Scaring Myself

It took me three times as a candidate before I was actually elected to the Board of Supervisors.  The first time I ran I was so naïve, but even though I lost I was thrilled that 3,000 people agreed with me.  Wow! 

So the first time a ran it was about 1985/86 when I was walking precincts that I knocked on the door of a modest home with a well-kept garden.  A woman answered, clutching a Bible.  This startled me a tad, but I went into my usual candidate spiel.  Her only question was, “Do you approve of the welfare system?”  My answer, “I used to be a social worker so I know the system needs to be overhauled, but basically, yes, I approve of the welfare system.”  By that time her husband was standing behind her, clutching his Bible.  The wife said, “We can’t support you.  We believe that the devil is behind the government trying to take over from God.  People need to rely on God, not the government, for what they need.  They need to pray that God will supply their needs.  We need to go because we’re late to Bible study.” With that she shut the door.  I was relieved that the clutched Bibles were not a means of protection against me.

Needless to say, I was taken aback because that was the first time I had heard that idea.  As a Roman Catholic of a fairly liberal stance it never occurred to me that the welfare department I had worked for was an instrument of the devil.  I had rather thought we were trying to help people – not hinder their spiritual development.  We weren’t very good at times in helping people, and I was probably one of the worst of social workers in that I had graduated from college on a Friday with a degree in English, and gone to work for the welfare department on Monday.  I could identify almost any verse from Milton or Shakespeare but hadn’t a clue as to the few laws the department had to follow in the early 1950’s.  Fortunately for the county I was then working in, I didn’t last very long.

But back to the couple and their beliefs.  I shrugged and went on, thinking that these two were real ding-bats, and thank the good Lord there weren’t that many of them.  How wrong I was.

Since none of my friends were Evangelical Protestant Christians, and I didn’t really see the need to attend one of their churches, little did I know that this anti-government attitude was so very prevalent.   There was also this notion that if they had enough faith, God would reward them with material goods.  How wonderful this was!  And how it fit in perfectly with the right-wing Republican notion that taxes are basically a bad thing, especially if used for the benefit of the poor, elderly, disabled or other unfit members of society who are unable to work, because that is socialism, and socialism requires tax dollars, and these unfit people should be praying to God anyway. 

So we ended up with what I consider the unholy alliance of right-wing Christians who believe that only God should provide, and the wealthy that want it all for themselves, and don’t want to pay any taxes to benefit anyone else.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, the wealthy have great PR people who twist words to mean what they want them to mean.   For example, we constantly hear from our current Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, “the American people have spoken”.  He says this because the House of Representatives now has more Republicans than Democrats after the 2010 elections, even though the Senate and the White House are Democratic. 

The Huffington Post Social News, March 22, 2010, posted Frightening GOP Behavior.  “The idea that the minority party represents the “will of the people” (not some of the people, but ‘The people”) is the seedling of a totalitarian mindset.  In this mindset – democracy doesn’t matter, ideas are not to be discussed, and opposing views are not to be respected.  What matters is that they alone have the truth, they alone are metaphysically connected to the “mind of the people” and can interpret their will, and because they have truth and speak for the people, others represent a threat and must be silenced and stopped.”

How perfectly this fits into the fundamentalist Christian view that unless one accepts Jesus Christ as one’s personal Savior, then one is not a Christian.  They and they alone have the “truth” for Christians.  This convergence of the radical right in religion and radical right in politics is becoming ever more frightening for those of us spend time looking at these issues.