In hard times we can either turn on each other or turn towards each other. The Republican Party, along with Bible-believing Christians, seem determined to turn on the entirety of our society, destroying us until nothing of honor remains. This destructive characteristic is well summed up in the following post currently making the rounds on Facebook.
It says:
- Corporations are people
- Women who use birth control are sluts.
- College students are snobs
- Gay Americans are an abomination
- Poor people deserve to be poor
- Union workers are Socialist thugs
- The unemployed are lazy parasites
- Latinos are illegal until proven otherwise
- The Bible trumps the Constitution
- Global Warming is a hoax
- The U.S. auto industry should go bankrupt
- The U.S. President is a Muslim agent from Kenya
We could add to that list that, although big government is evil, large global corporations are benign. We could add that public education is immoral indoctrination. We could further add that bombing and invading other nations, torturing our enemies and increasing homeland surveillance of Americans, particularly Muslims and liberals, is morally necessary.
Basically the Republican Party and Bible-believing Christianity are categorically no different than the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia. It's all the same spirit of destruction that yearns for the removal of the "other" in society. Bible-believing Christians and the Republican Party are on a strategic mission to roll back capitalism to the Gilded Age and to roll back culture to the abuses of Christendom when clerics had the power to discern who was righteous and who was an infidel.
Bible-believing Christians love only those who submit to their will. In essence, if you don't love their version of Jesus, you are not quite fully human. To hell you shall go. The Republican Party is consumed with an insatiable pursuit of profit and the dominance it brings to enslave others. The heart of both is set on revolution. They want to unglue society, driving us toward helpless capitulation to the "strong man" whom they will invent to save us. Having hollowed out all our institutions, they will assert control through the continual spreading of the big lie that insists that we must fear the other.
That anyone would associate with this nihilistic fascism reveals the depths of spiritual atrophy that has entranced our body politic. It reveals that the real battle is not simply in the ballot box but where desire is shaped, in the deeper recesses of the human heart.
Fear and destruction cannot be defeated by better politics. Rather, they must be healed by our courageous willingness to embrace the diversity of the other. The politics of segregation must be transformed through the spirit of solidarity, an insatiable curiosity and compassion toward those who are different than us. Now is the time to turn toward each other and embrace the other as friend.