The key to creating an illusory world is
a biased selection of facts
according to
a preconceived notion.
Thomas Sowell
"Through a Glass Darkly, How the Christian right is re-imagining U.S. history," by Jeff Sharlet, in the December, 2006, Harper's Magazine examines how religious fundamentalists look for signs that their God influences our history.
The first question I'd like to ask is why large groups of people in this day and age have the need to understand the world in terms of God causing wars, or being on our side (never the other guy's), or getting the credit for winning them.
What these folks do, actually, is to look for signs of God's influence and once they've made them up, they credit God with the victory or accomplishment.
By reinterpreting our history as an act of God, and not of men, the religious right hopes to control the future. This is not just some abstract theological discussion because the fundamentalists, as many of them are also called, support private schools, Sunday schools, and try to get their religious beliefs into the public schools. They mount efforts to require the teaching of evolution as science. Until the mid-term election of November, 2006, resulting in a debacle for Bush, the war in Iraq, and the religious right as a political movement, or so it appears, Bush's fundamentalist base had the power to influence judicial selections and government policy on abortion and stem cell research. With the Democrats in control in both houses of Congress, we may see a different wind blowing.
Why does the religious right reinterpret history in terms of God making his presence felt? According to the author, they cite Orwell's 1984, "Those who control the past control the future." The corollary is that those who control the present control the past. This is an example of the victor writing history.
After the Whigs in England succeeded in beheading Charles I and overthrowing his too Catholic successor James II, in 1688, replacing him with the Protestant William of Orange, an import from the Netherlands, they wrote up the story as though it were inevitable and God's will that all history until then were pointing in the direction of this victory. Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England is the great example. As a result, to call a historical study no better than a piece of "Whig history" is to call it false, i.e. based on a logical fallacy. It assumes that history is a thing which has a mind of its own and is capable of moving in one direction or another.
History, I believe, comes from the same root as "story." History is the story we tell of our past in order to make sense of what otherwise would be a chaotic mess of facts. Wars are messy and can be lost, or won, as much by chance as planning. The winner of a war is the side which comes better prepared and makes fewer mistakes. Both sides in a war make mistakes. Supplies don't reach the front, soldiers don't get fed, ammunition fizzles, leaders do stupid things, intelligence is wanting, soldiers lose heart, panic, and flee, etc. The list is endless. It must seem an act of God when enough things go right that your side actually wins.
Putting victory on God is like the person who survives a bad automobile or airplane crash. "Thank God I survived, this person says. Where was God before the crash, I wonder?
"Providential historians," is how the author terms those who see the hand of God in the committee and war work required to found this nation. Christian history makes for a Christian, not a secular, nation.
The problem is that there are so many willing to put their faith in the supernatural. I think they believe that God lives in the White House, where George W. Bush and the others talk to Him. The problem with this is that if Bush gets it into his head that we need to invade another country, well, then this must be the right thing to do because, well, doesn't he get the straight word from God hisself?
Relying on God to justify policy choices is usually a bad thing. God was in favor of Negro enslavement. I don't know why, but he was. All the ministers in the South and almost all the ministers in the North before the Civil War believed and taught that slavery was the will of God. Even Jesus didn't protest against slavery. What was the matter with Jesus, I wonder? The Abolitionists out-Jesused Jesus. Beat him at his own game. Imagine.
Does God live down at the tax office, you know, the I.R.S.? Over at the U.S. Attorney's Office? The U.S. Post Office? The F.B.I.? The D.E.A.? The C.I.A.? This would be a surprise, indeed. Is God winning the war for us in Iraq? How come we didn't find the WMD?
Are these signs that God doesn't control our policy, our destiny? Isn't God on Bush's side? Any longer? When did He split for the Democratic Party, otherwise known as the party of the devil.
Maybe we really are, as the Iranians like to call us, the Great Satan. As though God, or Allah, were on their side.
I don't geddit. Didn't Nazi soldiers have "Gott Mit Uns" embossed on their belt-buckles? They did. "God is with us." They lost to the Godless Americans. Or semi-Godless. Not all of us was fighting for God and country when country alone was enough. Pearl Harbor, after all, was an attack on warships, not churches.
The key to finding God in human events is a biased selection according to a preconceived notion. This is Thomas Sowell's quintessential illusory world.
We live in an illusory world to the extent we regard it as controlled by the god of the Christians, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else for that matter. Regarding Israel, Jews believe that God promised them this land 5,000 years ago. Great, say the Palestinians, but not our land. The result is the Middle East, where it is said that if Jerusalem were obliterated by a nuclear bomb, leaving a big hole in the ground, the fight would be over who controlled the wholly holy hole.
Religion is a wonderful thing, properly confined.
Religion can be one of the most powerful, and dangerous, world-views if we aren't paying attention to what its adherents are trying to accomplish and how they go about it.
So much for Christian history, Whig history, and religion-directed history.
How should we understand the story of our creation as a nation and as the descendants of a long line of other humans who didn't have the benefit of the tribal and other gods of the Christians (2006 years) and of the Jews (5,700+ years)?
If you're going to write history, to tell the story, you might just try telling the truth about how things happened. Tell the good stuff and the not so good. Once you start telling the story according to your preconceived notion, you're lying already.
Richard Feynman, the god of investigators, reminds us that doubt is a good thing. It inspires us to look further. The first principle, he says, is that you must not fool yourself, but remember, you are the easiest person to fool. Why is that? Because you want to believe, on some level, whether you admit it or not, and as soon as you favor one result of investigation over another, guess what? You're a sitting duck to be duped by someone else, or, more likely, yourself. No one else may be able to fool you, but that still lives one big opening. You. You are more likely to fool yourself than any other person. That's why there are so many divorces. Too many bought the sizzle, not the steak. Romance, we call it. Fantasy. Advertising, Hollywood, and Politics are built of it.
But you knew all this, right?
So be careful what you believe, and don't take any wooden nickels, as a wise old dad used to tell us kids.