It’s Cuomo vs. the Senecas, with the Thruway as hostage
No governor of recent vintage has been successful in navigating the law and politics of Native American nations. That’s less a criticism than an acknowledgement of reality. The combination of competitive sovereignty, federal law and big money have left us with serial crises and bad policies.
For example, New York’s rush to build casinos was the result of proliferating Native American casinos. “We can’t let the Indians be the sole beneficiary of legal gambling” went the argument. Our current overbuilt and failing casino network resulted. We should have known better.
Some wounds, however, seem self-inflicted. As part of the continuing saga of New York/ Seneca Nation conflict we now have a three-mile section of the Thruway that is dangerous and unmaintained. Intentionally.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo persuaded the Thruway Authority to adopt this course of action in response to the refusal of the Seneca Nation to pay casino taxes they had agreed to. The courts have determined that the Seneca Nation owes the money, even as it continues to refuse to pay up.
Cuomo is in a bind. He has an obligation to collect the missing $255 million and few tools to do it with. The decision was to stop road maintenance on the threemile stretch of the Thruway that crosses Seneca land. The stated grounds was that doing so might weaken New York’s position before the courts. Not the clearest
Campbell of the University of Notre Dame said: “It’s unlikely that [young people are] going to be able to climb back to the same level of religious involvement as their parents’ or grandparents’ generation did. Just because they’re starting at a much, much lower point.”
Why is that point so low? There are a number of reasons, but one of them, Campbell argues, is “an allergic reaction to the religious right.” This sets up an irony. “One of the main rationales for the very existence of this movement was to assert the role of religion in the public square in America. And, instead, what’s happening in that very movement has actually driven an increasing share of Americans out of religion.” This alienation preceded the current president, but it has intensified in the Trump era.
Since 2000, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has more than doubled, from 8% to 19%. The percentage of millennials with no religion has averaged 33% in recent surveys.
As Campbell describes it, some of those alienated from religion merely drop out of the faith marketplace. They are what he calls “passive secularists.”
But there is also an increasing number who are “active secularists” — people who have chosen secularism as an identity. And this is creating a secular left within the Democratic Party to counter the religious right in the Republican Party. In their hands, the culture war will be fought to the last man or woman.
If evangelicals were to consult their past, they would find that their times of greatest positive influence — in late 18thcentury and early 19th-century Britain, or mid-19th-century America — came when they were truest to their religious calling. It was not when they acted like another political interest group. The advocates of abolition, prison reform, humane treatment of the mentally disabled and women’s rights were known as malcontents in the cause of human dignity.
Today, far too many evangelicals are seen as angry and culturally defensive, and have tied their cause to a leader who is morally corrupt and dehumanizes others. Older evangelicals — the very people who should be maintaining and modeling moral standards — have ignored and compromised those standards for political reasons in plain view of their own children. And disillusionment is the natural result.