An American Apology for Bush's Religion

An American Apology for Bush's Religion
By Dr Gerry Lower - 10 April 2003

Dear Friends across the Atlantic,

America under the Bush administration ("Bin Laden's Victory", The Guardian, March 22, 2003). To be sure, his dismay is shared by many thoughtful people in America who are similarly disturbed at how the Bush administration has managed to take a world full of concerned outpouring following September 11th and turn it into a world in distrust of and disgust with America.

By now, the Bush Administration has let the entire world know it wants to be in full charge of the global storefront. It has accomplished this, as many have pointed out, by fabrication and falsehood in dictating exclusionary doctrine, abandoning international treaties, snubbing the European democracies, labeling entire nations as "evil" incarnate, declaring pre-meditated and unprovoked war on Iraq, stripping Americans of their civil rights, and fueling both the national deficit and class warfare by pandering to the already-too-rich at the expense of working people.

Dawkins writes, "My American friends, you know I love your country, how have we come to this?" How has America come under what George McGovern calls "the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington ("The Reason Why", The Nation, April 3, 2003)?

How can one not feel obligated to convey an apology to European friends for the despotic religious regime currently in control of America? Heaven knows, such an apology is long overdue. How can one not feel obligated to convey an apology for the willingness of the American people to abide a regime that is overtly against the people and the values of nascent Christianity and Democracy? The nature of and sheer volume of transgressions, however, renders any apology inadequate and our only hope resides in our collective comprehension in the interest of collective control.

Professor Dawkins went on to write, "I know most of you didn't vote for him [Bush] anyway, but that is my point. Forgive my presumption, but could it just be that there is something a teeny bit wrong with that famous constitution of yours?" Here, one can safely presume, the Professor is speaking of our failed national electoral procedures, which implemented Bush's appointed entrance into the Oval Office. But, the Professor is also, perhaps without knowing it, pointing his finger straightway at the much deeper core of our problem in contemporary America, i.e., our Constitution's divergence from the values and principles of our Declaration.

Yes, Professor, there is plenty wrong with America's Constitution. But if we ask when it went wrong, the answer would be at the onset. If we ask how it went wrong, the answer, ironically enough, would be that it was compromised by the values of none other than British crony "mercantilism" (forerunner of American crony capitalism). If we ask why it went wrong, the answer would be rightwing greed embedded in the self-righteous attitude of pro-British Tories, those who had established lucrative relationships by doing business with the British monarchy, those who wanted to retain their dominant niches in the colonial hierarchy.

This is not a criticism of the British people for past policies. Neither is it a criticism of the American people for Bush's current Orwellian policies. It is a request that we put our current situation into cultural perspective in the interest of comprehension. It is not the people who are directly responsible here, so much as their unquestioning involvement in cultural processes that transcend us all. As the British played their power role when the opportunity emerged, so it goes with America, directed into following a script which the people had no part in authoring and have, under Jefferson's Democracy, no obligation to follow.

Richard Goldstein addressed the issue as to what George Bush's unprovoked war on Iraq is really all about. Goldstein said it all in his first sentence, "Say what you will about oil and hegemony, but the pending invasion of Iraq is more than just a geopolitical act. It is also the manifestation of a cultural attitude" ("Neo-Macho Man", The Nation, February 24, 2003).

This is the simple truth of it, that what we see today in American government does not have so much to do with Bush administration principles and policies (as greed and power-driven, as inconsistent and, therefore, as illogical as they are) but more to do with "cultural attitude." In evolutionary terms, this attitude is characterized by religious self-righteousness, from Judeo-Roman imperialism to British colonialism to American capitalism.

Andreas Whittam Smith argued that the newly-emergent American "religiosity," brought into the White House by the Bush administration, "suggests that in a way Americans consider themselves a chosen people. The British had the same delusion in the 19th century" ("Which British Politician Would Quote Isaiah?", The Independent, February 3, 2003).

Now, two centuries later, that old, worn-out attitude has resurfaced in the Bush White House and is being redirected back across the Atlantic toward nations that have long since outgrown the need to kill in the name of the gods. What we have here is self-righteous cultural blowback, two centuries in the making, and the Bush administration is no more likely to voluntarily shed this attitude than were the British two hundred years ago.

America has been hijacked by the religious rich and placed under the self-righteous dominion of people who, like their British predecessors, are convinced that great wealth and power are the direct result of favoritism by the Judeo-Roman God of the west (never mind "American ingenuity" and a well-honed talent for capitalizing on others). From this spooky interpretation of the causes of wealth comes the assumption that current and continued American dominion is something that is ordained from above. Bush's religiosity has lumped us all together in one Old Testament heap and we don't know if we are supposed to be "eye for an eye" or "turn the other cheek," we don't know if we are for war or for peace. We have been bombing so many other countries for so long in the name of keeping the peace, we don't even know the difference anymore.

Let me give you an idea of how far away from Jefferson's world the Bush administration has crawled. In America, our ideological blueprint is found in Jefferson's Declaration and our operational approaches are codified in our Constitution. It was making the translation from Declaration values to Constitutional policies that turned out to be America's failure, due largely to right wing pro-British influence. This failure was accepted as such by Franklin when he signed what he saw as an inadequate document. Jefferson saw the document as "an oligarchic device to deny democracy to the people," and his Bill of Rights was implemented so that inbred Constitutional inadequacies could be rectified as necessary.

Jefferson, an inspired Deist theologian, was likely one of the most Christian and one of the least religious men to have walked on American turf. He built his spiritual world on the dialectic values of nascent Christianity and Science, values which transcend the values of Occidental religious and Oriental ethical systems, and his Declaration remains today as one of the most Christian documents yet penned.

In editing the King James Version to create a secular scriptures (i.e., The Jefferson Bible), Jefferson was keenly aware that Western scriptures had long espoused two mutually-exclusive moralities, one based in vengeance and war, the other based in compassion and peace. This monstrously despotic inconsistency had escaped western theologians for nearly two millennia because seeing the truth would have put an end to vengeance-based religion and centuries of imperial and colonial western conquest (in playing out its evolutionary role in uniting the people under larger and larger banners, from tribal to national to global organization).

Jefferson literally trashed the Old Testament as a pre-Christian source of despotism and he removed every shred of superstition and supernaturalism from the New Testament to leave essentially an edited Life and Morals of Jesus Christ. The last line reads, "There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed (Matthew 27:60)." That's it. The first Christian was dead and gone. In Jefferson's mind, the "second coming" was when people stopped talking about the first Christian and started thinking like him, when the people incorporated compassion into political philosophy where it belongs. Pretty down to earth and human, this man. But, there is more.

In a 1790 Cabinet Opinion, Jefferson further reformed western religion by placing God in the "head and heart" of every person, and he defined the "highest authority" as "the will of the people, substantially declared." In other words, and in a Deist tradition going back to 12th century Christian mystics, Jefferson rejected the notion of "external authority" (a god "out there," as Einstein put it) and he placed God, the decision-making apparatus of the human world, on the human inside.

In essence, Jefferson believed that God, the highest authority, is embedded in what we know and care about. It is our ideas and actions which mold our world and define our God. Determined authority comes from within as we struggle to define and control a probabilistic world on the outside. Without that internal authority, known as human choice, and a good deal of honest, reliable knowledge to back up our choices, where would we be?

The Jeffersonian approach to God is now more commonly held in Europe than in America, where Bush restricts the people to a "dirty old man" god, ostensibly "out there," a greedy, jealous god of vengeance, conquest and apocalypse, an apparition which allows people to get away with murder and cultural genocide. It is as if the New Testament-inspired Protestant reformations never occurred, as if the Deist-inspired American Revolution never occurred.

The millennial conflict between the right wing conservative mindset (religious transcendentalism) and the left wing liberal mindset (scientific empiricism) came to the front in the debate between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who spoke for the Tories and British capitalism. It was a conflict between theologies, a conflict between putting the people first or putting profits first, a conflict between the values of nascent Christianity and the values of Old Testament religion. It is the difference between having an America under the dominion of the stated values of Democracy (rule by the people) or under the dominion of the values of the marketplace (rule by the rich).

Jefferson and Franklin lost their battle to keep the Constitution in line with the Declaration, and they both knew it, when America decided to imitate its former oppressors rather than outthink and outlaw them. In 1816, Jefferson warned the people that the last thing America needed was a "corporate aristocracy." But, the times were set for the Industrial Revolution and the upcoming era of "robber barons." By the turn of the century, the new corporate aristocracy had done its best to discredit EuroAmerican philosophy, relegating it to a drawer in the humanities instead of atop the sciences. American "philosophy" culminated with William Jame's famous statement that "the value of an idea is its cash value," likely the most superficial statement ever made in the name of philosophy.

With the mania following World War II , Americans were literally sold a complete bill of Hamiltonian goods. Don't' be concerned about traditional family and community values, follow the way of the wealthy, go for the money and your family and community will flourish. In fact, post World War II saw American families torn apart as individual members sought distant employment in an economy designed not in the people's interest but in its own interest. Corporate economies took over the rural and community economies which held us together as a people. We referred to this cultural genocide as "progress" and true American story was over.

By the 1960s, the bulk of America's youth knew that the American socio-economic system had crashed and burned, sold out to mammon. Both political parties came to see capitalism as an operational religion, America's reason for "success" and, apparently, America's gift to the world. Half of our electorate never bothers to vote because they accurately see that it fails to provide an alternative to capitalistic dominion. Democrat or Republican, crony capitalism rules. "What else is there?" Well, there is, of course, religion.

The Republican party opened the doors to the rich in American government in the 1980s with Reagan's pandering to the religious right for votes, the Texas Southern Baptist Convention took over the Texas Republican party in 1994 and George W. Bush brought this self-righteous world view directly into the Oval Office. Today, the Democratic Party in America languishes, lost entirely from its liberal, Jeffersonian roots. Meanwhile, the people are stuck with the likes of Kenneth Lay and George Bush as exemplars of American business ethics and Christian morality.

Indeed, we Americans are stuck with quite a load of capitalistic accomplishments. As summarized by Dr. Robert Bowman ("The True State of the Union", January, 2003), "the United States is number one in our use of the world's resources, number one in the production of pollution, number one in the gap between the rich and the poor, number one in deaths by gunfire, number one in teen pregnancy, number one in poverty among the elderly, number one in citizens without health coverage, number one in child poverty, number one in homeless veterans, and number one in citizens behind bars. We also lead the world in the number of hours worked per family, since it now takes two wage-earners and three jobs to provide the income earned with one 40 hour per week job in the 1950s."

Now ask yourself, how could this have happened? How could the largest gap between rich and poor in human history emerge in a nation birthed from the concepts of fairness and equality? How could this have happened if America had not been much farther off track than thought, for much longer than thought, compromised by our British heritage? Do you see how we are all in this together?

The horrible truth beneath American denial is seen in our educational systems, which bother not to teach our youth about the origins, values and principles of capitalism. This, our chosen "ism," and our educational systems simply dare not mention the subject. Who would willingly go along with a curriculum overtly teaching their youth to admire the values of Dick Cheney or Kenneth Lay? As a result, America's youth learn about American socio-economics in the same way they learn about their sexuality, in the streets, where history is dead and mythology flourishes.

The values and principles of democracy have been entirely supplanted in America by the values of "compassionate" conservatism and crony capitalism, and much of the American electorate is no longer able to make the distinction. America has undergone a grand de-evolution as part of a larger evolutionary program aimed ultimately at discrediting western vengeance-based moralities and greed-driven crony capitalism from the political arena so as to create an opportunity for establishing a global democracy of democracies, based on the values of science, democracy and nascent Christianity (no religion in sight), as Jefferson intended first time around.

Once this can be recognized and accepted, i.e., that we have come full circle to find ourselves this time on the global rung of the evolutionary spiral, the real question becomes, "What are we going to do about it?" How are we going to convince the world's only remaining "superpower" that it ought take its place as a leadership democracy among democracies, that it ought practice what it preaches, that it's only hope to democratize the world is to set meritorious example?

The world has already seen how far the Bush administration will go in pursuing its self-righteous, neo-Roman, neo-British American agenda. There is no reason to believe that these people will stop short of going off the deep end, as they appear already to have done in principle. So, it would seem that thoughtful and caring people in Europe and America, people who would be citizens of a democracy, must look quickly and deeply for solutions.

George Monbiot ("Out of the Wreckage," The Guardian, February 25, 2003) pointed out that "America's assertions of independence from the rest of the world force the rest of the world to assert its independence from America." He alluded to one non-violent but economy-shaking solution, an approach which does not involve taking aim at a belligerent and dangerous America (what a horrendous thought). Rather, given the huge dependence of America on British, Dutch, German, and Japanese, etc. investment, this approach involves withdrawal of capital so as to drive America into bankruptcy, no longer able to afford being the world's judge, jury and lord high executioner.

Mark Tran ("Bush Fiddles with the Economy while Baghdad Burns," The Guardian, March 26, 2003) likewise noted that the Bush administration has, on its own, already done everything possible to make such an outcome easier to achieve. With the OPEC nations considering a switch to the Euro as the sole oil transaction currency, Bush's ability to support his agenda would be even further eroded. Indeed, American capitalism's fear of losing ground to the European Union and the Euro is well taken and may be a weighty motivation for the Bush administration's ongoing fight for physical control over Middle Eastern oil fields.

No one really knows how far an increasingly desperate Bush administration will go in pursuing its imperial agenda. Help us out here, friends. Despite all differences, those of us in the Western democracies are the most "alike" people on Earth and there simply isn't anyone else around to maintain the millennial western struggle for democracy and freedom. We Americans can only hope that our European friends will remember that we have all been here before and that, more than ever, we are all in this together. So, if push comes to shove in Euro-American relationships, please do not shoot at us. Just pull the damned plug.

There is simply no need for apocalypse in order to learn the simple lessons we need to learn, lessons that America's founding fathers mastered two centuries ago. After vengeance-based moralities and self-righteous capitalism have discredited themselves on a global basis, we will be in a position to implement a new evolutionary journey toward world peace. We need to begin by rethinking just what we mean by the terms "Christianity" (beginning with Jefferson's Bible) and "Democracy" (beginning with Jefferson's Declaration). Get thee enlightened and the people will follow.