Morality vs. Religion
That was the US election. Morality on the left versus religion on the right. Who won? Well, I can’t say that Trump is the poster child for religious ideology or anything, but religion did win the election.
What really happened was that Trump managed to convince a whole bunch of people that he would create a Christian Nationalist United States for them and they believed him - so much so, they voted him into office again.
What’s he really going to do? Change the United States from a capitalist democracy into a dictatorship. Why is he going to have the opportunity to do that? Because people were too busy fighting over morality versus religion to notice what his true intention was. It was buried in all the insults and bluster he tends to offer, but the majority of people weren’t paying enough attention to notice. That or they just didn’t believe anything he said, which is equally problematic.
To be fair, religion and morality are pretty distracting things, especially once the ego gets involved. The ego turns it into a fight. The ego creates a sense of right and wrong, good and bad. The ego makes it personal and defends it as such. The ego makes people believe that these moral and religious issues should also be political issues.
The US, like Canada, was founded on the idea of separation between the church and the government. But when you build political campaigns on religious ideologies, you lose that separation. The morally ideological left understood that but didn’t see how their own ideology was completely hypocritical. When we build political campaigns on moral ideologies, we lose the separation between public and private, between work and home, between the self and the collective. We start projecting - a lot.
Religious ideology after all, was the political right’s counter to the moral ideology of the left. Religion was used as defense. Every time the left tried to argue moral authority, the right would try to trump them (no pun intended) with God. That’s not to say that God won because God wasn’t part of the argument. Religion or God was just the weapon of choice.
In the interest of transparency, politically I’m mostly left. I believe that all basic needs should be met just simply for being alive. Food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education should all be fully provided for. Those are pretty left leaning ideas. However, over the last few years, I’ve had to separate myself from the left. Why? Because I understood what the right was saying. I understood why they felt censored and in many cases, degraded. I understood why they felt their freedom to say what they wanted to say and believe what they wanted to believe was being taken away by the left. I saw the implication of that and knew that it was the reason for the division in our society. Because of that, I could no longer support the left.
Politically, I don’t typically agree with the right either. JD Vance expressed it the best at the Republican National Convention. I caught a clip of him on TikTok talking about how they felt censored. It hit deep, not because I agree with what they are saying, but because I understood their desire to be able to say it. My judgment of what they are saying as wrong doesn’t overshadow my awareness of their need to be able to say it freely. Why? Because freely talking and sharing has been my own personal struggle. I understand them on a very human level because I spent my life trying to make other people happy and I made myself miserable doing it.
I see and feel the pain of being told that what you have to say isn’t important, is wrong, or shouldn’t be heard. My judgment of what they are saying should not be the thing that stops them from saying it. I don’t have to agree or even like it to allow them the freedom that they deserve to have for simply being living, breathing human beings. If I want my ability to say I want to say, then I had better be willing to extend that same courtesy to everybody.
This is where the moral ideology becomes particularly hypocritical. If you want the freedom to state your beliefs then you have to allow everybody to do the same thing, regardless of your moral judgement of those beliefs. We need to get out of this idea that it is our job to protect people from the themselves and each other. It is not. That is a moral argument. It is a personal belief. It is not to be projected onto others anymore than religious beliefs should be projected onto others.
The moral of the story is simple: Leave morality and religion out of politics. Again, no pun intended. When we learn to do this it will free people to discuss instead of defend. It will dampen the egos’ need to be right. It will make politics collective again instead of personal. That is what will narrow the divide.
Until we get there however, we have to deal with the distinct possibility that the United States as we know it today will no longer exist in 4 years time. These next 4 years are going to be some of the most difficult many of us have ever experienced. This is going to be very hard to watch. But as I’ve learned from doing my own work on myself, sometimes the only way we learn is through experiencing pain. I have a feeling, we’re about to collectively experience our fair share of it over the next few years.
Stay well, my friends.
Della