By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Sectarianism is the bane of organized religion. A group of people becomes disenchanted with the entrenched powers. They begin to feel that those in charge of their faith have either lost touch with its essence or become too arrogant and powerful to be trusted. They feel not only the right but the obligation to oppose those powers.
Sometimes the sect establishes itself as an alternative faith altogether; Christianity began as a sect of Judaism. Sometimes the sect manages to efface what had been the orthodox faith to begin with; Judaism developed out of the Pharisaic movement, which came into being to oppose the priestly elites of the ancient Temple (not so much a sect, perhaps, as a political movement; but in classical Judaism, politics and religion were intertwined).
Sometimes this process is a peaceful one. Sometimes it is not. Catholics and Protestants fought many wars. The island of Ireland is still tormented by that division, and the Sunni and Shiite sides of Islam fight each other to this day. Wars between sects, in other words, can be as violent as wars between completely different faiths. Few murders are as brutal as fratricides.
Not all fighting, of course, hinges on religion. Many wars are fought over the control of scarce resources; others are fought over deeply differing political viewpoints. But perhaps this begs the question of how to define religion; of what makes any system of thought into a faith, as opposed to a political belief. Unless you are dealing with ancient Israel, you might wonder why it matters. But whenever people are willing to die, and to cause the deaths of others, a line gets crossed, and it would be helpful to understand that line.
The title of Eisenhower’s memoir of the Second World War was Crusade in Europe.
Our wars in Korea and Viet Nam were explicitly designated as wars against godless Communism.
Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were leveled against a very particular, very fanatical, and very violent strain of Islam.
While we can critique the religious component of these wars, and we can label them defenses of capitalism, instead, that again just begs the question: why does capitalism go hand in hand with mainstream western religion.
When people are willing to kill each other, and be killed in turn, to ignore the question of faith is to ignore the obvious. Because you don’t face death without a considerable consideration of what comes after it.
The war on Covid-19 is an interesting one. In this war, we all have a common enemy: the virus itself, that sickens and kills people. In previous epidemics, the desire to defeat that same sort of common enemy overcame all merely political divisions as a matter of course; people took their vaccines out of both a desire to overcome the disease in question for themselves and a sense of duty to others.
Not this time, though.
I can’t generalize as to why people are resistant to the vaccines that have been developed. From what I have seen, different people have different reasons. Some don’t trust the government to have made these things safe; some are worried about the physical ramifications of taking these shots. You would think those arguments could be countered with reason. They have proven to be stubborn, though, betraying their bases not in logic but in pure emotion. But some are more honest about their emotions. Some simply don’t want to be told what to do.
Some of these same people wear their seatbelts; most probably agree not to smoke in restaurants; nearly all probably got their own childhood immunizations, and have probably immunized their own children as well, as a matter of course (and because those immunizations tend to be required by schools). But something is different about this one.
The gun lobby has harped on this difference for decades: my freedom is worth more than your safety. And gun violence is rare enough that only thousands die, not millions. So they’ve gotten away with that posture, because not enough people truly care.
That same brand of gun-toting freedom writ large, however, in the context of Covid, has a distinctly sectarian flavor. And the religion being resisted is the religion of America; the religion that has as its overriding goal a more perfect union. Not one in which every man and woman stands alone; rather one in which every man and woman stands together, in defense of what is seen as their god-given rights to life and liberty. “God-given” is a religious idea. America was founded on religious precepts, and what must be seen as its secular faith has lasted for more than two centuries now. It has been very successful. It has sheltered many different viewpoints. It is flexible and beautiful and grand.
Sectarianism that centers itself on the right both to die and to cause the deaths of others is not a sectarianism that threatens violence; it is a sectarianism that is violent to begin with.
Sectarianism is the bane of organized politics. A group of people becomes disenchanted by those in power. They see that power as illegitimate, as the product of malicious influence. They feel not only the right but the obligation to oppose it. Much of American vaccine hesitancy is flip side of January 6th, and that did not end well.
Michael Davidow is a lawyer in Nashua. He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and his most recent one, The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
