October 21, 2004
(Paris) – Listening to a locker attendant in my Paris health club talking about her shocking experience watching a television program on the role of evangelists in America was an aberration for me. As a somewhat educated “European” she could not accept the whole story and believed that it was a gross undermining of American voters’ intelligence. She asked me sunken in a deep surprise, how could the Americans permit that somebody – looking so greedy – play with their faith and dictate to them how they should worship God and how to select a President? She noted that she was born a Catholic and believed in Jesus. She goes to church every Sunday and she pays her dues to the church, the Vatican, but in all her life, she had never asked God to help her elect a President who was to preside over the earthly affairs of her country. Then she added in a mix of sadness and fear that she was worried that an autocratic approach to religious beliefs and dubious attacks on all other faiths preached by those evangelists may not only give rise to a strong dislike of America, but may also bring about a war which could be infernal for all.
I left her perplexed. Yes, she was right in being so fearful of the direction that America had taken in the course of the last few years. Yes, she was even more right to fear for her faith as a devout Catholic, in light of relentless efforts by Catholic priests to tell the flock that voting for a candidate with Kerry’s policies could lead to eternal damnation. The gospel aligning Kerry with the forces of evil has gained a momentum of its own! Middle America is faithful, goes to church and is tuned to the insinuations and denunciations by preachers. Middle America, out of a fear of Armageddon created by neocon evangelists or self-declared envoys of Jesus, may well follow and decide blindly just at the last minute to send God’s “envoy on earth” back to the White House. If that happens we should be prepared to witness more of the same and a gradual return to ages where church doctrine ruled and scientific findings were demonized. America will then soon be in need of a new renaissance and enlightenment.
I wonder when all this happened? I left America just over a year ago. Was I blinded for some 28 years when I lived in that “Land of Free”, or was it just my blind trust in the American sense of judgment and determination to defend what they had achieved after a long struggle, that endowed me such dismissiveness? How could I, or anybody else, have ignored or taken lightly the formation of such a close and explicit alliance between church and the state? Having escaped my natal land some 40 years ago in search of freedom and democracy, for me the present reality is rather painful. How shocking it is to see that America is sacrificing its hard-earned freedoms for an illusion of feeling more secure, not realizing that it may take it back on a road to the past.
So, probably an election in America should not only be left to Americans alone, given the enormous influence of the religious communities most of them tilted to the right. The Europeans ought to be apprehensive of the results of the upcoming election in the US, given the enormous force, influence and pressure of an almighty America; the Asians alike, leave alone the Africans and Latin Americans. After the disappearance of the bi-polar world, we all live in a world with one “superpower” and have to look to its dominating influence for enlightenment, models of modernity and moral values. Given the vast and widespread impact of American moral values and its political, military and
economic power, I believe that we all, no matter in which country we live, should be permitted to participate in the vote for an American President. I am confident that given what is at stake, we all will take this task seriously. We may end up voting for “a model president” who will think and act for prosperity and peace of the global community. A President who would command by virtue of respect and conviction and not by pressure of modern warfare and gunship. And the world would be a better place!
Mehri Madarshahi
Paris
Correspondant of the UNDiplomatic Times