How Will We Respond To The Quest For More Power?

Have been taking a lot of time off from the blog for personal reasons. In the meantime, what started so seemingly innocent with the passage of the Patriot Act has become a global problem: the quest for more power by those with power. George Monbiot recently wrote an article about this for ZNet (click here for the article). Monbiot specifically focused on the growing fascism that exists in India, Brazil, the Philippines, the UK, and the US. But those aren't the only ones he mentioned. The sign of authoritarianism which he is focusing on is the growing disregard for law by national leaders.

And just as it is with wealth among many who are wealthy, one of the reasons for obtaining more power is to keep up with the Joneses--as they use to say when I was young.

For the US, what enables favored leaders to grab for more power is the holdover authoritarian culture left by America's Christian influences. Religiously conservative Christianity naturally  tends toward authoritarianism with followers embracing a passive authoritarianism. Such an embrace enables our leader(s) to seek more power provided they promote the agenda of my fellow religiously conservative Christians. Part of that agenda is a legitimate pro-life concern for the unborn. But as our President has instituted policies that favor the wealthy which put social safety nets in harms way, that pro-life of my fellow Christians concern shows significant cracks from compromise. 

Another part of the agenda of many of us religiously conservative Christians is that our religious liberties, in our case our right to discriminate against the LGBT community in the public square, be protected. This shows the self-centeredness that many of us religiously conservative Christians have obliviously but passionately embraced.

What is destroying America, and the World too, is unbridled arrogance and greed not just by some, but by many of its leaders. And that is exhibited by a continual grabbing for power. All of this has been stated in a number of ways for a while and yet no one listens. And that greed and pride is not just for the wealthy, it is for people of the lower classes who support their preferred authoritarian leaders because those leaders throw them enough bones to make them feel significant and protected. Here we should note that some Churches from other nations practice similar sins. For the Church in Egypt and Syria have latched on to tyrannical leaders because those leaders protect those Christians.

Thus, religiously conservative American Christians are putting their own nation at a threatening crossroads. For America to break with the world's penchant for authoritarianism, it will have to divorce itself from conservative Christianity or America's religiously conservative Christians must do an about-face. With the latter seemingly unlikely, religiously conservative Christians are asking for a persecution that they have been crying wolf over for the past few years. And why is that? It is because of arrogance and greed.