Religiosity in the U.S.

[Dhlazare at aol.com]

Yes, but don't forget the secular equivalent -- the unthinking obeisance to
the Founding Fathers, the pious invocation of the Federalist Papers, the all-
prevailing notion that if Madison or Jefferson said something -- anything --
it must be right, even though they contradicted themselves on innumerable
occsions.  Religious piety in the US rests on a solid foundation of
constitutional piety.

In fact, we can take this a step farther.  Two things stand out about the US
constitutional tradition.  One is that it lacks any coherent concept of
sovereignty as the term was defined by Hobbes and Bentham -- no concept that
someone must be ultimately in charge, no concept of a people's government as
the source of law rather than something subordinate to it.  Instead, power is
endlessly fragmented, and the people ar hamstrung even in their ability to
change the Constitution created in their name.  Politics is an endless merry-
go-round involving Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, etc.  The
other thing, as Hobbes and Bentham would have predicted, is that the govt that
results from this absurd constitutional set-up is consistently dysfunctional.
It continually breaks down, dissolves into rancor and confusion, and ends up
in corruption and demoralization.  Amid all this disarray, however, the US has
emerged as the sole remaining superpower.  Hence, the widespread belief that a
dysfunctional political system is somehow the key to greatness.  The fact that
the people are not sovereign in the US system reinforces the belief that
sovereignty inheres in God.  As a Russian political scientist named Moisei
Ostrogorsky once put it, "God takes care of drunkards, of little children, and
of the United States."  The fact that political failure coexists with
political triumph is a sign of divine intervention.  Only God could take
something so absurd and make it work.  Therefore, all those lilliputians in
Washington don't matter, because something higher is clearly guiding the
American ship of state.

Dan Lazare

<< 

 This pervasiveness of pious expressions--including coyness and timidity of

 atheists in the face of the pious--must be a result of the lack of class

 consciousness + class politics. One of the unstated requirements for

 participation in public political discourse in the USA seems to me to be an

 ability to swallow an unlimited amount of pious hypocrisy, and this high

 tolerance for hypocrisy--that is, theory-practice inconsistency--looks like

 a measure of depoliticization of workers. At the same time, God-reinforced

 nationalism and American exceptionalism are major--perhaps the most

 important--obstacles for the developement of class consciousness + class

 politics. There's a vicious circle here!

 

 Yoshie >>