Bigotry, ignorance, corruption have no place in America’s reality
“America, as it has done before, has gone off the rails,” said Marianne Williamson, the author and lecturer, on Thursday evening.
Williamson, a native Houstonian, was speaking at Unity of Houston as part of her “Love America” tour, which began last month. I was among the several hundred people who had gathered in the pyramidshaped sanctuary, to hear her talk about spirituality and politics. For context, I really had no idea what to expect. I had heard of Williamson and knew that she writes about spirituality, but I’ve never read any of her books. The reason I ended up at the event is as follows. Last week, I decided to visit a place called 59 Minute Photo, on Westheimer, to get a set of passport photos. While en route, I happened to drive past a church and noticed that its sign was promoting Williamson’s upcoming lecture.
That might be interesting, I thought. Our politics are certainly bedeviled lately. So, while waiting for my passport photos to be printed, I consulted the internet to see what this was all about.
On Williamson’s website, the tour is billed as an effort to promote political renewal via “a revolution in consciousness.” Fear and hatred, the site explains, have become powerful forces in politics. In Williamson’s view, we can harness the powers of love and decency in response — and, if our democracy is to survive, we must.
My curiosity was piqued. The ills of fear and hatred are ancient, of course. Their political manifestations, like bigotry and corruption, predate the election of Donald Trump. But we’ve been confronted with them on a daily basis since he entered the White House, and many Americans have been asking themselves what they should do in response.
And this is a line of inquiry that Trump himself revived just
hours before Williamson took the stage.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” said Trump on Thursday, in a meeting with Republican and Democratic lawmakers, according to a bombshell report that appeared shortly thereafter, in the Washington Post.
This was, per the Post’s sources, in response to the suggestion that protections for immigrants from nations including Haiti and El Salvador be extended as part of the comprehensive immigration reform deal he has called on Congress to pass. The president went on to say that the United States should prioritize immigration from countries like Norway instead.
Trump has subsequently insisted, in a tweet, that although his language at the meeting was “tough,” it did not include the obscenity attributed to him. I don’t see why that matters, frankly. Let’s suppose that he referred to “suboptimal countries” instead. That would still be evidence of bigotry and ignorance, both of which are worse than cussing, in my view.
And I’d like to highlight a few points that Williamson made in her talk, which I found very bracing. Virtues and flaws
She began by emphasizing how important it is for Americans to know the history of our nation, and to be clear-eyed about both its virtues and its flaws, and the contradictions that they reflect. We’re the only country founded on small-d democratic principles, for example, but many of the men who signed the Constitution, which enshrines those principles, nonetheless owned slaves.
Since then, in Williamson’s telling, the Americans who want to realize those ideals have been in a constant struggle against those who would rather not, for various reasons. Perhaps they’re beneficiaries of an unjust status quo, or are subconsciously seeking to re-create a regime in which the people are subordinate to an entitled aristocracy.
The latter, Williamson continued, currently have the upper hand. And so it’s incumbent on spiritual and religious communities to lead the change — as, historically, they always have.
“People just being antislavery was not going to end slavery,” she noted. They had to actually do something, as the Quakers did in the abolitionist movement, or as Martin Luther King Jr. did in the fight for civil rights.
But what struck me most in Williamson’s talk was her explanation for why spiritual and religious communities step up to the plate.
“We don’t believe in a God out there, and a devil out there, that is stalking the planet, trying to grab men’s souls. We believe in something in here,” she said, pointing at her head.
That being the case, spiritual and religious Americans agree that there is a world beyond the world in which we live — a “truer reality,” according to our beliefs. A world in which people are equal, and truly free. Love and decency
Like all Americans, we also believe that’s how things should be in this world, or at least in this country. But religious communities have, historically, been leaders in so many fights for change.
Beliefs can’t be quantified, measured, or documented; as Williamson put it, the truth sometimes “becomes out-pictured” by the proximate reality. But when political leaders are flouting basic American principles, spiritual and religious Americans often object, because our civic beliefs are often reinforced by our beliefs about the truer reality.
Williamson is right, I think, about the powers of love and decency: They can harnessed, for political purposes, and should be channeled into actions accordingly. Voting is one example. Another would be pointing out that Trump’s comments on Thursday should be offensive to all Americans, regardless of their political beliefs. As Americans, we believe that all people are created equal, even if they come from suboptimal countries; that is a foundational premise of this one, which Trump supposedly leads.