By Mark Ashwill
Buffalo, NY – Faith in people, ourselves, our God is a powerful and ennobling force that can sustain us through the darkness days of our lives. Blind faith is the ultimate substitute for reason, intellectual rigor, for asking the tough questions. This insidious strain of holier than thou self-righteousness turns places of worship into exclusive clubs and deludes the self-anointed into believing that they have a monopoly on truth and salvation. When you've got God on your side, how can you go wrong?
Blind faith gives you a pass on learning about and understanding an increasingly complex world, or turning a critic's eye toward one's own shortcomings and failures. Why do they hate us? Because of our freedom!
True believers will follow their faith over the cliff, glazed look in their eyes, smiling all the while as they free fall into oblivion. That would be fine if they did it on their own time and their own dime; the problem is that they're taking the rest of us with them.
True believers have the decisiveness of Charlie Brown's friend, Lucy. If you're going to be wrong, be wrong at the top of your lungs! Who needs facts? They are useful only to the extent that they support your own position and the cause. Don't second guess your decisions, flip flop, or wallow in pointless discussion and debate. Keep your eyes on the prize. Remain loyal at all costs to the cause and to those who carry the torch.
As political pundits and observers much wiser than I have noted, a war is being waged in this country between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers. In the sharply divided America of late 2004, many evangelical Christians who claim credit for the President's reelection sincerely believe they have a representative of Jesus Christ in the Oval Office. This soldier for Christ governs by gut instinct, intuition, faith. Just trust me and get on board because, like our enemies, if you're not with me, you're against me.
Bruce Bartlett, domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for Bush I, had this to say about the President: "I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. ...He understands them, because he's just like them... This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis." It is what prompted former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, a stalwart Republican, to refer to Bush as a "blind man in a room full of deaf people."
This venomous and volatile brew of blind faith that mixes evangelical Christianity, ethnocentrism and a neoconservative vision of American global leadership is leading America over the precipice. Whenever I hear that freedom is on the march!, I can almost feel the burn of Napalm, hear the bombs falling, feel the ra-ta-tat of automatic weapons fire, and see the blood. The Vietnam War was a Cold War era debacle and national disgrace, the invasion and occupation of Iraq a neoconservative travesty and quagmire. Then, there's the rather large Islamic republic sitting on Iraq's eastern border, which rejoiced when our government did it the favor of destroying its mortal enemy.
I wonder and worry what the next four years will bring for the U.S. and the rest of the world. Our country is overextended, deeply in debt, with mounting problems at home and the gap between reality and its ideals widening daily. Crimes committed in the name of the American people proliferate. Hatred toward America is at a fever pitch and, breaking news!, it's not because we're "free." This is Mark Ashwill.
Dr. Ashwill is an administrator, instructor and Fulbright adviser UB.