A Note to Readers: As an African American Christian living in France, my views on America’s raging health-care debate were bound to be out of the mainstream. But a recent trip to Burundi, one of the poorest nations in the world, has given my point of view another twist. As a result, I am writing three op-ed articles for UrbanFaith on the health-care issue from my specific perspective as a black American based in Paris who does reconciliation work in Africa.
Over the course of this three-part series, these are some of the topics I will address:
• How the anti-government worldview is poisoning America’s political environment and how my African American and Christian worldview inoculated me against the indoctrination
• Why Christians get sucked into the manipulation process
• How Burundi’s political system was manipulated by the rich and powerful — with catastrophic results — and why it should make us think twice about how the health-care battle is being waged
• Should “socialism” be considered a dirty word? Some truth about health-care under the French system
Let the Deprogramming Begin
I must begin by stating unequivocally that I am a follower of Jesus Christ. Sometimes the primacy of our Christian identity can get swept away in the torrent of emotions and accusations that accompany our political engagement today. I love God, and I love and respect my brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of where they land on the spectrum of political opinion. With that said, it’s important to note that our human ideologies and political beliefs are just that — human.
American conservatives who were upset about President Obama’s speech to the nation’s schoolchildren are right to be concerned about political indoctrination. Repeatedly reinforcing ideas on impressionable minds can change the way a generation thinks.
And they should know.
They are part of a generation of Americans that were programmed to believe that government is not to be trusted. And that belief, more than fears of “death panels” or budget deficits, is the biggest obstacle facing the President and those who want to overhaul our broken health-care system.
As the President prepares to address the nation on health-care tonight, I would argue that there is no greater challenge to our system of democracy — not just health care — than to start the process of deprogramming.
A Mighty Worldview
When one listens to the arguments of those who speak out against “Obamacare,” it becomes clear that the anti-government worldview is in effect. Those who live in this worldview don’t see government as an imperfect extension of themselves. Government to them is an evil entity, completely separate from them. It is not to be influenced and improved. It is to be minimized and castrated.
Government is not the necessary guarantor of freedom for all; it is the impediment to freedom and, therefore, must get out of the way.
This has been the basic reasoning for one part of America since the so-called Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, when my generation of Americans was indoctrinated with the ideas that government was necessarily a bad thing, and that society only worked well when individuals were left the freedom (read “keeping their money”) to do things for themselves.
Ronald Reagan perhaps said it best, and most influentially, when he ran on a platform that asserted, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
Within a few years, this thinking became preached as a matter of fact in many circles — even from pulpits and Sunday school classes. And who could argue? We watched, after all, the fall of communism. And since most didn’t realize that communism and socialism are not the same thing, we took this as confirmation of our doctrine of less government control and more freedom. Capitalism became good and virtuous and productive and healthy. Socialism became ungodly, sloth-producing, inefficient, and destructive.
And somehow, government itself — not just specific policies — became evil. Any government spending (with the notable exception of blowing things up), would be labeled “socialism.” And if it was socialism, it was naturally evil.
In perhaps the most skillful mind-control trick of the generation, images of the American flag seemed to always accompany this type of talk, so that people began to actually associate hating the government with patriotism.
But here’s where worldview comes into play. People like me never accepted Reagan’s thinking, because the logic didn’t fit our worldview. To us, it was Martin Luther King Jr. who sounded patriotic when he called on the United States to live up to its Constitutional creed, pushing the government to act.
Reagan’s words, on the other hand, sounded an awful lot like the cry of the Southern states during the civil rights movement a generation earlier, as those Southern states sought to maintain a system of segregation and the denial of voting rights to non-white Americans.
That generation also argued that government had no right telling normal people what to do. They talked about the evil government, restricting freedom. They called those fighting for justice “socialists” and “communists.” They spoke with hatred about their government, which to us did not sound like patriotism. It sounded like other “isms” we had grown accustomed to.
A century earlier, the same basic cries came from the Confederate States, who wanted to continue exploiting humans for profit. They waved their flags and spoke of fighting tyranny, even as they took up arms against their countrymen and left the Union. In my worldview, this was not patriotic.
We realized that their calls for the government to get out of the way were really based in a desire to continue profiting from injustice. We saw government as existing to ensure justice.
Healthy Mistrust
We, too, had a healthy skepticism of government. We carried in our collective memory images of a government that did not protect us from slavery, nor later from state-approved systematic terrorism. Government did not protect us from being cheated, discriminated against, and held out of the very basic freedoms our Constitution guarantees.
But rather than take up arms against our oppressors, there was a belief that this nation was ours too, and that its government, in the end, represented us. It was imperfect, but it had to be fixed so that it would work the way it was supposed to work.
People like Malcolm X, who had essentially the same point of view of many in today’s government-hatred movement, were branded evil traitors and dangerous to democracy. Malcolm basically argued, to quote Thomas Jefferson and many of today’s patriots, that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Notice how those words sound when they are not coming from someone who looks and thinks like you. They suddenly sound anti-democratic, dangerous, hateful, and destabilizing. That’s how Malcolm was perceived.
Fortunately for America, King’s Jesus-based approach of loving your enemies won out as the method of choice for the movement. We would be living in a very different America today had it not.
I would argue that the anti-government rhetoric once again has taken America to the brink of becoming a very different nation. Perhaps Christians will again play a key role in leading us to a Jesus-based approach to societal change instead of following the “Gospel according to political ideology.”
At any rate, the deprogramming needs to start soon. Perhaps our president can begin the process with his speech tonight.
Related Articles: Confronting Health-Care Hysteria, Part 2
I believe it’s unfair to accuse the late President Reagan of believing that any government was evil, simply by virtue of being a government. If Reagan had believed that, he would not have sought public office.
To my knowledge, Reagan applied the word evil to only one government: the totalitarian regime that prevailed at that time in the Soviet Union. I think Reagan’s use of that word has withstood the past twenty years quite well.
Why is it that people who believe differently from those who support Obamacare have to somehow be brainwashed? Why can’t it be that folks disagree with him on legitimate grounds? Personally, I believe that the more power you give to government the worse it is for the individual citizen. Government is inherently inefficient. Plus, why is it so easy to dismiss the problem that a doubling or tripling of our deficit would bring? No one would handle their personal budget like that. Why would we handle billions and trillions of dollars the same way? I do agree that there are problems with our system that need fixing but accruing a debt that our grandchildren will be saddled with is not the answer.
This article made me think and I believe your correct. The shouts of “socialist” that we hear today have had a tinge of something more than just anger about Obama’s policies. This article has helped me make the historical connection to some of the race-related stuff that may be, consciously or subconsciously, going on when Obama’s opponents break out the socialist label.
Glad to see the President talk about the basic idea of government as being there to insure fairness and to protect. Too much government might be bad, but so is too little. Was hoping he would address this in some way.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090910/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_health_care_fact_check
Stretch983,
It looks like most of what Obama said checks out as accurate. The iffy math that the article talks about regarding Obama’s deficit pledge is no surprise. Most sensible people understand that when a politician (Democrat or Republican) talks actual dollar costs, those numbers are always going to be steeped in hopeful thinking that leans toward the best-case scenario for whatever that politician’s plan is.
The bottom line for me is that Obama once again built a moral and ethical case for health care reform. If we believed in working together to lift each other up as much as we believe in keeping money in our own pockets and letting the poor and helpless fend for themselves, this would be a better country.
Michelle D.,
It is also ethical and moral to be good stewards of the money God has given us. Promoting debt is not good stewardship. This is something the Obama Administration seems to not understand. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of unsensible people out there who buy into anything and everything politicians say.
It is good to want to reform health care so that more people may benefit from it, but it needs to be approached in a mature, HONEST, and realistic fashion. This is also moral and ethical.
Well written. I look forward to the next installments of this series.
By the way – I, too, am a 100% follower of Christ and believe that what is happening is way bigger than liberals vs. conservatives.
Okay…first off I am a public school teacher in an urban district. President Obama’s speech to the schoolchildren was nothing more than what I tell my students everyday! I had five students who were absent that day. One of which admitted they were gone because of the speech. My class did not even get to see the speech because we were at lunch when it came on. I wish they could have though.
Secondly the author of this article needs to be extremely careful in making blanket statements. By using the pronoun us, he is not referring to the American citizen (who this article should be about), but is referring to the African American Citizen in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s.
As a supporter of President Obama on many of his policies, I can say that I do not agree with the proposed government run health care. I am NOT saying that I don’t think the government welfare (not just health care) needs to be reformed. I think that overall there is an epidemic of what I like to call the “Victims Mentality.” This disease is spreading throughout the United States at an alarmingly rapid rate. Just because someone was dealt a rough hand, doesn’t mean they can’t turn that into inspiration and rise out of it. Instead what we are seeing is a dependency on the government. Some of these thoughts that I’ve heard in my own home growing up were: The government owes me this amount of money, why should I have to pay for my own health care–it’s my right as an American Citizen. If our founding fathers would have had this attitude, our country would not be here today. Let’s get over the victim mentality, teach our children to not let anything hold them down, and see what we can really achieve!