When Faith Turns Deadly

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 5, 2008.

As a writer, when I want to have a character do something, I always try to see what it is in them that would make them do it -- whether they're heroes or villains, winners or losers, male or female. The actors process, which is similar and applicable, is to find what in themselves -- if they were in those circumstances, including age, life experience and social context -- would motivate them and lead them to act.

The process, in this case (I think) was like the intellectual one of trying to understand religion. To go below the labels -- the forms that faith takes -- and try to figure out what the underlying needs and cravings are, and then understand how religion functions to meet that needs.

The primary function of fundamentalist religion is a world of order. Any religion, but on a sliding scale, the more fundamental, the more order. As someone who has been either a freelancer or an entrepreneur my whole life, I have frequently dreamed of -- but never chosen -- a life in which I didn't have to figure out what to do with myself every morning and in which structures were imposed from the outside. Not religious ones, but still, there's the same kind of desire.

One of the primary selling points of fundamentalist religion is patriarchy. A world in which wives and children obey the No. 1 male figure in the house. It's a pleasant fantasy. A very pleasant fantasy. And a common one. I've never experienced it, but I have experienced being at the top of a social system. Particularly as a rich -- by world, not U.S., standards -- white American in Eastern Europe and in Third World countries. Also as a fellow at an Oxford College where the class structure is out of the 17th century (or earlier).

One of the most striking qualities of that class structure is that it is a co-conspiracy; it is not imposed by whips and chains or even by explicit and visible sanctions. We can say that society imposes it through this or that means, but in the individual case, people at each level choose to relate in a class manner to both those above and below them.

The great peculiarity -- to an outsider -- of religious and right-wing sexism is that there are many women who advocate such an order. It is PC to claim the patriarchy is imposed, and that if it weren't for the oppressors it would disappear. But in practice, it's often a co-conspiracy. That has to be understood, and that's actually a bigger stress.

Then, once you get into it, other things happen. I got to like Carl (the name of the main character and the narrator of the story). When I got stuck, we'd take long walks and have imaginary discussions together, and he would explain what he would do in whatever situation I'd stuck him in and how he felt about it.

But to answer your more specific question, posed as conservative versus liberal, I think that's an old division. The real division is between reality and myths. The problem with free market capitalism is that it does not work in reality the way it works in the mythology. The economic failures we're going through now result from the failure to distinguish between how markets are "supposed" to work and how they actually work. The disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq come from believing in the myth of how democracy and "freedom" are supposed to work and what happens in reality.

And that's true, all down the line. It's fascinating to read the post-election Republican self-analysis. There's a general admission that Bushianity failed. It is almost universally blamed on his failures to adhere to the true faith and principles of conservativism (unlike St. Reagan). The failure is to understand that that's what happens when "conservatives" actually get into power. Whether it's [Newt] Gingrich, [Tom] DeLay, [Dick] Cheney, and on and on. The only successes they've had were when their leaders really dealt with reality -- Reagan backing out of Lebanon when attacked; Bush I raising taxes and stopping short of Baghdad during the first Gulf War; Eisenhower faced reality most of the time; or Nixon reaching out to China, or passing the clean air and water acts.

As we look forward to [Barack] Obama, the ideologues on the left will probably be disappointed. But if we redefine our goals as looking for reality -- peace and prosperity, however we get there -- justice and the rule of law, even if we don't try Bush for war crimes (which would be a slam-dunk case), and so on, I expect he will go a long way toward meeting them.

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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