The changing nature of faith in the United States
I was listening to a religious leader speaking about the decline of faith in American culture. I disagree, Faith is strong in the US, but its focus and practice has changed. Instead of the idyllic spires of countryside churches nostalgia reminding us of that “old time religion,” we have a new vision, “a golden ballroom..” Some Native American religions had beliefs in “shape shifters,” people who could magically transform into animals and birds. Some contemporary Americans have become “faith shifters,” using symbols of wealth as a substitute for spiritual values. Medieval painters used gold paint as background to indicate paradise symbolically, but some sectors of contemporary society has taken gold to mean paradise literally.
How does one reach “the golden paradise”? Being bornonce to a one-percent family helps. Winning a large lottery, having great athletic or theatrical skills can mean being born-again. Increasingly in the US, predestination means if you are born into a onepercenters family, you are destined to live in a heaven of consumption without debt. If you are born of lower financial means, the distance between paradise and the lower earthly regions is increasing. Luck, correct skills, or marketable intelligence makes one more likely to be able to rise to the elect. Like Eve, in Old Testament Genesis, temptation is not just hanging from the nearest apple tree, but dangling everywhere in front of us. Storefront windows, media ads, and online memes promote visions of a golden life, that except for our unworthiness, bad luck, or lack of effort, could be ours. What does it mean to be a member of the golden paradise elite? One can walk down a street and with a simple wave of the magic plastic card, purchase whatever one desires. Desire is at the heart of things. Looking cool or chic (my old timer terminology), having the right luxury car, multiple homes, yachts, private aircraft, and people to satisfy your basic needs are signs of the elect. You can get your children into the best schools, where they meet the right fellow privileged students who will be their web of contacts within the onepercent elect club. As part of the elect, miracle healings are not only performed, but expected, because they can be paid for.
Where do the elect live? One can hardly tell unless one can get through the gated community guards. Great wealth brings great arrogance, but also a measure of fear. Will the masses of others that work, produce, pay taxes, and make the machinery that produces the wealth of the elect remain passive and obedient? The system is full of wealth controlled media saying the system is open. They endlessly repeat the promise, “You can gain admittance to the “golden club!” Casinos tell you that you are a winner by just showing up and playing games, sports betting, buying lottery tickets…you just need “faith” that the golden god of wealth is waiting at the end of your personal rainbow.
Beliefs that the system isn’t rigged, and that honest work and effort are the key to unlimited consumer ecstasy, keep the average people’s protests to a minimum. Yet, unlimited money in politics has opened the government to oligarchic control. The Federalist Society and their libertarian allies have worked hard to limit oversight and regulation over the machinations of the one-percent. Democratic laws that treat all citizens equally, and institutions that are manned by people of virtue and integrity are the enemies of the one percenters. They use their control over mass media to attack and disparage any genuine democratic limits on their power.
Capitalism as religion has its vision of dark forces availed against it. Liberals, with their demand regulatory Capitalism threaten the one-percent materialist heaven. No enforcement of legal limits on large corporate or wealthy one percent actions can be looked on as good. Any effort to organize ordinary people to limit the unions of wealth, large corporations, in their control over the main aspects of society, is evil. Any mention of a social good, above the good of isolated individualism, is threatening. The word “socialism” becomes the image of the golden paradise anti-god, even if very few people know the definition of what socialism is.
We recently saw a tableau of a group of one-percenter apostles at a table with their golden idol in the center, stumbling over themselves to praise their Benefactor. They saw their role as supplicants for favors and benefits befitting billionaire interests. The golden idol smiled at them for the abject debasement before the possibilities of augmenting their billions, into possible trillions, of dollars. Money, after all, is for consuming, but once one cannot possibly consume what one’s money can buy, what is left? Power. Few think of their accumulated wealth as an opportunity to build a more equitable society based on more lasting values than material consumption. It is surprising the degree that materialist philosophical religion has supplanted spiritual religion in the Western world. There is only one thing unlimited accumulation of wealth cannot buy, it is the concept of enough. Heaven is a manifestation of the concept of enough, unless when we get there, we find we have to continue to compete for higher angelic status.
Rick Lohr, formerly of Marathon City, is a retired history teacher and former owner and manager of Pine Valley Golf Course. He has been retired for over 20 years but has given about 650 talks to schools, service groups and senior centers related to the 45 counties he has traveled to.
