Bay
View
As published in Allen’s Bay View column, which appears in The Valley
Falls Vindicator and the Oskaloosa Independent, two Kansas weekly newspapers:
"The last
crusade" / Dec. 30, 2004
"O
beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years." – Katherine Lee
Bates
The freedom craved by those who came on the Mayflower in search of a haven where they could worship freely quickly turned to intolerance for Quakers, Catholics and Jews who followed to the New World for the same purpose. Roger Williams, a Puritan preacher, fled Massachusetts for his very life after saying that "forced worship stinks in God's nostrils;" religious dissenters who followed him to Rhode Island soon bickered and created schisms.
There have long been crusaders and visionaries for good: Clara Barton, Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Mahatma Gandhi, Anwar al Sadat, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter…. William Lloyd Garrison worked tirelessly to abolish slavery, but it took Harriet Beecher Stowe's gripping novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, to catapult the cause into national attention. (Abraham Lincoln told her, "So this is the little lady who started this big [civil] war!") Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony worked tirelessly to allow women the right to vote. It took seven decades of demonstrations amid considerable opposition for the vision to become a reality. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill was a voice crying in the wilderness as he continually warned about the Nazi menace, encouraging the country to prepare for defense, but the British didn’t want to hear.
But there are have also been, and are now, other kinds of crusaders. The first of four great Christian holy wars—"the Crusades"—began when the Vatican wanted more power. As Joan Acocella tells it in "Holy Smoke" (The New Yorker, Dec. 13) Pope Urban II, on a tour of France, "gave a sermon calling on Christians to journey to the East and reclaim the Holy Land. 'A race absolutely alien to God,' he said, was defiling Christian altars, raping Christian women, tying Christian men to posts and using them for archery practice. None of this was true, but it had the desired effect [the First Crusade]." In medieval times, men worried about their soul's damnation for killing, but Urban offered a solution: "He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it was not a sin—indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins. By the Fourth Crusade, participants were guaranteed absolution of all confessed transgressions—in other words, a ticket straight to paradise." En route to Jerusalem, the First Crusade took Antioch, killing "almost everyone, including the resident Christians," and in Jerusalem, "[a]ccording to contemporary accounts, they left not one Muslim alive. The city Jews took refuge in their temple; the Franks barricaded the exits and set the building on fire." Later, the good Christians set themselves upon beautiful Constantinople and sacked it. "So a great, ancient civilization was destroyed," says Acocella, "in the name of God."
Now we are engaged in a holy war; no, not just in Iraq, but here in the U.S.A.! Not since the days of the Massachusetts and Bay colonies (1600s) has there been such a frantic, even desperate, struggle for one kind of religion to have its views dominate every aspect of American life. The well-heeled, well-organized movement that put Ronald Reagan on the throne has worked, slowly and stealthily, to groom political candidates whose professed embrace of God, Jesus and "Christian" moral values has shoed them into office or onto library boards (where they can censor library materials simply by controlling what the librarian orders), school boards (to monkey with science books by trying to get "creationism" into the curricula), and, state legislatures and Congress.
Religious extremists are not in the majority in this country, but—in the name of God—they have managed to get a stranglehold on Congress. Throughout history, those with narrow agendas have shown little respect, tolerance, mercy or understanding for minorities. Those who are enthusiastically endorsing the chipping away of the First Amendment, getting prayer back into schools and legislating morality by denying certain individuals their basic human rights will rue the day they have put certain leaders in power. Even into the 20th century, preachers used the Bible to justify slavery ("Slaves, obey your masters," I Timothy 6:1). Now televangelists use it to justify prejudice against gays and lesbians. What will these people do when science proves, as it assuredly will, that sexual orientation is genetically based? Who will they then choose to demonize in order to fill their coffers?
As I tell my fourth graders, one can have only as much freedom as one is willing to give to others. Those who are interested in choking out human rights for others will find their own human rights being eradicated!
"All truth
goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed.
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident." – Schoepenhouer
As I bid you adieu, I leave you this word from Webster: "fascism: a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized governmental control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism."
© 2004 Allen Gardiner