Guest column: Welcome to the new atheism. Is there no sense of shame in national politics?
Once upon a time in our halcyon past, shame was a thread in the fabric of our national conscience. This was the idyllic past when we lived in an enchanted universe — a place where our social imagination was inhabited by notions that there was One watching over us to whom we are ultimately accountable. Even if you did not have literal notions about a divine scorekeeper, we nevertheless had a social sense that there are actions and attitudes that are essentially "right" or "wrong." To be sure, gross public violations of these norms carried with them social penalties. It is not all bad that we have left behind the facile judgmentalism that often accompanied the public punishments, but we have also lost something valuable in the process.
One looks in vain for any sense of shame in the national politic. We live in an age of relativism with regard to what constitutes truth and morality. I suggest that this is more than "different strokes for different folks." It has always been the case that "where you sit makes a difference as to where you stand." Perspective makes a difference, but we now inhabit an emerging reality when "perspective constitutes reality." In such a constructed reality, truth and morality as norms do not hold sway. They are out there, but they are irrelevant.
People with political power and unlimited wealth are above the fray where matters of truth and morality get sorted out. They open their mouth (or their bank account), and a new reality issues forth. Truth is what they say it is; they are sovereign over the spoken word from which truth springs forth. In this sense, the politically powerful and the money brokers have become gods. Each day the leader of them all spins out fresh new absurdities without shame and with impunity — which his acolytes accept and repeat endlessly as if they are Gospel. The supreme irony of this shameless atheism from the mouth of the political icon is that among his most loyal acolytes are those who know so well the language of the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth. Piety and political power are comingled to construct new illusions of reality, and it seems that absolutely nothing can dispel the illusory charm of the fantasies.
The political universe has fallen under a new and different spell — a false enchantment: a spell that cannot be broken in the hearts and minds of this infallible one’s followers. Once upon a time in our halcyon past, there was shame. No more. Welcome to the new atheism.
W. Stephen Gunter, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at Duke University Divinity School.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Guest: One looks in vain for a sense of shame in the national politic
