Dragon Food: The Preposterous Obfuscation

  

Dragon Food: The Preposterous Obfuscation

The Two-headed Dragon, Part II

In our last blog:  The two heads of this dragon kill both at home and abroad.  Here at home, crazed young men with assault weapons slaughter children and movie audiences. Overseas, suicide bombers destroy hundreds of people at a single stroke.

"Who will slay this two headed dragon and how? 

The metaphorical two-headed dragon stalking us today is the creation of a Western religious culture that could have made angels instead.  Its origins grew into a U. S. culture customarily understood to have begun with leaders like Puritan John Winthrop who saw the vast new continent as a New Jerusalem, “a city set upon a Hill.”  The trust in this exceptional gift soon permitted other exceptions: Native American removal, slave trading, railroading leading to land monopolies, mining for private ownership of precious metals. 

Later, after Darwin, came Social Darwinism—to justify cementing class and race distinctions and the “natural” way a cooperative God would confirm separating the wheat from the chaff.   People who succeeded became exemplars of this natural selection in more recent centuries. The faith communities very often adapted themselves to this comforting theology that helped the nation accept segregation, discrimination, growing inequality and the preferential option of God for the USA.    

This has made what is attractive about today’s very real, menacing, two-headed dragon:  Morally dubious decisions by the powerful can be masked as truth or patriotism; religion can be used as a love potion, a divine anesthetic that exempts people from making judgments about good and evil. Thus the Securities and Exchange Commission discussed in this week’s news media has long practiced its version of exceptionalism. Giant corporations or powerful business leaders found guilty of fraud are permitted to wink. They are permitted to simply pay a fine but admit to no wrong doing.    

So it has become common that instead of identifying dragons, instead of perceiving the demonic forces at work in our midst, faith communities can simply recite a litany of forgiveness, an insurance policy that promises anything and everyone can be forgiven. Just so are budgets for churches, synagogues and mosques raised, but much more so, a compliant and uncritical citizenry become accustomed to accept foreign wars that slay millions and drone planes that deliver sudden and summary death indiscriminately.  It is just so!

This amounts to a preposterous obfuscation—a moral hypocrisy that the disadvantaged of the world have learned to hate. Devouring the opportunities of tens of millions of unemployed Americans, our dragon’s dual heads also feed the fury of destroyed and impoverished  people around the world.

It’s not yet too late to cut off this monster’s food supply. The timidity, the irresolution of faith traditions, grows from ambivalence about their own origins in movements of resistance:  The Hebrews resisting the power of Pharaoh and the culture of idols; Muhammad resisting the tribal manipulations of polytheism that empowered them to practice the slavery of debt imposition.

Jesus--commonly portrayed as the teacher of love and forgiveness—offered  little of either to the Temple leaders or scribes and Pharisees who vied with one another for  political power.  He passed judgment on the religious-political regimes that crushed people’s spirits, that linked illness with the guilt of having broken the religious law, filling them with self-blame.  He led a resistance movement against the monsters of inequality, against the leprosy, blindness and death that were interpreted as the sufferer’s just deserts.

These days, because a new generation has been coming out of our universities and seminaries, there are reasons for hope. They are still being asked to agree not to disturb the peace, to stay in line, to not mix moral principle with politics. Often very well educated, they show signs of the capacity to resist. There is still time for them to disobey, to lead the fight to destroy the very real two-headed dragon that threatens the future.  Their moral leadership cannot come a minute too soon.