Faith-Based Reality

Chuck Dupree, one of the writers at Bad Attitudes, has several posts up about Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (and, for the prurient minded, Jerome Doolittle has a post sandwiched in between with a just-barely-safe-for-work picture of Marilyn Chambers--hehehe). I point to them for pretty obvious reasons, perhaps best expressed by Gibbon himself when he noted that in his work, “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” Food for thought in today's political climate of faith-based torture sanctioned both in word (Gonzalez's torture memos) and deed (Abu Ghraib and Iraq, just to name two examples).

For instance: The Rude Pundit, in the course of a much broader piece about the, um, decline of the American Empire (NOT his exact phraseology), links to this pretty scary ABC story about evangelicals who don't want to wait any longer in imposing their special brand of intolerance upon the country. "Dr." James Kennedy, who preaches at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, offers two observations on those who might not share his peculiar tastes--"I couldn't care less," and "repent."

Michael Berube, perhaps following up on this (that's satire for the irony challenged), likewise culminates in the "repent" theme, prior to which he fulminates about his "foray" into the memes and themes of "New Christianity®," which he describes as:

Creationists and
Homophobes for a
Righteous
Inquisition of the
Secular
Terrorists who
Infest
America
Now.

In other words, forget about The New Testament--well, except for Revelation.

Back to Gibbon, via Chuck Dupree, for a second, though. Dupree points out that Gibbon's footnotes contain fair amounts of wit and humor, one of which he offers by way of evidence:

I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: “My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obediance has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.” — I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.

I can't think of a better description of those who consider themselves to be the true "faith-based" these days--between the mansions of dubious taste, the escapades and frolicking of some who "wear the cloth" (or their twin daughters), the absolute denial of humanity towards those who don't march in lockstep several paces behind--with heads bowed--and the sickening justifications of practices like torture, they are, quite frankly, a collection of charlatans whose only loyalty is to themselves and whose only faith is in accumulation of whatever they covet--money, power, objects of desire (sexual, material, etc.), you name it. They are literally a walking collection of deadly sins who simultaneously drown out dissent with proclamations of piety.

Sounds somewhat Romanesque, if you ask me.

At the same time, though, there's a bit of the old "alms-for-the-poor" in some of the bleating, as this wonderful article by Barbara Ehrenreich points out--although she notes virtually all right-leaning, church-based "charity" carries with it a political undertone that advises a destruction of any secular equivalent (along with ensuring that secular humanistic principles are abandoned in the process): "What makes the typical evangelicals' social welfare efforts sinister is their implicit--and sometimes not so implicit--linkage to a program for the destruction of public and secular services." Ehrenreich notes this cuts both ways, as it were: the destruction of state-based assistance accounts at least in part for a rise in religious based charity, and that some, i.e., the religious right, use this increase in what is basically power to strike additional blows against all things secular. Ehrenreich offers an interesting antidote: the example of the EARLY Christians, who took on the power of the Roman Empire, and, depending on your point of view, either defeated it, or at least managed to come to an acceptable compromise.

As for me, I'm watching and waiting. One thing I wonder about is how much more quickly the world moves these days. It took centuries of folly before the Roman behemoth was brought to its knees--the late 5th Century in the West, and not until the 15th in the East. But considering how much of this present empire is based, well, on faith, it will be interesting to see how long it takes before the tank reaches empty--and how we intend to pay for a refill.