Sherry Chandler

Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered The Divinity School Address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School in July of 1838. Keep in mind, reading the passage below, that he was giving advice to a class of future preachers. In its entirety, the address created quite an outrage, arguing as it did for a particularly American form of Christianity more Gnostic than Calvinist:

The time is coming when all men will see, that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to Jesus, than to the souls which it profanes. The preachers do not see that they make his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks of beauty and the attributes of heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington; when I see among my contemporaries, a true orator, an upright judge, a dear friend; when I vibrate to the melody and fancy of a poem; I see beauty that is to be desired. And so lovely, and with yet more entire consent of my human being, sounds in my ear the severe music of the bards that have sung of the true God in all ages.

And speaking of preachers, here are some words from a contemporary graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Chris Hedges. His new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, expresses outrage and will be met with outrage. The passage below is from an interview in Salon, “The holy blitz rolls on:”

The son of a Presbyterian minister and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Hedges once planned to join the clergy himself. He speaks of the preachers he encountered while researching “American Fascists” as heretics, and he’s appalled at their desecration of a faith he still cherishes, even if he no longer totally embraces it. Writing of Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley and his close associate, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, he says, “[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it.”

Also from the Los Angeles Times:

…the goal of the Christian right is “not simply conversion but also eventual recruitment into a political movement to create a Christian nation,” where constitutional freedoms would be replaced by biblical law, as interpreted by evangelical leaders. Kennedy has been clear about this goal: “As the vice regents of God,” the Florida-based minister has written, “we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government,” as well as “our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors….”

Hedges carefully distinguishes this strand of Protestant Christian evangelicalism, known as “dominionism,” from traditional fundamentalism, which “has not tried to transform government … into an extension of the church.” Under Christian dominion, Hedges writes, “Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished…. and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.” The Christian right could come to power, he suggests, if we had “another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster.” At that point, Hedges asserts, evangelical leaders such as Kennedy, Falwell and Robertson could be “calling for the punishment, detention and quarantining of gays and lesbians — as well as abortionists, Muslims and other nonbelievers.” Thus, Hedges concludes, the United States today faces an internal threat analogous to that posed by the Nazis in Weimar Germany.

The United States has always had its theocrats, its Jonathan Edwardses — the Puritans burned witches and Quakers somewhat indiscriminately — but it has always also had its Deists and Transcendentalists, its Jeffersons and Emersons. I would like to think the balance will turn back toward the Emersonian version of America, is beginning to turn with this past election, and that Hedges is being hysterical. He has great credentials, however, and it’s difficult to dismiss him as a mere wingnut. Here he is again in Salon:

People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There’s a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are. When I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, at the start of the war, I would meet with incredibly well-educated, multilingual Kosovar Albanian friends in the cafes. I would tell them that in the countryside there were armed groups of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who I’d met, and they would insist that the Kosovo Liberation Army didn’t exist, that it was just a creation of the Serb police to justify repression.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don’t understand how radically changed our country is, don’t understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.

The appeal, according to Hedges, is based in the disenfranchisement and desperation of the working class — the same fear that causes some to embrace the Rebel battle flag also causes them to embrace this dominionist Christianity. It offers them community and hope.

In her review of Reading Lolita in Tehran, at the end of a paragraph explaining how Iranian guards raped virgins before executing them because virgins can go to heaven, Magaret Atwood makes this point:

Nafisi says that it was the “persistent lack of kindness”—extended to every spere of life—that frightened her most. Similarly, for the novelists she teaches and admires, the worst sin is the failure of empathy—the lack of imagination that must lead inevitably to the “persistent lack of kindness.”
—from Margaret Atwood, Witing with Intent

Call me a bleeding heart, soft and liberal, but my major quarrel with the right, and especially with the Bushes, has been that they are mean. They apparently cannot win by appealing to compassion or logic so they win by appealing to the lowest human emotions, fear and hatred. This is the very definition of demogogery.

They have been able to use this meanness to ruin American workers while convincing these same workers that they are under siege and only the right can save them. There is a meanness industry on the right that is the utmost in cynicism. I have even seen my mother, usually the soul of “sweet, natural goodness,” turn a fierce attack on those who would ban “Merry Christmas,” ban Christ from Christmas. She had been convinced by the talking heads that there is a War on Christmas, a completely manufactured threat. The incident broke my bleeding heart and frightened me.

Soft and sentimental I may be but I think the history of the 20th century should warn us how easily a “persistent lack of kindness” can turn totalitarian. Let us strive to find our empathy, our “sweet, natural goodness” that encourages us to be and grow. I’ve always thought humanity is at base humane. I hope I’m not wrong.

H/T to Have Coffee, Will Write.