Zealotry is unAmerican

 

I was born in 1961, and in the United States in which I grew up, people were suspicious of extremes. A “zealot” was something you did not want to be, religious or otherwise.

That is why the nation’s turn toward extremism in recent years seems surprising and dismaying.

Especially surprising and alarming is the combination of religious and political zealotry.

I saw an article in The Atlantic recently about the New Apostolic Reformation, “The Army of God Comes out of the Shadows” (February 2025). The subhead states: “Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.”

According to the article, this movement is on “a mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom [of God] as humanity barrels deeper into the End Times.” Anyone opposed to it is, by definition, opposed to God’s will, which makes them a heretic and invalidates their views (and perhaps their rights).

Its members see Donald Trump and MAGA as instruments for bringing about the kingdom. The feeling is mutual, according to the article. Trump (and Elon Musk) see them as instruments to attain their goal: acquiring political power to enrich themselves and avoid time in jail.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and I do not recall anyone saying that Jesus wanted to create the Kingdom of God as a literal government. I certainly never heard that coercing Christian beliefs and behaviors on other people was advisable. Freedom was a core value: people were free to believe or not, and only those who believed were obligated to follow God’s teachings.

However, the New Apostolic Reformation has other ideas and is intent on creating a theocracy: a government based on their particular version of Christianity. The article states the movement seeks “aggressive social and institutional transformation.”

This strikes me as inherently unAmerican. The article cites a study indicating up to 40 percent of American Christians are part of or approve of the New Apostolic Reformation’s goals. That means they have abandoned freedom.

If freedom is out, then so is democracy.

This situation reminds me of “What Is An American?” by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. This is the
title of a famous entry in his book Letters from an American Farmer, which was published in 1782. (I assume historian Heather Cox Richardson alludes to this book with the title of her newsletter, Letters from an American.)

Crevecoeur discussed religious fervor in “What is an American?” The American immigrant experience cooled it, and he found that to be a good thing.

One way America was better than Europe (a major topic for him) was “how the various Christian sects introduced wear out, and how religious indifference becomes prevalent.” He said intense religiosity was the source of conflict and division. See how many wars and oppression it had caused in Europe? He described how in a generation or two after immigrants arrived in the colonies, marriages between people of different denominations were common. What people believed was not the concern of others.

He wrote, “How does it concern the welfare of the country… what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen…. This is the visible character, the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.”

Crevecoeur would be sadly surprised to see religious zeal burning again and to see the return of persecution of those who deviate from the beliefs and behaviors of self-appointed divine rulers – health professionals receiving permission to withhold treatment from others because of religious differences, county clerks refusing to process marriage certificates for people to whose lifestyles they object, books being removed from libraries, etc.

Making another person’s beliefs and lifestyle your business leads to trouble, and Crevecoeur celebrated the tolerance he found in America: “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates….”

I wish that were true again.

Tea Party Time Machine

I have looked in vain on Craigslist for a used Delorean with a working flux capacitor.

I want one so I can take a trip back in time with my libertarian friends, whether they are tea partiers or not.

They talk an awful lot about what the Founding Fathers intended when they created the Constitution of the United States.  They insist the First Dudes wanted a very limited government, and they feel we should have one today.  They want fewer regulations, fewer laws, fewer taxes, fewer fees, fewer government agencies, etc.

I want Dr. Emmett Brown's time machine so I can acquaint them with the world in which Jefferson, Franklin, and others lived and to which the Constitution was a response.

Back to the Future III

But since Doc is still living in the Wild West with Clara Clayton, I will need to rely upon the words of someone who lived through the Revolutionary era, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.  He wrote a popular book in 1782, Letters from an American Farmer, and in it is a famous essay, "What Is an American." In the essay, Crevecoeur waxes poetic about the differences between Europe and America:

It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have nothing.  There are no aristocratical families, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury.  The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.

Crevecoeur

Things have changed, haven't they?  The rich and the poor are quite removed from each other today.  According to figures from 2007, 10 percent of Americans own nearly 70 percent of the nation's wealth -- and the top 1 percent own nearly 34 percent.  The bottom half of the population?  It owns 2.5 percent of the nation's wealth.  I think half of the nation constitutes a "herd," don't you?  And 2.5 percent comes pretty close to "nothing."

The Constitution was written to restrain two sources of power that were prone to abuse, at least in the eyes of Jefferson & Company: the government and the church.  The British government had operated frequently through patronage (who you know, not what you know) and for its own benefit rather than for the people, and it had little accountability to its citizens.  The church was wealthy and influential since it had been closely integrated with the government.

But in the time since Washington grinned through wooden teeth, a new source of considerable power arose in the United States, the corporations ("the manufacturers employing thousands").

The framers of the Constitution understood that competing interests in the populace and within government could keep each other in check, but only if their powers were equitable.  How could they have known that corporations would develop to such size and influence, would hold more sway in the Capitol than the nation's citizens?  When Franklin was dangling that key from a kite string in a lightning storm, little could he have imagined something like General Electric -- projected revenues of nearly $142 billion in 2011.  If GE were a nation, it would be the 50th wealthiest country in the world.

Exxon Mobil's estimated revenues of $460 billion this year would rank it 21st among nations, just in front of Sweden.

If there had been institutions of such power and resources in Jefferson's time, I imagine he would have left us with a different Constitution.  And longing for a return to those "good old days" of Crevecoeur's life is a pointless daydream -- unless you can build your own flux capacitor.  In the meantime, corporations are perfectly happy to support the populist drive toward less government, since fewer regulations mean more freedom from accountability toward others and from responsibility for the public good.

Who, other than a strong federal government, would be powerful enough to counter the strength of such corporate giants?

The real problem, I tell my libertarian friends, is not that we have a big government; the problem is the kind of big government we have.  We have one that seems to work harder for corporations than citizens.  Changing that government might help; getting rid of it won't.