to shut up about religion. You need me on board to show that you won’t sell out all the others.
John F. Kennedy had to alibi his Catholicism; Rick Santorum just uses the magic word “Christian,” and it goes away. Rick Santorum brings his religion into everything. I think he’s deeply wrong, but I have no problem with him being a believer running for public office. All his talk of god will get his core followers fully hard and wet (and we can hope dripping some santorum out of their assholes), and with the word “Christian” it doesn’t lose as many people as “Catholic” alone would. Now let’s watch Mitt Romney as he works on trying to get the magic-underwear- wearing, the-Garden-of-Eden-was-in-North-America Mormons considered part of that “Christian” magic word.
If I make all my deadlines, our president might still be Barack Obama. If you search on the Web for Obama’s religion (and ignore the stupid Muslim shit), you’ll find he is Christian. He goes right to the magic word, and stays there. He names no specific cult ever. He no longer belongs to Trinity United Church of Christ, but our magic word saved him there. Trinity Church describes itself, on its website like this: “We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting, and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.” If Obama had run as a Trinity Church believer, he would have had a lot of explaining to do, but being “Christian” solved everything.
Again we have the Clinton cynic problem. If we see Obama as a Trinity Church believer, he’s as bugnutty as Sarah Palin, but my friends don’t see him as a believer, not even a Christian. They see him belonging to a church and saying he’s Christian so he could get elected. Many people have said to me that Obama claims religion because otherwise an African-American liberal would never have a chance of being elected. If he didn’t call himself a Christian and talk about praying in the White House, he would be painted as a Muslim and have no defense. You and I know, as the condescending argument goes, that an atheist is further from being Muslim than a Christian, but Americans don’t know that. The argument says that Americans could never understand that not believing in god means not believing in a Muslim god. Yeah, fuck you, if Americans can program in machine code and understand “icing” in hockey, they can understand this. I’ve had many liberal friends (are they really friends?) defend Obama by calling him a liar. They have made this unilateral secret deal with Obama that Obama will say he’s Christian to get elected and then he will govern as an atheist. Obama doesn’t have to wink when he says he’s Christian; these liberals just know. It’s supernatural. These people might be right, but it doesn’t make Obama a hero to me. I’m way more against lying than I am against Christians.
It’s not hard to picture Obama in that kind of cynical deal. When he won his Nobel Peace Prize, he felt he had to address the fact that he had sent more soldiers overseas to kill and die than all the other Peace Prize winners put together. Alfred Nobel wrote that the person who won the Peace Prize “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” I don’t know who that would be, but it’s demonstratively not Obama.
Obama’s speech got a laugh at the top referring to this controversy. He worked a laugh out of the crowd by pointing out that a guy running a couple wars had won the prize. I believe that anything can be funny—there are funny AIDS jokes—but this one rubbed me the wrong way. He then addresses Martin Luther King’s winning of the same prize:
“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
“I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.’ As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naive—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.”
Man, that’s some great speechwriting and Obama sure can deliver, but then I wanted him to say “. . . so I will be bringing all our troops home and we will stop dying and killing people for ideas we don’t understand.” But he didn’t say that.
He said, “But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
Evil is strictly a religious concept. That word does not appear in the “I Have a Dream” speech. Not once. It’s not found. You would think that Martin Luther King Jr. had seen some evil in his day, but in his speech, he doesn’t use the word. He keeps it secular. People can be wrong, cruel, ignorant, and horrible, but there’s no separate evil driving some of us. We are all people and our mistakes are our own.
Obama finishes up his sweet spin with this: “The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached—their fundamental faith in human progress—that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.” I guess it’s good that he doesn’t dismiss them, but that sure feels like a pat on the head to a couple of sweet nutjobs, and not real respect. I don’t question that Obama has real and pure respect for Gandhi and King (and the other men like them who are, um, give me a moment, um…), but I wouldn’t be that quick to say that I had all their thinking covered and I was ready to move on to using violence.
Similar to the secret deal that some of my friends have with Obama—that they’ll know he’s really atheist when he says he’s religious—is the deal that peaceniks have with presidents they like. Bush was killing people overseas because he was evil and wanted to; Obama is doing it because he’s good but he has to. That’s the thinking: when a president is sworn into office, the military shows him shit that they keep secret and that changes his whole worldview. There’s heavy, secret shit that justifies war that the public could never handle. If this were true, there would be no reason to ever vote on an issue. There’s no reason to ever have a public debate. We want our benevolent despot. We vote for the best-looking president who we trust, and then let him do what he wants because we can’t handle the truth.
I don’t buy any of this. I think King did a pretty fucking good job of speaking truth to power and he did it non-violently without lying and secret deals. I think he was a real hero. He was not just a Christian, but a Baptist, yet he trusted me, an atheist, to care about his cause and join together with him. I didn’t actually join with him at the time, but I like to think that’s because I was eight years old.
Atheists are growing way, way fast. The end of the twentieth century, atheists were under 2 percent, probably lower when King gave his speech. That number got to 8 percent in the twenty-first century, after the faith-based initiative of September 11, 2001. If you throw in self-labeled “agnostics” and “not religious” some people have gotten the atheist/agnostic/humanist/secularist/freethinking cult numbers up to around 20 percent. Evangelicals are about 26 percent, Catholics about 23 percent, Jewish, 1.7 percent, Mormons also 1.7 percent—if you start breaking these “Christians” up into their smaller groups, non-believers get close to being the dominant “religion” if you can call no religion a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
The March on Washington was important and MLK needed everyone. He ends the speech by saying that “
I hope that our politicians will learn from Dr. Martin Luther King and keep expanding the group of people they want to serve until we move the next little step from “Christian” being the magic word to the real magic political word: “American.” Then let’s go a step further and make the magic word “humanity.”
Free at last, free at last, thank god almighty we are free at last.
Let freedom ring in the human heart.
