by
P. Luis Barrios, Church San Romero of
The Americas
Originally published in El Diario, New
York, April 14, 2006
Email : barrios@jjay.cuny.edu
Translated from Spanish by Ernesto Paramo and
revised by Mary Rizzo, members of Tlaxcala (www.tlaxcala.es <http://www.tlaxcala.es> ) the network of
translators for linguistic diversity. This translation is on Copyleft.
Introduction:
In the ideological religious battle that is taking place at the present moment
here in the United States, with the political administration of George W. Bush,
a fundamentalist movement has been morally marketed for the last six years
which declares, in a very clear way, that in this country a Christ-centered
theocracy rules. Therefore, allow me to make it very plain that this matter is
far more serious than it seems at first glance. We need to remember that George
W. Bush was re-elected with 40% of the fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic
vote. Hence, whether we like it or not, religion plays a fundamental role in
American politics.
The theocratic project:
First of all I will have to clarify some terms. The word theocracy stems from
two Greek words. On the one hand we have Qeo (Theos) which means
God and on the other hand we have kra tein (cratein) which means,
the one who governs. In theory, theocracy means a government directed by God.
Nevertheless, in practice it means that a few people organize themselves very
well to take over and control power in the name of God. However, as we all
know, God has nothing to do with this matter and the only thing that has to
happen is that the key words are uttered: “this is the word of God”.
This absurd theocracy here in the United States is identified as
being Christ-centered or a Christocracy, within the fundamentalist evangelical
Protestant context. However it is necessary to recognize the fact that there are also some fundamentalist
Catholic groups that dance to the same tune. So, what does this tune sound
like? They identify themselves for leading an undemocratic campaign on at least
three projects.
On the one hand the immorality of criminalizing and demonizing the reproductive
civil rights of women, including the rights that they ought to have on
decisions concerning abortion. On the other hand, the violation of the civil
rights of gay and lesbian couples to be married. And last but not least, they
sanctify male supremacy and the oppression and subordination of women violating all fundamental civil rights. Curiously,
these matters keep being discussed, debated and decided on the wrong grounds;
as matters of religious morality and not as civil rights issues.
The key moment in which this oppressive and undemocratic project really takes
off is in the year 1989 when the Rev. Pat Robertson, the TV Evangelist founded
what today is known as the Christian Coalition. Which is, actually, not very
Christian at all. This was the point when the Rev. Robertson voiced the idea
that his grassroots movement had as a main objective taking control of the
Republican Party. Unfortunately they have already achieved this objective, and
the also have a presence in the Democratic Party.
Facing this reality, the debate of separating religion and government, has
engaged many progressive people who have mistakenly mounted a campaign against
religion. Unfortunately, this has happened without realizing it or by even
willfully ignoring the fact that just as there are religions that are
tyrannical and are used to crush all hope with the intention of immobilizing
and controlling people, there are also religions which are subversive and
through which hope is awakened and people moved towards their liberation.
Oppressive religions:
From this point on, we need to understand that the debate must be centered on
admitting the fact that it is not possible to separate politics from religion.
What we need to identify now is the type of politics Bush’s religion is tinted
with. Bush’s religion is tinted with the politics of the right, which serve the
interests of the powerful within a neo-liberal project of corporate capitalism.
This is the reason why every day that goes by, the poor become poorer and the
rich carry on getting richer. This scenario reflects the painful reality we
have here in the United States where approximately 80 million people live with
an income that is below the minimum calculated by the Department of Labor. It
was in 2004 whilst in the middle of two genocidal wars conducted by the Bush
government against Afghanistan and Iraq that we were informed that the battalions of the poor had increased to
35.9 million, that is, 1.3 million higher than the previous year. It is
shameful that the ruling classes and the mass media try to ignore the fact that
approximately 12 million people suffer chronic hunger and malnutrition here in
the country that pretends to be the perfect democracy. Reality keeps getting
worse when we are confronted with statistics that tell us that to benefit
health corporations and due to the privatization of medicine, approximately 2
million people a year suffer surgical interventions that were not at all
necessary and that approximately 10,000 of them die because of it. Inside this
capitalist nightmare which is the health corporations, approximately 45 million
people, that is, 15.6 per cent of the population, do not have medical
insurance. On the subject of public health we can also include the shamefully
criminal statistic that one of ten women report to the police that they are
victims of rape and this means that approximately 700,000 women are reported as
victims of rape annually. One every 45 seconds.
In the fanatical religiosity of President Bush and the Rev. Robertson these
issues are not discussed, on the contrary they are justified with a theology of
retribution in which we are punished for our sinful lives or we have to suffer
God’s tests. Hence, the constant calls for personal repentance. This oppressive
theology has been used with much success by the ruling classes here in the United
States –also in Latin America–
as mechanisms of counterintelligence to dismantle revolutionary and/or
progressive movements. It is for this reason that they tend to promote these
TV-Evangelists¹ programs. They have a narcotic message that entrances people
with tales of Christ’s second coming and the rewards of another world. These
are the people who today on Good Friday were preaching of a crucified Jesus who
is irrelevant and irreverent to
human struggles. This is a Jesus presented to us as a museum piece that we must
tenaciously reject. These people live inside their sado-masochistic religious
nostalgia and they lost contact with the reality long ago, they live inside a
sort of mystical schizophrenia.
Within this oppressive religion, observe carefully and you will notice that
there is not a speech of president Bush where the word God, democratic crusade
or divine will is not present. In fact, when he speaks and acts, he projects
himself as if he was a Messiah who has the mission of saving the world, at the
same time as he screws it up with
a neo-liberal capitalism. We can see this Messianism on a global scale in his
rationale to militarily attack Iraq and Afghanistan; the coup d’état in
Haiti; the threats of war against North Korea and Iran; his determination to
deny recognition to the Hamas government in Palestine; the constant hostility
and threats against Cuba and Venezuela; continuing with colonialist policies in
my native Puerto Rico; and justifying the Zionist-genocidal agenda of the
government of Israel; among other atrocities. Or, according with Bush, God gave
him a celestial mission to screw the world. Some imperialist little god this
man has invented!
In the national plane we can observe him in his projects bringing
“Christianity,” from a fundamentalist perspective, not only to
Congress but also to the Supreme Court. At this point I have no doubt
whatsoever, when I accuse him or running a facist-Christian government by
controlling the four powers: the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, the Legislative Branch and the mass media. It is because of this, that up until
now, he has managed to get away with this theocratic project of invasions,
kidnappings, torture, murder and lie after lie. Coming back to the national
arena, it is important to be able to identify the way in which Bush’s
theocratic agenda also interferes with the academic curricula in the introduction of creation as the only option and eliminating
the scientific discussion of evolution, when we educate our children, when they
imposed the use of the Christian Protestant prayer inside school classrooms;
the presentation of abstinence as the only alternative for the prevention of
HIV; when sexual education is pushed back and replaced with safe sexual
practices; pre-matrimonial sexual relations become the work of the devil and
they oppose the programs of risk reduction.
Here we have also the painful reality of some non-governmental organizations in
our communities (NGOs) who have created economic alliances to benefit from the
taxpayers¹ money. These NGOs have made themselves comfortable and raising money
to pay their salaries is their most important reason to exist. This means, that
in a Holy Week like this, they have committed the sin of having sold their dignity and integrity as
they betrayed the people they were supposed to help. Here, I say to any
fanatical religion that does not allow us to think: I condemn it, I curse it
and I reject it.
Liberating religion:
Now then, there are people and groups inside religious activism who are
constructing a resistance movement from below, against what is hegemonic. Here
we present another more hopeful alternative, a religion with progressive
politics from the left, which address the needs of the people, with the people
and for the people. We believe in a world that is here and now, with serious
repercussions to the present and the future. We understand that the resources
created by our Goddess were erroneously distributed and it is our
responsibility to restore justice in all its dimensions. We fully realize that
rich people declared war on poor people; the whites on the blacks; the men on
the women; the heterosexuals on the homosexuals; etc. In other words, we have
created these problems ourselves, we human beings; therefore it is up to us to start
sorting it out. Our Goddess has nothing to do with this matter.
Therefore, it does not seem right to me that the atheistic left carries on
making generalizations with the intention of under-valuing or even eliminating
religion as such but rather they should realize that the enemy is the religion
of the right – which on the one hand says to us that nothing bad at all is
happening around us or that whatever happens is because God allows it to happen
to test our loyalty. It is the ideological theocratic project of the ruling
classes that we need to dismantle. In socio-political matters, to believe in
God or not is an option in my democratic rights. In existential matters, to
believe in God, as a personal or as a collective experience, it is a part of my
revolutionary energy to create a different and better world. In my particular
case, my biggest challenge continues to be whether people can see God in what I
do, not in what I say.
The oppressive atheism:
In the same way, I make an invitation to the atheistic left to help us to
destroy the project of the religion of oppression and I also invite them to do
the same with the oppressive atheism. In other words, let’s admit that the
automatic denial of God does not solve in any way the problem of absence of
justice. This is not a matter of beliefs but of practices. In the same way as
it happens with religion, there also exists a kind of atheism connected to the
processes of justice and another connected to the ppression, exploitation and
exclusion of people. This oppressive atheism must be repudiated in the same way
as we repudiate oppressive religion. Yet again, the struggle still is between
those who believe in a project of peace with justice and those who do not. In
matters related to the practice of justice, theologically speaking, I
understand that believing or not in Goddess, is secondary. We must not forget
that both theism and atheism are not ways of thinking about justice, but rather
of living it. Here is the call that through the practice of justice we become good believers in our Goddess or good atheists.
We can do this practicing the subversive spirituality of theism and the atheism
of social holiness.
The oppressive religion, the oppressive atheism and the immigrant community:
Contrary to the manipulative speech of Bush – in which he constantly tells us,
opportunely and selectively, about the loss of family values, the decline of
morality or how sacred life is – we need to be able to rescue the issues of
life and coexistence in solidarity with the seriousness that they deserve.
Within the discourse of morality and life we need to talk about the human and
civil rights of immigrants, homosexuals and women.
For example, organizing our campaign in defense of the human and civil rights
of our immigrant sisters and in particular of those who have no documents, we
have met a very divisive conflict which the ruling classes have used very well
to their advantage. So much so, that we have been asked that as members of this
project fighting for just laws for female immigrants, on the one hand we do not
attack the militaristic policies of president Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
on the other hand, we do not insist in the civil rights of our sisters and
comrades regarding reproduction (including the right to abortion) or the rights
to civil marriage of our gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, etc. sisters. Of
course, before this ambivalence we will carry on saying what we have said until
now. Our commitment to justice can neither be half-hearted nor can it be
selective. Therefore, within this reality, the strategy of violating human
rights to achieve justice seems to me to be contradictory.
In other words, for as long as there is an oppressive religion and an
oppressive atheism that promote an unjust campaign, it is our responsibility to
make clear that issues such as abortion, sexual pre-marital relations or
homosexual relations between partners, must not be evaluated within the context
of the distortion of religious morality related to Bush¹s theocratic project,
but within the legal context of human and civil rights and inside the necessary
medical contexts. The theological issue of whether something is or is not a sin
must not be the reason for the discussion. What must be a part of our
theological or non-theological discourse is the freedom and happiness of the
people. I do not really care what your religious or atheistic beliefs are as
long as they do not violate the human or civil rights of the people. We need to
learn to respect and live within diversity. This is possible!
Conclusion:
There exists the need to keep on educating our people to find their freedom.
Let’s tear to pieces the ignorance that enslaves us. However, let’s make sure
that we understand that liberation does not come automatically with the
awakening of the critical conscience; this is just one necessary step. It is
also important to understand that there exists the need to organize and to
mobilize the people so that they achieve their liberation.
Curiously and historically the people of the religious right have used the
elections to Congress, not the presidential ones, to put its key people in the
most strategic places. Our elections will be this year during November. It is
time to start asking those running for office where they stand on the issues
that concern the struggles of the people.
Hence my invitation on this Easter or Resurrection Sunday, to make sure that
through peace with justice we carry on dismantling Bush’s theocracy while we
resuscitate the hope of all peoples for their liberation.