KAGIN'S COLUMN

ON TRADITIONAL FAMILY VALUES

Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire when this greatest of civilizations collapsed. I am not so historically naive as to ascribe the disintegration of Greco-Roman culture to the rise of this aggressive new supernatural world view. But the new faith was a symptom of the illness. Reason in problem solving yielded to reliance, through faith, on mystic resolution of all mortal cares after the believer was dead. "Odor of blood where Christ was slain, made all Platonic tolerance vain, and vain all Doric discipline" (William Butler Yeats).

This pall on the human mind extended throughout most of the Western, and some of the Eastern, world through a thousand year plus period appropriately called the "Dark Ages." Rediscovery of scientific methods of inquiry, all but repressed to extinction by the Church, led to space travel, VCRs, computers -- to the technology that keeps us more comfortable than our ancestors who studied sacred scrolls by lamplight. The Church resisted, with fire and sword, every attempt to advance beyond superstitions of postmortem bliss. The Church had the legal power to murder anyone who challenged the belief system. Dissection of the human body to gain useful knowledge, denying a geocentric universe, or advocation any proof or logical argument contrary to officially revealed truth could result in torture, imprisonment, or cruel death.

The faith subdivided or schismed many times, as it still does. Rival dogmas, each held to be inerrant, warred with and repressed one another as they do today in Ireland. Certain ultra-Fundamentalists, known as Puritans, frustrated by having been dislodged from their authoritarian religious control of Parliament, left England and set up a temporary religious theocracy in the New World, our America. Wise humanists, like Thomas Jefferson, saw the danger of religious laws such as the one in the Virginia colony that made it a crime not to go to the right church. The First Amendment was appended to the Constitution of the United States. It says in part -- the first words of the Bill of Rights -- "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or the free exercise thereof...." This humanist proscription has worked, with mixed results, for over two hundred years. God is not mentioned once in our Constitution.

The United States Supreme Court, the body constitutionally empowered to interpret our Constitution and its amendments, has gradually, often reluctantly, insulated non-believers from the tyranny of the self-proclaimed "saved." Religion may not force itself on free people by requiring prayer in public schools, by demanding religious affirmations as qualification for public office, by deciding how and with whom citizens may have sex, or by telling women when to reproduce. Christian fundamentalists, freed to the restraints of law, would happily impose upon this free land repressive laws circumscribing our bodies and our minds, establishing their rules for sexual energy they fear, and limiting science to proving myths free inquiry and evidence have rejected.

Christian fundamentalism flourished in the last days of Rome, as it did during the rise of the Third Reich, because people sought mystical answers to complex problems of social disintegration. A quick fix was sought, and sky pilots persuaded disoriented populations to adopt morally depraved solutions flowing from an ethical base rooted in reliance on divine private revelations to dysfunctional or psychotic religious and secular leaders whose offices were too often indistinguishable. Central to religious tyranny is the conviction that all human thought other than the accepted belief system is either redundant or wrong. With pious impunity, sanctioned by the state they controlled, fundamentalists burned the library of Alexandria, exterminated nonbelievers, and through Holy conquest, spread their injustices throughout the world, destroying indigenous peoples they sought to save. The spiritual descendants of the Puritans have rooted in the heart of America and, like cancer, subvert the spirit of democracy and inquiry that have made us a great nation.

The terror threatens to rise again. Styling their campaign a quest for a return to "traditional family values," Christian fundamentalists are trying to gain control of the laws, bodies, schools, behavior and thoughts of America. It is dangerous, it is frightening, and it must be stopped. We must seek not to outlaw their myths but to stop them from making those beliefs law universal and making criminals of disbelievers.

Through painful evolution (a concept fundamentalists deny) we have made progress in protecting the promise of separation of church and state established by our founders. Those who do not accept this precept are not good Americans, despite their assertions that the irreligious are traitors. We can continue to make new bottles for new wine, or we can regress and be trapped forever in cultural childhood, slaves to ancient myths, doomed to infantile fantasy and fear.

When some obnoxious ignoramus opines on the virtues of "traditional family values," ask why the most Christian nation on earth is also the most violent and crime infested. Question if John Wayne getting drunk and imposing his way with fists and guns on others is really the way our children should go. Question why every fertilized egg should become a child, all too often to be shamefully ignored after birth. Should the racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic views of our ancestors that have caused our problems necessarily control our approach to new moral dilemmas and definitions?

It cannot be denied that many Christians are people of good will and sound morals. Nor should it be forgotten that certain individual Christians have done great works of humanity and compassion, creating centers of learning, advancing medical knowledge, and tempering and humanizing the destruction wrought by other Christians through conquest, slavery, and greed. These Christians, however, generally accept advances in knowledge, tolerate dissent, and do not attempt to make God and government one.

By contrast, the Fundamentalist's idea of "traditional family values" is a father, a non-working mother, and children living for God and church, believing the Bible is infallible revealed truth, tolerating sex only for procreation, and pitying and punishing those poor damned souls who disagree with them. Because of the correctness and infallibility of their beliefs, these beliefs should be made law. And that is what they mean by "traditional family values." Their laws would require public prayer, ban teaching of evolution in favor of creationism, make sexual lifestyles different from theirs criminal, make women criminals for forbidden reproductive choices, permit physical and emotional abuse of children, decide what art, literature, music, and movies are morally correct for remaining legal, and insure only true believers gain public elective or judicial office.

The dark ages can come again. But they don't have to. We can fight back. The same First Amendment that gives us freedom of, and from, religion also gives me (for the moment) the freedom to write this article and to close with this little observation on the evil and hypocrisy that can lurk behind the smirking sneer or the moralist and the gesso of "traditional family values."

A fundamentalist bigot named Keating
Is off to prison for lying and cheating
Expect folks to lie
When their god's in the sky
And watch your wallet while you are retreating.

Edwin Kagin
October 13, 1992

Last updated: 9 January 2005