The Second Reformation

                If you’re watching the stream of events coming out the Trump administration and wondering how Republicans can tolerate Trump’s rampant disregard of political protocols and legal restraints, I bet you’re waiting for the first Republican to stand up and uphold the law.  It won’t happen.  What we’re watching is not a political party operating within the boundaries of the institutions and laws we’ve grown accustomed to; what we’re watching is a religious cult.  Like any cult, the Republicans no longer participate in the ‘real’ world, opting instead for an internally manufactured reality that pits them against the world of non-believers.  That means that the real religious wars facing us don’t involve Islam or any other religion, the real religious war on the horizon is the same one that we thought we settled in the 17^th century.  We’re in the middle of a second reformation.

                Sometimes this is very clear.  Listen to Bannon and his version of the coming apocalypse.  He openly talks about a conflict of civilization involving Islam, but the conflict goes deeper than that.  He includes secular institutions such as the government and the press as forces that must be defeated.  Like other neo-cons, he is comfortable with the idea that this conflict could be the final conflict.  They don’t flinch from including nuclear holocaust as an option.  If those of us who are appalled by Trump think that this is just a phase that Republicans are going through, one that they will surely come out of when they regain their sanity, I think we’ve missed the signs.

                Trump is merely the most extreme version in a line of spectacularly unqualified Republican presidents that started with Reagan (you have to give old man Bush a pass).  All of them appealed to a white base that felt persecuted because of their race and religion, and all of them promised to return to a ‘true’ version of America that had been debased by women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, academic egg heads and any other offending group they could imagine.  To these folks, Hillary wasn’t just a politician they disagreed with, she was a witch.  They have increasingly pursued ‘scorched earth’ policies that completely disregard the fact that at least half of the country disagrees with them.  They brush aside any attempt at compromise as weak and not worth of their God’s approval.  They see their political opponents as agents of the Devil.

                In the 17^th century Europe emerged from the Reformation using the combination of the Peace of Westphalia and the growing movement of the New Science.  People like Bacon, Newton and Locke used the New Science not just to change the way we thought of the physical world but the moral world as well.  Unfortunately, that underlying conflict, while temporarily suppressed, was never really resolved.  It often replaced one religious truth with one scientific proof, and while science and reason seemed to rule the day, a parallel set of truths was always in sight.  Today, the ‘Christian Right’ at the center of Republican politics has flipped the order.  They openly defy science and routinely make a mockery out of ‘reason.’  Their goal is to purge society of the other.  They have no interest in a sane, orderly or diverse world. 

                The consequences could be pretty ugly.  In the six months that followed some German princes saving Luther from certain death at the hands of the Roman Church and kick starting the Reformation, 500,000 people died.  Probably all of them will killed by someone they knew and thought of as their neighbor.  This is not a conflict that will be resolved by what we used to call ‘politics.’ 

                Maybe we will continue this dance edging closer to some cultural civil war and then backing away a little before edging closer again.  Maybe we can break down these barriers.  Invite a Republican over, feed them some chili dogs, play the Beach Boys and let them watch reruns of ‘Lassie’ until they come out of it.  Maybe some outside threat will drive us back together again.  Maybe UFOs will land in Times Square or we’ll find out after she dies that Queen Elizabeth was an alien.  Maybe not.  What I do know is that the alternative is no picnic.