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God save us from tent revivals and dancing elephants!

Every once in a while, Americans get religion.  


Just for the hell of it (I was going to say before I thought better of it), I looked up "Great Awakenings".  Church history books have labelled a series of religious revivals in the U.S. as "awakenings".  The first happened before we became a nation, and two or three later waves of religious enthusiasm seem to have punctuated our history, right up until the present. 


It wears me out, trying to get interested.  It always has.  The "last" great awakening may or may not have happened, depending on whether one thinks it was great enough.  I was there.  In the seventies, Billy Graham cruised around the country, blessing presidents and preaching in great gatherings of sinners.  Even in the church I belonged to, the Lutherans, we were nudged into goofy, straight-laced imitations of zeal and conversion.  It was like trying to teach elephants to dance.  Elephants can be taught to sing, "A Mighty Fortress", but they cannot dance.


Maybe the latest religious awakening really didn't happen in the seventies.  Maybe it has been stretched into now.  Look at the Tea Party!  Somewhere in that revival movement, there are chants about God and Bless America and Damn the heathen who have lost their way.  Not all Tea Party people are religious, but the movement clearly behaves as if religion and politics belong in bed together, and that the religion isn't just any, old religious impulse, but a kind of simple-minded, fundamentalist one.  Right wing Catholics can follow along, if they wish, but they aren't the real thing, and Mormons are kidding themselves, aren't they?  


Oddly, or perhaps understandably, Muslims have been having their own fundamentalist revivals.  They have lined up, with Sunnis over here, and Shiites over there, and perhaps Indonesians off in the distance.  Fundamentalist Muslims have been as zealous to climb into bed with politicians as fundamentalist Christians have.  They all sing war songs, and call on God to lead them to victory.  They learn to sing, "God is great!", and shoot guns into the air, but they can't dance.


It is obviously retrogressive.  The strains of racism are obvious; even embarrassing.  Michele Bachmann says men should be heads of the household, and Rick Perry says he is a man.  Science (what we know) is cursed, and fine, old myths are recited.  People gather around sacred rocks, and hang big religious ornaments around their necks, and have, "For Mom and Country" tattooed on their bellies.  


"Get me a gun!  This is a war!  God bless America, or Syria, or Somebody!"


These revivals never last.  We get over it.  Even in the Middle East, there is talk of an Arab spring, after the fundamentalists are through chanting and shooting.  


I hope that what we are seeing here, politically, is just about enough, too.  No nation can achieve its possibilities by dividing the true believers from their neighbors.  It is insane to pretend that what we know, scientifically, is not so.  Racism is ugly, and stupid.  Great nations need great government, not an irrelevant government.  


There is a strange silence, right now.  We have marched ourselves right up to the brink.  Let us hope that chanting mindless slogans, and trying to teach elephants to dance, does not cause incurable stupidity.  


Enough is enough!  It is time to use our heads, and not our tent revival slogans.  

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