POLITICS & RELIGION

On the UnGodliness of Alternative Energy

Also, the day I found the magic political decoder ring and realized America was done for

America is a dead country walking because conservative politics is literally inseparable from religion.

The day was Friday, June 6th, 2014. 6:00 p.m. Pacific time, to be precise. Which might seem oddly specific.

I had just finished watching All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC, featuring a story on alternative energy in the heartland. He’d interviewed Bob Dixson, the Republican mayor of Greensburg, Kansas regarding wind turbines:

Your first impression in rural America was, oh, that is something that is political. That’s left-wing. That’s new age. That’s secular stuff.

Let that roll around in your head for awhile. I’ll wait.

You back? I know, it took me a minute to come to grips with it, too: he said rural Republicans didn’t like windmills because they’re inherently unGodly.

And in that we see the end of the American experiment.

In this context, all the discussion about economic insecurity and differing views on policy are meaningless. The heartfelt essays on whether liberals are too condescending or conservatives too rigidly ideological miss the point.

America is a dead country walking because conservative politics is literally inseparable from religion. Science, education, liberalism and liberal thought, the Democratic Party and its platform… Anything they disagree with is more than just incorrect, it stands in opposition to their God. What’s to debate if they believe everything the other side stands for is beyond the pale?

Of course, there’s an argument this is only one man’s opinion. Can we assess the entire conservative movement by extrapolating from a quote by a small-town Kansas mayor?

Yes.

Because it’s not just him. Barry “Mr. Conservative” Goldwater, of all people, saw it coming decades ago:

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

It’s easy to test. Consider how confusing Republican politics can be, for instance the way they can turn on a dime. Early in the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump was pilloried on the right as a dishonest sociopath with a long history of unsavory behavior.

It would make sense for the party of family and faith to reject an admitted serial philanderer accused of paying hush money to a porn actress, a man who pronounced II Corinthians as “Two Corinthians,” and claimed to have never asked God’s forgiveness. White Evangelical Christians preferred fellow religious conservative Ted Cruz.

To their credit, they nailed it…until it was clear he would win. Then overnight, they dumped much of what they’d ever claimed to believe without batting an eye.

The party of Russia hawks stood by silently as Trump coddled Putin. The deficit exploded (though to be clear, conservative concerns for deficits has always been more tactical than real). Free trade was abandoned. The notion that personal morality was relevant in evaluating public officials collapsed.

Polling varies, but in 2016 Trump got around 80% of the White Evangelical vote, a higher percentage than the famously devout George W. Bush. By the end of his term in 2020, after all the scandals and incompetence, that support had fallen…to 76%.

It seems contradictory at first: why would a religious party line up behind the least devout candidate in the race, if not in modern history? But once you realize how conservative politics and conservative Christianity are fused, you have the magic decoder ring.

Viewed through that lens, everything that happens in the Republican Party is clear and obvious: what they believe is literally and by definition Godly. What the other side believes is not.

It doesn’t matter whether Trump is actually religious or that Joe Biden verifiably is. Biden is a Democrat, so like Barack Obama — who was accused of being secretly Muslim while simultaneously criticized for having a controversial Christian pastor — his faith is nullified. Trump is a Republican, so he is anointed as God’s chosen candidate. Amen.

There’s talk of how God works through nonbelievers and “imperfect men,” or how his missteps are due to being a “baby Christian,” and so on. But in the end it’s obviously just flailing for a justification: Trump is clearly not a good person (as even conservatives will let slip on occasion) who doesn’t respect the pious...but they desperately want to support him, somehow, because of his utility.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories abound on the right, and analysts are perpetually confused about how far conservatives will go to support Trump. But apply the decoder ring: it doesn’t matter that he seems less like Jesus and more like the Antichrist. It’s gospel that God has blessed him and no data or contradiction can overcome that. Whatever mental gymnastics are required to justify that position will be done.

The implications are grim. It’s not an exaggeration to say that strictly interpreted religious dogma and democracy are incompatible. In fact, they’re practically opposites. Democracy doesn’t just need compromise, the two are basically the same.

So how can we navigate our policy differences when they have nothing to do with policy? Every fight — from abortion to wearing masks during a pandemic — is actually part of a culture war and not rooted in any factual or logical basis that can be argued. One side is literally on a mission from God, a mission they feel they can’t afford to lose.

Is there a glimmer of hope? In the interview, the mayor goes on to say he’s realized that windmills aren’t “secular” after all, and that they make sense on the Plains where the wind never stops.

Unfortunately, research tells us that conservatives are naturally short on empathy. His constituents’ change of heart only occurred when residents realized the utility of wind power to them, because then it came into the tent and received God’s blessing.

That isn’t compromise, it just means we can accomplish at least some things both sides agree on. But we can’t possibly agree on everything. How can we form a functioning government when one side of the political aisle sees every issue in black and white, holy and unholy, and hence will likely reject any sort of compromise?

We got our answer to that on January 6th, 2021. At the very core, what makes our system of government work is the peaceful transfer of power. That means the willingness to lose is the single most important quality a citizen or party must have in a functioning democratic republic.

And they aren’t.