Earlier this week, I saw this. Nothing much to see here, just Elizabeth Bruenig, a New York Times columnist, advocating for some sort of Theocratic Monarchy, ideally ruled by decree by Jesus Christ Himself, in the United States of America.
If you would have told younger, conservative, Christian me this would happen 20 or 30 years ago, I would have punched you right in the mouth.
Among other things, God simply does not work that way.
On a fundamental level, belief requires faith. Faith requires unanswered, indeed unanswerable-in-this-life questions, or it isn't faith, it's certainty. In real life, God does not show up and say "Hey, I'm God" and do a few miracles and say "Worship me." Also Jesus is not an American citizen and was not born here, and there'd be some Constitutional issues involved, not to mention the whole damn point of this country.
God does not get a vote here.
Nor do prophets or Saviors.
Plenty of people have tried to claim that label though, usually with some really fucked up results.
And I'm sorry, but I've been either a religious or more loosely 'Spiritual' person for my whole life, and certainty is something to which no one is entitled.
To expect the Creator of the Infinite Universe to violate His own laws and the way that He set things up...just so you can finally put down your childish fears and embrace your even-more-childish needs to bow to authority or strut around claiming your own rightness...for fuck's sake it's positively asinine.
I mean, who the fuck does this person even think she is?
I was raised Christian. I went to Christian schools. I was literally taught to read and write with the Bible as a major part of the curriculum on some level until I finally enrolled in public schools as an eighth grader because my Mom and I moved across the country.
I was taught God just does not work that way. God does not magic the universe around to suit our needs, rather, we have to do the work of life. I'm not really a fan of the old saying "God helps those who helps themselves" but in a certain sense, it is accurate. You have to do your part, but sometimes God or the Universe or whatever you want to call it might help you along, too.
Thing is, God, or rather childish, unthinking belief in God certainly enables a hell of a lot of people who don't want to "help themselves" to make a good living, or maybe just get by, at somebody or everybody else's expense, too.
While I'm at it, in terms of secular history, the track record of Philosopher Emperors and kings and such is not actually so great either. I've read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius several times over. They were mostly composed while Marcus was on campaign in Germania, during seasonal pauses in operations and when he was ill. History knows Marcus Aurelius as the last of the Five Good Emperors who defined Second Century Rome and the Empire's high water mark, but to his contemporaries, the Caesar was more General than Emperor and his son who would succeed him, Commodus, turned out to not much be up to the task and was ultimately assassinated.
Plenty of European kings have tried to claim they were philosophers, usually with poor results.
In history there have been a few, some of the Greek and Roman philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, Constantine, Saladin. Mohandas K. Ghandi, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, I'm sure you can think of others you believe fit the bill. But the point is, Leaders or notable would-be leaders who exhibit a true spiritual nature are rather rare for a reason.
Things of the spirit and things of this world require different sets of attributes. Good leaders are, fundamentally, pragmatic, tempering their personal impulses and spirituality with enough belief in reality that they're not going to try to immanentize some sort of eschaton.
Some of our Presidents have actually made some respectable (or not) attempts, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, JFK, Reagan, either Bush, and of course Barack Obama. Along the way, these people have collectively defined Americanism and what a lot of people refer to (often disparagingly) as American Exceptionalism...and the truth is, those people are often not wrong in disparaging it and we as a people tend to deserve their doing so.
And there ain't a single damn one of them who ever, literally or figuratively just gave it all up and said "Jesus take the wheel" much less attempted to violate the laws of God and Man, much less reality or space and time, to make it so. God simply does not work that way. God cannot work that way, else He is not God.
Plato said that Man is but dust and shadow, I think you could make the argument that in that analogy, Plato's cave and Man being the shadows cast by the fire...well, if the fire gets too close the dust burns up and the shadow disappears. We, in this life, are not meant to stand before the divine. Indeed, according to Christian doctrine most of us simply would not be capable of it. You have to die first, that's why it's called the Afterlife.
This is why God in all of the Abrahamic faiths and the many related religions spoke through Prophets.
But there have been few, if any, modern prophets and the real ones do not seem to claim that label. Abraham Lincoln clearly spoke prophetically more than once, there are and have been others in all walks of life even just in our country. Bob Marley, Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain, Malcolm X, MLK...and I will say I have been blessed to know a person or two I've thought of as such. Speaking prophetically is about far more than telling the future, or being a spiritual leader, technically it requires neither of those things, only that one be able somehow to tap into the Divine Conversation, the ebb and flow of the Universe, whatever you want to call it and speak that which is true in such a way that people hear not only with their ears but with their souls.
Such people tend to leave a mark on history, and in whatever capacity they were here for they tend to become legends.
But they also tend to be given temporal power only briefly, if at all, and usually for a specific purpose. And too often, they have their work undone by others. It's a hard way to go, and it's not always your choice.
Of course, none of that is what people like Elizabeth Bruenig want. They want to convert the Universe into their personal security blanket, effectively to undo all of reality to address the fear that gnaws at their souls.
And they want this crap no matter what it does to other people.
Because, fundamentally, to people like this...other people simply don't exist, they aren't real, We're all just shadows on the cave wall. Ideas are more real than people to them and they live in constant, deadly fear that their ideas might be wrong. That's why so many of these motherfuckers end up being shitty little authoritarians who want to remake the universe in their own image.
And indeed, historically theocratic regimes usually end up as collapsing Empires ruled by craven, dishonest and incompetent men as they're overrun by somebody else's horde, or they're overthrown from within and turned into secular states when the people who have to live under that shit get tired of it, or they collapse under their own weight and become a bunch of smaller countries. The pages of history run red with this stuff.
But you can't tell that to these fucking people, or, more accurately they often just won't hear it.
Well, for all of our sakes somebody better start fucking listening. That's all.
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