I started out in life as a Black Nationalist. My late baby brother was born with Spinal Meningitis which he survived - this turned my mother, a lapsed Catholic, into a born-again Evangelical and introduced Jesus for the very first time into the household when I was in elementary school. Understand that as a kid, we never said grace or bedtime prayers. There were no praying hands on the mantel, cross or portrait on the wall. So suddenly I had to reorient causality onto this Jesus character.
It took a couple years, but I finally figured out that Jesus must be in my head and that I didn't have to alter my body position to speak to him. And since he must be God, then I don't have to sit and wait for an answer - either he's going to say something to me immediately or not. If he doesn't answer immediately, then he's saying, in effect, Michael go do what you want. How could he be incapable of hearing my prayer? If he answers prayer, how could he stand to be subordinated to my own will? So my checking in with Jesus worked with the provision 'unless otherwise directed by heavenly command, I'm about to do this'. Jesus never really stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do, but the act of checking in developed into a strong conscience. So strong in fact, that I became convinced that I was doing God's work. That stayed me for a very long time.
Soon enough it was off to Catholic School, who told me that I was too lowly to speak directly to Jesus and that I better check with Mary first. Hmm. That's a twist. Not only that, but they stopped in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, so the priest could say "Deliver us Lord from every evil and grant us peace in our day." Well the Catholics had it all over the Evangelicals for dignity and demeanor, but what's up with the intercession? I already had my P2P connection with Jesus hooked up, now this new gaggle of saints and clergy are cluttering up the connection and translating it to SNA. I swear if it was in Latin, I would have never given them a second thought.
Two years later I was off to study with the Jesuits. They deconstructed Genesis, taught me about who this character King James actually was (yike!) and introduced me to the machinations of the Council of Nicea. Well, there's a fine how do you do. These guys have a set of moral power tools which have made a fine mess of all previous constructions, but one thing stuck firm. Be a man for others - be Christlike. And suddenly I was no longer capable of making the ultimate sacrifice for any Black Nationalist cause.
In the end, I decided with Pops, that straight up Episcopalians were the right combination of tradition, structure and Living Jesus and Good Works. I took my second Catechism, was re-baptized and Confirmed into the Episcopal Church at the age of 16.
I bring this up because I am proud of having been Confirmed by an Archbishop and of all the discussions I have regarding the sensibility and provenance of my conservatism I never am questioned about my Christian faith. And yet any person with a reasonable amount of certainty about the propriety of their own sect might easily point an accusing finger at my less that singular history. Is this because we simply don't do that in America or that we have accomodated for our religious diversity? In other words, while some folks are dividing us up into Red and Blue states over something we only do once every four years why don't they bother dividing us up into 30 someodd sects based on something we do much more often?
Well, we don't need religious consensus to function as a nation. People more or less assume (I assume) that a proper religious upbringing is sufficiently moral to not worry about the differences in the forking paths to righteousness. After all, religion is all about righteousness. But this kind of benefit of the doubt is less likely in political circles, even though political ideology is less well defined than religious dogma.
I don't want to seque too far away from the theme of the title other than to say that installing a Republican in your head is not quite as likely to happen as installing Allah in your head. Is it because politics is not all about righteousness that we are so critical of non-deterministic political philosophies?
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