“For more and more Americans, politics has become a religion. It has become a faith. People find their meaning in it. They define themselves by their stands.”
These words weren’t written last week. When former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote them in her book “Patriotic Grace,” the Tea Party didn’t exist and Donald Trump was just another reality show host grabbing women by their genitals.
In fact, “Patriotic Grace” came out in the fall of 2008, even before Barack Obama had been elected president.
Of course, when politics becomes a religion, especially in modern-day America, it becomes almost impossible to compromise.
It really started around 1980 when Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority came along.
Falwell and his ilk did a merger of sorts with Republican conservatives. They would support the Republican agenda of massive defense spending, cuts in the safety net and lower taxes for the rich. Republicans would support school prayer, banning abortion and keeping gays and lesbians in the proverbial closet.
And there is where it all went off the track, with Ronald Reagan spouting platitudes and Falwell spewing hatred, saying things like it was impossible to be a liberal and a good Christian.
As it became more and more about good and evil to folks on the right, the temperature got higher and higher, with more and more people getting burned.
When the War on Poverty started in the mid 1960s, 29 percent of Americans lived below the poverty level. By the time Reagan took office in January 1981, that number was down to 15 percent. But between conservatives who thought helping the poor was a waste of money and the Falwell crowd who thought it was God’s will people were poor, the programs got cut.
And when the percentage of people who were poor started increasing, they claimed the War on Poverty had been a waste of time.
It may be hard to believe in 2023, but there was a time — in my lifetime — when two subjects that were off-limits in polite conversation were politics and religion.
Now people won’t shut up about either.
Not much patriotic grace to be found.