This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In case you haven't noticed and I know you have this country, as I wrote recently, is being (un)built before our very eyes. As a start, an increasingly well-armed populace has, the polls tell us, become ever more willing to imagine using violence to see its political aims met. I'm sure you won't be surprised to find out, in the wake of the (first?) Trump era, that Republicans (especially his supporters) express that urge far more readily and strongly than Democrats. It's what Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War, is calling "the politics of the gun" and it's on the rise, along with armed militias.
Somehow, despite everything in election 2020, the bedrock American political system still worked. The question is: Will it ever again? In fact, if you want to catch the mood of the moment a moment that none of us has experienced before, not in the Civil Rights era, not in the Vietnam War years just consider this: only recently three retired generals wrote a Washington Post op-ed suggesting that parts of the military, in a future crisis like January 6th (only worse), might not even support or defend the elected government of the country, while fears of a future coup continue to rise.
Meanwhile, a year in which the Covid-19 pandemic took hundreds of thousands more American lives proved a remarkable boon for Republican politicians of just about every sort, most of whom have only fed the flames (with the lives of their supporters) and no surprise here either it also proved a boon for billionaires. (Elon Musk added $121 billion to his staggering wealth in 2021 alone.) In other words, we're in a country and a world of startling inequality, growing desperation, surging illness and disease, and increasing disrepair. In the process, American democracy is distinctly in the crosshairs. And it's this very world that seems to be feeding the flames of hell in this country that TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign Liz Theoharis focuses on today, considering how even the Bible, at least the Christian nationalist version of it, has played its part in the dismembering of America. Tom
Which Way America?
Confronting Christian Nationalism in the Spirit of Desmond Tutu
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The world lost a great moral leader this Christmas when Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away at the age of 90. I had the honor of meeting him a few times as a child. I was raised by a family dedicated to doing the work of justice, grounded in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and also sacred texts and traditions. We hosted the archbishop on several occasions when he visited Milwaukee both before the end of apartheid and after South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1996.
In the wake of one visit, he sent a small postcard that my mom framed and placed on the bookcase near our front door. Every morning before school I would grab my glasses resting on that same bookcase and catch a glimpse of the archbishop's handwritten note. This wasn't inadvertent on my mom's part. It was meant as a visual reminder that, if I was to call myself a Christian which I did, serving as a Sunday school teacher from the age of 13 and a deacon at 16 my responsibility was to advocate for policies that welcomed immigrants, freed those held captive by racism and injustice, and lifted the load of poverty.
Given our present context, the timing of his death is all too resonant. Just over a year ago, the world watched as a mob besieged the U.S. Capitol, urged on by still-President Donald Trump and undergirded by decades of white racism and Christian nationalism. January 6th should have reminded us all that far from being a light to all nations, American democracy remains, at best, a remarkably fragile and unfinished project. On the first anniversary of that nightmare, the world is truly in need of moral leaders and defenders of democracy like Tutu.
The archbishop spent his life pointing to what prophets have decried through the ages, warning countries, especially those with much political and economic power, to stop strangling the voices of the poor. Indeed, the counsel of such prophets has always been the same: when injustice is on the rise, there are dark forces waiting to demean, defraud, and degrade human life. Such forces hurt the poor the most but impact everyone. And they often cloak themselves in religious rhetoric, even as they pursue political and economic ends that do anything but match our deepest religious values.
Democracy At Stake
"What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realize just how apartheid has damaged us, so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong." Archbishop Desmond Tutu
By now, lamenting the condition of American democracy comes almost automatically to many of us. Still, the full weight of our current crisis has yet to truly sink in. A year after the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, this nation has continued to experience a quieter, rolling coup, as state legislatures have passed the worst voter suppression laws in generations and redrawn political maps to allow politicians to pick whom their voters will be. The Brennan Center for Justice recently reported that more than 400 voter suppression laws were introduced in 49 states last year. Nineteen of those states passed more than 30 such laws, signaling the biggest attack on voting rights since just after the Civil War. And add to that another sobering reality two presidential elections have now taken place without the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
This attack on democracy, if unmet, could alter the nature of American elections for at least a generation to come. And yet, so far, it's been met with an anemic response from a painfully divided Congress and the Biden administration. Despite much talk about the need to reform democracy, Congress left for the holidays without restoring the Voting Rights Act or passing the For the People Act, which would protect the 55 million voters who live in states with new anti-voter laws that limit access to the ballot. If those bills don't pass in January (or only a new proposal by Republican senators and Joe Manchin to narrowly reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is passed), it may prove to be too late to save our democracy as well as any hopes that the Democratic Party can win the 2022 midterm elections or the 2024 presidential race
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
