As part of my personal religious deconstruction I have come to better understand the tangled layers of authority under which I was trapped.
Authority is not a trivial thing in modern christianity, at least as I understand it. It is the foundational basis of almost everything, in fact.
I’m not here to debate “honour thy father” ideologies, though. Rather, (and since evangelical christianity is so clearly tangled up in right wing politics these days, and is thus fair game for criticism in my opinion) my perspective on these notions got me thinking in particular about leader worship.
To push my pin firmly into the scoreboard, I’m going to clearly state my position: our elected leaders should be considered civil servants, nothing more. They are overseers and top managers of the government, which itself is an embodiment of the will of the people which is… well, it’s us. Elected leaders in a functioning democracy are the employees of a society. They work for us. They answer to us. Not vice versa.
I’m certain this perspective is not universally shared.
See, I was brought up in a church where authority was hierarchical.
We obeyed to our parents.
Our parents obeyed church leaders.
The church leaders (apparently) obeyed god.
It was a chain of command, and unquestionable. You followed, capital-O Obeyed, and you didn’t ask stupid questions, dammit.
Okay, so you go to church now and you believe this, too, and hey—for myself, what I believe is that we live in a society where you can do you, and I can do me, and we should be able to get along. If you want to buy into to that submit and obey stuff, go nuts.
But politics should not work this way… and yet every shred of evidence I see points at the notion that folks who live in this religious notion of hierarchical authority, particularly strong on the right these days, apply it without question to politics, too.
In doing so, their tell is the emotion they tangle up in elected leadership. They stop thinking of these people like civil servants doing a job and start treating them with a fervour of religiosity. “Fuck Trudeau” didn’t come out of being angry about tax law, it came out righteous anger better directed at a false prophet. And worse, a false prophet that in their mind they by default are obligated to capital-O Obey (they are not) and from whose duty of obedience there is no escape but through decrying them as some kind of false leader.
We heard “wear a mask to improve public safety” where it seems like they heard “wear a mask else be smote and turned to a pillar of ash” —which I admit would make anyone upset if that were actually the case.
We heard “vaccinate your kids because it reduces the chance of terrible infection” where it seems like they heard “thou shalt vaccinate your kids because the leader has commanded it” —which, if you think the leader is a literal demon sent from hell, yeah, that would probably put you off vaccinations, too. Foolishly, but still…
My take from what I see it that the modern right doesn’t seem to coherently abide alternative political viewpoints outside of this context and I am increasingly certain that this is more because they are confusing politics with religion, treating the left like some kind of blasphemous spiritual enemy, rather than people with different opinions on spending our collective tax money… neighbours who want school funding to be improved, or health care to be managed effectively.
More and more it seems they mixing their obedience to hierarchical authority with their democratic duties and driving us into an ideological war… casting civil servants who come from an alternative viewpoint into a spite-filled curse, and literally worshipping leaders with whom their particular sect aligns.
Out of this stems increasingly drastic and dramatic attempts to cleave their obedience (which is not an actual thing they should be worried about) from the larger body: like, say, breaking Alberta out of Canada so they can elect their own local gods to worship.
It is a dangerous slide into a democratic collapse that many of us will not recognize until the holy-like war is knocking on our doors.