The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory

It's a good book about people who drink the tainted Kool-Aid of radicalized Christian extremism. Unfortunately it's written by someone also drinking the Kool-Aid, if from a less tainted batch. We just call such a person a Christian. In other words, the problem Alberta is trying to dissect and solve from within Christianity is, in my opinion, a problem inherent in religious belief, only solvable from without. Religion is defined by faith and faith is defined by a belief in something for which there is no basis for that belief. The rest of us call that delusion, and the delusion of Bible-thumping, mouth-frothing Trump supporters is different from run of the mill religious delusion only in degree and not in kind. The notion that people are going to believe they possess the unerring word of God and not eventually fall into an egoic craziness, a trance which leads inexorably to places like Jan. 6 — that notion is itself a delusion. We can roll back time, scanning history, and see example after example of just this sort of thing playing out. When the religious say that absence of proof is not proof of absence (something which is true in a general sense but unhelpful for finding truth) they are opening the door for behavior based not on intelligence and logic, but on hope, a need to feel safe and taken care of (‘saved' in the language of the evangelicals). Nothing is more uncomfortable for a societal animal to continually take illogical action when the group does not support that action. And nothing is more uncomfortable for a group taking such action when the society it's part of doesn't support that action. This is the place we find ourselves and it's the reason that the Religious Right is now so desperately interfering in what is correctly secular politics. To highjack a phrase (somewhat ironically) from David Mamet: they are attempting to correct for a raging internal imbalance. (In the original Mamet was referring to writers, also at the best of times not the sanest lot. But that's a different book, a different review.) ‘Cognitive dissonance' is the general psychological term for all of this. Those suffering will stop at nothing to right the balance. It really is a dissonance of belief. They believe that their actions are logical, and yet they ‘believe' this other thing which is inherently illogical and leads to illogical actions. What's more, they're being reminded of it constantly by the society they live in, either explicitly or by comparison.

This is a book worth reading if you are capable of separating the author's own faith out of the larger story he's telling, the story of the modern extreme radicalization and politicization of Christianity. It is a mistake, however, to think that American Christianity was somehow sane and healthy before this modern variant began to take hold. The core belief system is unstable and unhealthy at the core.

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory is an example of books that need to be written. (They need to be read as well, but the functional illiteracy of the American public is beyond the scope of things being discussed here.) These books need to be written from without, though. With Albert I fear we have a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Secularism needs to take a serious look at the accumulative power of the religious in our modern, secular, pluralist society. Secularism then needs to take steps to corral and diminish that power until it no longer poses the threat that it currently does.