As I read the essay Hallowed Be Your Name by Marilynne Robinson where she describes ,as she terms, the anti-Darwinists or neofundamentalist assault on the "holiness of the human person and of humanity" and Chris Hedges chapter outlining the Dominionist's agenda of cultural, religious and political domination I became afraid. My fear stemmed equally from the idea of distortion and restriction on the freedom to love, the destruction of sacred words like liberty and the restructuring of our democratic system to resemble a totalitarian Christian state (where only complete surrender of one's moral discernment and abandonment of "rational and intellectual inquiry" is accepted) and from the simple fact that I can't see them. I can't find these dominionists or tyrannical fundamentalists on the street or in my supermarket. Maybe I should say they have not adopted the swastika or an armband or a certain dress code, yet, that distinguishes them, sets them apart from the "dilettante Christians" and other humans occupying this planet. I don't want to start pointing fingers at whole groups of people, labeling them without knowing who they are, what their motives and beliefs are. Otherwise I become like them, whoever "them" might be. Perhaps this is why we need to be on watch.
It would be much easier if they were like those startlingly malevolent villains in my son's comic books, Doom, Sandman or Venom. They are a known quantity evil with faces, in direct competition with good. Who are the villains outside of this graphic dualistic world? If there is a beast, a villain attempting to dominate our thoughts, our lives and potentially the planet, right in our very midst, I will stand guard to make sure that we don't awaken one day to wonder, too late, what happened to love (the real love for one another and for our enemies), to equality and our own ability to decide between what is right and wrong.
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Kathryn, this is one of the issues I so struggle with -- how to be engaged in respectful dialogue (or at least regarding another with respect) while passionately disagreeing. So often I feel that, whether it comes from the left or from the right, there is a villifying of "the other." It's the same spirit -- just at work from different perspectives. I think of Sojourners, for example, whose social justice causes I almost always find myself in agreement with -- and yet their headlines so often feel ugly to me -- negative, villifying. "The Religious Right" becomes a phrase to identify an enemy -- dehumanize the "other" -- just like "insurgents." People cease to be considered as brothers and sisters in the same world family when they are simply lumped into an enemy camp.
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