In The Midst

While I was writing up my eleven-hundred word essay on Bush and his flawed notions of freedom, Mark Shea was doing the same thing from another perspective.

On the other hand, there’s something mighty scary about a population that is supposed to participate in a nation of laws pledging a sort of covenant fealty to one man (which is plainly the tenor of the poster above). We are, it seems to me, a very tired democracy, which is to say, a people ripe for tyranny. God has often looked out for fools, drunks and the United States of America. But we are taking great chances when we pledge allegiance, not to God, nor even to country, but to The One. He seems to me to be cool, deliberate, and thoughtful (overlooking the ideological blinkers with which he is saddled). So I’m not laying awake at night worrying that he is just about to seize the sweeping powers that, well, Bush has seized for him. I don’t anticipate some crazed Hitlerian state. But I do think a people that is this ready to give themselves in idolatry to a pol is a people that is taking a fast road to slavery. We make ourselves slaves before somebody else enslaves us. [Emphasis Added]

The Biggest Disappointment

I’ve been praying for George W. Bush lately as well as Barack Obama. For all my disagreements with both me, for every failure of Bush’s administration, I’ve been praying especially for the soon-to-be-former President, hoping the anger of the last eight years can subside, that he can accept his failures and failures and that his successes will be accepted as successes, and that he won’t have to spend the rest of his life justifying the unjustifiable, trying to rehabilitate his legacy. That is, I believe, almost unavoidable, and yet, I still pray he avoids it. 

I read somewhere, perhaps on TIME.com, that, of all the words used to describe the Bush administration, such as failure, disaster, and whatnot, the best, most accurate, most sensible and honest answer is disappointment. As a president who set up these immense foreign policy goals after 2001, that’s perhaps the best assessment there is.

In November 2000, I was sixteen and a sophomore in high school. I was not yet Catholic, although I was going through the process, and I was in the political thrall of my father. I was therefore fairly conservative, which would make most of my friends laugh today. I listened to Rush Limbaugh and read Sean Hannity and Robert Bork and more or less believed in the whole conservative project, the idea that America was the greatest country the world had ever seen and that it was our duty to spread freedom throughout the world. In this I needed no more confirmation than the Second World War, in which we had crushed tyranny and begun the process by which the world largely democratized. I, like so many, fetishized the word freedom; it was the highest value and greatest good.

During the Republican primaries, I had supported George W. Bush largely because my dad did, and during the general, grew increasingly frustrated with the caricature of Dubya as an imbecile and buffoon, funny as Will Ferrell was. I had certainly hated Clinton, and responded well to the none-too-subtle promise to restore dignity to the White House. I gritted my teeth through the whole Florida debacle, and was gratefully relieved when Bush won. My political conservatism was coupled then with a religious conservatism, a sort of doctrinaire and authoritarian stance I have since abandoned. It’s worth noting, then, that both of them faded around the same time for fairly different reasons.

After September 11, 2001, (which was, coincidentally, a day to which I had been looking forward, as it promised the release of Ben Folds’ first proper solo album, Rockin’ the Suburbs), Bush, to this point a fairly battered president whose most notable acts had been a tax cut and an executive ban on stem cell research, was reinvigorated. Suddenly, he seemed to have a clear idea of why he had become President, and in his public speech, he would occasionally reference God placing him where he was. He concluded that he was there, not to make the world safe for democracy, but to make the world democratic. Perhaps considering the very true reality of the pax democratica, the principle that democracies never make war on each other, he believed that snuffing out tyrants would make the world a more peaceful place, securing the safety of the United States and bringing the world the freedom and prosperity the United States enjoyed. Hubristic? Certainly. But certainly well-intentioned. He began in Afghanistan, and in this, we were largely on board. Afghanistan was the closest thing to a country we could invade and occupy, both in revenge for the attacks and in hopes of catching the perpetrators. Revenge was achieved. Justice was not. A disappointment.

Continuing to consider his role in world history the beginning of the final push of democracy, the President took his war to Iraq. I will go to my grave believing that, yes, the evidence and motive were falsified. Occupied as we were in Afganistan, how could we accept the rationale that Saddam as a tyrant needed to be deposed for no reason other than his tyranny? That tyranny itself was the threat to the United States, without weapons of mass destruction even a factor? He couched it in every term other than the truth — WMDs, the security and stability of Israel and the Middle East, keeping the terrorists occupied in Iraq instead of the US — and managed to pull off the war. I don’t, as so many do, believe that, for him, this was a war of revenge for the assassination attempt on his father; this was simply part of his vision to affect positive change in the world.

The problem with that program for change, though, was that it was built on a lie, on a flawed vision of the human person and the processes of history. For a man whose father presided over the free world during the stuctural and almost entirely non-violent collapse of the Soviet internal and external empires, Bush failed to grasp that war was not the best tool for enacting positive social change. He believes politics drives history and that political world leaders the decision-makers with power to do the most good. He looked at the strength of the United States, by which I mean our unparalleled ability to kill people and blow stuff up, and proposed to the world a profound evil: freedom under the dangeling sword of bunker-buster bombs. Freedom or else, and the United States would make bloody sure of it. Bush was Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, with both peace and death in his hands.

1989, though, should have given a lesson to 2003: culture, not politics or war, is the driving force of history. In Poland and in Czechoslovakia and in Russia and in the Ukraine, people siezed their state from tyrants with barely a shot being fired. Freedom, it seems, is more than civil rights — it is the refusal of oppression. It is impossible to oppress people who simply will not be oppressed. You can kill them, but never can you strip them of their freedom as long as they refuse to give it up. And, when a cowed and frightened people realize the state is not an immutable, eternal entity, that they have their freedom in their own hands, that it isn’t the true expression of themselves or their culture — that state can’t last. It just can’t. In order from people to be free, they must know what freedom is, but above all, they must know who they are and have some sense of what they need to be. Without that, the democratic systems they may have will simply be the tools to erect a new tyrant. What is democracy to people who don’t know how to be free?

This is exactly what happened in Iraq to begin with. This is how they got their tyrant. They had democracy, and it didn’t work. It’s how Germany got Hitler and how France Napoleon. Democratic systems faltered because freedom and democracy don’t go hand in hand. Freedom must always precede it, and once established, can flourish under the harshest totalitarian dictator.

Bush never understood any of this. If he had, he may have been a much better and more successful president, a moral leader capable of using the unprecedented bully pulpit which 9/11 gave him to truly promote authentic freedom, rather than brandishing the might of the world to achieve his aims. That, to me, is the greatest disappointment. Not his wiretapping. Not Katrina. Not even his blatant politicizing of the terrorists attacks and his vague, endless “War on Terror;” no, simply this inability to recognize how the world works, what’s necessary for democracy to work, and his empty confidence in the power of force to change the world.

Practical Ecumenism

When I was young in my Catholicism, I spent the better part of my time on various internet message boards, usually AOL’s Protestant and Catholic board, or another place called Zboard, currently in it’s fourth or fifth iteration (which I now run), debating religion. We would all spend hours and hours discussing the most arcane things, researching proof-texts or some second-century Church Father to back up our point. Ostensibly we were trying to Win Souls for Christ by pointing out the weakness of the other’s position, demonstrating the fallacy of Protestantism or some such. Nothing seemed of more consequence than apologetics work. Nothing seemed worth my time more: not schoolwork, not socializing, not anything. I didn’t do it 24/7, but it did essentially serve as my Time for God; I barely even prayed. 

So I did that for around three-and-a-half years, finally stopping in early 2004, largely as a result of my seeing The Passion of the Christ, which forced me to re-evaluate if this is really what Christ had in mind. The film stripped away two-thousand years of Christian sophistication. Gone were the PowerPoint presentations and movie nights. Gone were the talks from guest speakers. Gone, too, were internet debate boards. For two hours, I was forced to confront Christ in a way I hadn’t before: not as a mere theological abstraction to which we assent, but as a man to be known. It was pretty heavy.

So, not long after that, I more or less swore off debating, and tried to become the Zboard’s voice of reconciliation. Always I strove to end the endless Protestant/Catholic debates as unproductive and destructive, fostering as it did an us-vs-them mentality that I didn’t feel conducive to the community Zboard was rapidly becoming as we all matured. The board’s population had largely joined when we were between fourteen and seventeen, and now many of us were entering college. Surely, I thought, we meant more to each other than simply being sparring partners. It drove me crazy, and I became something of a nag. It was just another way for my arrogance to shine through.

Every now and then, though, I still get dragged into something. Truth be told, there’s still a lot of animosity and hurt feelings bubbling beneath the nice and happy surface. There’s resentment over Catholicism’s attitude toward Protestantism as deficient, that they are somehow lacking in not having the sacraments or a union with the pope. They resent, especially, the pity we tend to feel, the sorrow that they don’t have the fullness of the Church, and can’t countenance the idea that a relationship with God which they feel as fully as any of us is a little emptier for the loss. Beyond theology, beyond liturgy, these are real issues Protestants have with Catholicism that can’t be easily dealt with.

What, though, am I supposed to say to them? I’ve tried to take a tack of honest engagement of differences when these topics come up, to admit that, yes, this is what we believe, and yes, we’re very sorry that you don’t have what we have, and there’s mighty little we can do about that. And they fume, quietly or not. Some of them are dear friends for whom I have a particularly great love, people I’ve known for seven years who will tell me with such hurt in their virtual eyes that this is insulting, demeaning, degrading, that I’ve devalued their experience of God and of the Church by claiming it to be lacking in lacking communion with the Pope and the Holy Eucharist.

From there the questions continue. The sexual ethic of John Paul II, which we Catholics on Zboard universally espouse (I can say that, as there are very few of us), and which was designed as a liberation from a degraded sexual ethic promulgated by our parents’ generation, as a truly human and humanist sexuality the respects women and the body and sees sex as an icon of the Trinity, an image of the interior life of God which contraception degrades in hindering that union, they see as yet another ridiculous mortal sin. “Isn’t it true,” they ask me, “that you believe we’re all going to hell because we use contraception? How can something as small as birth control crush your relationship with God?” And again, they don’t ask me snarkily or hostily, but with hurt, real pain that I could be saying and promoting these ideas. What answer can I give? They understand correctly. But they don’t simply disagree; they are, in fact, pained by the idea.

I have for seven years been a part of this small Christian community on Zboard and for that long been engaging in this sort of practical ecumenism, and I’m honestly not sure how to work this out. It seemed for a while as though we’d reached a fair bit of consensus, a sort of Catholicism-lite that respects biblical scholarship and the dignity of the person and human body, that was socially and politically conscious but certainly aware that politics can’t affect the sort of change we believed necessary. And then the marriages started, and sexual issues beyond simply “How can I avoid masturbation?” began cropping up. And from there, the very idea of mortal sin. And from there, the strained and pained ecclesiology. I’m honestly not sure what to do about any of it but hope and pray.