Post-American Elections 2004 Reflections

by Carmen Nge


About 2 years ago, when I was still residing in the U.S., one of my students—an outspoken, intellectually astute and serious political science major from Japan—told me about an incident I have never forgotten.

She was in the midst of a professor-led discussion on American foreign policy and World War Two, in a senior year course on American history and government. Rena was the only Asian and the only Japanese student in the room. The discussion eventually led to a debate about Pearl Harbour and the eventual detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb in Japan. After a heated exchange among the members of the class, one of the students—a white American male—finally burst out: “Well, better their grandparents than mine.”

Rena’s story, told to me in anger a few hours later that same day two year ago, reverberated in my mind earlier this month, after George W. Bush smirked and prayed his way to another four more years in the White House.

The brutal and uninhibited honesty of the white American male student is symptomatic of an “us and them” mentality that has swept throughout the globe. This mentality has become sanctioned political rhetoric for George W. Bush, whose election campaign was marshalled not only on the battlefields of Fallujah and Baghdad but ushered along the aisles of anti-abortion, anti-gay civil unions and pro-Christian evangelicalism.

The “us versus them” rhetoric, however, cannot simply be reduced to West vs. East, Christian vs. Muslim, and America vs. rest of the world binaries. Even within America itself, the nation is divided: roughly 56 million out of a total of about 115 million voters cast their ballot in favour of John Kerry. These voters are overwhelmingly from urban centers of the Northeast, West Coast, and Great Lakes states—what Mary, a very good friend of mine from Massachusetts, calls the “safe havens” of America.

Those who voted Bush are more rural-based, residing in Middle America and the South, areas traditionally seen as Republican strongholds. According to CNN exit polls, Bush supporters can be characterized as follows: white evangelical (mostly male), above 30, who attend church at least once a week and earn more than US$50,000 a year.

In a country where Muslim fundamentalism is routinely denounced and Islam is misunderstood and vilified, the American public is still not openly critical about the mounting strength of the Christian evangelical movement, which considers their President responsible for laying the groundwork for the Second Coming of Christ. As preposterous as this may seem, Bush himself makes no bones about his faith and its ability to guide him in his daily political decisions. It is deeply troubling to think that one of the most avowedly secular nations of the Western world has become a quagmire of religious realpolitik.

The problem, however, is not just religious talk but religious action. As a female friend of mine from Cambridge, Massachusetts (who declined to be named) puts it: “The thing is, I could care less about these [Christian evangelicals]. What is terrifying is that [they] are trying to impose their thoughts onto the honest, intelligent people in this country.”

With the current Republican majority control over every branch of the federal government—from both houses of Congress to the U.S. Supreme Court and Presidency (and even filtering down to most state legislatures and governors’ offices)—fears about the dissolution of the right to privacy and sexual preference, women’s right to have control over their own bodies, and the law separating church and state are not unfounded.

For those of us here, however, these issues were never central to our pre-occupation with the outcome of the recent American elections. After all, our Internal Security Act is but an older version of the U.S. Patriot Act; the violation of a right to privacy and sexual preference is a non-issue for us because such a right does not exist to begin with; abortions (for the most part) are illegal in this country; and the mosque and state is intimately intertwined. Like most of the world, we are more concerned about the situation in Iraq and the Middle East, we wonder about the coming of the Third World War and in our own selfish way, we pray there won’t be another oil price hike.

There is, however, a salient feature of the American elections that should be a cause for worry; if exit polls and voting demographics are accurate, then the second coming of Bush to the corridors of Capitol Hill and the halls of world power signals a new “us and them” mutation: Christian evangelicals versus secular folk. Perhaps the atheists, agnostics and non-religious among us will soon be the new infidels of the world.

In a bizarre twist of history, the nation that was forged from beneath the yoke of religious oppression in England has now come full circle. When social pressure at the White House equals bible study, when faith-based initiatives take the place of government-funded welfare benefits, when the poor and disenfranchised are told to seek material and emotional comfort from a church, and when gays and lesbians’ desire to get hitched becomes a national issue and sets-off crises in state legislatures—it is evident that the constitutional separation of church and state in America is no longer sacrosanct.

The problem with religion (whether leaders, education or dogma) occupying such a central position in the halls of government is twofold: one, it invests the state with a moral authority that becomes indivisible from religious ideology; and two, this means that to a large extent, the governing elite is indirectly beholden to the hermeneutical knowledge of religious leaders.

Whether state leaders and politicians choose to oppose or conform to religious pressures is besides the point. The fact of the matter is that a religious paradigm becomes the context within which laws are created, vetoed or passed, and issues are raised, contested or disregarded. Using our own country as example, we should question why moral debates have revolved around reality TV shows and rock concerts instead of focusing, for example, on the government’s proposal to levy a sales tax on the public (which can definitely be viewed as an immoral act against the poor).

The Sunday Times of London’s coverage of the recent American takeover of a Fallujah mosque provides us with a startling quote from U.S. Marine battalion commander Gary Brandl, who has 800 officers under his command: “The Marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy. But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in Fallujah, and we're going to destroy him.”

This is the kind of trickle-down religious rhetoric that the American Christian right can be proud of for it infuses the potent mixture of religious revolt and divine destiny with a clear military agenda. Ironically, this three-prong tactic bears an uncanny resemblance to Osama bin Laden’s anti-American missions.

Ultimately, the dilemma raised by this year’s American elections is not what to do with the Christian right (or for that matter, any form of religious orthodoxy) but rather, how to reconfigure our socio-political landscape such that our moral universe is not configured within and constructed by/against a religious paradigm that is more pervasive, more insidious and certainly far less benign than we give it credit.

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This piece was published in the final (December 2004) issue of Options2, The Edge.