Fundamentalists in Europe can learn from American openness

PLEASE, could we just shut up about the American presidential election? Now we have it sorted, I mean. Now that we’ve established the fault lies with redneck born agains over there who voted for him in such numbers.

It would nearly put you off the Christmas shopping trip to New York, so it would.

Up to last week, we thought America was a big diverse society, but this week we learned they were really one big Bible belt hiding 51 million religious fundamentalists from us. Gun totin’ religious maniacs, all of them: anti-abortion, anti-stem-cell research. Beer drinkin’, boot scootin’, Bible-totin’ unsophisticates, too thick to deserve democracy.

Or that’s what liberal Ireland, Britain, Europe and east coast America would have us believe.

It boils my brains to be so embarrassed by people I normally agree with.

This mass-stereotyping of millions of Americans is outrageous, idiotic and stupidly patronising. It is bad loser-ship brought to a blindly arrogant level.

I stood in an American firehouse the week of the election, in one of those southern states currently being portrayed as populated by spittin’, whistling,’ whittlin’ dumb conservatives. The room was dominated by three big fridges.

“We gotta lotta gourmet cooks here,” one of the firefighters explained. “They don’t like to get their ingredients mixed up with anybody else’s.”

I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. One firefighter cooks for all on a rota, and this firehouse had a bunch of firefighters who produce haute cuisine between being called out to knock down fires.

In addition, they all have second jobs like graphic artist, bartender, builder. A couple had been schoolteachers before they got into the fire department. More than half had university degrees. You might think a firehouse was a good safe place to find a bunch of deep south shallow stereotypes, but the reality was at least as varied and thoughtful as would be found in an east coast city Starbucks.

I asked them about their religion. Catholic, one said. Lutheran, another offered. Jew, Reform. Episcopalian. Some (like the divorced, non-Church-going Catholic) carried their religions like trailing threads of DNA: inherited, unchosen and largely untended. Some, by contrast, were enthusiastic recent converts to a particular church. One had shopped around and - he said - “Got me a congregation and a wife, same Sunday.”

They were positive about presidential candidates having something to believe in, but in much the same way they’d approve of them having a chair to sit in. Faith was part of the furniture of a rounded life: you picked the kind that best suited you.

It was such a balanced, easygoing, non-judgmental stance. It floored me. I suppose I’ve got used to a culture where someone claiming to be a believer is automatically assumed to be a Neanderthal throwback with their wrists dragging on the ground. They must be intolerant, stupid (otherwise why would they stay in a Church where pedophiles have operated?) anti-sex, anti-intellectual, anti-freedom of thought and speech.

Currently, to admit to have come through a convent school is to invite sympathy and questions about nuns telling you not to wear patent leather shoes because of what they might reflect and forcing you to kneel on desks to check that your skirt covered your knees. (The only time I remember a nun in our school getting worked up about anything related to appearance was when our French teacher noticed the back of a student’s hand gouged with a boyfriend’s initial. Septicaemia, the nun remarked, was not fun, and amateur tattoos with the potential to outlive the relationship they celebrated might have their drawbacks.)

Undoubtedly, the first half of the 20th century was a time when you were born into a religion which did your thinking for you. A time when the morally certain knew, deep in their water, that listening to other viewpoints was a waste of time: those viewpoints were just wrong. Period.

The marvellous progress of the intervening 50 years means you now get born into a secular religion which is as constraining as the old one ever was and just as good at ridiculing the ideas and lifestyles of anybody not in step with the new orthodoxy.

Just like their predecessors, the morally certain of today never listen to or learn from people who think differently. Try pointing out to them, for example, that ordinary believing Americans give more of their income to charity than happens in any European country and watch their eyes glaze over. That’s before you get to mention the high level of volunteering in the US, as opposed to its diminution in more secular states.

AMERICAN religiosity is not what Osama and his lads are out to kill off.

Fundamentalist Islam may not like the worshippers in the millions of churches that dot the American landscape, but it’s the irreligious side of the US, with its sex-sodden, drink-drenched, undressed commercialism, that outrages Muslim terrorists.

Meanwhile, liberal Europe is congratulating itself on getting rid of Buttiglione, the man whose chances of an EU commissionership were scuppered because he admitted that he believes homosexuality is a sin, that the purpose of marriage is for women to have children and be protected by a man, and that having babies out of wedlock is bad.

You may not agree with him on any or all of the above. But you can bet your life al-Qaida does.

Cancelling his commissionership confirms for fundamentalist Islam the godlessness of Europe and affirms Europe’s relevance as a terrorist target.

It also confirms the liberal dictatorship the EU has become. We no longer allow prominent individuals to express their deep-held religious beliefs. The EU, a historic model of multi-cultural governance, couldn’t be relied on to withstand one talkative old buzzard who was bothered by gays.

Despite his naïve openness, notwithstanding the EU Parliament and half a million institutions headed and staffed by the brightest and best, the interests of the gay community in Europe seemed compromised by having him in high office.

Interesting, that. If the systems we rely on could be so warped by one man, the next logical step should surely be to review and strengthen the systems. But, for the morally certain, institutional reform would never be as satisfactory as condemning an individual.

Like Caiphas, the high priest in the Bible, the EU believes “It is fitting that one man should die for the people, that the people be not disturbed.” Modern, liberal Europe does what the Catholic Church used to do 50 years ago, with precisely the same cruel certainty.

The ruling class - be it right wing or left wing - always runs on a coercive, controlling, unthinking dogma. It cannot understand any other view, let alone learn from it. When defeated by the other view - as happened in the presidential election - it resolutely rejects the possibility of learning from the defeat.

Instead of learning, the pervasive response has been to ridicule and caricature 51 million people, particularly about their belief systems, demonstrating, in the process, a totalitarianism of thought which diminishes all who call themselves liberal.

And lest it be thought that this is a plea for tiptoeing back to religion, it’s the opposite.

It’s a plea for tiptoeing forward to real tolerance.