Bryan Fischer’s Indian Delusion Meets the Reservation

 Pagan+Politics  6 Responses »
Feb 112011
 
Little Crow

(This post originally appeared on PoliticusUSA on February 10, 2011 as part of a series of articles on Bryan Fischer’s attack on ethnic religion. As of today, Indian Country reports that the offending AFA blog post to which I refer here has been taken down – Hrafnkell)

To the left: Little Crow Being the European Bryan Fischer Insists No Indian Was

As the Huron Sachem is made to say in a Hollywood film, “The white man came, and night entered our future with him.” The Huron leader’s tone is fatalistic: he knows his world has been changed forever.[1] Among the Dakota of Minnesota, Little Crow knew this as well. Gary C. Anderson notes in his biography of the Mdewakanton leader that his “understanding of the nature of the Indian-White relationship was far superior to that of his contemporaries.” As a result, he pursued accommodation, not war. As he told his people when the first shots had been fired, they could not win: “you will die like rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon.”[2]

Accommodation not only landed him on a reservation, it landed him in a war. Yet Brian Fischer would have us believe that the Native Americans refused accommodation with the whites. He claims that “the native American tribes ultimately resisted the appeal of Christian Europeans to leave behind their superstition and occult practices for the light of Christianity and civilization.” He goes on to assert that “they in the end resisted every attempt to ‘Christianize the Savages of the Wilderness,’ to use George Washington’s phrase.”

Let’s do something Fischer won’t, and look at some facts.

In 1838 Commissioner of Indian Affairs T. Hartley Crawford observed the Native American and concluded that the major impediment to “civilization” was their culture itself; specifically, the ownership of land in common. “Unless some system is marked out by which there shall be a separate allotment of land to each individual whom the scheme shall entitle to it, you will look in vain for any general casting off of savagism. Common property and civilization cannot co-exist.”[3] The Dakota had no concept of individual ownership of land. The idea was completely foreign to them and as long as tribal and band affiliations existed, the government could not successfully impose the idea of individuals owning specific tracts of land.

On 6 February 1851, before the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota had ceded to the United States the Dakota lands that would become Minnesota, Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey reported the recommendations of a meeting of the Dakota Mission held the previous year at Little Crow’s village, Kaposia:

We regard the Community System among the Dakotas as one of the most serious obstacles in the way of this civilization. And we would suggest that, in case of a treaty with them, arrangements should be entered into which will at present diminish its influence, and finally break it up entirely. For the accomplishment of this object individual rights should be secured and extended as far and as fast as possible.

To Luke Lea, the recipient of these recommendations, Ramsey stated that this was the view of men “who have long lived in the Indian Country, become familiar with the defects of the institutions of the Red man, and who certainly are disinterestedly devoted to the moral and material improvement of the Indian.”[4] Ramsey and Lea, in their post-treaty report of 6 August 1851, continued the anti-Community System bias, saying it “is now the bane and curse of these tribes.”[5]

It wasn’t really. It had worked just fine for the Indians before the white men came. But the white men were here change was upon the natives whether they wanted it or not.

The reservation system was the method adopted by the government of accomplishing this change, which essentially, meant turning the Native American population into whites, or as Northern Superintendent William J. Cullen said in his 1860 report, to make them “as part of our own people.” Cullen says “the means adopted to sustain this policy are:

First. Making their agricultural system one of individual, instead of tribal character.

Second. By inducing a voluntary abandonment of their nationality in dress costume.

Third. Furnishing them with houses and the comforts of civilized life.

Fourth. Protection by the government of those who assume the character of improvement Indians from all attacks upon their persons and property.

Fifth. Punishing by loss of annuities those who leave their reservations for the commission of depredations upon the white settlers, or to enter the war path against other tribes.

Sixth. By making intoxication an offense punishable by the loss of annuity and degradation from prominent position in the community.[6]

Indian Agent Thomas J. Galbraith (who must be Bryan Fischer’s personal hero) succinctly explains the perceived differences between white and Indian: “To be clear, the habits and customs of white men are at war with the habits and customs of the Indians. The former are civilization, industry, thrift, economy; the latter, idleness, superstition, and barbarism…”[7]

Dakota Being Farmers and Not Rejecting European “Civilization”

Dakota Farmers

What did this mean to the indigenous inhabitants? The utter destruction of Dakota culture was essential if the reservation system was to succeed in its goal: The community system practiced by the Dakota had to go. George W. Manypenny, commissioner from 1853-57, objected to the tribes retaining land as reservations and believed individual holdings were essential if the civilizing process were to succeed. Missionary Stephen R. Riggs supported the idea: “(T)hey should be individualized and encouraged to be industrious. First, the community system should not be fostered by the payment of any part of their annuity to the villages or bands…“ The result otherwise would be (here he sounds a lot like Galbraith) the fostering of “idleness and paganism.” Riggs’ fellow missionary, Thomas S. Williamson, echoes his view: “I entirely concur with Rev. S.R. Riggs…in regard to the importance of doing all the government can do to break up the community system.”[8]

Commissioner Manypenny was not optimistic about the Indians’ chances. He believed that the Native American was bound for extinction:

But if this be so, it does not discharge the government of the United States and its citizens from the performance of their duty; and every effort is demanded by humanity to avert a calamity of this kind.

But it did not have to be this way, if proper efforts were made to save him:

I believe that the Indian may be domesticated, improved, and elevated; that he may be completely and thoroughly civilized, and made a useful element of our population.[9]

Clearly then, given a “complete and thorough civilizing,” relocation to the reservations meant an irrevocable severing of their pasts and destruction of their culture. And while John Upton Terrel’s characterization of the reservations as “concentration camps” is extreme, there is no doubt that life there was doleful and hard.[10]

Christianization: According to Bryan Fischer, this could not have been happening

Missionary activity among the Dakota

That culture shock of an extreme nature resulted is easily imagined. From being self-sufficient and independent, able to go wherever and whenever they desired, the Dakota found themselves isolated from the bison herds and tied to the land in a way many of them had never imagined. They became farmers, and shopped at the traders’ stores instead of hunting and trapping. They subsisted on what was in many ways a welfare system.

Though the annuities represented their money, they had no control over it. The “Great Father” doled it out as he saw fit, withholding and deducting at will and explaining nothing. Historian Robert M. Utley believes that the resistance of the Native Americans was directed against the reservation, not against the white interlopers, with whom they had shown they could live at peace.[11]

Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, popularly considered the archenemy of the free Indian, had this to say about the reservation system:

If I were an Indian, I often think that I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains, rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.[12]

Custer was not alone among frontier officers in feeling this way. Many of them had a great admiration, borne of long contact, for their opponents. Colonel Henry B. Carrington, commanding officer of Ft. Phil Kearney and famous for his role in the Fetterman Massacre of 1866, relates that he once said, “in an extreme hour, when all I held dear on earth was in danger of self-immolation, or slow death at the hands of the red man, that if I had been a red man as I was a white man, I should have fought as bitterly, if not as brutally, as the Indians fought.”[13]

In the preface to his book, Carrington gives the lie to Fischer’s assertions: He cites the 1876 report of Generals Sherman, Harney, Terry and Augur, and civilians Henderson, Terry and Sanborn: “It is said that our wars with them have been almost constant. Have we been uniformly unjust? We answer, emphatically, yes.”

This is the first article in a three-part series detailing Bryan Fischer’s delusions regarding the white treatment of Native Americans – HH

[1] For the Huron Sachem’s words, Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans, Twentieth Century Fox, 1992.

[2] Gary Clayton Anderson, Little Crow (St. Paul, 1986), 3.

[2] Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (hereafter RCIA) cited in Francis Paul Prucha, Documents Of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990)

[4] U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received (hereafter cited as “Letters Received”), letter of Alexander Ramsey to Luke Lea, 6 February 1851. The idea of introducing private ownership of land to the Native American was not new. The first Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Elbert Herring, had suggested it in 1832. See Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln, 1990), 63.

[5] RCIA (1851). Washington: Gideon & Co., 1851, 22. Report of L. Lea and A. Ramsey to the Secretary of the Interior dated 6 August 1851.

[6] RCIA (1860). : George W. Bowman, 1860, 43. Report of W.J. Cullen dated 29 September 1860.

[7] RCIA (1863). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864, 283. Report of Thomas Galbraith to Clark W. Thompson, dated 27 January 1863. Emphasis in the original.

[8] RCIA (1853), 78. Report of S.R. Riggs. Italics in original, and page 77 for the report of Thomas S. Williamson. For Manypenny, see Kvasnicka and Viola, ed. The Commissioners of Indian Affairs (Lincoln, 1979), 59. Also, Federal Indian Law (New York, 1966), 227.

[9] RCIA (1855). Washington: A.O.P. Nicholson, 1856, 17-18. Report of George W. Manypenny dated 26 November 1855.

[10] John Upton Terrel, Land Grab: The Truth about “The Winning of the West (New York, 1972), 33. Terrel is justified in his criticism of the reservation system, but the intent, however misguided, was not to exterminate, or even to imprison. As seen in this section, the hope was that the reservation would act as a sieve, dropping Native Americans in one end and having Europeans come out the other.

[11] Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846-1890 (Albuquerque, NM, 1984), xx, 36, 63.

[12] Cited in Robert Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin (Norman, 1988), 149. The Native American was no more a “simple-minded son of nature” as seen by many, than a “creature possessing human form but divested of all other attributes of humanity.” Custer did not, however, have any doubt about the eventual fate of these people, or in the rightness of that course.

[13] Henry B. Carrington, The Indian Question (New York, 1884), 8.

 Posted by Hrafnkell Haraldsson at 4:20 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

Pagans and the New American Theocracy

 Pagan+Politics  29 Responses »
Oct 072010
 

It’s hardly a secret that certain elements in the United States desire to overturn the Constitution and bring America to a theocratic form of government, in the process turning the clock back on the European Enlightenment and re-writing the history of the past thousand years or so.

The process has already begun. The United States dodged a bullet during the Bush administration, when dominionists came closest to controlling the government. It was a near thing and while one would think the election of a left-leaning centrist president would put the brakes on the drift, it has not. The Religious Right is as potent a force as ever.

Though Evangelicals comprise only about 25% of the population, and extremists/fundamentalists only about half that, their influence is all out of proportion with their numbers thanks to their wealth and their positions in government. Eight years of owning an administration did not hurt their cause at all, however much they might complain after the fact.

Today, xenophobia and Islamophobia have become central to the conservative platform. We are told that Sharia Law threatens to overturn our Constitution, but it is not Sharia Law that we are threatened with but Mosaic Law, which to all intents in purposes is identical, save for the name of the god involved, and who will be calling the shots.

For those who are either irreligious or follow spiritual paths other than Christianity, one is as bad as the other, and neither of these essentially Bronze Age law codes has any place in a modern liberal democracy which enshrines ideas of diversity, pluralism, and individual human rights. It must be remembered that the Old Testament enshrines none of these things. The Mosaic Law is not about rights but about obligations and restrictions; it is not inclusive but exclusive.

Where does this drift leave those belonging to alternative religions, minority groups like modern Paganism, which itself is a diverse collection of spiritual paths? Clearly, a theocracy – Christian or Islamic – is not to be desired. Pagan religion was suppressed for many centuries. As late as the 18th century, some American colonies had law codes as repressive as the fifth century Theodosian Code. A prison term awaited anyone who denied the Trinity or the Scriptures.

The American Revolution and the Constitution that was its aftermath, that was the highest development of the European Enlightenment, changed all that. State sponsored religion, that scourge of the Old World, was banished from these shores by liberalism and its victory over the status quo.

So modern conservative Christians want to turn the clock back, and to a period that left Paganism – or any other religion, even other monotheisms – outlawed. Do not forget that in the early days of the colonies both Catholicism and Judaism were outlawed. Do not forget that some of these prejudices remained so ingrained that the United States did not get its first Catholic president until John F. Kennedy in 1961. He remains our only Catholic president.

The religious landscape of America has changed greatly since the 18th century, when most Americans were Protestants of one denomination or another. We have more Catholics (of many varieties) and more Jews and we have Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and others, including Pagans. That this religious diversity did not emerge until state-sponsored religion was banished is no accident and no mystery.

Historian A.H. Armstrong relates for us the legacy of Christian intolerance:

The choice of the way of intolerance by the authorities of Church and empire in the late fourth century has had some very serious and lasting consequences. The last vestiges of its practical effects, in the form of the imposition of at least petty and vexatious disabilities on forms of religion not approved by the local ecclesiastical establishment, lasted in some European countries well into my lifetime. And theoretical approval of this sort of intolerance has often long outlasted the power to apply it in practice. After all, as late as 1945 many approved Roman Catholic theologians in England, and the Roman authorities, objected to a statement on religious freedom very close to Vatican II’s declaration on that subject.

If this is not damning enough, Armstrong goes on to say,

In general, I do not think that any Christian body has ever abandoned the power to persecute and repress while it actually had it. The acceptance of religious tolerance and freedom as good in themselves has normally been the belated, though sometimes sincere and whole-hearted, recognition and acceptance of a fait accompli. This long persistence of Theodosian intolerance in practice and its still longer persistence in theory has certainly been a cause, though not the only cause, of that unique phenomenon of our time, the decline not only of Christianity but all forms of religious belief and the growth of a totally irreligious and unspiritual materialism.

Conservative Christianity has driven people away from traditional religion but it has not forgotten them, and has in the process created a whole new group of non-believers known as atheists who find religion reprehensible. By religion, of course, they mean religion in the Christian sense. But alternative religions – unfairly – share the fallout. Religion in the modern sense has become the problem. In the ancient world, religion was the solution, transcending cultural and ethnic barriers and bringing people of diverse beliefs together. It can be that way again. There is no reason religion has to remain defined solely by one restrictive group of believers.

But only if theocracy is kept at bay. The threat is real. More than a few Republican candidates belief that the Ten Commandments should be legislated into law. They speak openly of bringing prayer back into school, and of making social work the sole domain of Christian groups, which would make all needy Americans victims of unwanted proselytizing, of re-writing school textbooks to bring them in line with conservative ideology, of teaching Christian creationism in our public schools. In ways large and small, all over America, the First Amendment of the Constitution is under attack.

It is essential, I think, for Pagans of all religious minorities in this country, to remember their history, and if they do not know it, to learn it. We have everything to lose and nothing to gain by a rightward turn in matters of religion. We can argue about conservative and liberal politics and until conservative politics became so closely tied up with conservative Christianity, these did not matter so much where the First Amendment is concerned. But until the Republican Party divorces the Religious Right, religious minorities must remain on their guard.

 Posted by Hrafnkell Haraldsson at 4:16 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

Islamophobia and an American Heathen

 Pagan+Politics  102 Responses »
Aug 272010
 

Islamophobia has been on the rise since 2001. The latest cause célèbre of conservative opponents of Islam is the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center. The extent of this opposition is shown by the intentional mislabeling of this project as the “Ground Zero Mosque” despite the by now well known facts – that it is not at Ground Zero but two blocks away (it is not even visible from Ground Zero) and it is not a mosque, cut a community center with a prayer area. Imagine a hospital with a chapel. Do we call that a church?

I don’t. I go into a hospital quite frequently which has not only a chapel but pictures of Jesus on a little table by the door.

Things have gotten so out of control that it is being suggested by some on the right that great Americans “give up their rights” and that Muslims ought to forfeit their Constitutional guarantee of free exercise and go somewhere else, or that Islam is not really a religion at all but a cult, and is therefore not protected by the Constitution. Qur’an burnings have even been announced; an act of violence by Christians somehow meant to demonstrate “once and for all” that Islam is a violent religion.

What is a Pagan to think about this feeding frenzy of angry monotheists? One possible response would be to say, “Well, it’s between them; it doesn’t concern me.” I am here to argue that such a response would be mistaken. It does concern us. It concerns everyone because it concerns a Constitutional guarantee that is under attack by the dominant culture.

Conservative Christians have constructed a new narrative for America, a Mythic America that was founded by and for Christians, an America in which free exercise applies only to Christians, and in which the wall of separation is a myth. The First Amendment ensures that all Americans can practice their religion of choice – or none at all. When the dominant culture – in this case Christianity – takes it upon itself to decide to whom Constitutional guarantees apply, it is time to worry.

Naturally, anyone who defends Islamic rights is accused at worst of being a terrorist, or of being somebody who is “soft” on terrorism. Islam has become the communism of the new millennium, and we should all be searching under our beds for Islamofascists, one of the wonder new terms the right has gifted us. I have been attacked myself, and just recently, for defending Islamic rights in this country. For it is not just conservative Christians who are up in arms and misinformed, but Pagans too. The hysteria is widespread.

But I am not here to defend Islam. My own views on monotheism are hardly a secret to anyone who has read my pieces over the past few years. But my views on monotheism in general or Islam in particular are hardly applicable to this case, for this case is not about Islam but about the Constitution. And the Constitution says that a Muslim group can build a community center wherever they want. There is nothing illegal about it. They did not steal the land. They made a deal with a developer and they are using the site of an old coat factory in the same way that some Christian-oriented group might.

The only difference is that they are Muslims.

And it was Muslim terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The thing is, it wasn’t THESE Muslims. And mis-characterizations of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a man with a reputation as a progressive interfaith leader, as an agent of America’s destruction are simply character attacks aimed at creating at atmosphere of fear and resentment. Fear is the coinage of Republican politics and has been since 2001. Fear of minorities, fear of immigrants, fear of non-Christians, fear of feminists, secular humanists, atheists, the LGBT community – and fear of Islam. It is easy to rally people around fear-inspiring causes – Irish immigrants, Germans in WWI, Japanese in WWII, communists in the 50s, Muslims today.

The situation gets very confused – as it’s meant to – fear mongering inspires neither calmness nor rational thought. Fear demands that people respond on a visceral, atavistic level, from the gut, in the same way that George W. Bush ran the country for eight years, from the gut. It is an anti-intellectual stimulant, fear is, and it brooks no argument.

For a Pagan, to get back to my original point, such attacks should resonate on a level invisible to most monotheists, who have a long history of being the persecutors rather than the persecuted. Once upon a time it was the witches who were being sometimes literally fed to the fires of hate. It isn’t all that long ago that being a Pagan was against the law, or that being a Pagan could cost you your job or your home. Rather than jumping up and joining those who would tear down freedom of religion, we ought to be defending those whose rights are under attack. Because next time, it could be us.

Can anyone forget the words of Jerry Falwell or the agreement of Pat Robertson in the aftermath of 9/11 on the 700 Club?:

JERRY FALWELL: And I agree totally with you that the Lord has protected us so wonderfully these 225 years. And since 1812, this is the first time that we’ve been attacked on our soil and by far the worst results. And I fear, as Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said yesterday, that this is only the beginning. And with biological warfare available to these monsters — the Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Arafats — what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact — if, in fact — God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.

PAT ROBERTSON: Jerry, that’s my feeling. I think we’ve just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven’t even begun to see what they can do to the major population.

JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well yes.

JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

Can we so easily forget that it was Pagans Falwell blamed first, and not Islam? Does anyone seriously think that if they succeed in depriving the world’s second largest religion of their Constitutional rights that they will hesitate to do the same to Pagans?

The threat to the Constitution is very real. Conservative Christians, religious zealots known as dominionists, wield a degree of power in this country far out of proportion to their numbers. Study right-wing Christian theocracy; study the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Study Sarah Palin and her witch-hunting pastor. People like to scoff, but then, people scoffed at Hitler too.

And look where they ended up.

No, I don’t have to think twice to know where I stand. With religious freedom and with the Constitutional guarantees I was born with, and not just for me, but for everyone.

 Posted by Hrafnkell Haraldsson at 7:14 am  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Intercultural Translations

 Pagan+Politics, politics  16 Responses »
Jul 302010
 

A pluralistic and diverse society is not easy to manage. One would think with several centuries of ethnic mixing, particularly in a country as diverse as the United States, that people would be used to getting along, or at least tolerating the differences between one another. But that does not seem to be the case. Our society seems to be fragmenting rather than blending.

There are many factors which give rise to antagonism: religion, nationalism, ethnicity, political ideology, and the old Marxist bogeyman, economics. And while we think of ourselves as a melting pot, the degree of mixing which has taken place has recently been called into question. We may co-exist to a degree but inter-marrying is less common.

Daniel T. Lichter recently reported on CNN that “According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, one of every seven new marriages in 2008 was interracial or interethnic — the highest percentage in U.S. history.”

One in seven.

That isn’t a lot. About 14%. And “seemingly overlooked in the Pew Report is the finding that less than 5 percent of all married whites have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. The vast majority of whites today — as in the past — marry other whites” (The Supreme Court ruling that outlawed state prohibitions against interracial marriage did not come about until 1967).

Keep in mind too that some people marry only within the “tribe.” It was widely believed that Swedes and Norwegians couldn’t live together and many European ethnic groups arriving in the United States clustered together, out of need or desire. So even among “whites” there were limitations on the mixing taking place.

Of course, some whites feel differently, seeing even that miniscule amount (because it is rising) as a threat to white America. “Their concerns,” Lichter goes on to say, “are heightened by recent Census Bureau projections that the U.S. will become a majority-minority society by the middle of the century.”

Will the rising tide of immigration and immigrant birth finally complete the process of mixing?

In what can hardly be called a surprise, CNN recently reported that a new poll “indicates Americans have complicated views towards immigrants.”

The poll, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national survey, shows that “the vast majority believe that most immigrants are basically good, honest people who are hard-working. However, nearly seven in ten say that immigrants are a burden on the taxpayer, 62 percent think they add to the crime problem, and 59 percent believe they take jobs away from Americans.”

Ouch. From the descendants of immigrants. Sounds like today’s immigrants are getting the same treatment once meted out to the Irish.

This poll is not referring simply to immigrants from south of the border, though I would be surprised if such thoughts did not influence the respondents. Instead, the poll, released Wednesday, “asks about all people who have immigrated from other countries in the past ten years, and not just about illegal immigrants in the U.S.” Doubtless far fewer immigrants today are “white” Anglo-Saxon compared to when our ancestors arrived from the Old World. Probably, far fewer of them are Protestants.

“The results may explain why most Americans think that the policies that made the U.S. a ‘melting pot’ strengthened the country a century ago but do not make the country stronger today,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

CNN asks whether, taking the “melting pot” metaphor a bit further, do Americans think that immigrants should maintain their own culture, or blend into the existing culture in this country?

The answer: “Two-thirds of whites say that immigrants should give up some important aspects of their culture to blend in; only about four in ten Hispanics, and an equal number of blacks, agree with that view,” adds Holland.

When my great-grandfather Tollef arrived in the Unied States, he did not speak any English. He wrote his letters home in Swedish. Wrote from the ranks of the Union Army during the Civil War. Was he less of an American because he kept elements of his native culture?

And how about Pagans? Paganism is and always has been a diverse phenomenon; all sorts of cultures, all sorts of ethnicities. This is as true today as it was in the ancient world. The common denominator was polytheism. This is not always the case today, but despite a broader interpretation of religion and spirituality, there is still a rejection of the Judeo-Christian idea of monotheism. There is the inclusion of nature, the inclusion of the feminine. There is a lot of inclusion and a lot less exclusion.

But even this rejection of one world view and the adoption of another does not have as a goal the destruction or negation of what is rejected. It adds a voice to the harmony; it does not remove one. It is more a matter advocating an acceptance of alternative forms of religion. The view of Judeo-Christian monotheism is, on the other hand, that all alternative forms of religion are inferior, wrong, and must (and will eventually) give way to the “True” religion.

Of course, we have three competing Abrahamic faiths all insisting they have possession of that exclusive Truth so the religious issue is problematic, especially when the sacred teachings of none of them espouse tolerance. After all, where the capital-T truth is concerned, there is no room for tolerance of what is not true. Even if alternative religionists wanted to join the True religion they couldn’t; there is no way to tell who has it, if anybody does.

The evils of nationalism have been well noted. The First World War is about as powerful a comment as one can make on the subject. The 60s anti-war protests about as powerful a rejection. Now, with the rise of American Exceptionalism, the pendulum has swung back the other way and the “constructed other” is again rejected, not welcomed. Hate and mixing are mutually compatible. American Exceptionalism is as ugly today as Prussian Nationalism was a century ago.

And unrestrained, it may lead us to the same place.

Ethnic squabbles are nothing new. They’re old beyond the extent of the historical record. We can look at the Old World over the past few centuries. We can look at the Balkans today or at Africa. America has had its own share.

But despite all these differences, people can get along. It has been proven. By Pagans. And I would argue that if Pagans cannot manage it today, nobody can. We have our own history to support us. We do not all have to believe the same things, or anything at all, to get along. Because there is no pressing need for others to believe the way you do, the religious equation ought to simply go away.

But how do Pagans cope with increasing polarization in the religious and political landscapes? Ancient pagans might have been drawn together by what they shared – polytheism’s non-exclusivity – but today’s version of religion – largely monotheistic and exclusivist, pushes people apart. Nothing can be shared when each group adopts an exceptionalist stance, be it due to religion or an excess of nationalism, ideology or some other cause.

Fast growing religion or not, Pagans are a drop in the bucket of American diversity. Can what we have in common, in the words of Jan Assmann (Moses the Egyptian 1997:3), “function as a means of intercultural translatability”? Fostering our common humanity, looking for connections, seems far more helpful a course than creating more gaping cracks between us, doesn’t it?

Disagree we might, but if we Pagans cannot tolerate each other, if we can’t translate inter-culturally, how can there be hope for anyone else?

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted July 16-21, with 1,018 adult Americans questioned by telephone, including a special sample of 308 black and 303 Hispanic respondents. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

 Posted by Hrafnkell Haraldsson at 9:52 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

An Interview with Mikey Weinstein of Military Religious Freedom Foundation

 Pagan+Politics, politics  78 Responses »
Feb 262010
 

On Thursday, 25 February 2010, I sat down for an interview with Mr. Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org. Mr. Weinstein is, according to his bio, “the undisputed leader of the national movement to restore the obliterated wall separating church and state in the most technologically lethal organization ever created by humankind; the United States armed forces. Described by Harper’s magazine as the constitutional conscience of the U.S. military, a man determined to force accountability.” I would like to again thank Mr. Weinstein for taking time out of his very busy schedule to talk to me, and I apologize in advance for any remaining typos.

PNC: I’d like to begin by asking you about the incident at the Air Force Academy.  Now as I understand it, it was a client of yours who saw the cross propped against the rock at the circle of stones. This was reported and the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) began an inquiry but I haven’t read much about it recently. Has the incident created any tensions in the community or in the Air Force Academy itself? Did the cadets take it in stride?

MW: We were upset at first that it took two-and-a-half weeks before our client, Tech. Sgt. Longcrier, who heads the earth-centered/based group up there, was even interviewed by the OSI. And of course we got involved because we felt that there have been a number of communication gaps. And initially we were very pleased, then we were very upset and now we’re back to thinking things are moving along. But look, it’s going to be very hard to have any clues about who did that; very, very difficult.

Tensions? Yeah! You’ve got people in the world who say the academy should never even have accommodated the earth-centered Pagan, Wiccan, Druid, what have you faith groups there. We were also reached out to by Native American spiritualists because they’re saying you know we’re earth centered also and we greatly predate Christianity, Judaism, Islam and many current Pagan groups who’ve been around for a long time.

And so I think it was great that this was accommodated but at the same time there shouldn’t be too many gold stars out there. I mean, People have a right to practice whatever faith they want to.

So in this instance we refer to this a hate crime. And this upset I’m sure a lot of Christians who said, “Well wait, it was just a cross.”

And our response is: “Yeah, well what would happen if you put a pentagram on a church, or put a crescent moon on a church, or put a crucifix on a mosque, or put a swastika on a synagogue?”

But people are just not smart enough to understand those things. I think we are moving along in a better fashion now and certainly when we broke the story we clearly significantly sensitized everybody and so I think that from that perspective – although it’s unlikely we’ll catch who did that – we’ve made it clear that the stakes are high if you try that again.

PNC: So nobody had the courage of their convictions and stepped forward and was anxious to claim responsibility.

MW: No, not at all.

PNC: No instant martyrs there.

MW: Right. We had people argue, “Well we just thought it was a campfire,” which is just complete and total crap. So we think we stand in a better position now and the cadets that are part of this group – Sgt. Longcrier leads it – I think feel emboldened and like I said before we want that worship place – it’s just like a church or mosque or synagogue or what have you – and it needs to be treated with the absolute same level of respect.

The problem is that there is a tremendous dearth of education about the Constitution in our U.S. military – among our officers, NCOs, cadets and midshipmen. They just don’t know what they don’t know and that’s very, very dangerous.

If you think of the military with all of our nukes, conventional and laser-guided weapons – if you think of it as a civilization – and I love to use H.G. Wells’ definition of civilization, which is “a race between education and catastrophe” – and catastrophe is currently winning in the U.S. Military. This is has been the case for humanity. Whether it’s trying to fight a disease or prejudice – which is another form of a disease – or what have you, the concept of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution – which by the way represents the first time in the history of human kind that any nation state created a governing document that does not invoke somebody’s particular deity .

That by itself is education but it’s being re-framed by the Christian nationalist historians that are out there that argue that Franklin and Thomas Paine and Madison and Jefferson were all fundamentalist Christians and they really wanted this country to look like an enlarged version of the “700 Club.”

PNC: It’s amazing that even confronted by the facts, for example Thomas Paine’s writings about Christianity and his opinion of it…

MW: And Jefferson composed a Bible devoid of any miracles. It’s very likely he was an atheist and most of them were deists or agnostics and they looked assiduously at European history where most of the tyrannies that had occurred there were by men in political power or by men of the cloth. They looked at Cromwell in England; they obviously didn’t even have to leave our shores: They looked at the Salem witch trials and said “Not here.”

PNC: What do you think about claims like that made by the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission which claims that Christianity is under attack and that “a violent anti-Christian spirit is growing in America.”

MW: This reminds me of the famous plea by the young man who has murdered his parents: He’s in court and has now been found guilty and upon sentencing he throws himself upon the mercy of the court and goes: “Please your honor, please, have mercy, after all I’m an orphan.” Or if you will the playground bully who after beating a poor kid into the dust is caught by a teacher monitor and says, “This kid has put bruises and scrapes on my fists.” I hardly find them to be the aggrieved party; that the poor Christians are under attack here. First of all let’s keep in mind who we are fighting.

Our foundation is in a battle, a war with a subset of Christianity just as we are at war with a subset of Islam.  We are not at war with all of Islam though that’s the way it’s portrayed by the Christian fundamentalists. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term that “if not you need to be.” We are at war with Wahhabist fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are trying to impose Sharia Law on the rest of us.

We represent over 16,300 active duty Unites States Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen, cadets and midshipmen at the three major service academies – the Air Force Academy, West Point, Annapolis – and ROTC cadets and midshipmen, reserve and Guard units, Coast Guardsmen and vets.

96% of our clients are believers in Jesus Christ. They’re either Protestants or Catholics. About three-fourths of that 96% are Protestants of a complete rainbow of different denominations, including something like 21 varieties of Baptist. One-fourth of the 96% are Roman Catholic. Most of our staff are Christians; most of our supporters, most of our donors.

So for people to say me or our foundation is anti-Christian we consider that to be defamation because that’s like saying we’re anti-Islam because we’re fighting Wahhabist fundamentalists. We’re fighting a subset of Christianity with a long technical name and it’s known as: Pre-millennial Dispensational Reconstructionist Dominionist Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity – it’s about 12.6% of the American public. They are like mirror images of the Islamic Taliban and al Qaeda . This is like the fundamentalist Christian Taliban.

PNC: Yes, they’ve been referred to on the Internet as “Talibengelicals.”

MW: Yes, that’s it exactly. So if you’re going to say Christianity is under attack, no sorry. The sad part of this story is that maniacs like these people are very generous with their money and their time. The vast majority of Americans who are Catholics or Protestants are not. They sit back or they pull lint out of their belly button, have one thumb in their mouth and one up their ass and play switch. They’re going to have to get off their ass and do something or we’re going to lose everything. If this war is cast as a cosmic war – a religious war – between Jesus and Allah we lose because that is exactly what our enemies want to cast it as.

Look, we defeated fascist like Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini in World War Two in just 44 months and guess what?  We didn’t have to become fascist like them. We don’t have to become fascists like them. We do not have to become the American military Christian Taliban and al Qaeda to defeat the Islamic version.

PNC: Right, we do their job for them.

MW: Exactly. We’re already doing that. We broke that Trijicon gun sight story. You saw the gun sight story right? That’s ours also and it’s astonishing, the level of ignorance in this country about our Constitution. The Tea Partiers say, “We’re looking at the Constitution and nowhere in there does it say separation of church and state.”

Well I got a couple of words for these idiots. The first is that The Constitution and the Bill of Rights -which is of course the first ten amendments – are only a few words. But over the hundreds of years we’ve had construing federal case law that interprets the Constitution and those are millions of words.

For instance, nowhere in the Constitution does it say slavery is prohibited, but slavery is prohibited now. Also nowhere does it say that in public you can’t say “nigger,” “kike,” “spick” or “dago,” but see, we’ve had the Constitution interpreted by our federal courts saying, “No those are fighting words and they are an exception to the First Amendment right of free speech,” just like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. I thought at first that this was intuitive but it’s not, the average American has no clue about that. For instance Miranda rights are also not in the Constitution. See – that’s where the word Miranda comes from – it was a Supreme Court case. You follow me?

PNC: Yes.

And there are a million or two other things that exist now that were not in the Constitution but exist now because of case law. So if you’re going to say the concept of church and state does doesn’t say it right there, well yes, that’s a foundational aspect of this country. And that’s how it’s been interpreted. They go back and say, “That’s just a letter of Thomas Jefferson to them Danbury Connecticut Baptists”… no sorry, that isn’t the case.

PNC: They also like to denounce the treaty of Tripoli.

MW: Yes, that’s right. They find all kinds of ways even though Washington negotiated it, Adams signed it, it was unanimously passed by the United States Senate…they find all kinds of ways of saying that doesn’t exist either. Well, good luck. It’s embarrassing enough that we have to go with this “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing. Every NATO ally allows GLBT members of the military to serve. Our CIA and FBI do it. The countries that currently don’t: Libya, Iraq, Iran and the U.S. – Congratulations U.S.

PNC: Nice company.

MW: Yes.

PNC: I find one of the most frightening things to be that series of books, the “Political Incorrect Guide to “fill in the blank”.”

MW: Particularly The one about Islam which is sold in every military PX that you can find and it’s just like the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” you know, the defamation blood libel book against the Jews. It’s unbelievable. In other words, all of Islam is bad; they’re all devils.

PNC: I think a better title would be the “Politically Inaccurate guide to…” We find out that the true Age of Reason was the Middle Ages that people that oppose the Bible oppose reason…

MW: It’s so self-evident. I like what Carl Sagan, the late-famous astronomer said, “Look, absence of the evidence of god,” he admitted, “is not necessarily conclusive evidence of absence.” It’s just his way of saying, “I don’t see anything.” And that’s my right. I don’t have to; I don’t have to say I believe. We have people tell us all the time that America was founded as a Christian nation, and I’ll give you that, America, the colonies- but not the United States of America. It was specifically not founded that way. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony – the Puritans – they had religious freedom: If you didn’t like the way they believed you were free to leave.

Roger Williams up in Rhode Island tried to establish more equanimity up there but it’s amazing. It’s one thing for a public school system or a police department or a fire department to be filled with these fundamentalist Christians but it’s quite another, and listen carefully here, when they are inextricably intertwined into the very particulate of our “Pentacostalagon” – what we used to call our Pentagon.

You see we’re not on this call talking about a particular problem or an issue or challenge we’re talking about a national security threat and here is the calculus of that national security threat: It is a national security threat internally to this country every bit as much in magnitude and formidability as what we are seeing externally by now from a resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda at least as strong as it was on 9/11. And here’s what it is: We have a fanatical religiosity – in this case dominionist fundamentalist Christianity – mixed in with actual weapons of mass destruction. We have them, the other side – thank god – doesn’t – yet. Throw in a dash of terribly misguided patriotism, complete unfettered access to everything due to the draconian specter of command influence, a total abrogation of the oath that everyone is supposed to take to preserve, protect, support and defend the Constitution, and a total dearth of any restraint, oversight, and supervision – and what you’ve got is a national security threat that is so serious that this so unbelievable that nobody believes it unless they’re complicit. That’s it. That’s what we’re facing.

PNC: What do you think about the role of the Oath Keepers as they’re calling themselves – where they recruit military personnel to swear not to violate the Constitution…

MW: Here is the problem with the Oath Keepers. You see they have a version of the Constitution that is like the version of the blind person who reaches out, touches the nose of the camel and thinks he is touching an orange.

We promise you we will not do the following: We will never disarm the American people etc. The problem with the Oath Keepers is that they’re completely infused with fundamentalist Christianity. Their oath is to their version – this warped, perverted, tortured version – of the Constitution.

PNC: It is interesting that these groups only arose after President Obama’s election.

Look, we’re old enough to remember a president by the name of Ike – Eisenhower. Remember his famous warning at his farewell address? What we’re talking about this morning on this call is that we’re fighting is actually a fundamentalist Christian parachurch military corporate proselytizing complex. We talk about the Oath Keepers or Force Ministries or Officers Christian Fellowship or God-chasers or the Navigators or Military ministries, Campus Crusade for Christ.. These are parachurch organizations mixed in with the military, mixed in with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grummond.

We can go on and on and on. This is what we’re dealing with. The Family. You may have seen The C Street situation that came out this past summer. It really is this gigantic breathing, living, driven, wanton, willful, purposeful desire to make everybody the right type of Christian and the astonishing and sickly sad irony is that it’s kind of the flip side of what we’re seeing from the Wahhabist Islamic maniacs.

My mother used to tell me “moderation in all things including moderation,” but remember Goldwater’s famous ‘64 nomination acceptance speech that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Too many people are being moderate and that’s the problem. Or that’s the national security threat.

PNC: What’s the atmosphere for them at present with the growing polarization of the religious landscape?

MW: There’s two ways. We feel emboldened because nature abhors a vacuum. If they have a problem they can come to us and we are a very militant organization. Our militancy is in support of the Constitution. We’ll move very quickly into the media and the court systems. But many times it’s such an overtly fundamentalist Christian military that the moderate progressive Christians sit back and do nothing. Same with the moderate Jews or Muslims. Every rabbi in the military who is a chaplain we refer to by the same last name – “Rabbi Speed Bump” – because that’s what they are for the fundamentalist juggernaut. The same with every – there are a few of them – Muslim chaplain in the military: They’re speed bumps. The problem is that if you’re not the appropriate type of Christian you’re a tarantula on a wedding cake and we all know how long tarantula’s on wedding cakes last – not very.

PNC:  Right. And unfortunately many Christians don’t understand the caveat “right kind of Christian”

MW: Correct.

PNC: and they see just a triumph for Christianity in terms of the Great Commission in Matthew. What they don’t realize is that they’re probably going to be categorized as heretics.

MW: Right. You see, the fundamentalist Christians love to look at the Great Commission pursuant to Mark 16.15 and Matthew 28.19 – one of the last things Jesus is supposed to have said: “Go and make disciple of all nations.” The difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical Christian – I want to stress that we have a number of evangelical Christian clients, supporters, donors and even on our staff -  evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are identical in that they want to turn you into their version of a Christian pursuant to the Great Commission. But an evangelical will say, “I realize I must comport my zeal to proselytize pursuant to the Great Commission in accordance with the time, place and manner restrictions of our Constitution and construing federal case law.” A fundamentalist will say “To hell and fuck the Constitution and case law because that’s just flawed man’s law and I will subordinate that to my Weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The non-Evangelical or fundamentalist Christians follow the great commandment which is part of the Sermon on the Mount, which is two things – the Golden Rule, treat others as you want them to be treated and you will love the lord with all thy mind, soul and heart, and they follow the Great Commandment. The bottom line here is that the average person doesn’t understand the following thing about our Constitution and the Bible. The First Commandment is what? You cannot have any other gods but me. What does the first amendment say? Oh yes you can! That’s the problem. They don’t get that. Irrespective of what the first commandment is it doesn’t make any difference, because you’re not allowed to have any other gods.

PNC: They miss the fine distinction that they are allowed to have no other god if they so choose but they want to tell the rest of us we have to follow that too.

MW: That’s it.

PNC: I wanted to ask, I think you already answered this. Do you see the atmosphere improving in the military in light of the Air Force Academy putting up the stone circle? Are we winning or losing the battle.

MW: No, let me make it clear. It’s not getting better – for a couple of reasons. Unfortunately there is a seamless transition between the Bush administration and the Obama administration. We cannot get any traction in the White House, with the commander in chief. And I think that if he was aware of what’s going on I want to think he’d engage but how long can we continue to wait? Remember the movie Top Gun? In the end it was “Maverick , Engage, engage, engage and get into the fight.”

I’m a Republican but I’m a Republican who voted for Clinton twice, Gore, Kerry and Obama. And it seems that as I mentioned, the people are not educated and there is no ongoing program for it. What is civilization? Civilization is that race as H.G. Wells said, between education and catastrophe.  Catastrophe is winning. The people who are our enemies are the people who are complacent and do nothing. Remember that Edmund Burke statement that “All that is necessary for evil to win is for enough good men to do nothing.”

PNC: And we see conservatives quote that.

MW: Yes, of course they do and it’s astonishing, and at the same time it’s absurd to believe that we don’t separate church and state in this country, and of course that makes topical that famous statement by Voltaire that “he who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity.” To the side we’re fighting anyone who believes we have separation of church and state is absurd. We consider that to be the Dark Side of the Force. On our side of the Force if you don’t believe in separation of church and state you’re absurd. It’s a very, very pitched battle and there is no ongoing effort to educate members of the military. I’m sure you know about many of the Christian historical nationalist revisionist that have tried to push that alternative history that never happened in this country. As I said before, it is time to stand up and fight.

PNC: They have a history as it should have been and then they put a spin on facts so quickly you can’t keep up.

MW: I don’t know if you have ever read Howard Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States.” That’s a powerful book. He writes from the perspective of the African Americans and the Native Americans. We’ve been spinning history for a long time but it’s another thing to spin it completely out of control. The concept of what they’re trying to do in Texas now with David Barton, complete revisionist history focusing on Christians. It’s astonishing.

PNC: Thank you Mr. Weinstein, I appreciate you taking the time to talk, and thank you for doing what you do.

 Posted by Hrafnkell Haraldsson at 3:10 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

An open letter to Gov. Tim Pawlenty

 politics  6 Responses »
Feb 192010
 

I would like to discuss with you your speech at The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) today.  Now, I didn’t just read the clips that reporters thought an Olympics distracted public might want to gloss over while waiting for the next skier to crash.  I took the time to listen to the entire speech so I won’t be dissuaded by comments that you were misquoted or taken out of context.  I thought that much of your speech was exactly what a constitutional conservative should be saying.  Of your four principles on which you made the emphasis of your speech, I whole heartedly agree with three.

In inversed order, principle # 4“Bullies pick on weakness not strength” is a clear statement of common sense and Realpolitik.  I agree with the principle that our nation must remain strong militarily.

Principle # 3, “People spend their money differently when it’s their money”.  No argument.  The best way to control the rising cost of anything is to make sure the person doing the buying has a significant emotional investment in the cost.

Principle # 2, “We can’t spend more than we have.”  Fiscal conservatism at its most basic.  Again, no issue.

Principle # 1, “God is in charge.”  OhhhKaaay?  1st question.  Which God we talking about?  Yahweh, Zeus, Dagda, Odin, or maybe Hera, Cerridwyn, or Freya.   Or perhaps you meant Buddha, or Kali.

You said the founding documents of our country enshrined these ideas.  You quoted the Declaration of Independence to say that it was our creator from who our rights flow.  I think you were using this quote, incorrectly, to insinuate that the founding fathers thought that The Creator should be involved in the governance of men.  The Declaration did not speak to the governance of the colonies, only to throwing off the yoke of tyranny.  

 “Section 16. That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.” 

This is a quote from the Virginia Declaration of Rights.  This document was written by George Mason prior to the Declaration of Independence and a document from which Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, drew heavily in writing The Declaration of Independence in 1776.  After a failed attempt at a federal government (The Articles of Confederation), the Founding Fathers went back to convention and wrote the constitution in 1787, there was no mention of God in the structure of our government.  There were no limits placed on God’s influence on our government either.  In 1789 The Bill of Rights was drafted to spell out the limits of power that government had in the lives of citizens.

“THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”  This is the preamble to the Bill of Rights that congress set down in 1789.

It is very clear what their purpose of adding the bill of rights was intended to do, limit the abuse of the power of the constitution. The 1st limit they stepped forward to clarify was; “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,.”  One of the most enduring ideas of the time of the Founding Fathers was that each person must practice his duties to God as he saw fit, and that Congress shall not establish or endorse a religion.

Governor Pawlenty, please understand that the intent of the founding fathers was to establish a government controlled by the citizens, represented by men and women of sound mind and good judgment.

Oh wait, that’s where we made our mistake.

 Posted by Daniel Maine at 11:58 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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