Any hypotheses as to why the U.S. should be so uniquely plagued by religiosity? One can understand it in Iran and some other Islamic nations as a reaction to western imperialism. But why in the U.S.?
Carrol
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Carrol,
I have tried to figure this one out for a long time. The posts on Horowitz were just one more thread, along with Augustine, Machiavelli, and many other posts related to this theme.
It has to depend on the peculiarly american habit of casting every political discourse in moral terms, which automatically sets adversaries off as good and evil. This is always a handy ploy for media purposes, and to give a little flair to rhetoric but we in the US carry it around as part of our national psyche. In some kind of collective way, we believe that there is an inherent moral order to the world. The idea that institutions, government, social forces and history are formed in concrete conditions that are absolutely indifferent to a moral order, is somehow inconceivable to us. In short we have a kind of national secular religion based on this assumed moral rectitude of the world.
I tried to get into this business in a long ago post with the idea that the deepest political mistake of my generation was to cast its outrage at segregation and war in moral terms. These were clearly bad and shouldn't have required the moral hyperbolic crap we generated in order to move a significant popular judgment against them. But moral outrage is about the only thing that seemed to generate sufficient public will to change laws and interfere with US government conduct in Vietnam. Ultimately these failed anyway, and we were left with a completely polarized commons.
In the aftermath, in a kind of surreal echo, the Right took up the great moral banner and used identical moralistic propaganda to depict civil rights and anti-war radicalism as the seminal cause of social and moral decay. So, we got thirty years of reactionary domestic policies as our just deserts that culminated in the great blow-job impeachment as an absurd mirror to the Nixon fall.
I just finished Chip Berlet's essay, `Dances with Devils'. (see: www.publiceye.org/Apocalyptic/Dances_with_Devils_TOC.html)
It's worth the slog for its historical documentation, but it doesn't go into a sociological understanding of what is occurring and re-recurring in these bizarre apocalyptic and millennial visionaries.
I suspect the entire concept of a moral order to the world is somehow the culprit.
Clearly there isn't any moral order to world, and yet we persist in believing there is. More accurately, we want to believe there is, or that something like that is a potential achievement. Somewhere in that struggle has to be found the basis for these external and collective expressions, of which the apocalytic and fundamentalist nonsense is a part.
Chuck Grimes