Freedom FROM Religion

Tom Wolfe was on the CSPAN BookTV program on Sunday, talking about Mark Twain at the Mark Twain House Museum. During the Q & A period he talked about the era we are currently living in. He called it the Era of Freedom From Religion.

As is his style, he had a slightly irreverant tone and flippant attitude, but what he said made enormous sense. He started off by describing how America was founded by our forefathers seeking freedom of religion and freedom from the monarchy of Britain, then went on to talk about Freedom from Want under FDR, with some other stops along the way I missed and then came to the notion that in the last 20 years or so, the social fabric of the US is stretching a great deal and we are not in an Era of Freedom FROM Religion (read: religious guilt).

The notion is that church and your mother used to make you feel guilty when you broke moral barriers; i.e., if you stole something, you were fearful of your mother's (or father's) wrath and censure, so you didn't do that. As an adult in that same vein, the church could shame you into "good behavior" and you would not go around coveting your neighbor's wife or other sinful things which your neighbors might consider amoral.

He said that we are leaving behind the era of religion having a moral hold on most Americans. In 1970 he said an astronaut was given the right to go into outer space if he was divorced and BEFORE this, he was not. He went into a totally hysterical description of trophy wives and how now it's not only permissible -- to be a successful older Alpha Male who dumps his wife of 20 odd years for a babe -- but practically de rigeur and that the only real social discomfort it creates is the time it takes to find out how the new wife spells her name -- suggesting that girls with names such as Brittany may spell it as many as ten different ways and you must get it right and scribble it in your address book where the old wife contact information had once resided.

I think (and he did not make this connection) it's absolutely true that this Bush White House (witness this flap about Janet Jackson's breast, much less Ashbrook's weird bare breast covering activities) is all about trying to fight this freedom from religious morality and reinstate an antiquated notion of marriage, feminine virtue and all things "good" of course by THEIR definition. They find themselves in a Dantesque Hell of going to war with religious fundamentalists out-moralizing their endless moralizing. They deserve it. Ironically, Bush and his relgious right and the Moslem fundamentalists are more in alignment on religious issues than they might want to admit. Do we need their bosom burqua? Do we need their narrow view of marriage? Do we need their old time religion? I don't think so.