I have been waiting for something FAIR to happen. I don’t believe in the popular versions of karma, or The Universe, or deities—the versions in which those entities lie in wait to zing someone who has been behaving badly. But that is the KIND of thing I have been waiting for. I have been waiting for MOVIE/TV/BOOK JUSTICE, where things look bleak but then it turns out the very bleakness is what whips around to destroy the forces of badness.
If this were an episode of The West Wing, and the Republicans had tried to push through a Supreme Court Justice less than a month before an election, after THEMSELVES saying ONLY ONE PRESIDENCY AGO that NINE months before an election was too close; and if they had tried to do this while NOT dealing with legislation to approve relief for their constituents during a pandemic; and if they had themselves not worn masks and had gathered in person during all of this, spreading infection among themselves while trying to do their unfair, unjust, corrupt thing; then what would have happened in that episode is that too many of them would have become ill with the virus to be able to approve the Supreme Court Justice in time. That’s what would have happened. Things would have looked SO bleak, so BLATANTLY unfair and unjust—but then: NATURAL CONSEQUENCES would have stepped in! You can’t break ALL the rules and expect to WIN, you bad, bad politicians! SATISFYING SMITE!!
Part of my problem is TV/movies/books, which lead us to expect these plotlines. But certainly another part of my problem is that I was raised Christian. The type of Christianity I grew up in believes that although God won’t intervene if, say, children are being raped and beaten, even if those children pray to God for help, because that would mean breaking God’s own voluntarily-established-and-voluntarily-held rule about free will for the person doing the raping and beating, he WILL allow Natural Consequences to punish people—and the universe is set up so that Natural Consequences DO punish people. In fact, that is why he in his wisdom has made the rules he has made: not because he’s a meanie who won’t let us do what we want, but to PROTECT us. Because the things he has told us not to do are all things that will hurt us, and he lovingly and mercifully wants to spare us the consequences of those things. And so here is what I expect: when people break rules and do terrible and unjust things, the Natural Consequences should show them why those rules are there, and the people should suffer the way God tried to protect them from suffering.
But here is what I realized this morning. Right now, the terrible things that are happening are things that many, many Christians believe are instead showing us all that God has a hand in everything. They think that the appointing of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court shows that God did indeed want our current corrupt president elected: that God can use EVEN AN ACTIVELY EVIL PERSON to do his ultimate will, which is to bring about their version of conservative evangelical Christianity everywhere. For everyone’s good.
The fact that I can see from their point of view how things appear to be working out for the absolute most righteous BEST right now means that I have to deal with the idea that what I grew up thinking of as the natural order of things is in fact a system that supports what I now consider Active, Deliberate Evil.
Originally I continued that paragraph, but now I want to leave it on its own for a minute to make sure you pause to see what I’m saying. When you grow up fervently believing in a set of religious beliefs, you grow up with that religion braided into the entire structure of the world: there isn’t a single aspect of anything that isn’t infused with the beliefs and world view of that religion. Extricating that religion from my brain and thoughts and world view has been hard and traumatic, and this is yet another aftershock of it decades later: realizing that what I used to be able to lean into as a system of justice and righteousness is instead a system that in fact works IN FAVOR OF a corrupt United States president, a corrupt segment of Congress, and the establishment of an unjust justice system. When they are unjust, when they are unfair, when they work against the equality of human beings—then THEY get the “fair thing,” the TV/movie/book triumph thing, happening in THEIR favor. They work so hard, they give up so much, they compromise so much of themselves and so many of their principles to bring about something corrupt—and THEY get what THEY want. THIS is the system that, if there were a God, he is supporting with his system of natural consequences.
I had already, back in childhood, worked on understanding that God was not going to intervene to prevent evil things from happening; then in early adulthood I worked on extricating the braided-into-my-psyche idea that God’s Natural Consequences were going to punish people for doing evil, and that there was an afterlife that was going to take care of any justice we didn’t see happening on Earth; now I have to work on the idea that what I USED to see as God’s Natural Consequences For Good are actually things that support and bring about evil—and so what I USED to pray for and celebrate were things that were evil and wrong. This is the fresh, nauseating realization I am dealing with this morning, one week before the U.S. presidential election.
