance to injustice and inequality, a wide-open canvas for art and music and literature, and so much more.
This empowerment of our individual “pursuit of happiness” was the direct result of restricting the pursuit of profit. Almost a century ago, FDR’s New Deal taxed the wealthy to provide for the sick and elderly, gave organized labor legal standing, and curbed the financial gluttony that had triggered the Great Depression. These reforms carved out a place between poverty and wealth for a postwar middle class, whose children grew up with unprecedented prosperity. The Baby Boom was the first generation to reach adulthood with the leisure and education to explore their individuality and forge new modalities of living.
Along the way they discarded the hypocrisies of their parents and the patriotic mythology of America. Rejecting convention and tradition wholesale, they floundered in an amoral bog of self-absorption, pleasure-seeking and aimless wandering. But many also embraced the path of service in the civil rights and anti-war movements, lived communally close to the Earth, and embarked on spiritual journeys like yoga and meditation.
The wild experimentation of 1960s counterculture seeded the culture at large with a host of explorations and discoveries that led to a glorious flowering of consciousness which my friend Garrick Beck calls the “New World Culture.” The fruits of counterculture gone mainstream include not only tangibles like organic agriculture and renewable energy, but a gradual shift in attitudes toward gay marriage, trans rights, racial diversity, respect for nature, etc.
Predictably, this creative cultural explosion horrified and outraged white Christian conservatives. The church fathers were scandalized by the decline of “traditional morals,” meaning church attendance, chastity, sobriety, the patriarchal family. But another citadel of white male authority under siege was defending not morality, but money: the One Percent, which chafed under high taxes and government regulation, from FDR’s labor and banking reforms to Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency.
And so the unholy alliance of evangelical Christianity and predatory capitalism was born. Somehow the ultra-moralistic Religious Right found common cause with the ultra-materialistic Libertarian Right. The merger of sky’s-the-limit funding and holier-than-thou missionary zeal slowly regained the upper hand in state legislatures and the courts, and finally found its champion in Donald Trump.
And suddenly it’s our turn to see the world we took for granted facing the abyss.
“Christian Nationalism” Is Neither!
After the election I discovered a copy of Mother Jones I’d received in the mail but never read, a special issue on “Christian Nationalism.” So ever since the Second Coming of Trump, I’ve been reading about the people who schemed and strategized to make it happen. They made no secret of their objective: to reverse the tide of tolerance that defines our familiar world – the individual freedom and cultural diversity I treasure – and impose a system of religious law like the Sharia system that subjugates women and dictates conformity in Saudi Arabia and Iran.
But the “Christian Nationalist” agenda bears not the slightest resemblance to either the teachings of Christ or the intent of the Founding Fathers. Religious conversion obviously can’t be imposed by force; the bedrock of Christian doctrine is the free acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior. And the Framers of the Constitution categorically rejected anything approaching a state religion. “Christian Nationalism” is to Christianity as “National Socialism” was to socialism: an advertising slogan for an Orwellian campaign of deception.
Where right-wing Christians seek to expand the power of government to mold society in Christianity’s image, their capitalist co-conspirators have the opposite goal: to shrink the government’s power to enforce a quasi-Christian ethic of sharing with the poor. Trump’s promise to the One Percent is to roll back not only Biden’s belated response to climate change, but all previous Democratic reforms back to the New Deal and beyond.
Neither branch of the conservative movement, however, seems to grasp what originally sparked the countercultural rebellion that blew the closed society of The World Before wide open. It wasn’t Satan or Marxism, Elvis or LSD. The Baby Boomers deserted 1950s America because it offered them nothing meaningful to live for. A career in the corporate rape of the Earth? The pathetic privilege of lording it over people with dark skin? A church that sanctifies the carpet-bombing of peasants in Asia? A God who condemns nonbelievers to eternal torment? Who could fall for trade-offs like these?
Today’s urban gangs, opioid addicts, teen suicides, school shooters, obsessive gamers, hardcore partiers – not to mention the forest defenders and water protectors – are only the latest generation to see through the patriotic glitter of consumer culture to the lucrative con-game at its core. Twenty-four-hour entertainment and smart technology can’t disguise the collapse of the middle class into an ever-expanding sinkhole. The shadow of nuclear holocaust that hung over the Sixties has given way to an equally bleak future of climate breakdown. And the rich keep getting richer.
The conservatives have won, for now; they can establish their theocratic police state and reign with impunity once more. But they will lose in the end. Because neither the cult of judgement-and-damnation nor the competition for upward mobility can ultimately satisfy the deep spiritual hunger that makes us human. Beneath all the superficial distractions and divisions of postmodern life, the human spirit will always long for that acceptance of difference in others which in turn allows us to accept ourselves, to grow into the person we always knew we were inside. It’s up to us to keep the culture of inclusion and respect alive as the forces of intolerance do their worst.
I grieve for anyone whose suspicion of the stranger walls them off from the joy of reaching across the boundaries of culture and identity to connect with other humans on the wavelength of our shared humanity. I pray that sooner or later even the staunchest white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, right-wing Christian will experience the flowering of mistrust into tolerance, tolerance into respect, respect into love that Jesus embodied in all those Bible stories we both were steeped in as children.
Human evolution isn’t finished yet. Just wait and see.
Note: These are my personal opinions and do not represent any organization I’m involved in. If my words resonate for you, please share widely. You can subscribe at StephenWing.com. Read previous installments of “Wingtips” here.
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Powerful, thoughtful words, dear Wing. Thank you, once again, for speaking so clearly and, in the end, giving us encouragement to “live on.”