Reply #19: don't be too adamant [View All]

The Constitution is the social contract of the country. The preamble sets the spirit of the social endeavor:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Tell the person that to see religion, e.g. Christianity, endorsed in that statement is a kind of Creationism- wishful thinking and I Miss My Daddy immaturity. I think the Federalist Papers have quite a bit about no one of that era thinking that government wasn't a vile and ugly and morally besmirched business- certainly most unChristian. Look, for the next century the primary business of American government was the theft of land and suppression of its rightful stewards/owners as well as protecting the institution of slavery until the revulsion at it became the fundamental schism in American life.

As for there being different ways of interpreting the Constitution, that reflects simply that Southerners still believe the Confederate Constitution to have been the correct one, not the federal one that actually exists. (There's a similar problem in the way they read the Bible, but that's offtopic here.) And yes, Republicans are actually spoon-fed their opinions. Every day and learned as children while spoonfed in the most literal way- how else to explain the way they reflect the bigotry of their parents.... Why they reject the wise and accept the foolish opinions, that is the true conundrum and sorrow.

About your friend...for one thing, anarchists and conspiracy theorists do tend to be radical Leftists- but they are rarely liberals. Right and Left extremists tend to remarkably converge in their opinions and illiberalism. Liberals can not be anarchists, by definition and implication (they live by a social contract), and they regard true conspiracies as a means of power concentration by the weak rather than the strong.

Secondly, the reason Democrats go to church in front of cameras is because Republicans do, and both do it because vehement selfprofessed Christians in this country have the curious mental disability of being too insecure in their faith to elect any other kind of person. Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure
that we are doubly sure. -Reinhold Niebuhr (US Protestant theologian).

In fact, the need to ally Christianity and the powers of the federal government reflects that Christianity is in decline in this country. The more it has to be preached by the secular government, the more hollow the churches and weaker and full of bad faith the Believers. The suppression of their critics means that the Believers don't actually consider their own foundation strong enough to endure. So, real Christians should be ashamed of the government coming in to their aid, and of course government can't reflect actual Christianity in any substantial way. It reflects Bibliodolatry and Christdolatry and theist-dolatry and the vanity-based Messianism of the ignorant and colonialist classes of Americans.

Thirdly, and this is unfortunately personal...you do seem to have forced rather too much in the way of supposition on this person. Righteousness, how ever well argued, doesn't get people to change their outlook. It sounds to me that this person is one of the 80% of Republicans that is too invested in that mode of misinterpreting the world, and you're similarly too invested in the converse. Genuine dialogue is about letting things speak for themselves, is not about keeping people on the defensive and annoyed with things that do not really get at their true concerns and reasons for making the choices they do. This sounds like a Republican by birth and raising and present personal environment, so the emotional attachments are too much to overcome on this person's own. The external condition has to change for this person's "opinion" and sense of investment to change.