How Would Jesus Vote?

Neither God nor Country

by Bruce Patterson

"Friends... taxes are, indeed, very heavy... but... we are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement."

When it comes to understanding the ABCs of politics, too many Americans don't even want to know. Their patriotism is faith based, in other words, which means they don't want to have to make any decisions on their own. They delegate politics to the politicians and so, as a practical matter, they more or less check their brains at the door. If they can bring themselves to vote, then they can't bring themselves to properly inform themselves and so they vote stupid. They simply don't want to be bothered by the world around them and that, when you think about it, isn't the worse crime there is. Still, nowadays some Americans are so timid it makes you think that, had they been born equipped with six arms, then they'd use two of their hands to cover their eyes, two more hands to cover their ears and the final two to cover their mouths.

Seeing what's going on in America today makes you wonder where all of the Christians have gone. The polls all say that the more often an American citizen attends a Christian church, the more likely he or she is to vote for George Bush. Now what kind of sense does that make? George Bush is a politician who, in defiance of the pleadings of the leadership of his own Methodist Church, and in spite of the pleadings of the American leaderships of virtually every denomination of every religion there is, went out of his way to start a war. George Bush went out of his way to start a war that, even though it has only just begun, has already brought misery and ruin to tens of thousands of Iraqi and American families — women, children, old people and babies.

In light of what he's done, how's a Christian supposed to vote for George Bush and not commit a mortal sin?

What would Jesus do?

I've never blamed Jesus for some American Christians. Were Jesus alive today and sojourning through America, I don't believe that He'd claim credit for them, either. Here in this land of stupendous waste and lost opportunities, one out of five American children at least occasionally goes to bed hungry. In America orphans are warehoused in cold, pitiless, for-profit institutions, widows with babies are forced by poverty to live in dangerous, blighted slums, the mentally ill rot in prison or hopelessly wander the streets while the dim-witted and the physically disabled are condemned to lives of unrelenting drudgery and/or poverty. Given the tremendous wealth of multinational America, not at all what Jesus had in mind for us, wouldn't you say?

Were Jesus alive in America today, would He be renting out the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House for $100,000 a pop? Would He be breaking bread with millionaire lobbyists? Or would Jesus be outside sleeping on the sidewalk with the homeless children? Would Jesus preach from behind a gold encrusted pulpit inside a giant crystal cathedral while, not six blocks away, a child cries for want of a supper?

I know it's rude to speak of such things — hypocrisy amounts to gouging out one's own eyes — but how long have I listened to the God and Country crowd presume to speak for me, my country and Jesus all at the same time? When the very politicians both Jesus and our founding fathers warned us against are now forcefully professing to speak for Him and they, what good is anyone's silence?

The fact is that those who claim to speak for Jesus do not speak for America and they never have. In case anybody hasn't noticed, we here in America are Capitalists of the cutthroat persuasion. Multinational banks and corporations rule America, and they are in it for the money. We're in it for the money, too. Under the current arrangements, we've almost got to be. We're just swimming with the sharks, right? We're just trying to survive in the jungle, to get what's coming to us.

I don't think there are any people on earth who make so much moral hay out of feeding their own faces as we Americans do. You'd think our first obligation to God and Country is to feed our faces whenever and whatever our little hearts might desire. So when we get a chance to vote, if we do vote, we consume it. We count our pennies, calculate our own individual "interests" and then we "vote our pocketbooks" feeling all proud like we've just carried on some noble American patriotic tradition.

Just because America is a secular society, that doesn't make us Secular Humanists — no way. For example, look at who Americans send to prison and how those prisons operate and then try to find a Secular Humanist who is willing to accept responsibility. Institutional violence, torture, rape, murder — put a Secular Humanist on the hot seat, shine the spotlight on him, give him the third degree and, soon enough, he's going to be tearfully swearing on the grave of his mother that he knew absolutely nothing about any of it.

Having recently fallen under the sway of the worst of its spawn, America's religion is back to Dog Eat Dog.

So if anybody wants to live under God's Law they can move to someplace hospitable like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Down through the ages God's Law has always amounted to whatever the rich old men of some tribe has said it was, or what some charlatan has made it out to be. So if you want to live under God's Law, you can start your own tribe right here in America if you want to. Join the crowd. Have you ever opened a big city Yellow Pages and looked under "Churches"? Like, how many different kinds of Baptists can there be? How many different kinds of Episcopalians? Are you suffering under the illusion that there's only one kind of Mormon, or one kind of Catholic or Lutheran? Since reading down a list of America's Christian denominations is like reading down a list of the members of the United Nations, it makes you wonder just what kind of God's Law they'd be able to agree upon, and just how far they'd go to enforce it.

Luckily we don't have to worry about living under the tender mercies of whatever kind of God's Law these squabbling sectarians could come up with. We don't have to worry because we're Americans and American law is civil and judicial and its ethical underpinnings are rooted, not in religious dogma, Ancient Prophesy, Sacred Tradition or Holy Writ, but in the US Constitution and the liberationist ideals of The European Enlightenment.

Speaking of The Enlightenment, how could any Secular Humanist vote for George Bush? After warning us about suck-ass Tories, militarists, imperialists and religious bigots — Duty, Loyalty and Obedience as cardinal virtues as opposed to a love for Liberty, Justice and Peace — our founding fathers warned us about fear mongers. Our revolutionary fathers studied their history and they crafted their Constitution knowing full well that the average citizen is a coward. Our founders knew that was the central problem with any democracy and so on paper they created a Republic to try to minimize the negative consequences of it. In their written Constitution they did their best to limit the power of a panicky majority to use The State to scapegoat and persecute or exterminate a minority or minorities.

Since as a class politicians are the biggest cowards of all, our founders also did their best to limit their power by making the people sovereign (but only so long as they were "eternally vigilant"). In addition, in an attempt to rescue future generations of poor young people from old rich men's wars, they made it a constitutional requirement that there be a formal Declaration of War passed by both the House and the Senate before American soldiers could be sent off to die in some overseas adventure. The founders believed most fervently in a "Division of Powers," as they called it, and if there were ten lessons about life they wished to pass down to us their would-be heirs, those lessons boiled down to two words, "Power corrupts."

Once fear mongering politicians set about stoking the fears of cowards, all of the sudden the whole world is crawling with threats and gathering threats and unseen perils, grim possibilities and dire consequences. Suddenly we are surrounded by spies, subversives and shifty-eyed strangers. Put fear mongers in power and pretty quick those citizens who still love Liberty are rattling the bars of their cages. They are rattling their bars while outside in the street a lynch mob jabs the midnight air with flaming torches.

Fear mongers are the worst sort of demagogues because they not only rob us; they humiliate us and insult our American heritage. Those who've been convinced that they yearn for the benign protection of an El Caudillo, Il Duce or Der Fuhrer are an embarrassment and the fear mongers who have deceived them represent the absolute worst among us. And, I ask, who is George Bush but a fear monger? Who can listen to his taxpayer financed campaign pitches for three minutes running without hearing his heart-rending appeals to our most childish fears? Even putting aside his proven incompetence and corruption, how is George Bush any less disgraceful than a Nixon or a Joe McCarthy?

To get an idea of how far from Christ's teachings some American Christians have strayed, look at the current, furious feuds ripping apart some of their denominations over the issues of women clergy, gay clergy and gay marriage. Considering all of the violence and misery we Sinners inflict on each other every day, and considering all of the violence and misery we cause around the world every day, these people are going to worry about what two adults might be doing in the privacy of their own homes? Are you kidding me? "Eureka, Gloria! Come quick! Here's 23 Angels dancing on the head of my pin."

What would Jesus think of America's global arms trade? What would He think about us American taxpayers who have dutifully reached down deep into our own pockets in order to donate funds to contribute guns and ammunition to about every blood-soaked dictator in every corner of the world for the last 60 years? Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia — who haven't we bought ammunition for?

Is that the sort of charity Jesus had in mind?

And what about America's new craze of exporting mercenaries? How does the taxpayer-subsidized mass production of mercenaries for export not insult Christian sensibilities? And given the lengthy written denunciations of mercenaries left to us by our founders, not to mention their well known and deeply felt hostility toward and contempt for standing professional armies and the "military classes," you'd think Americans exporting mercenaries would be flat out against the law. Yet it has recently become a "growth industry" hereabouts and I haven't heard a peep out of the God and Country crowd when it comes to what they think Jesus would think about that.

The current American war machine didn't become so outrageously, unsustainably expensive, so outrageously out of proportion to any threat and so outrageously "global" and lethal because we Americans feel compassion for the world's destitute widows and orphans. The old American Welfare State has metastasized into a multinational Warfare State — it grabs food out of the mouths of children in order to buy ammunition — and I'm to believe that real Christians have no problem with that? I'm to believe that Secular Humanists and just plain American patriots have no problem with that? Who is living in this country nowadays?

It's seems to me that a Christian Fundamentalist is a contradiction in terms. Did Jesus even attend church? Did He go around pounding verses in the Old Testament? Was His Ministry devoted to convincing everyone that Adam and Eve were real people, that they were blond haired and blue eyed and deeply ashamed of their nakedness — most especially Eve? That Noah's Ark was made of wood and was so many rods long and so many rods wide? Listen to these Christian radio and TV broadcasters and, between peddling plastic icons, holy relics, patriotic collectables and pitching for "donations," they spend hours dissecting a sentence in the Bible that has already been dissected ten thousand times before. "Mumble-jumble" is all you get from them and the price you pay is however much time you've got to waste and however much money you are willing to send along.

What made Jesus so revolutionary was that, like Confucius and Siddhartha, He was a humanist. Jesus loved people and He showed how that was not only possible, but also necessary for liberation. The ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity made perfect sense to Jesus. Empathy, compassion, tolerance, mercy — everything Jesus taught was rooted in His love for people and His love for Creation. And what did He preach against? Did Jesus preach against women and homosexuals, evolution, food stamps and stem cell research? No, He did not. Jesus preached against violence, injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, hypocrisy and, much more than any other one sin, greed — greed for money, greed for power and privilege.

In other words, Jesus preached against the very same sins that the God and Country crowd never preach against. Or, if they ever do, you never hear it because they're too busy chanting while trying to deny teenagers sex education, or impoverished single mothers abortions and birth control. Under their regime a woman can't get an abortion, or childcare, or a living wage, or safe and decent housing, but she can sure hand over her first born son or daughter to Empire. Just as, I'm sure, our founding fathers would have wanted her to, and just as Jesus would have wanted her to.

When a society is in need of regeneration (witness what is occurring in Central Europe), people start by throwing out of their minds all of the bullshit they're heard all of their lives. They empty their minds and they return to the sources of their tribal wisdom and, if they share enough cultural history together, to the sources of their collective spirit.

So, before you vote, get up off your knees. Go back and read the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Go back and read the Bill of Rights and the Sermon on the Mount. Be proud, take heart, spread the word and vote your conscience.