American Taliban

— by Joe Markko

Let me confess it plainly from the first: this will be no measured essay, no carefully trimmed hedge of impartiality. This is rant, full-throated and unapologetic. The conscription of religion into politics, the marching of piety beneath partisan banners—what a grim and glittering spectacle. So, I loosen the reins of restraint, cast off the burden of balance, and let my bias speak in its native tongue. There is, after all, a strange freedom in honesty.

I have brooded over this trespass for years, watched it gather like storm heat on the horizon, but the uproar surrounding a tiny band of zealots in Florida proposing to burn the Koran in September of 2013 finally struck the match against the tinder. If that pastor imagined himself confronting terror by setting fire to a sacred text, then let him be consistent in his madness and heap Bibles and Torahs beside it, for history has shown with grim abundance that monsters have risen from all our scriptures when men have twisted holy words into weapons.

The sacred books of humanity must always be held as more than ink and binding, more than paper stitched and pressed. Yet they must also remain less than idols. No page, however revered, is worthy of bloodshed. No creed deserves the bruising of the innocent. No name of God is honored by injustice done in its defense. To wield any holy book as a political prop is to betray the very truths it claims to enshrine.

So often those drunk on a lopsided notion of righteousness imagine themselves agents of cleansing fire. This pastor, perhaps sincere, certainly misguided, would sweep away the objections of others as though dissent itself were chaff and the words of unbelievers fit only for flame. But in such gestures, men do not resemble Christ. They resemble conquerors. They imitate Saladin more than Jesus, becoming by degrees the very thing they declare themselves born to oppose.

Whether clothed in a preacher’s certainty or a politician’s ambition, there is abroad among us a hard-eyed spirit that would graft religious hostility onto political machinery, baptizing bigotry in patriotism and calling the offspring virtue. It is a species of zeal that speaks in sarcasm, thrives on innuendo, belittles others to conceal its own poverty of substance, and wraps itself in nostalgia, forever promising to restore “the America we all know and love.”

But America must be larger than my preference, wider than your tribe, more generous than any private dream of national purity. As John Adams wrote, government exists for the common good—for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people—not for the profit, honor, or advantage of one man, one family, one class. The republic was never meant to become a mirror in which only one faction delights to see its own reflection.

If we cannot answer injustice with imagination, mercy, and courage—if we rise only when our own skin is threatened and remain silent when suffering lands on the backs of others—then we have failed not only democracy, but the moral claims of every faith worth keeping. America is not one book. She is all the books. She is Bible and Koran, Torah and Kaballah, and every honest fragment of truth that has sought shelter beneath her flag. She is the long, unfinished experiment of many made one. There is deep wisdom in that old motto: from many, one.

And yet too many, skilled in summoning crowds and inflaming the already-convinced, mistake public appetite for divine anointing. They stand before microphones and call their ambitions Heaven-sent while stirring in decent people the sediment of old resentments and inherited fears. They teach that all who are not like us must somehow be enemies of God and enemies of country, as though the Almighty had entered into an exclusive covenant with a voting bloc. Meanwhile the wheels of politics grind on, circular and dusty, and the nation is neither kinder nor wiser nor any nearer to the God so freely invoked in its campaigns.

America longs for a voice with vision, for someone who believes in something greater than grievance. But in the famine of true moral imagination, we have fastened ourselves to personalities, to agenda-driven prophets whose opinions are swallowed whole and treated as gospel. Here preacher and politician are accomplices, each drawing profit from the other’s orbit. Instead of speaking truth to power, too many religious leaders kneel before it, lavishing admiration on their chosen champions while ignoring the dogma-soaked tirades that stand in open contradiction to the spirit of Jesus.

There is a peculiar madness in treating America as though she were ancient Israel, as though our national story were itself a chapter of sacred history and our political causes divinely guaranteed. Thus the fringe of patriotic religion saddles scripture like a pale warhorse, charging through each new cause du jour, trampling vineyards in the name of God. But Christ said plainly, My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, my servants would fight. If believers in the West cannot distinguish their duties as citizens of a republic from their calling as citizens of another Kingdom, they will remain clumsy and compromised in both—of little use to the nation, and less to Heaven.

Patriotism, in its healthy form, belongs to no denomination. Love of country lives in the conscience of the devout and the doubting alike. It is not proof of holiness, nor is it the private possession of one side of the aisle. To insist that God flies our flag, endorses our platform, votes our ticket, is not merely presumptuous—it is a species of national vanity bordering on blasphemy. It leaves no room for the possibility that wisdom, constitutional fidelity, and the fear of God may also dwell among those with whom we disagree.

America’s hope will never blossom from the dead stalks of a broken binary—Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal—as though truth could be exhausted by our manufactured oppositions. Forget right wing and left wing; even a child understands that it takes two wings to fly. And if our politics do not heal, if they do not reconcile, if they do not labor toward unity without demanding uniformity, then they stand opposed to the ministry of the Christ so often enlisted in their service—the ministry of reconciliation.

Taking a liberty with Cassius, the fault, dear Brutus, is not chiefly in our heroes, but in ourselves. We have blurred the boundaries between citizenship and sanctity until political allegiance has become, for many, a sacrament. Right-wing loyalties, conservative habits, and Christian belief are too often folded together and called righteousness, as though patriotism were not merely a civic affection but the very marrow of godliness itself. Yet our political instincts are shared, more or less, by half the electorate at any given moment—and numbers have never been a reliable measure of moral truth.

History groans beneath the evidence. From the Crusades to the American Civil War, from lynching trees to back alleys where teenagers were beaten to death for whom they loved, from bombed clinics to shattered federal buildings, from murdered doctors to sanctified mobs, blood has flowed wherever men became convinced that Heaven had blessed the point of their spear. This fusion of religious frenzy and political power—this American Taliban of the spirit—believes its rights, its opinions, its passions are divinely conferred and therefore fit for export, enforcement, and exaltation.

God have mercy on the obstructionists, on the self-anointed guardians of virtue, on all who confuse domination with discipleship. For whenever religion hungers for political power, it does not become more holy. It becomes more dangerous.