God vs. God

Anybody who still believes that there is no official U.S. state religion, probably hasn’t really looked at what is really happening at the top federal agencies in Washington. It’s pretty clear that the Trump-enabled evangelical movement – which actually has some pretty terrific people when they follow the New Testament’s clear vectors of tolerance, forgiveness, brotherly love, values built on charity and kindness and not casting the first stone or sitting in judgment of others – is trying to make their values the official and preferred American faith. Their enemy is diversity, laced with immigration policies allowing people of other cultures, faiths and races admission into “white evangelical America.” Steve Bannon’s view of America.

As I watched Bannon’s 60 Minutes interview on September 10^th, I felt I was in a time warp, listening to a man from the early 20^th century who was uncomfortably planted into a future he clearly did not understand. As he postured for the new populist nationalism embodied in everything Trump, he railed at what he perceived were the biggest enemies, foes that were taking jobs away from solid-if-displaced blue-collar American workers: cheap goods from China and other global competitors and immigrants, even the DACA innocents.

While globalization may have been the story a decade ago, while immigrants have been a mainstay in job-creation for some time, stuck-in-time Bannon missed the obvious mega-force that was really marginalizing that blue collar constituency: automation driven by artificial intelligence. Those displaced coal miners, assembly-line workers, tool-and-die craftsmen, heavy machinery operators, truck drivers, etc., etc. have a whole lot less to fear from foreign competition and DACA kids taking their jobs than they do facing the automation that will absolutely insure they those blue collar jobs disappear permanently… along with a pile of white collar jobs right behind.

Take a good hard re-read of my September 11^th Stitches blog to see that future. Reshoring those used-to-be-outsourced-to-cheaper-foreign-labor jobs only lines the pockets of those one-percenters who own those automated machines. You can read statistics about increasing pay as much as you want, but given the steep increases in housing and food costs and the number of people who have dropped out of federal job and earnings metrics, I am not impressed.

Still, that segment of white blue collar workers believes that God and Donald Trump are on their side, blame anyone The Donald points a finger (tweet?) at, and push for their government to mirror their values, culture and race. They seem oddly as if they were time-machine-travelled from the era of Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding, rather dramatically out of step with the real world as it is today. The odds of their recapturing their populist working class dream, making America white and evangelical and sustaining their belief that global climate change is a hoax? Zero. The Trump administration simply ignores the religious proscriptions in the First Amendment, thus encouraging evangelicals to press for religious supremacy in law, culture and governance.

Nothing brings this profoundly obsolete time-warp mentality home like the new policies being implemented at the Central Intelligence Agency by self-proclaimed evangelical, Director and Trump-appointee Mike Pompeo. Prior CIA directors, realizing that they had to reach into a highly diverse planet, made profound efforts to recruit agency employees with cultural, religious and racial diversity.

“[For Obama’s CIA-director, John] Brennan, the [diversity recruitment] changes were a matter of building a better workforce, as well as national security. ‘I believe strongly that diversity and inclusion [are] what this country is all about,’ Brennan said in a phone interview with FP [Foreign Policy magazine]. ‘I can think of no organization that can make a better business case for diversity and inclusion than the CIA. We have the responsibility of covering the globe, understanding all societies, cultures, and backgrounds.’” foreignpolicy.com, September 8^th.

But Pompeo has an entirely different agenda, one where diversity is actually a negative value. People with evangelical values trump those with multicultural backgrounds and expertise. Case in point from the above issue of Foreign Policy magazine: “In early summer, Judy and Dennis Shepard bought plane tickets to give a speech to the workforce at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The Shepards in 1998 had founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation in honor of their late son — a 21-year-old college freshman who was viciously attacked and left tied to a fence before he was brought to a hospital where he died of his injuries. One of the most notorious anti-gay acts of violence in U.S. history, his death led to some of the country’s first federal hate crime laws.

“The Shepards had been invited to the CIA to talk about diversity and LGBTQ rights, joining a long line of guest speakers at the covert overseas spy agency including lawmakers, former officials, authors, and celebrities... The schedule was set, and the details arranged, but in the 11th hour, the senior leadership shut down the event. The seventh floor, where the director’s office sits, had the Shepards’ speech canceled, questioning what value it would bring to the CIA mission…

“For those who have worked inside the agency, the backtracking on diversity represents a threat to the workforce and national security, according to Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who helped track high-level terrorist targets like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

“The agency needs employees from different backgrounds and orientations to effectively recruit agents abroad. ‘What if you have to recruit someone who’s gay and that’s the only reason they’re talking to you?’ she asked.

“‘This isn’t just about today’s diversity issue. It’s about tomorrow’s lack of diversity that will erode the agency,’ Bakos told FP. ‘You can’t hire someone who’s typically white American to walk around Baghdad.’… [Neverthless, the face of the CIA is transforming dramatically.]

“Things changed quickly with President Donald Trump’s pick for CIA director, Mike Pompeo. A West Point graduate and former small-business owner, he never made a secret of his conservative social viewpoints during his time as a lawmaker. He has visited college campuses to talk about his disapproval of same-sex marriage, arguing that ‘the strength of these families having a father and a mother is the ideal condition for childbearing.’ He has sponsored several pieces of legislation that would have weakened the rights of gay couples and supported organizations that champion those same beliefs…

“Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, has said previously that Islamist terrorists will ‘continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.’

“The concerns are not that Pompeo is religious but that his religious convictions are bleeding over into the CIA… According to four sources familiar with the matter, Pompeo, who attends weekly Bible studies held in government buildings, referenced God and Christianity repeatedly in his first all-hands speech and in a recent trip report while traveling overseas. According to a profile by the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, Pompeo is working on starting a chaplaincy for the CIA campus like the military has… The CIA did not dispute these events. ‘Director Pompeo is a man of faith,’ the spokesperson said. ‘The idea that he should not practice his faith because he is Director of CIA is absurd.’”

You can see these evangelical vectors across Trump appointments from Bible college graduate and Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, who wants less support for public schools and a voucher system to allow greater support of evangelical schools, to EPA head, Scott Pruitt, who clearly embraces evangelical notions of climate change denial. These religious vectors run through many of Trump’s appointees at time when the United States is more diverse than it ever has been. If there were the slightest credible argument why the elevation of white evangelicals would improve our national security and accelerate our global competitiveness, I have not heard it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and assuming we do not first slide into second-rate global power first, perhaps even unraveling into smaller nations, it will take decades to undo the damage of a powerful executive branch resetting the structure of American government upon the quicksand of rather blatantly false assumptions.