Much of the factionalism among Christian sects comes down to differences in metaphors people choose to understand the faith, he said. This was decades ago, so that may be a bit muddy. My high-school best friend was raised a Baptist and, via a long and winding road, eventually became a Greek Orthodox priest. But they are just metaphors, he said, not truth itself. If this metaphor doesn’t work for you, find another. No need to turn it into a blood feud.
Easy to say. Not so easy to live.
People become very attached to their metaphors. They can go off the rails when they decide their metaphor is THE truth. Or when a sect turns a Bible verse or two into its central organizing principle. Snake handlers, for example. Or the prosperity gospel. Or the “Jesus Only” people.
Or freedom worshippers. In the political arena, that is.
Conservatives who preached personal responsibility (for others) when they were more secure about their places in the social order now have made personal freedom their central organizing principle.
Personal responsibility was once a dog whistle Republicans invoked for opposing social programs that benefitted “lesser” Americans: the Blacks and browns and Asians. Personal responsibility referred to “those people” who presumably failed to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Don’t pick my pocket to help them, no. Let them sacrifice more, work harder, show more personal initiative, etc. Like nice white people.
That was when America’s social taxonomy was more clearly defined. Now that the country is getting browner, now that the lines are muddier, personal responsibility takes a back seat to personal freedom. But insistent cries of freedom are dog whistles, too. They are demands for dominance, for a United States defined again on white terms. For a United States that delivers more for them and asks less.
Thus, the insistence that wearing masks during the deadliest public health crisis in a century violates their freedom. They won’t defend women’s freedom to make decisions about their bodies, but will shout, red-faced and belligerent, that asking them to wear a mask to defend neighbors from a deadly pathogen infringes their personal freedom. Hell no! say would-be William Wallaces.
Sixteen million cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. alone and 300,000 dead. Freedom is their shibboleth, a demand for dominance one sees in the Proud Boys marching in the nation’s capitol. White. Angry. Maskless mostly. Violent. At least four stabbed on Saturday, including one Proud Boy per reports.
Freedom, not as an American ideal, but as a demand for domination, has become a central organizing principle on the right. And now a blood feud.