The Rise of Piety

In the run up to the election, BBC News was running a report from Florida, in which the reporter was interviewing a group of Vietnam Veterans to find out which way they were likely to vote. Perhaps not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of them claimed their strong support for George W Bush. He is, it seems, a Soldier’s President. In fact, one of the men there was wearing a T Shirt claiming, “Osama would vote for Kerry”.

It has been said that the re-election of George W Bush was brought about by a desire to return to Christian family values rather than because of any deep-rooted fears of potential terrorist attack from Al Qaeda. Indeed, if we are to believe the commentators, Americans are far more worried about the erosion of morality than the threat of another 9/11. Is it logical to assume that a nation at war would be more concerned with the behaviour of its own citizens than the conflict across the seas? Is such a move a sign that the American people have had enough of the climate of fear, and would rather stop the fighting and return to some sort of normality? And where does this leave the population on this side of the Atlantic? Is it right to assume that the rise of the Moral Majority could not be repeated here? Or are we all heading for a new dawn of fundamentalism in which totalitarian states and authoritarian churches wield absolute power?

When Osama Bin-Laden released his message to the people of America just a few days before election, I knew then that George W Bush and the Republicans would take the Whitehouse by a convincing margin. It would have been unthinkable that any other outcome could have been possible. Can you imagine if Adolf Hitler had taken to the radio to warn the British people not to elect Winston Churchill? What would they have done? As soon as Osama opened his mouth the fate of the Democrats was sealed. It was blatantly obvious that there would be a backlash against his words. There would simply have to be a show of defiance against such an address. Even if he had stood up in front of the cameras and talked about how much he hated Mickey Mouse, the very fact that he was alive and well would have motivated people in droves to elect a “strong” wartime President.

We only have to look at the attempts by the Guardian to influence marginal voters in Ohio to see the sort of backlash that this sort of action can cause. The idea had been that guardian readers should target undecided voters with their sincere and well meaning letters as to why they ought to be voting for John Kerry, but the presumption upset the whole country, and backfired so spectacularly that votes in Clark County swung far more in favour of George Bush than in neighbouring counties. Here are just a few of many such replies, and remember that these were directed at citizens of a supposedly allied nation. Multiply this reaction by a factor of several million and you might come close to how Bin Laden's message was welcomed:

"You radical leftwingers are worse than the Taliban. I suggest you stand back and take a good hard look at yourselves."

"Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys"

But it’s not a simple matter of defiance. The fact that Osama Bin Laden made that statement at a time when the Republicans most needed to raise everybody’s awareness to the dangers of Islamic fundamentalists should ring alarm bells with everyone who has the ability to think clearly. The message was designed to provoke fear in a population who were being asked to make a choice about who would make the best choice for a wartime President. Since the election could not have possibly swung in favour of John Kerry, who (according to the opinion poles) was perceived as less likely to take a tough stand, I have to ask what on earth Bin Laden’s motives were.

Working on the assumption that the man is not a complete idiot, I must assume that Bin Laden knew what effect that his words would have. I’ve bashed this idea around for weeks, but can only come up with two possible explanations.

1 – Osama Bin Laden is working with, or working for, the George W Bush administration.

2 – Osama Bin Laden wants the George W Bush administration re-elected and has attempted to ensure they will win.

I’m going to discount the first theory for the time being. The idea that Osama is holed up in a CIA hotel somewhere, making videos on demand is too ludicrous to take seriously. I can’t believe that he was working n behalf of the government when he helped fund the 9/11 hijackers, and I’m sure the CIA would have wheeled him out for a photocall by now if they had him.

I hate to use “either or” logic, but the fact that the first theory is unusable only leaves theory number two (Unless there’s another idea that I’ve overlooked. Please feel free to bring this to my attention as I genuinely have no idea what it could be).

So. Here it is: The reason that Osama Bin Laden made the tape is because he wants the George W Bush administration re-elected.

That’s easy for me to say. An argument like that is easy to make but difficult to back up. What possible reason would Osama have to want his principal enemy to remain in power?

Well, we simply have to look at the evidence. The Bush administration has invaded Afghanistan, just as it was expected to after the 9/11 incident. But Bush also invaded Iraq, which was a secular country ruled by a dictator who happily sent people to jail for wearing Islamic symbols in public. Now that the Arab media has a constant supply of stories about how the Infidel has subjugated and brutalised their devout people, extremists like Bin Laden are reaping the rewards in terms of a constant supply of young initiates ready to flock into Iraq and take up the fight in the name of Allah and Jihad.

American foreign policy is making killers and martyrs out of hundreds of people who would have been happy to wear David Beckham T shirts just a couple of years ago. Every time a single civilian death occurs in a military operation, the entire extended family of the victim transforms into an enemy of the west. Every time the Arab media show a burnt down mosque, or a photograph of naked prisoners in jail, the fury of the Arabians becomes more polarized and the stream of wannabe warriors becomes a flood.

Similarly, American forces are vulnerable and a convenient target while ever they are tied up in Iraq. Why go to the trouble of sponsoring a suicide bomber to blow himself up in Times Square when you can sponsor a dozen such operations in Baghdad?

Islamic fundamentalists are not interested in peace. They are interested only in the extermination of those who do not share their views and their own eternal salvation for doing such work. This is why insurgents are doing everything they can to make sure the puppet government of Iraq cannot deliver (killing locals who wish to join the police, kidnapping aid workers, bombing the UN offices, etc) and it is also why they would much rather see an administration that is showing no signs of faltering in its willingness to engage in battle. What fundamentalists such as Bin Laden fear more than anything is a complacent docility overtaking the Arab world, with the new generation admiring and envying the lifestyle and excesses of the west. While ever they can keep Uncle Sam sufficiently riled so that all he will display are his sharp teeth, the chances of him seducing their children with soft words and coca cola are minimal.

This strategy also accounts for the lack of further terrorist incidents in the USA last year. Although a good deal of this is probably down to the diligence and even the xenophobia of the security services, it is worth mentioning that Bin Laden wouldn’t want to undermine the American Public’s confidence in Bush to protect them in an election year, and so it’s fair to expect that if he’d been approached by individuals or groups who had been planning such an attack, he would have advised them to wait for a more opportune moment.

So what does this have to do with the fact that George W Bush was elected due to a “desire to return to Christian family values rather than because of any deep-rooted fears of potential terrorist attack from Al Qaeda”?

To answer that question, we need to look at Ireland in the seventeenth century.

The Protestant way of life was always rather less about fun and more about work. (See my previous article Standing Up for Blighty for more on the Protestant Work Ethic.) By contrast, life in many Catholic countries has always been much lighter and more about enjoying life to the full. Despite their rather harsh stand on certain issues such as divorce and contraception, the Roman Catholic Church has never had much of a problem with the “wine, women and song” philosophy of the Italians, and the playful vibrancy of the Spanish. As the Catholic theologian Michael Novak wrote in "The Joy of Sports," "The spirit of play is Catholic; the spirit of work is Protestant."


(appeared in Punch, April 25 1845)

Compare this playful and relaxed model with the piety of many Irish Catholics and it doesn’t take long to see that something has gone very wrong. The occupation by the British and the seizure of land by wealthy English nobles and merchants left many native Irish without farms, votes or money. The mistreatment of Irish Catholics by their Protestant neighbours is still a sore wound for millions of their descendants, who claim that the loss of life amounts to a deliberate and systematic case of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, there are claims that even at the height of the potato famine, food was still being removed from Ireland by the British Army on an industrial scale.

In cases such as this, it is important for those oppressed to be able to salvage not just enough food to live on, but also a degree of dignity to keep the spark of humanity alive within them. When open defiance becomes impossible against such an overwhelming force of arms, then other, subtler forms of rebellion take their place. In the case of the Irish, the rise in piety was a logical reaction to what they saw as a drunken, lecherous and Godless bunch of tyrants. The peasants may not have had much, but their poverty made them far more likely to receive their reward in heaven than the greedy English landlords. The Catholic Church became a focal point for the prayers of the great unwashed, and the zeal of the downtrodden became so engrained in the Celtic way of life that it endured long after the famine and the occupation were consigned to the history books.

Being a great lover of science, one of the first things I took to my heart was the Newtonian theory that for every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. So it is that Irish Anglicans also began to feel oppressed by sheer weight of the conviction of their neighbours. Yet again, oppression and adversity created an inflated need for piety, until the churches on both sides of the theological divide in Ireland had very little in common with the relatively liberal organisations that had originally fostered them.

Which brings us a little further to the real reason for the Republican’s Election victory.

For the American people, religion has always been important. The whole country is founded on the fact that Colonial settlers arrived there in search of religious freedom. In the New World, individuals and groups of different faiths were tolerated and encouraged to worship God as they saw fit. But two very important factors changed this from a very early time.

The first of these factors was a desire to be rid of the Hegemony. There was still a deep seated dislike for the European dictators who so many had taken to the seas to avoid. It was clear from the start that if the people of the New World were to prosper and develop spiritually, this could not involve ties with existing churches. As the Spanish were discovering, having the support of the church back home was all very well, but the founding Bishops had expensive tastes, and seemed far more interested in stocking up on gold than taking lists of congregations. The war of independence brought about not just political freedom, but also a large degree of religious autonomy for the fledgling nation.

But this new independence was a mixed blessing, and when combined with the second factor; distance between settlements and isolation of communities, churches became more insular and localised. Free of authority and common practise, sermons became more superstitious, and communities became more cult-driven. Congregations knitted together more tightly and developed their own laws and practises, giving rise to communities which cut themselves off from the rest of the world, or embarked on frenzied witch crazes such as those in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, where a mob killed an accused witch outside the very hall where the Framers where drafting what would become the Constitution.

The religious practises of the USA might have remained a matter of personal choice for eternity, where it not for one man.


("We are all perfectly happy")

Stalin’s Russia had suffered far more greatly than the other allies in the Second World War. Official figures put total Russian deaths at twenty million. Compared with just over five hundred thousand for the British Empire and four hundred thousand for the USA. Stalin was not about to let the German nation rebuild itself. He expected the German people to pay a heavy price for their crimes, and since our combined losses didn’t amount to a twentieth of his, he had no intention of letting us dictate the peace.

It’s hardly surprising then, that America came to see Communism as the next big threat. Stalin’s brutal regime was just about as far removed from the American Dream as it was possible to get. Stalin was a dictator, blind to the suffering of his people. His death in 1953 made way for the appointment of Nikita “We Will Bury You” Khrushchev, and with the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, America had a very good reason to be worried.

Stalin’s effect didn’t only change the course of European and Russian history. It also shaped the American way of life, and with it, the rise of the American Far Right.

In 1950, Joseph McCarthy led what have become known as America’s second series of Witch Trials. This time, it was not isolation and ignorance that brought them about, but an innate fear that communist agents were infiltrating every aspect of American life. There were supposedly agents in all aspects of public life, quietly watching and waiting for an opportunity to subvert and brainwash the weak and the vulnerable. The House of Un-American Activities Committee was set up to root out members of the American Communist Party, and soon, communists were being accused and found where ever they were looked for.


Reds in the Greenhouse – Small town America takes on the Commies in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1954)

A nation which was still very much in control of its own sovereignty began to feel very much under threat from this hidden menace. Much of the fiction of the time revolved around this insidious threat. Children of the Duck and Cover generation grew up thinking Communist was just another word for the bogeyman. Using history as a guide, it’s not difficult to see why the American nation moved on mass (if you’ll excuse the pun) into the churches.

This was a nation Under God, and the Communists were trying to take that away from them. To be American meant different things to different people, but in the resurgence of patriotism that the Cold War brought with it, the one thing that was clear was the fact that good Americans were Christians, as this extract from a letter sent by the KKK to the HUAC illustrates:

“Every true American, and that includes every Klansman, is behind you and your committee in its effort to turn the country back to the honest, freedom-loving, God-fearing American to whom it belongs.”

What has always been important to the Fundamentalist Christian, is not the behaviour of their own congregation. Those who worship in the church and contribute to the coffers on a regular basis are rarely taken to task on their conduct outside the church. What really matters is that its members all profess a belief in the Lord God and (most importantly) a deep seated loathing of anyone who would oppose them.

So, now that we face yet another non-Christian threat, I think it’s only logical that we should see a fresh resurgence in the fundamentalist churches. The American way is demonstrative. Children pledge allegiance to their flag every day in school. Islamic citizens are expected to hang the Stars and Stripes from their homes to show their true loyalty, and even those too drunk to see straight are expected to stand for The Star Spangled Banner. The American Way dictates that attendance in church is more important than a love of God, and that loving your country is more important than loving your neighbour.

Just like the old days, it’s the rural communities who feel the most threatened. In small, rural towns, many people spend days in the company of just a few close friends, so it’s unlikely that new ideas will travel quickly. For the most part, many of the people in such communities live quiet, insular lives, meeting the majority of their neighbours only occasionally, such as on Sunday mornings, when everyone turns up to hear the Preacher speak of salvation.

I’m not accusing all rural people of being backwards. I’m simply stating a fact that anyone who doesn’t regularly mix with a wide spectrum of people is going to develop ideas that are a bit slanted. Put a whole community in isolation and you’ve got the beginnings of a cult.

And now the American people feel threatened like never before. The attack on the World Trade Centre gave the Americans a very nasty taste of what trouble in your own back yard is like, and they now feel more under siege than ever. Stories of Al Qaeda sleeper cells operating in every town have fuelled the media for months. So have tales of last minute raids thwarting armies of Islamic terrorists hell bent on destroying The American Way. Very few of these stories ever seem to have much substance, but they still serve to deepen the suspicion and widen the gap between the two faiths.

So, it doesn’t strike me as odd at all that the Bush administration should have returned to power after playing the God card. There are five million people in America who sincerely believe that the end times are upon us and that they will be abandoning the likes of me as they are swept up in the Rapture that is just around the corner. With only a few thousand votes deciding the winner of the Presidential election, coaxing their vote was a very smart move indeed. Failing that, all Dubya had to say was that the Democrats were going to take everybody’s guns away.

So where does that leave the British on May the 5th? I’ll come back to this closer to the time, but I’d like to bet that if the Conservatives try to play the Family Values card in the same way they’ll end up behind UKIP.