Day 1 An Important Conversation

A Lenten Blog, 2017

Day 1 An Important Conversation

I’ve decided to write a Lenten Blog again. 

I last did one 2 years ago in India. That situation seems now to be so much more exotic than this. Yet the cluster of issues that have developed over the past 2 years make the communication of ideas all the more important even than they were in India 2 years ago. There and then I took up environmental issues, which was my reason for being in India, and reflected upon aspects of Indian culture and life that I thought might be interesting both for Australians and for Indians reading the reflections of a sympathetic foreigner.

Here and now? Well, my city of Sydney, and my state of New South Wales have just lived through a summer whose average daily maximum temperature was well over 2 degrees Celsius greater than the previous record. That is huge, and is only one metric that indicates that climate change is well and truly upon us.

Even more distressing is that pyromaniacs seem to be taking control of the ammunition depot. Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, 600,000 One Nation voters in Queensland, reclusive, deeply conservative billionaires funding the rise of the alt.-right, climate denial, white supremicism, misogyny, attacks on the free press, amongst other values that I thought were disappearing after Nazism and World War II. Have we gone mad? Why are we letting them do it?

A more biblical image might help to answer that. It comes from johnpavlovitz.com via Facebook. Pavlovitz reckons that white American Christians have let the wolves in. By this he means that American evangelical Christians in particular have become so allied to the Republican Party, which itself has swung so far to the political Right that extremists belonging to the “Alt Right” have achieved real power in the United States. 

The values of these Alt Rightists, some of which I have listed above, have little in common with orthodox or, for that matter, Orthodox(!) Christianity. So Pavlovitz has picked up on one of Jesus’ images. Evangelical Christians, who should be like Jesus’ undershepherds, protecting society from those who would destroy it as a shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. Instead, some conservative Christians are behaving like wolves themselves, and others are acquiescing with that behaviour. If you want more detail on this argument, for I realise that it is controversial, I refer you to “In Defense of Christian Faith and a Democratic Future: On the Trump Presidency From Members of the Princeton Seminary Faculty”. 

Evidence is now emerging that it is not only Russia that has been meddling via the internet in US politics and in deeply un-Christian ways. Conservatives themselves have learnt to collect data on hundreds of millions of people via unmanned computer programs, and to sway the public’s perceptions by swinging thousands of websites into action at strategic moments in a political campaign. This in addition to more traditional means of corrupting politics: outspending one’s opponent, and gerrymandering such that votes are far from being of equal value. To say nothing of widespread efforts to hinder and prevent the young, non-whites and those of lower socio-economic status from being able to vote at all.

But this lupine phenomenon is not confined to the US, unique though that country is. Feeding on fear of Islam and widespread dissatisfaction with their ruling classes, and motivated by their own perception of disenfranchisement prompted by influxes of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, extreme right wingers are also making their presence increasingly felt in the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia and other countries. 

All my life I have assumed the reasonability of the electorate in my country, Australia, at least. Along with others, and influenced by the common perception that this Australian prime minister was incompetent I sang “Billy McMahon was a bullfrog”. I sensed a new optimism when Gough Whitlam came to power, and raged when he was deposed by the governor general. But I assumed that I could at least have a civil discussion around the barbecue with those who interpreted those events differently from me. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 I was confident that a new era of democracy was dawning.

But now I worry, and grieve. Totalitarianism, it seems, is more tenacious than we had thought. And if that is not serious enough, if the would be “masters of our political and financial universe” get their way this corner of the physical universe will become less and less liveable, even in the gated communities to which the uber rich are already retreating.

This, I think, is a set of issues worthy of our urgent pray this Lent.

David Reichardt