More Money Than Brains (6 page)

That final caveat is very important. Paine may reject institutionalized religion in the strongest possible terms, but he
also maintains that we all have the right to our own beliefs, provided that those beliefs do not transgress or suppress others’ freedom of conscience.

Religion becomes a problem when it tries to curb rational inquiry, which is a God-given inclination, right, and responsibility. Scripture, or a particular faith’s interpretation of it, cannot serve as a substitute for individual, independent thought and conscience. Kant is certainly no atheist, but he cautions us that being good out of fear or to curry eternal favour is actually immature and immoral, another instance of our desire to be bossed and dandled by Big Dad.

The relationship between religion and politics is one of the significant differences between Americans and Canadians, one that helps account for Canada’s liberal policies with respect to issues such as gay marriage and abortion. The U.S. was settled by Puritans, and it remains the most fervently religious country in the developed world. Canada was founded by a mishmash of Loyalists,
coureurs de bois
, and dirt farmers. Some of them were every bit as devout as their southern neighbours, but Canada’s long, proud tradition of squelching public displays of zeal has discouraged the theopolitical proselytizing that is so prominent in American politics. Twice as many Americans as Canadians regularly attend church, and Americans are much more likely to say that their private faith influences their political choices.

This is not surprising, but some of their beliefs are. In the year of Our Lord 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention agreed upon the following:

This sort of Biblical literalism is not merely a pre-modern position but a pre-medieval one, since theologians as early as Saint Augustine argued for an allegorical reading of the Bible. This puts the Southern Baptist Convention and its coreligionists on the other side of 397
AD
. They are not goofing around when they sing “Gimme that old-time religion.”

It is also odd when religion uses the latest heathen innovations in the service of the totally true and trustworthy. The American Creation Museum, which opened in Petersburg, Kentucky, in May 2007, is a state-of-the-art multi-million-dollar facility with more than a hundred displays, a planetarium, and a couple of theatres. Here you can watch “Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers,” thanks to high-tech exhibits engineered by a former designer for Universal Studios.
⁹

The Creation Museum is a sign of the times, the perfect image of an age that is simultaneously complex and cloddish, sophisticated and wilfully stunned. Museums grew out of the Enlightenment belief in universal knowledge. They were encyclopedias you could walk through, places where you could commune with the seemingly infinite diversity of human reason.

The Creation Museum explicitly repudiates the Enlighten ment at the same time that it shamelessly rips it off. It employs the tropes of reason and science to lay waste to reason and science, using modern technology to dismiss the kind of inquiry that made such tools possible. The museum’s website boasts, “Our halls are gilded with truth.” It’s a felicitous verb choice, since
gilding
means applying a thin veneer, a surface coat of gold atop the inferior bulk beneath.

There are some thickets of Bible-thumpery here in the Great White North, and they have been emboldened by the success of their southern fellows. There is a Creation Science Museum in Big Valley, Alberta, that uses the wealth of local fossils to conjure up visions of dinosaurs on Noah’s ark. However, it is open only by appointment and housed in a modest bungalow that looks like a retiree’s house, save for the dinosaur replica perched above the door, a gargoyle warding off the demons of secular humanism.

Of course, it would be overstating the case to say that religion is simply a stupefying force. For much of history, churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were essential to the preservation and production of texts, which means it’s hard to go deep into old literature or history without paying attention to sacred works. And studying the Bible, old-timey theology, and other religious traditions is a really good way to combat dunderheaded fundie proselytizing. Good luck launching comparative religion classes in the Bible belt, though; what can possibly compare to the totally true and trustworthy?

Most mainstream Protestant and Catholic denominations tend to let Jesus and Darwin co-exist as different explanations
for different registers of existence. Parents and preachers who cannot abide this milquetoast moderate position keep trying to drive Darwin and his devilish apes out of their blessed broods’ schools. U.S. courts have repeatedly ruled that classes that give “equal time” to creation science and actual science are unconstitutional. Nevertheless, plucky believers in states such as Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have soldiered on.

In 2009 the Alberta legislature passed a law granting parents the right to pull their young ‘uns out of classes covering hot topics like religion, sex, and sexual orientation. School boards now have to notify parents about impending classes with a high risk of secular hedonism. One
MLA
, Rob Anderson, said that there were “thousands and thousands of parents, the silent majority, severely normal Albertans that are extremely happy with this legislation.”
¹⁰

This declaration of victory reminds me of another summary of parents’ struggles, a rueful admission of defeat that came from a Pennsylvania pastor protesting the teaching of evolution, Ray Mummert. He said, “We’re being attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.”
¹¹
Then he and his fellow concerned parents got into their gleaming vehicles and drove to their warm homes, where intelligence continued to assail them with light, medicine, clean tap water, and mod cons such as cable
TV
and the Internet.

As per the Paine principle, they’re free to be walking contradictions, to believe in whatever blend of Jeebus and “I got mine, Jack” they like. Belief becomes a problem only when it encroaches on those institutions that people of diverse beliefs must share, when it leaks into the law or politics. Like when
congregations in the South and the sticks and the suburbs aid and abet the installation of a Big Dad president who is the wonder-working tool of their Big Dad God.

The megachurches and pastorpreneurs that kept Republicans in office by urging their flocks to vote for them ought to pay reparations to sensible voters. Ditto for the Catholics and Mormons who stumped against gay marriage in states such as Maine and California. Yanking their tax-exempt status and slashing Christian corporate welfare would be a good start. It would send a very clear message that those who traduce the separation of Church and State must pay to play politics instead of profiteering from their unholy union. This brings us to …

I won’t bang on at length about politics here, since I’ll be doing that in
Chapter Five
. But I have to mention one of the most important legacies of the Enlightenment, the one we see in documents such as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which is the idea that liberty is a God-given or natural right. The only acceptable curb on this liberty is the liberty of others. As the French declaration states, “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.”

A king may be able to tamp down the violence and lawlessness and guarantee his subjects a modicum of security
and commodious living, but he does so at the cost of the people’s liberty and autonomy, a price that, by the end of the seventeenth century, enlightened people were no longer willing to pay. Locke, for example, argues that “absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted the only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so can be no form of civil government at all.”
¹²
Having a king means living under the rule of Big Dad.

If we are to have a rational polity, a democratic polity, then we must throw off the shackles of hereditary, arbitrary, traditional authority. Popping out of the lucky regal vagina is hardly a guarantee that the heir will know how to run things. Rather, the insular and privileged world of the aristocracy produces too many monarchs who are totally clueless about the concerns of the people. As Paine puts it in
Common Sense
,

Fast forward to now. Are our democratic leaders shut from the World? Lord knows they press a lot of vulgar flesh, immersing themselves in ordinariness and hoping some of it will rub off, concealing such snobbish stains as an Ivy League education, a family fortune or, worse, brains – dangerous
brains. But even though the campaign process and the business of governance mean meeting and mimicking the people, politicians still constitute an elite. To come within sniffing distance of public office, candidates require stacks of cash, bundles of donations. It’s a sham to pretend otherwise, to keep staging this bumpkin burlesque and conducting elections as if everyone were running for Saltiest Salt of the Earth.

Conservative thinkers from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott have cautioned that the Enlightenment demand for new laws instead of old traditions leads to utopianism, revolutionary violence, and the dissolution of established community bonds. You might start with a bunch of great ideas and do badass things like take over churches and rename the months of the year (Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor!), but it all ends in tumbrels and Terror.

The so-called conservatives who have been in and out of power since the eighties are actually revolutionaries in this pejorative sense. Your Reagans, Thatchers, and Bushes have created regimes that are far more radical and utopian than those of their liberal coevals. Their dogma – market fundamentalism – is not to be confused with fiscal conservatism or enlightened support of the free market as a freedom that fosters other freedoms. Which brings us to …

Conservatives and their compatriots in the business community complain that intellectuals are anti-capitalist. They allege that nerds are socialist moochers or simply inept, congenitally incapable of effectively monetizing their ideas. But this
ignores the stable of brains that the moneyed have bought and stored in a myriad of think tanks and foundations. These moneyed brains frequently plump for the Enlightenment in the same way that Glenn Beck flounces around in Founding Fathers drag. Regnery, one of the conservative movement’s publishing houses, pushes eighteenth-century classics, such as Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
and
The Federalist Papers
, alongside its offerings from such contemporary
bien-pensants
as Michelle Malkin, Oliver North, and David Limbaugh, Rush’s duller brother.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment did indeed have a generally favourable view of business and free trade. Brisk trade was one of the things that Voltaire admired about England. In a letter from his exile in London, he writes, “Commerce, which has enriched English citizens, has helped to make them free, and this freedom in its turn has extended commerce, and that has made the greatness of the nation.”
¹⁴
Merchants were certainly preferable to lazy, corrupt aristocrats.

Voltaire also sang the praises of the London Stock Exchange, one of the few places in Europe where Jews and Muslims and all the fractious factions of Christendom did business freely and peaceably. At the Exchange, “a more respectable place than many a court … you will see the representatives of all nations gathered together for the utility of men.”
¹⁵

That bit about stock traders working for the utility of men might strike you as awfully quaint, but it’s important to highlight it, because it is another aspect of our Enlightenment heritage that has fallen into disrepair. Now we call our traders masters of the universe, not servants of the people.

David Hume called merchants the “most useful” of men. But for Hume, industry, knowledge, and humanity were inextricably linked. He thought that