When America Was Great
The Bible and the Plot to Destroy American Democracy, Part 11
Picture for a moment Norman Rockwell America, when people lived in small towns or small suburbs and everyone went to church.
America trusted in God and one another and there was widespread agreement on moral issues. Life was black and white.
Maybe you long for those days, maybe you don’t believe they were real, either way, I do believe that we all long for a time when there was a shared vision of morality; when everyone looked at something horrible, agreed that it was horrible, and decided to do something about it.
A few years ago, I watched a documentary on the UNESCO project to move the temples of Abu Simbel in order to build the Aswan Dam between 1963 and 1968. When it was over I said, “That was it. That was the peak of human civilization.”
It’s an obscure story, but when I watched it, all I could think was that there is no way humanity would ever come together to do that today, because we would not agree on the validity of the problem, nor would we be willing expend the resources, or work cooperatively.
I realized that when I think of civilization, I think of humanity’s ability to cooperate and live with one another in peace.
What I saw in the video was an example of the Post-War Liberal Consensus, which peaked in the mid-1960s, a lot of us just didn’t know that.
I began this series talking about a different view of the peak of Western civilization, one from the much more distant past, when men were men and everyone knew their place in the order of things.
Two competing views: cooperation vs. order; peace through negotiation vs. peace through strength; democracy vs. autocracy; liberalism vs. authoritarianism.
I wonder if the nostalgia that people have for the 1950s and 60s is for liberalism. They picture it as a time when church attendance peaked (at 49%) as families went to their local mainline churches to learn the Golden Rule.
It was a time when people agreed that democracy was good because it protects the rights of individuals - and ancient temples.
The question I never asked until I was doing research for this essay was: who was democracy protecting us from and how?
Before we can explore how the mid-20th century became the pinnacle of liberal democracy, and American Christianity, we need to know what the threat actually was. Who was threatening the rights of individuals and ancient wonders?
If you were raised to be a good Republican, like I was, then you know the answer: the federal government. Duh. Also, the Communists.
Except that the Republican Party was formed for the express purpose of using and expanding the power of the federal government to protect the rights of individuals and natural resources (did you know that? I did not know that!), because that’s what the federal government was created to do.
What I failed to understand, and maybe you were way ahead of me on this, was the role of the oligarchy. I get so hung up on all the different names for them and the various forms of government they adapt to, that I miss the simple truth.
There are greedy people in the world who just want more power and more wealth and they use that power and wealth to get more power and more wealth, and they disregard the rights of others and ransack our natural resources along the way.
Oligarchy means “rule by the few.” When I think of oligarchy, I think of Russia and I imagine some kind of organized group. I picture them all sitting around a table, like a dark council and if one makes the leader mad, he will use the Force to crush their larynx.
While that last part might be fairly accurate, “the oligarchy” doesn’t get together for meetings every fourth Thursday. It’s not an organized committee, it’s just extraordinary corruption that usually leads to exploitation and oppression.
It’s a bunch of (usually wealthy) people who are above the law and who have a disproportional influence on how the law is applied (or not).
They do not believe that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed - ”
The British Parliament of the late 18th century was a de facto oligarchy, as were the Roman Republic, medieval feudalism, the Southern United States, and the Gilded Age United States.
What I finally understand is that from the time of the Civil War until 2025, the federal government has, to varying degrees, been in the business of protecting the people from the oligarchs. This is why the Department of Justice was created.
Liberalism peaked in the 1950s and 60s because the oligarchs, and the fundamentalists (see last week’s blog), had lost much of their power.
Power and authority shifted again.
Next week: How the Mighty Have Fallen
Image: “Freedom From Want” Norman Rockwell. 1943. Public Domain.
The purpose of this series is to flesh out the story of how the Bible came to be an instrument of power so that Christians can be empowered to reject bibliolatry and authoritarianism and follow Jesus instead. See full bibliography here.
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