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June 14, 2024
Editor, The News-Gazette:
Timothy Synder, Princeton historian and expert on fascism, cautions autocrats don’t take power; citizens willingly surrender it. Surrendered inches lead to miles.
The Founders didn’t trust any single person or branch of government to have absolute authority. Checks and balances in our first-of-a-kind government produced the longest-lasting democracy in human history. We became citizens, not subjects.
Protestant fundamentalism, numerous groups with no single body of doctrine, is calling for a Christian nation, not voted in, but imposed, making us subjects again, under an unconstitutional religious dictatorship. But whose Christianity? Theirs? Which is what? The existence of so many versions of fundamentalism suggests a refusal to compromise. Governing, however, requires compromises, so, to achieve unanimity, who among these disparate groups is prepared to give up dearly held beliefs?
Christian nation has, though, offered memorable moral guides: Marjorie Taylor Greene, divorced by her husband for adultery, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker and Jerry Fallwell Jr. For a life of Christ-like poverty, we can look to ministers Kenneth Copeland, worth $760 million, Joel Osteen, $43 million per year, Rick Warren, $25 million.
Politically, Christian nation has a dubious history. Protestant Puritans brutalized and executed Quakers and felt righteous exterminating Native Americans as godless. State-supported Anglican Protestantism in colonial America discriminated against Baptists and Methodists. The Klan referred to itself as a “fraternal Protestant organization that championed white supremacy,” practicing arson, assault, murder and burning victims alive, charred body parts claimed as souvenirs. Protestant Anti-Catholicism and antisemitism are as old as America.
God on your side, apparently, allows a wide latitude of behaviors.
The politics of democracy warns “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The Bible says original sin taints all. Aesop advises, “Be careful what you wish for.”
The Founders knew religious autocracy was the road to hell — which is why the Bill of Rights addresses what you, in government, cannot do unto others. Citizen, yes, subject, no. JOE PETITE Rockbridge County
