With a Supreme Court majority of right-wing ideologues, we are in an era that could lead to wide and deep contempt for law. Law is a fiction. In the United States, law ideally consists of a set of rules for living drawn up by people we have elected to represent us. It is effective only if we accept those rules as legitimate. Law exists and individual laws are written and enforced so that we cantankerous human beings might live our public lives in harmony and our personal lives in privacy, allowing the culture to evolve and our species to grow in wisdom. It is a lovely idea.
For law to effectively govern our public lives requires faith that the system works to maximize equity, fairness, and justice for all people, no matter what systems of belief to which they may adhere. The Supreme Court with its black-robed theocratic majority is imposing upon our pluralistic society a literalist and supposedly Christian interpretation of the Constitution that is more in keeping with Jonathan Edwards’ 1781 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” than with the Founders’ belief in the creation of a nation unfettered by a religious establishment.
Edwards terrified the faithful in Northampton with his sermon in which he described his God as one who “holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire … he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.” Deeply flawed in their racial, sexual, and social mores, the Founders did, to their credit, understand the evils inherent in religion.
The Supreme Court, with its theocratic majority now permits the bureaucracy of various states to interfere with women’s bodily freedom. The Court’s decisions are based on primitive religious beliefs and practices, not on science and a rigorous examination of the law. As a result, women will die. That is fine with Supreme Court Justices, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett. Supreme Court rulings have also enabled mass shootings, supported capital punishment, and cleared the path for environmental catastrophe.
The god envisioned by the theocrats in the Supreme Court majority is the god of the Christian nationalists who prattle and pray in its name, a jealous, fearful god, demanding worship and obedience, willing to visit unimaginable horrors upon those who do not kneel to its authority. It is a petty and vengeful understanding of the divine, missing any respect for the sacred, the holy. The Supreme Court’s majority, their religious lives based on a primitive mythology, has profaned the sacred.
That the minds of the majority on the highest judicial body in the United States are controlled by such a perverted version of Christianity should unsettle us all. Religion, as an organized activity, has always been about control. Religious clerics, priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, pujaris, witchdoctors, or whatever they wish to be called, are agents of control. The police of faith. In 1794, William Blake, in his poem, “The Garden of Love,” described them as “priests in black gowns … walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires.”
Spiritual faith can inspire us to reach beyond ourselves as did Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and the current Dalai Lama. Sadly, admirable religious leaders are outnumbered by con-artists, charlatans and hucksters who use religion to accumulate wealth and power, or to advance narrow political objectives, the Grahams, the Falwells, the Bakkers, their imitators and successors. They are not Christians, their faith rooted in love. They are the Christers, scoundrels who use the words of faith to justify the politics of death. These days the Christians are losing. The Christers are ascendant. They are ruthless. They are amoral. They are dangerous to democracy. They ravage the earth. And, thanks to their majority on the Supreme Court, they are armed.
God save us from religion.
Wilson Roberts, is a retired professor of English from Greenfield Community College and former Greenfield Town Council president. He is currently parliamentarian for the City Council.