Love, Fear and Marianne Williamson

When establishment liberals mock progressive spiritual icon Marianne Williamson, they’re signaling a profound cultural shift pitting believers vs. an emerging party of secular non-believers.

A pure believer vs. secular nonbeliever election would be unprecedented in America, resulting in a Donald Trump landslide. If 2016 and the protests that followed were a divisive cultural replay of 1968, then 2020 could resemble 1972 (when progressives were smashed in every state but Massachusetts).

Catholics are swing voters: the largest, most diverse religious denomination with voters of every ideological stripe. The candidate who wins a majority of Catholics wins the White House every time — yet Democrats don’t seem to understand they are pushing believers away: from the faithful in the pews to the “spiritual but not religious” represented by bestselling author Marianne Williamson. That’s why conservatives seem to be nicer to Williamson than her fellow liberals (who often equate faith with superstitions)

How you’ll vote predicted by one question: In the George W. Bush years, Karl Rove discovered the one fact that would best tell him how a voter would vote: church attendance. If you went weekly, you were likely to vote Republican while those who never went were likely to vote Democrat or not vote at all.

Both sides began actively courting voters from each of those two camps at the opposite ends of the belief system (Republicans chasing weekly churchgoers and traditional Christians while Democrats chased the non religious). Both parties gave short shrift to the vast majority of lukewarm believers in between.

Marianne Williamson could be a bridge, exactly the type of candidate who could appeal to liberal and progressive believers, including many liberal and politically correct social justice warrior Catholics, the non-religious as well as the third of Democrats calling themselves “spiritual but not religious.”

“She’s really the definition of spiritual but not religious… she represents — and you’d think might be able to reach — a very sizable group of Americans,” political scientist Laura Olson told FiveThirtyEight.

Politics often lacks meaning when you delete God from the debate. The liberal Establish seems to be pushing Williamson and her spiritual messages away. They don’t want to hear about God, the Christian traditions of our culture or anything remotely religious or spiritual.

The Democrat National Committee recently openly embraced and pursued the growing number of people who ignore faith altogether. In their resolution, they slighted believers and those valuing religious freedom.

Culture trumps politics. The deep data on American “Nones” (people not belonging to any religion) shows most of them actually do believe in God, particularly spiritual forces or causes greater than themselves.

America remains a nation of believers. The vast majority of “Nones” aren’t genuine atheists who truly reject God or even agnostics who doubt God but rather, people who put God so low on their priority list that they simply have little to no time for religion (which isn’t the same as not believing or rejecting God).

“We’re not going to win this election by mocking people of faith — it’s not just me,” Williamson added.

Treading water in the shallow end of the pool of Believers

Same pool — but not as deep. Marianne Williamson is a believer though traditional Catholics and Christian evangelicals would probably say she’s living in the shallow end (the “kiddie pool” side) of the bigger pool of believers and people of faith.

A religion of her own making. Williamson was born Jewish and “The Course on Miracles” she studied and taught was rooted in some form of belief in Jesus. She does something most political candidates seem scared of doing: she mentions Jesus by name. She literally moved to Iowa (the first state that votes), recognizing the heartland as a place where believers dominate.

1992 flashback: Bill and Hillary Clinton unseated a sitting president (who had a 91 percent approval rating a year earlier) by dropping a single Bible verse into their stump speeches: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

False prophet or gateway drug to deeper faith? Is Williamson a false prophet or demon (as some conservatives believe) or a “gateway drug” to a deeper spiritual journey that could eventually lead others to the true God, or at least get people moving in the right direction?

In the 2019 film “Blinded by the Light,” we meet a teenage Pakistani immigrant to Great Britain who wound up rejecting his father’s strict Muslim faith in the 1980s by following, embracing and memorizing the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen (the boy’s father thought Springsteen was a Jew but the Boss is Catholic). Culture trumps politics — and religion and spirituality are at the core of our culture.

The alternative direction to moving in God’s direction, of course, is a selfish, self-centered politics of anger and fear, openly rejecting and moving away from God and love and truth (believers believe God is love and truth itself). Doing things “my way” over God’s Way goes back to Eden and will always find a following.

Non-believers can eventually find their way to God if they are always seeking love and truth. A selfish political debate lacking standards for love and truth is a mess of name-calling few want to watch or be a part of.

My faith teaches me to judge actions, to let God judge whether His children are good or bad, to pray for enemies as well as friends, to love God first then to love one another as we would love. Marianne Williamson is one of the few candidates talking daily about love.

In an increasingly secular culture literally fighting (often rudely) to delete God from public spaces and public conversations, I give Marrianne Williamson credit for publicly sharing some form of belief in prayer and a higher power greater than humanity alone. Contrast that with non-believers who mock her talk of love and deride her as “Oprah’s guru.’’

She did at least tangentally support praying away the September hurricane and the hurricane changed course away from the United States. Contrast that with the other angry non-believers who literally laugh at prayer and belief itself, making “science’’ their new undeniable idol (even though the science of meterology struggles to accurately predict weather just hours into the future).

Like other people of faith, Williamson does believe in a power greater than herself, embracing God as truth and love itself. And in a tribal age where every tribe wants to condemn others but no one seems to want to change themselves, I am pleased she is talking about love rather than simply hating her enemy.

I’m not alone. Conservatives seem to be giving her a fairer shake. Most Donald Trump supporters are wary of the Establishment and she spoke their language when she told “Fox and Friends”: “The system is even more corrupt than I knew and people are even more wonderful than I knew.’’

Positive = love while negative emotions = fear

Many Americans, myself included, have benefited from spending at least some amount of time relaxing in that shallow end of the pool. I remember like yesterday driving from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in the summer of 1992, playing Williamson’s bestselling “Return to Love” cassette tape.

Williamson’s one lesson I immediately embraced, memorized and never forgot: all positive emotions are forms of love while all negative emotions are forms of fear. I loved that. That meshes with Catholic mysticism as well as secular American common sense.

As an American man, I have zero desire to show any fear. The Bible tells us 365 times not to be afraid and Williamson’s lesson equating negative emotions (from anger to hate) with fear is powerfully helpful nearly three decades after I heard her discuss it. Her reminder that all positive emotions are forms of love dovetails nicely with Christianity’s teachings to love and to pray for enemies, even those who persecute us.

One of her most widely quoted quotes from that book is routinely misattributed to the late Nelson Mandella, tailor made for the 21st century meme culture:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”

That quote also appeared in numerous commencement addresses with The New York Times noting that Hillary Clinton, astronaut Mae Jemison, and former Spelman College president Johnnetta B. Cole each quoted Williamson in speeches (while thinking they were quoting Mandella).

The Canary in the coal mine

Williamson recently made news lamenting the Left’s cruelty, saying “I’m such a Leftie’’ that she understood why conservatives would call her “Godless’’ but couldn’t understand why liberals appeared to be even meaner and more dismissive.

An example of Democrats running away from Williamson and other believers: the Democrat National Committee recently supported language praising “the religiously unaffiliated,’’ calling non-believers the “largest religious group within the Democrat Party.” Believers, again, were challenged with support for traditions being equated with evil.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton dismissed Trump backers as “Deplorables’’ (and more significantly to Donald Trump), she called millions: “irredeemable.’’

Christianity teaches that all of us can be redeemed. Catholicism teaches the miracle of reconciliation. A party or peoples that believes its foes cannot be redeemed has replaced the Christian values of Western Civilizaton with the humanist focus of the “ism’’ ideologies: secularism, atheism, Communism, socialism, humanism, etc.

Like Clnton, Barack Obama similarly dismissed people “clinging to their guns and religion.’’ In both cases, dismissing rather than loving the believers on the other side. Williamson, in contast, talks often about love.

This battle of believers vs. non-believers may be new between the American Left and Right but it’s occurred on the global stage for centuries: The French Revolution of the 1790s and the Communist Revolution of the 20th century both were waged by professed non-believers who made male rulers their new gods.

St. John Paul the Great warned during his 1976 visit to America: “We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel… It is a trial of not only our nation and the Church, but, in a sense, a test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights and the rights of nations.”

As pope and as a survivor of both Nazi and communist takeovers, John Paul saw precisely what happens to a culture when God is deleted from public discussions, when crosses are removed and replaced with portraits of secular rulers.

Liberal establishment pundits who spend more time studying each other than God, are routinely puzzled by the way the vast majority of evangelicals and a clear majority of Catholics voted for Donald Trump despite his numerous flaws. They wrongly assume people of faith are “afraid’’ or abandoning their principals to go for a winner (the theme of a recent Time magazine cover story).

What they fail to consider: we tend to rule out candidates who dismiss or mock our greatest and most important belief: In this case, our belief in God.

They fail to see a simpler truth: one side incrasingly dismisses people of faith and even labels the expressions of centuries-old expressions of values rooted in religious tradition as forms of “hate speech’’ or worse.

Donald Trump is by no means seen as a religious role model (our faith teaches we are all sinners who all can do better). But Trump wins over people of faith through deed and action by his belief and repetition of a single sentence showing he is on the side believers.

Trump praises American symbols his opponents don’t embrace like the flag. But he grabs the believers with something even more fundamental, the most famous symbol in history: the cross.

It’s a simple seven-word sentence but when Trump says it, believers know the other side is literally uncomfotable to use the name of Jesus, let alone God the Father. Those seven words and the lack of anything similar from the Left speaks volumes:

“We don’t worship government, we worship God.’’