A Strikingly Accurate Comment and an Implied Question from Dr. Boyce Watkins — Who Are We Now? — Using Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich to Symbolize Mistaken Spiritual Directions

09 December 2011

Does gluttony explain our state of affairs?

Boyce Watkins, a professor at Syracuse, wrote something eloquent and strikingly accurate yesterday:

In many ways, Newt Gingrich is the perfect Republican candidate:

He lives in a world where it’s easier to be a hypocrite presenting a fantasy of perfection than it is to be an imperfect man who presents himself as a genuine and flawed human being.

What’s also interesting about Gringrich is that he is a candid reflection of what we’ve become as a country.

We are a nation that has become so spoiled by wealth, power and insatiable gluttony that we’ve lost any desire to care for our fellow man.

Children dying in poverty aren’t worth an extra 2 percent on our tax bill, and we take no responsibility for untold atrocities being committed by our government and corporations throughout the world.

When spirit rots, what’s happening around us begins

Watkins concluded that our American decline may be due to the “corruption of our core societal values.”

I couldn’t agree more.

And I would add that societal values are founded on personal spiritual ones.

Going an illustrative step beyond Dr. Watkins — the Evangelical Right agrees about spirit, but then reliably spirals off into its own bit deviltry

The Evangelical Right likes to masquerade as having spiritual values. But it tends to get caught up the kinds of blindly unwarranted absolutes that Watkins is implicitly addressing.

For example, Presidential candidate Rick Perry’s recent Iowa television advertisement capably illustrated this characteristically subtle deviltry cocooned in much of the Evangelical Wing’s unthinking hubris:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

You can see Perry’s campaign video here.

“So what’s wrong with what Governor Perry said?”

I’m using Rick Perry’s comment to illustrate how easily we fool ourselves in equating principles that (a) have no connection to each other and (b) are almost certainly not the final answer in spiritual matters.

There is not much that I can say about bigotry against homosexuals that will convince people whose self-regard requires them to be prejudiced against somebody. The inhumanity ensconced in Perry’s anti-gay position is self-evident to people who operate on the mutually supporting spiritual principles of (i) compassion, (ii) soul-to-soul respect, and (iii) spiritual humility.

The more interesting aspect to Perry’s call to religious arms is his profoundly ignorant juxtaposition of two completely disconnected phenomena: (a) homosexuals serving “openly” in the U.S. military with (b) Supreme Court case law that prohibits government-sponsored religion in schools.

The first of these is a civil right. The second is an argument about the necessity of separation between church and state — so as to prevent reoccurrence of the interminable religious warfare that plagued Europe before the Founders wrote the American constitution.

Legally these two principles do not overlap, despite the fact that Perry’s statement implies that they do. His juxtaposition reveals the thoughtlessness that so often characterizes pronouncements from the Religious Right.

Perry has (almost moronically) conflated his anti-gay sentiment with his discomfiture with the separation of church and state.

Though that overlap will make intuitive sense to much of the allegedly Christian Right Wing, it will not to people who can reason. "Allowing" homosexuals to die openly for America is not the same — historically, legally, or rationally — as being concerned that government sponsorship of religion would have an almost certainly immediately destructive impact on our nation’s ability to survive.

The moral? — Bigotry, gluttony, hubris, and stupidity make a deadly mix

In a person or a nation.

PeteFree.com

A Strikingly Accurate Comment and an Implied Question from Dr. Boyce Watkins — Who Are We Now? — Using Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich to Symbolize Mistaken Spiritual Directions