Woe to you, hypocrites

Sigmund Freud, that master explorer of all things proctological, would have been utterly fascinated by Dale Carpenter’s obsessive use of the term “filth” in his recent letter to the editor, to describe the alleged “pornography” Mr. Carpenter wants his tax dollars to stop funding in the Samuels Public Library. In fact, Mr. Carpenter is so morally offended by this insult to the public morality, that he wants the Warren County Board of Supervisors to stop giving any money at all to the library—as if it provided no other public service other than peddling porn to little kids.

Well, since Freud has to content himself with rolling his eyes in his grave at Mr. Carpenter’s obsessions, allow me, a seasoned (which is to say, old) observer of human folly to substitute my humble analysis of Mr. Carpenter‘s … vicissitude.

Mr. Carpenter, the leader of the Shenandoah Christian Alliance (SCA), obviously fashions himself as a pillar of rectitude (so to speak) in the community. But he reminds me of nothing less than the Pharisaic critics of Jesus, whom Jesus himself describes in the gospel as “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.”

Mr. Carpenter, who, from his letter, just as obviously likes to be seen praying in the marketplace as much as the enemies of Jesus, may shine with Christian piety on the outside, but his inner subconscious appears to rumble with darkness—fear, ignorance, and bigotry. His almost clinically sterile civic language cannot disguise the demons within.

Neuroscientists have done a number of studies on the political mind and, perhaps unsurprisingly, have found clear, significant, and physical differences between the brains of conservatives and liberals, differences that persist across ages and cultures. Whereas the brains of political liberals have more activity in the left posterior insula, which gives them more openness to experience and a greater tolerance for uncertainty, conservative brains are characterized by the enlargement of the amygdala. LINK: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/

The amygdala is “commonly thought to form the core of a neural system for processing fearful and threatening stimuli, including detection of threat and activation of appropriate fear-related behaviors in response to threatening and dangerous stimuli,“ according to the National Academy of Sciences.

What would appear to be Mr. Carpenter’s bulging amygdala is on vivid display throughout his letter. He fears everything: Change; The future; The differences in human nature; The secular state.

And according to the SCA website, he and his followers even boast about their “fear” of God. LINK: https://sca4christ.org/who-we-are/ This is something I (and other spiritual liberals, I suspect) have never understood. Why would a loving God want “fear” from the children of the divine womb? It makes no sense to me.

In “Moral Politics,” one of the most insightful books of the past half century, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff uses these studies of the differences between liberal and conservative brains to advance the theory that Americans view the nation as a family, but liberals and conservatives adhere to different models of that institution.

Liberals follow what Lakoff terms the “Nurturant Parent” model, which is characterized by a sense of equality among the family members, where even children, though requiring guidance, are recognized for their full humanity.

Lakoff calls the conservative model of the family the “Strict Father” model. This is consistent with the conservative moral tradition, which sees the father as the head of the family, and wherein children are not to be spoiled by sparing the rod. And neither are wives, according to the “rule of thumb,” the biblical injunction that requires, for “mercy’s” sake, that disobedient wives be punished with a stick no bigger in diameter than a man’s thumb.

These psychological differences in family models, Lakoff believes, explain why liberals and conservatives hold a remarkably consistent range of opinions across a variety of seemingly unrelated issues, like the environment, abortion, and guns.

More vivid than Mr. Carpenter’s fear, though, is his unconscious ignorance of a vast range of subjects—beginning with his mistaken notion that this nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values.

Certainly, the religious beliefs of the Framers—especially their Deism—contributed mightily to their political beliefs. But the Framers were also acutely aware of the destruction wrought by religious differences and the religious wars that had roiled the European continent for a century. For this reason, the word “God” is deliberately absent from the US Constitution. Does Mr. Carpenter see this merely as an unfortunate, correctable oversight?

God save the republic.

Perhaps surpassing his ignorance of American history is his oblivious indifference to modern world history. Is Mr. Carpenter aware that, in the seminal classic, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” author William Shirer contemporaneously identified Adolph Hitler’s base political constituency as being primarily made up of rural religious conservatives, whom we know from The Third Reich rhetoric they supported only wanted to make Germany great again, right? Does Mr. Carpenter not recognize himself in that archetype—the God-fearing, institution-preserving extremist—an archetype that recurs again and again throughout history? (Fawcett World Library Edition of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” – pages 326 to 333; and pages 354 to 356)

But perhaps even more inexplicable than Mr. Carpenter’s ignorance of history is his profound ignorance about the foundations of his own faith.

Forget the Song of Solomon, the sexually-charged book in the Old Testament whose racy passages have thrilled schoolboys for centuries. Mr. Carpenter, his dogmatic blinders fully installed, refuses to associate these passages with the “filth” he finds so abhorrent in the library, yet posts on his website for everyone to read.

Methinks someone protesteth too much.

But Mr. Carpenter’s most fundamental error is his ironclad refusal to recognize the true nature of the God he claims to “fear” and worship. Were it not so tragic in its consequences, I would find his ignorance on this subject to be downright hilarious.

The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, begins, in its original Hebrew, with the words, “Bereschyt Barak Elohim.” The 22 letters which make up the Hebrew alphabet also correspond to numbers, and these numbers represent cosmic principles that swirled in the minds of the original authors of the Hebrew Bible—principles of which we, living in our “King James” translation reality today, are barely aware. But that is not the ignorance of which I speak.

“Bereschyt Barak Elohim” is generally translated as, “In the beginning, God…” “Elohim” is the first word used to represent the concept “God” in the Bible of both Jews and Christians.

“Elohim” is an interesting word. In the first place, it didn’t originate with the Hebrews. It had its origins in the Ugarit tribe, who preceded and cohabited with the Hebrew tribe in the land of Canaan and used the word “Elohim” to refer to God before the Hebrews. But here’s where things get interesting. The word “Elohim” refers to a council of gods, who become one in their intention—Divine Providence—but which is made up of many different gods, both male and female, of whom Yahweh—the name many contemporary Christians associate with the God of the Old Testament—was a minor thunder deity in the Elohim pantheon.

The word “Elohim” is composed of a singular masculine root—“El”—combined with a feminine plural ending—“ohim”—into one word, one God. Carrying this line of thought to its conclusion, it is a sublime irony that the God that Mr. Carpenter and his apostles claim to worship is “transgender”—both male and female—and the most appropriate pronoun you can apply to that God is “they.”
Of course, somewhere in ancient history a band of warriors among the Hebrews decided to adopt the thundering male Yahweh as their primary god. Consequently, the Ugarits were slaughtered or kidnapped, and written out of the religious history they brought to Canaan. We’ve been dominated by single male deities ever since.

Patriarchy loves warrior gods.

To be fair, like the fallen woman in the old song, Mr. Carpenter is more to be pitied than censured. He is a slave to his own inter-cranial physiology. He lives in a fast-changing age that has blinded him to his own ignorance. He is blind to his hatred. Blind to his injustice. Blind to his bigotry. And he is joined in his blindness by his small cabal of book banners. Book banners, book burners—same thing.

I pray daily—in my little, secular, pantheistic way—for the healing of their souls. But meanwhile, as Jesus says: “Woe to you, hypocrites.”

Mike Hasty
Front Royal

(In 2000, the West Virginia Press Association named Mike Hasty “Best Columnist” in the category of large circulation weeklies. Like the Old Testament prophets, he is also a musician. See 1 Samuel 10:5-6)