More Guns, More God, More Government

"What have you become?
Could you please them all?
Living someone else's life
Distraction keeps the blinding light
Deflecting off the horror
You've lost your soul or slowly let it die
It's not who you are"

 

Faith and the Muse - When We Go Dark

 

 

Whenever talking to relatives or acquaintances abroad, you'll hear quaint anecdotes... and everyone chuckles at those kooky Poles or Australians or Panamanians or Japanese or French or Canadians, or French-Canadians, and moves on. But I've found discussing America in particular prompts a whole new layer of incredulity at just how backward, parochial and flat-out primitive Americans choose to behave, despite having the greatest opportunity to prove the opposite. With recent religious attacks against public safety, personal rights and freedom, many in the world at large seem surprised at what to the untrained eye might appear a sudden turn, when really religious reactionaries have always been America's groaningly ubiquitous braindead zombie swarm, kept at bay merely by a few flimsy rotted boards nailed over its legal system's windows.

I'm not sure how to convey religious primitivism's pervasiveness in American life, even living in a fairly centrist, even consistently left-leaning state, and in a small college town no less, where the abnormally high professor-to-yokel ratio could supply ready explanations against superstition, even in the produce section at the supermarket. Maybe remember that health insurance makes an exception for religious smoking. Maybe you'll be convinced if I tell you the hick handing me my burger at the drive-through window tells me to "have a blessed day." Or maybe it would mean more that when interviewing for a teaching assistantship, you should expect a standard question of whether you're willing to teach evolutionary topics in the lab, or how you'd answer a (university!) student worried about a faith conflict with evolutionary theory.

 

But maybe the best way to get this point across is sheer volume. A town with a population just breaking into five digits (much of it itinerant) supports at minimum 20 churches. Baptists, methodists, presbyterians, anglicans, more baptists, catholics, episcopalians, lutherans, more baptists, more lutherans, more baptists, plus all the generic protestants and even more generic "we's gots us sum Jesus" and that's not even counting the little prayer meets and clubs and the smatter of muslims, hindus and other imported idiocy, like there wasn't enough of the home-grown variety. Basically, whichever way you want your children raped and beaten to death, we can accomodate all your faith-based needs! Even headshrinkers and "counselors" make sure to advertise faith-based solutions. Yes, about half the mental health professionals openly advertise belief in magic sky-daddies.

While the rest of the world is laughing its ass off, let me turn to the American contingent and point out this not only is unhealthy, IT IS NOT NORMAL. A European village will always feature The Village Church, more or less maculately whitewashed and frequented by everybody's grandmother, plus an alternative for the major minority... but for the most part, they're content with that. Not everyone who moves to town needs to build a new steeple. Religious ritual is never absent from their lives, but it does not escalate to the demented extent that bullshit dispensaries outnumber all your gas stations, grocery stores, schools and pharmacies combined!