Personification in Let America Be America Again

Lincoln knew what it was to be a secular leader with a profound religious sense of moral and spiritual accountability [EPA]

"America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath –
America will be!" – Langston Hughes

As I wrote last week, there are a number of troubling facets of the New Apostolic Reformation [NAR] that cry out for media attention. The NAR is the significant, yet relatively little-known religious movement embraced by many prominent endorsers of Texas Governor Rick Perry'south upcoming prayer event, "The Response". Information technology represents a major break with the Religious Right of the by: it's not about issues or fifty-fifty "values".  It'due south about power, pure and uncomplicated. About taking over the world, a grade of Christian dominionism, and as I described, they've even got a seven-point plan for doing and then – the "Seven Mountains Mandate".

1. Mythos and Logos

This calendar week, I want to take a step back and write nearly the NAR in a much broader, historical context – the context of the by few centuries in which fundamentalism has emerged. To do so, I plow to Karen Armstrong's remarkable 2000 book, The Battle For God, which provided profound insight into the nature of fundamentalism by deeply examining specific examples from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds. It may seem like a less gripping, less titillating story at first, but I promise you, it's well worth hearing, and could even relieve your culture – or your life.

In her introduction, Armstrong argued that the late-20th century resurgence of fundamentalism needed to exist seen in an historical context. Fundamentalism was not, every bit its believers causeless, a render to older forms of organized religion, more true to the original. Rather, she said that fundamentalist movements "take a symbiotic relationship with modernity. They may reject the scientific rationalism of the W, but they cannot escape information technology. Western culture has inverse the globe. Nothing – including religion – tin always be the same again."

Providing a sharper focus,  Armstrong went on to discuss two ways of knowing that were traditionally regarded as entirely distinct: mythos and logos. The first was primary, dealing with "what was thought to exist timeless and abiding in our existence" – the origins and end purpose of life, culture and individual existence. "Myth was non concerned with practical matters, but with meaning," she wrote. "Unless we discover some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair."

"The mythos of a society provided people with a context that fabricated sense of their 24-hour interval-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal," writes Arsmtrong. No one can uncertainty why this form of knowing held such profound importance.

Logos, on the other hand, was "the rational, pragmatic, and scientific idea that enabled men and women to role well in the earth". It was equally vital for human being being, but in a more mundane, everyday way. Nosotros humans know practically zip by instinct. Without the fruits of logos nosotros should surely perish in short gild.

But it is just within the past few hundred years that logos has become transformed from a vast collection of different strands of specialised knowledge into a relatively integrated whole: our collective scientific knowledge of the earth, whose totality provides, in its ain way, the same sort of comprehensive story of "life, the universe and everything" that'southward traditionally characteristic of mythos.

The distinction between mythos and logos could always break downward, with troubling results, Armstrong explains. But with the emergence of modernistic science the condition has become chronic. Fundamentalism is, in essences, an effort to express the lost primacy of mythos by asserting it in terms of logos. "[B]ecause an increasing number of people regard scientific rationalism lone as true, they have often tried to turn the mythos of their faith into logos," Armstrong wrote. "Fundamentalists have too made this try. This confusion has led to more problems."

2. Post-fundamentalism

With all the above in mind, I would contend that the NAR itself is non simply another course of fundamentalism, although many who come to it no doubt experience it that way – equally a kind of supercharged version of the Pentecostal or Charismatic movements. However, careful reading and attention to critics makes it clear that it differs dramatically from Christian fundamentalism in one basic way: It does not just try to affirm that the Bible is a scientific text superior to all others, as creationist organisations such as "Answers In Genesis" does.

Rather, the NAR has been sharply criticised by more traditional conservative Christians precisely because practitioners get across the Bible – a polite fashion of saying that when push comes to shove, they supersede or disregard it.

"[Eastward]xperience is elevated to a position of high authority when it is confirmed by consensus opinion and apparently positive results accordingly, it may supervene upon biblical truth," wrote Bishop Michael Reid in his 2002 book, Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare: A Modern Mythology? Reid goes on to quote from Confronting the Powers, a volume by the NAR's intellectual godfather, C Peter Wagner, in which Wagner admits: "I am not challenge biblical proof for the validity of strategic-level spiritual warfare, spiritual mapping or identificational repentence," [glossary here]. But he does argue there is "sufficient Biblical show to warrant … a working hypothesis that nosotros tin can field examination, evaluate, modify and refine".

Which is to say, Wagner is proposing a "scientific method" of developing extra-biblical demon-fighting practices, based on the claim that "the Bible doesn't forbid information technology". It should be conspicuously understood that dealing intuitively with the spirit globe, gradually building upwardly a trunk of experience on which to rely is precisely the practice of pagan "witchcraft".

It should be no surprise that this approach has proven immensely popular in places like Africa with a strong living tradition of understanding the earth in terms of competing spirits and demons. Even while pretending to fight confronting pagan belief systems, the NAR itself is really deeply embedded inside them – much equally fundamentalists are deeply embedded in logos, while utterly convincing themselves they are fighting against it to the decease.

There should be no doubt that the NAR is responding to an intensification of the aforementioned historical developments that Armstrong describes equally giving nascence to fundamentalism. But the de facto abandonment of the Bible (which, of course, they would never acknowledge to) represents a much more radical response. This ultimately constitutes a difference in kind, which, for lack of a meliorate term, we might telephone call "post-fundamentalism". This actually did not originate with the NAR, but has been bubbling up in different forms for quite some time at present – as for example, in the "Latter Rain" movement of the early mail-World State of war 2 era, which was condemned by the Assemblies of God in 1949, just as elements of the NAR were condemned in 2000.

Another forerunner was known as "Moral Government Theory", which taught that homo free will limited God'south foreknowledge – a clear indication of how post-fundamentalists tend to subtly elbow God bated, the same way that they accuse secularists of doing.  Critics have correctly noted that this amounts to a reassertion of the ancient Gnostic heresy.

We tin can run into the difference between fundamentalists and postal service-fundamentalists more clearly by means of a parallel: Just as fundamentalists try to argue they are more than scientific than secular scientists past picking and choosing bits and pieces of scientific testify out of context, as jumping-off points for their own pseudo-scientific speculations and "scientific" arguments, so, too, post-fundamentalists attempt to argue they are holier than the holy fundamentalists by picking and choosing bits and pieces of the Bible out of context, equally jumping-off points for their own pseudo-biblical speculations and "spiritual" practices.

Of course, a similar sort of argument tin be made confronting violent "Jihadists", such as members ofal-Qaeda, whose terrorist attacks on 9/11 were extensively condemned equally un-Islamic, fifty-fifty by quite conservative religious regime. This is a further indication that we are seeing the results of a world-historical process, impacting different religious traditions in similar ways, as mail service-fundamentalism appears in different guises to accost felt shortcomings, or failures of the fundamentalist project.

3. Jihad vs McWorld

Although beyond the compass of my summary above, Armstrong also argues that the logos-based forces of modernisation were highly disruptive and destructive of older ways of life, though she focuses much less on how this happens than on the results information technology produces in the realm of mythos.

Some other volume that provides a more two-sided test of this procedure – though in a much more compressed time-frame – is Benjamin Hairdresser'south 1995 book, Jihad vs McWorld [Article that spawned the volume here]. Somewhat similarly (though not identically) to Armstrong, Hairdresser argues that the global modernising forces of technology and commerce ("McWorld") are locked in a profound struggle against the backward-looking ethno-religious forces of religion and localised civilisation ("Jihad").

Yet, Barber also argues that both sides of this struggle also feed off of each other and gang up against a third culling – the humanistic, secular commonwealth developed in modern, Western, democratic welfare states, which empower citizens to act collectively in multiple ways to negotiate and achieve shared ends that help create new forms of community and means of living together.

Barber has written extensively nearly "stiff commonwealth", a sustained participatory practice that both institutionalises and regularly recreates the sort of deep direct democratic involvement seen in Egypt'south Tahrir Square which led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Furthermore, decades of international research has shown, via the Earth Values Survey, that the more people manage to have their basic needs met, the more interested they get in actively self-governing themselves.

If one takes Barber's framework seriously, one can expect at America's pre-nine/11 involvement in the Middle E as a archetype example of how McWorld and Jihad collaborate: oil out and guns in for the Saudis and other "pro-Westward" governments constituted the main thrust on the McWorld side, forth with increasing levels of Western-way consumer affluence for those on top.

Support for fundamentalist institutions at home and abroad largely bought off the criticism this would otherwise have brought on. The calculus varied somewhat elsewhere – such as Egypt – but the dynamic was similar: the wages of McWorld were used to buy-off and redirect anger of Jihad, which in turn was then used to justify still more of the hard-nosed military side of what McWorld had to offer.

Things were more complicated on the Israeli side of things, merely like dynamics were involved in terms of how McWorld'due south consumerism and techno-rationalism and Jihad'due south tribal-religious passions fed off each other, each pretending to be each other's opposite, while collaborating together to stalemate any functional autonomous process that could substantially improve people's lives and move towards a merely, peaceful and fright-free future.

The 9/11 attacks brought all these contradictions out into the open. But they also drew out so much fear, astonishment and anger in America that contemplating contradictions – much less resolving them – was  the final thing on most American's minds. The fact that Bush took Osama's allurement, elevating a blood-drenched killer of innocents to the status of "holy warrior", may accept been merely what Osama wanted.

Merely playing into Osama's illusions helped Bush-league promote his own "holy warrior" illusions also, heightening the synergy of Jihad and McWorld inside the Republican coalition. If only Iraq had not turned out to exist such a disaster, Bush really might have established a prolonged menses of Republican rule, every bit "Bush-league'southward brain", Karl Rove, had dreamed of doing.

Instead, Bush became deeply unpopular, and Barack Obama sailed into the White Business firm backed past an incredibly hopeful electoral movement expecting dramatic democratic renewal – a rebuilding of the elements of strong democracy Barber has written well-nigh, which had eroded for decades earlier Bush took a battering ram to them.

Merely that, too, has turned out to be an illusion, every bit Obama'due south greenbacks-on-the-barrel indebtedness to the high-rolling donors of McWorld has proved vastly superior to the empty strong democracy rhetoric of his campaign. Every bit civilization critic Naomi Klein – author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine – put it, in a Democracy Now! interview, Obama'southward campaign was the first example of Nike-style lifestyle marketing campaign "that plays on our, sort of, faded memories of a more idealistic era, merely, yet, doesn't quite say anything". This is McWorld, branding itself with the iconography of strong democracy. "Nosotros think we hear the message we want to hear," Klein said. "But if you lot really parse it, the promises aren't there, information technology's really the emotions."

Thus, the very model of how democracy is supposed to work is systematically being dismantled in America, the birthplace of mod republic. As Obama sells out his base in ever more sweeping ways at every plough, he relies on their fright of much worse to support him anyway. And what does the GOP have to oppose him?

Rick Perry, with the aid of the NAR post-fundamentalists, or so it would seem.

4. With malice toward none

Investigative reporter Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer, recently published an extensive article on Perry'southward August six prayer event and his endorsers, "Rick Perry's Army of God." I spoke with Wilder at some length, and our discussion too encompassed the prolonged drought that Texas is experiencing, with well-nigh no policy response, except of course, for Perry having issued yet another call for prayer – this time for pelting.

Whether or how much Perry actually shares in the NAR'due south belief organization is difficult to say, Wilder told me, but, "You can say this about Perry and The Response – there is this underlying theme which is kind of throwing up one's hands at all these problems that we're faced with in society and saying: 'Well, I got zippo, so let's encounter what God can practise for us.'"

Although Perry – along with the preachers behind him – tries to spin this as typically American, and a return to an earlier, more overtly religious attitude among presidents and other political leaders, the lack of any sort of rational planning, or pragmatic foundation is actually greatly at odds with our real American heritage, which is much more than along the businesslike, activist lines that "God helps those who help themselves". What's more than, the hollow helplessness at its core is the exact contrary of the NAR's self-promotion as an organisation of prophets and apostles so powerful that God himself tin can't go the task done without them.

In contrast to these pseudo-religious shenanigans, Lincoln'south second inaugural address is a deeply religious meditation on the meaning and significance of the Civil War, arguably the most terrible tribulation America has ever faced every bit a nation. Information technology was a masterful alloy of both mythos and logos, addressing both, confusing neither. On the ane hand, Lincoln saw it every bit across human power to say what the war'southward outcome would exist.

"Fondly do we promise, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may apace pass away," Lincoln said. "Yet, if God wills that information technology proceed until all the wealth piled by the bondsman'southward 2 hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall exist sunk, and until every drib of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by some other drawn with the sword, every bit was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous birthday'."

Such was the level of Lincoln'south surrender to the will of God. Yet, that did not for one moment lead him to Perry's sort of pathetic despair and utter cluelessness nigh what to exercise. He did non carelessness logos or determination, even hope. Instead, Lincoln concluded with one of  the strongest statements of national purpose and commitment always uttered by an American President, or any other national leader:

"With malice toward none, with clemency for all, with firmness in the right as God gives united states to see the right, let u.s. strive on to finish the piece of work we are in, to bind up the nation'due south wounds, to intendance for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Lincoln'southward words reveal what it means to be a secular leader with a profound religious sense of moral and spiritual accountability, conscious of the requirements that mythos and logos each demand. His words tower over America today, which seems utterly incapable of even recognising what it has lost – much less figuring out how to regain it.

If America is to be saved, it will be in no small office because the people of other lands, such equally Egypt, take learned lessons from America that America herself has forgotten. Seeing them put America'southward lessons to piece of work in their countries – perhaps, but perhaps, Americans tin relearn what nosotros've forgotten.  And in the words of Langston Hughes, permit America exist America again.

Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly culling community newsletter.

The views expressed in this commodity are the author's ain and practise not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

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Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/8/5/let-america-be-america-again