This is the best article I have read to date from someone wanting to engage and understand those that participate in the “Tea Party” political movement. It is interesting reading. I mentioned in a post that I was frustrated by the term “Muslim American”. This author picks up this mode as some Tea Party participants identified themselves as “Christian Americans”. This is division rather than diversity and how the fear profiteers will continue to as “lord of the manor.”
“Me” the People: A Day with the Tea Party
by Alex MCNeill | Religion Dispatches | August 30, 2010
Individually, most Tea Partiers probably are nice people, trying to do what’s right, motivated by good intentions that extend from their faith in God and in their understanding of what this nation stands for. And individualism is exactly what the rhetoric of the rally was all about. From the Web site: “throughout history America has seen many great leaders and noteworthy citizens change her course. It is through their personal virtues and by their example that we are able to live as a free people. Our freedom is possible only if we remain virtuous.” Mirroring their Christology, salvation for themselves and for the country is an individual act.
There are websites, news, opinion, resource and entertainment, that I read each week. A new addition to my reading is a site called, Religion Dispatches. I am always on the look out for sites that treat religion and culture with intellectual curiosity and critical reflection. If there was ever a time when we need the “familiar” to challenge rather than comfort, now is the time. I think it is the “familiar” that has the best potential to alter, change (shame) or help our nation evolve during this second decade of the 21st century. Maybe the “anger” directed at Islam is a marker of our national movement through the grief process. I am trusting, as I suspect many Americans are, that acceptance is not far off.
For those of us that serve with youth and young adults, this “opinion” piece is a directional beacon. Plus, I grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s so headlines like the one below catch my eye.
1977 Redux: Star Wars and Evangelical Revisionists History
by Matthew Avery Hutton | Religion Dispatches Opinion | August 31, 2010
So what do Peter Marshall and Star Wars have in common? A lot. Most importantly, they show us that Americans are still searching for and finding faiths that affirm who they imagine themselves to be as a people rather than religions that challenge them to be better than they are. Marshall tells Christians that they are linked to a long line of holy predecessors just like them. Star Wars, in turn, helps viewers recognize their connection to an all-powerful, all-encompassing Force.
Both Star Wars and The Light and the Glory also trade in Americans’ nostalgia. Star Wars evokes a time when the most technologically “advanced” movie ever made had little more than cartoonish violence and no sex or profanity. There were no Bachelors, Survivors, Big Brothers, or Biggest Losers in 1977; and there were no films shot with digital cameras or programs broadcast in HD. Yet Star Wars was and still is unbelievably cool.
Peter Marshall also trades in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a particular vision of a white, middle-class, pre-Civil Rights, pre-Vietnam, pre-Watergate past. An imagined day when men were men, women were women, African Americans knew their place, and Mexicans lived south of the border. Not so cool.