CHAPTER 3.

THE USE OF RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION - A WAY OF

SAYING "NO"?

The quintessential American suburbs, with their gracious single-family

homes, large green lawns, and leaf-shaded streets, reflected not only residents’
dreams but nightmares, not only hopes but fears: fear of others, of racial
minorities and low income groups, fear of themselves, fear of the market, and,
above all, fear of change. These fears, and the restrictive covenants that embodied
them, are the subject of Robert M. Fogelson’s fascinating new book.[i]

The religious right and the progressive left are both protests against the
mainstream economy, and while the reasons for that protest look very different, at
root they are similar: they have to do with being left out of the mainstream
economy, the merry-go-round I described earlier. As people feel economic threat
they look for whom to align with for security. In much of the country religious
institutions and frameworks of faith are ready at hand, and even include “faith in
science” or “faith in the market place.” Insecurity tends to make fundamentalists
(“This is rock solid true.”) out of most people. Having a meaning tinged world
view is of course not just a reaction to economic and violence prone insecurity, but
it may be that its centrality in the political realm is triggered by fear, or disquiet
about the perceived trends in overall social meaning.
The search for meaning is fundamental to human nature. Economic
insecurity can pervert this quest. Each person has a right, and obligation, to
develop a world view. But to base that view on fear on one side and hatred on the
other is to reduce dignity to pathos.
Is the use of religion in the public and political space a way of saying "no" to
the mainstream trends? The standard view is that the country is split between those
who want change, the progressives or liberals, and those who want to stand still or
go backwards, often identified with the religious right. But the model of change
that we are offered by the leadership of both parties, often called neo- liberal
economics, has become what Bush meant by "democracy and markets." Bush has
deeply weakened the positive side of these terms because what he really meant was
governance by a combination of large corporations, large government budgets, and
a business owned press. Basically if you sign up for what both parties' leaderships
mean by "change" you are signing up for a corporate agenda.
The confusions on the conservative side are even stronger because in many
ways those who vote Republican in the weaker states and communities really do
want change. They want change away from the corporate agenda, which they see
as weakening their local economies, and they want change towards a more hopeful
expectation for a healthy economy, education, and family. It is their mobilization
around fear of bureaucracy and abstract authority that keeps them organized
around what in fact is a large business system and its needs.
We have a further confusion because the Democrats are working hard to
conserve a mixture of policies from Roosevelt to Clinton, and for a decade it is the
Republicans who have been changing things. That is, the Democrats are acting as
the conservatives in the simple sense of wanting to preserve some of the New Deal
spirit rather than change. I say “spirit” because the Democrats have become the
party of the professional class more than the party of the poor. “Increase breaks for
the middle class” is hardly a full spectrum politics.
Current politics can best be understood as a complex reaction to change.
Because GardenWorld is a change strategy, we need to be aware of how it will be
understood and by whom. In a recent interview we have

Proposition 13, the tax revolt -- by that time I was collaborating with a
professor at UCLA, David Sears -- we've done a lot of work together, and
our work essentially began with a theoretical question: how much is
personal self-interest the motivation of one's political attitudes, as opposed
to broader attitudes such as ideology, patriotism, racism. We were doing
work along those lines already, and then the tax revolt occurred and [we] had
an opportunity to look at that. My own take on that was the tax revolt was, in
some sense, another act of mass defiance of established elites, because
Proposition 13 was opposed by every elite actor in the State of California,
both major political parties, the business [establishment], the educational
establishment, the labor establishment, and yet it passed overwhelmingly. It
should never have happened. The way in which property tax revolt
developed was, in some sense, a failure on the part of state political leaders
 to react to an obvious problem. My take on the tax revolt [was] that it was a
manifestation of the loss of trust, or the lack of trust, that I'd been studying
earlier.[ii]

Change is not new. Deciding what to do about it characterizes all societies

because of the human dependence on circumstances which never remain fixed. In
fact to do today what we did yesterday is not the same thing – it has become a
repetition which yesterday’s activity was not, and repetition is itself threatening
when changing circumstances require new responses – or reinvigorated old ones.
John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930:

We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the
growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment
between one economic period and another. The increase of technical
efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of
labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little
too quick; the banking and monetary system of the world has been
preventing the rate of interest from falling as fast as equilibrium requires.
And even so, the waste and confusion which ensue relate to not more than
7½ per cent of the national income; we are muddling away one and sixpence
in the £, and have only 18s. 6d., when we might, if we were more sensible,
have £1 ; yet, nevertheless, the 18s. 6d. mounts up to as much as the £1
would have been five or six years ago. We forget that in 1929 the physical
output of the industry of Great Britain was greater than ever before, and that
the net surplus of our foreign balance available for new foreign investment,
after paying for all our imports, was greater last year than that of any other
country, being indeed 50 per cent greater than the corresponding surplus of
the United States. Or again-if it is to be a matter of comparisons-suppose
that we were to reduce our wages by a half, repudiate four fifths of the
national debt, and hoard our surplus wealth in barren gold instead of lending
it at 6 per cent or more, we should resemble the now much-envied France.
But would it be an improvement?[iii]

In ancient Egypt it was believed that the social and architectural structure of
the capital metropolis was a reflection of the laws of the cosmos and hence any
change to the municipal structure was seen as upsetting to the cosmos itself. This
of course was an anti revolutionary belief system supporting elites in power.
Another approach to change has been the deeply held religious belief that the only
real drama in life is the fate of the soul. For those who hold this belief politics is
trivial and should be left to others. Another widely held view believes there should
not be separation of church and state but that a broadly acceptable religion must
also play a political role supporting the establishment.
Change always has winners and losers. There is no change without losers.
The problems occur when the losers are not dealt with compassionately, which
means some kind of indemnification. If we can pay farmers to not grow crops we
can find a way to cushion loss of jobs from technologically induced shifts in the
nature of the economy.
The history of the US is filled with rapid change. From the signing of the
Constitution to the Civil War is about sixty years. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803,
was not just Louisiana, but west to Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas,
Nebraska, Minnesota south of Mississippi River, much of North Dakota, nearly all
of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, the portions of
Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide. The railroads,
the rise of oil, the coming of industrialization, major recessions about every
decade. Looked at large or small, change bordered on chaos. The U.S. was on the
way to becoming an empire, as Hamilton, wanting empire defeated Jefferson, who
wanted rural democracy without business. “Great” Britain was for Hamilton the
“to be surpassed” target. The Civil War with its extended bureaucracy and reliance
on manufactured goods, and then the two world wars worked to enhance America’s
dominant position. Since then we probably have been weakening ourselves by
trying to protect the “military industrial complex” by engaging in strategically
weak wars - the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq wars, and all the
Grenadas and Banana Republic / United Fruit wars in between. Each of us has our
own history through these major events, and it is good to be reminded of this
history and its impact on the American economy, our political structure, our
position as a nation and its powerful effect on our own culture and its blindness.
The rise of the Religious Right is considered by many commentators to be
the major political event in the US since the Second World War. Its roots are deep.
The first few generations that came from Europe to the new Colonies came for
explicitly religious reasons. The generations that came to the United States from
the early 1700s came for economic reasons and advance. It was the second group
that wrote the Constitution. The first group, motivated by a mix of desire for
freedom and responding to land opportunities (native Americans ignored)
continued their migration westward and set the tone for local culture as “religious”,
opposed to the new ideas of the enlightenment. The two groups have always
remained somewhat estranged from each other, but later politics, seeking leverage
in the sound bite world stereotyped those with religious beliefs as seeing all
politics from their religious perspective, rather than mixed with economics. The
result is that we are made to appear more different to each other and we really are,
with differences in culture rather than economic. So we get “values wars” rather
than class wars.
While this view by the mainstream of the religious right is partially correct,
those who hold it ignore that the most likely future is a continuation of an elite
running both parties that support technology investment to which both parties’
supporters are in various degrees of rebellion. I want to look especially at the
rebellion from the right, a rebellion that supported the Bush administration, but
was fundamentally at odds with the Republican business agenda. I believe we
misinterpret the religious right by considering its basic motive to be religious and
cultural rather than economic.
I put this to myself as a question: On the right, is the reemergence of religion
into the public space in large part a reaction to modern and post modern trends,
technical, economic and cultural, to which normal politics – the Republican and
Democratic parties – provide no real alternative?[iv] In reality the Republicans and
Democrats support a growing economy, a powerful military, a growing
bureaucracy. Ever since politicians started wearing American flag lapel pins and
red ties and square shouldered suits, they look increasingly like old style photos of
the Soviet Politburo leadership: stolid, self righteous, unimaginative, and with
hidden personal agendas. There are signs of an increasingly corrupt leadership that
aligns itself with power.
The reemergence of religion[v] into the public space in politics and its
interpretations has been a cultural shock to many. And I would include myself. We
thought we lived in an increasingly science based secular world, and that the
enlightenment was still bringing reason to the few remaining shadows of old myth,
verbal rituals of gods and devils, blood- consciousness, and spiritual exploitation
by priests and shamans, and old style despair. To the extent we were religions we
thought it was private or based in our church community. Yet we moderns were
also bothered by the misuse of “rational” in the irrational trend of replacing
rational goals of the good life with “rational” means reflecting the tightening
connections of capital with technology and power.
The overwhelming movement of the West[vi]since the Middle Ages is the
confluence among technology, power, capital and status. The ruling class, loosely
defined by ownership, political connections, and education, has been able to keep
control, more or less, of this ensemble for its own benefit[vii]. Kings, and later
Parliaments, ran their nations as businesses, at first inconspicuously and later
explicitly, as trade, money, and war became central concerns. The industrial phase
required, until recently, a larger middle class of well paid managers to keep this
ensemble and its emerging complexity flowing and efficiently productive. The
digital world, with its technology and the consequences, seems to imply that we
need fewer managers, because coordination technology allows lower level workers
or the machines themselves to cross coordinate.[viii]
After WW2 the Republican leadership, being out of power since 1932,
sought an easy victory in Dewey’s candidacy, and the unexpected loss to Truman
led to the choice of Eisenhower as a non ideological candidate in order to win back
power for the Wall Street Republicans. Eisenhower was successful at creating a
more acceptable image of Republicans, less rapaciously business oriented, but was
attacked by the democrats for being soft on national defense by not keeping up
with the real but still hyped Soviet progress in missiles. Note that the “out” party
usually tries the defense issue as a leverage point to regain power. Kennedy during
his campaign against Nixon had accused Eisenhower of allowing a missile gap to
develop with the Soviets. Eisenhower shocked the national leaderships of both
parties – shocked into silence - when he ended his presidency with the famous
phrase of the Farewell Address, warning us all, “beware of the military industrial
complex” (which we now know was also to include “government” which was
nixed by advisors).
We are all beginning to see that there is an inexorable flow to the techno-
economic and its connection to the control of markets and resources and wars,
which is now sensed by almost everyone. Capital congregates around a few major
cities, and globalization is the extension of the exploitation of resource, but not of
real economic power, to more and more of the world. Elites in new countries are
paid off for delivering their populations to the megamachine. Law and regulation
support the movement of capital and ownership into ever more skewed
distributions.[ix] While we are creating some new middle class, the cost to the
environment and the rest of the population has been very high in most countries.
But disenchantment or outright resistance has had a hard time focusing itself
because of the distractions of war. We could start with the rise of Napoleon, his
attacks forcing the militarization of first Germany, then Japan, and the increasing
bureaucratization of empire, and the resulting 1st and 2nd World Wars, the Cold
War, and Iraq.[x] There are those who want to keep our attention focused on the
external things they encourage us to fear, rather than to fear the direction of the
economic technical system, with its concentration of money and power. This
prevents politically powerful criticism of the technical-financial axis, with its
negative impact for most of the population on family, community and the
environment, while we are seduced toward still producing children beyond
sustainability. Not only does this keep us distracted, but also the ensuing tensions
among increasing populations are good for markets: energy, weapons, and drugs.
I am inclined to look at Iraq, Bolton (remember him?), the Social Security
debate, and all the minor provocations forwarded by Bush, as distractions, keeping
the Center-right and center- left fragmented in not so important pit-bull fights on
minor issues. Meanwhile the distribution of real power narrows to elites within all
countries.
The tendency of "the system" to turn into a well coordinated machine owned
by a few is making everyone nervous.[xi] The progressive professional class wants
peace and reason, but while still supporting expensive careers and the professionals
would like new technologies that can be assimilated by society at a non-destructive
pace, but that actually are financed and used by the military though arms sales to
prevent peace. The tendency of the professionals has been to see the others, the
fundamentalists, the Bush supporters, as mere primitives. But there is good
evidence that the "right" in the US have maintained a resistance to modernization
that goes back to the puritans and the Counter Reformation.
America in the 1700's was a refuge from Europe, to avoid the powers of
change and hold on to ancient ways. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia and the earlier
History and the Current state of Virginia by Beverly both portray an asylum from
emerging European culture and its trends of modernity. What Jefferson saw as
potentially free from European oppression was a widely shared vision of the
American future. Many in America then and now believed, "Just leave us alone
and let us be on our own land." This is not new, but deep in the American
experience, and taught by school teachers for two centuries.[xii].
What is striking is the degree to which Bush was able to keep the support of
the resistant traditional part of the population while playing a support the rich guy
policy. The Democrats have failed to offer an alternative except what is perceived
as professionalization and bureaucratization that is insensitive to local and
traditional values. The “value proposition” of the Democrats (though not its current
leadership) – concern for peace, poverty, environment, quality of life, better
education – is lost. The Democrats are much more likely to be at home with Silicon
Valley than with unions or the bottom half of the population.
The progressives, seen and self-identifying as left, are against what the right
seems to want, but have no real alternative beyond a kind of center right posture
that is even divided on the Iraq incursion, but hardly asking for justice for the
bottom half of the population. In fact, no one seems to have an answer to the larger
issues of designing a quality of life with the good use of technology, the
environment, with education for all, reasonable rewards for high performance, the
use of capital and governance responsive to real issues. In the absence of
something to say “yes” to, “No” emerges with increasing power. The Obama
presidency will prove or disprove the depth of this assumption.
So I am proposing that there is a deep continuity between seeking alignment
with traditional, even fundamentalist systems of belief and a reaction against an
alienating economy that threatens local business, jobs, and identity. Most people
are deeply concerned about the directions of modern society, postmodern culture,
and either discouraged, cynical, or scared. Grabbing at local means to protest, to
say no, to put on the breaks, they will use any means at hand - and in many
communities, the local churches and their networks are the only available tools to
embrace an alternative.
The inexorable, but maybe not inevitable, tendency for concentration and
coordination to make a single world of secular non-humanistic technocratic
realism[xiii] married to market fundamentalism and Lockian[xiv] private property
fundamentalism, will eventually lead more and more people (the numbers already
might be quite high), to use whatever means they can to say “NO” to the official
future and hope for some emerging alternative. The uni-bomber and the Oklahoma
bombing are hints we should not neglect, and the similarity of critiques of what is
not working is similar across a wide spectrum of belief systems and orientations.
Michael Powell, just as he was finishing his term as head of the FCC, said,

"I'm incredibly optimistic, bullish and excited. There's another player in the
room and it's called technology. It's not a person, it doesn't have a soul, and
it doesn't care that it's ripping up the way we've done it. And there's nothing
to stop it. The laws of physics keep tearing things apart, and I don't think that
[regulatory] change is dependent on lawyers. We do need some [regulatory
reform] but even if we did nothing the world is going to change anyway. --
It’s an innovator's paradise. You can either catch the wave, or get run over by
it." [xv]

This kind of sadistic identification with destruction by the winners will

increasingly be seen as excessive and unfeeling. It has some truth, as changing is
both interesting and necessary but not that much. Insensitivity is worse than lack of
irony. The culture will react back against the excessive identification with change
and its destructive force (Schumpeter's "creative destruction.") as inhumane, and
off center. Will that reaction itself be more humane, or, by undermining
governance, lead to a descent to Rwanda like entropic soup?
In the context of resistance to change, motivated by increasing relationship
fragmentation, alienation from meaning, and loss of a relationship to those with
power, we might see – even if we did not expect - some surprising changes in the
political landscape. Rereading American History reminds us that the passions of
American politics have been deep and always mixed with religious thinking. Issues
like slavery, the gold standard, silver parity, paper money, westward expansion, and
the wars (all of them) have always had traditional values against “the money
interests.”
So we should not be so surprised by the reemergence of religion as a
powerful public force when general dissatisfaction is increasing. The reaction of
the world to the death of the Pope hinted at this. The Pope, in his humanism, which
in many aspects was real[xvi], has come to stand for an alternative to the mega-
machine[xvii] tendencies of the techno-capital axis. The archbishop of Canterbury
said in 2005 "Religion is the counter culture, the opposition to the way of the
world. The church of God is a community of people called to live at a cost, called
to live at times to stand against what seems to be the received wisdom, what seems
to be the obvious way of living in the world around, called to lead a transfigured
life, a life that is visibly different in its quality of love, faithfulness and hope, never
mind what the price is." [xviii]
The emotionality in reaction to Pope John Paul’s death I think was hinted at
earlier by the death of Princess Diana and the deep feelings for her based on her
anti-bomb crusade and other good works. The death of the younger John Kennedy
struck a similar chord of worldwide sympathy looking for belief in goodness. The
role of television and the Internet in creating these reactions is obvious, new, and
powerful. It hints at a worldwide socialization to prefer peace and softness to war
and authoritarian bullishness.
The promise of science as a force for good has long been lost as it has
shifted from a beneficial addition to humanity to being a driver of wealth, creating
effects that work against people and the environment, leading increasingly to the
suspicion that the economy is doing well but the people are doing badly. Science
has other burdens that have slowly sapped public support, such as Hiroshima, the
third world health crisis, and death by expensive toys. The promise of nanotech
and biotech cannot be realized without public support and a disentanglement of
promise from pure capital interests. I recently read a biography of William Law
Olmsted, designer of Central Park, the entrance to Yosemite, Prospect Park in
Brooklyn, the Boston Fens, and many others. What is clear in his life is the sense
that whatever good is created will be quickly spoiled by small-minded
opportunists. Thinking about the whole is a very rare human quality.
That a secular humanism, skeptical, compassionate, and environmentally
sensitive, could lose out to a religious view of the world was almost unthinkable a
few years ago. What we failed to consider was that the secular humanist world was
really a cover story for the technocratic corporate world. The alternatives, we
thought, were between science and religion. But the real choice for many came
down to either supporting a technocratic societal tendency run by elites, or religion
as the only alternative mobilizeable social force to put the breaks on.[xix]
To the extent that religion does emerge as a new public center of power and
persuasion, the dangers of demagoguery are probably even worse than for the
bureaucratizing capitalism of modern society. This is because religion tends to the
authoritarian and rhetorical, and willing to choose blood, rather than the reasoned
and parliamentary, as a style of persuasion. People in churches are fairly benign,
though exclusionary. People led by religious leaders outside church tend toward
crusades and demand blood in the name of belief.
But the reality is our secular leaders or those room wearing a religion as a
mask, have, in the name of security lead us into larger and more “rational” wars.
Those who are more sensitive to the humanization issues, compassion, justice,
environment, must face up to the act that the technology and science that was
meant to benefit mankind got stolen by careers and money and lost much of its
human centered values. Since Francis Bacon tried to persuade the King of the
value of science and the Royal Society to the value of empire, there has always
been a mixed story we could have learned from, if we had looked. [xx]
The two choices we thought we had: modernization vs. fundamentalism,
turn out to be three: technocratic centralism, humanizing reform, and religious
zeal. A compromise might be a revaluing humanity through religious influence,
Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist.[xxi] with the better use of technology to
support people and the environment, and an effective business sector that was
aimed - by values and regulations, to make a better world and rein in the game of
private profiteering. I say “compromise” because it is clear that the victory of one,
or even two of the tendencies over the third would probably lead to a new kind of
totalitarianism, brutal, harsh, and control oriented.
To create that compromise we need a view of the future that allows for good
lives in the present and works toward

• Providing reasonable security through world cooperation

• A vigorous economy that creates jobs and is yet less exploitative of the
environment and with much better distribution of product and profit.
• The integration of civilization into the landscape.
• Increasing decentralization as the new peripheries become stable and
responsible.
• Capital as raw power, as financial instruments, up to and including
interest, are de-legitimated, and we have better public accounting (one
trillion unaccounted for in the Pentagon)
• Bringing corporations back under meaningful state charters.
• Taking children and their parents very seriously as the major method of
producing the core of society: the next generation.
 • An over-arching vision that is simple.

If you think of your own most cherished values, something like this list will
probably emerge. And since we have no political party or well known public
spokespersons for this humanizing civilizing goal, people look for old language to
express their discontents. The issues are deep and personal

As a new parent, I’ve been painfully aware of how little real community
there is around us. This is a market success. Our parents are too far, our
friends are too shy, the mothering old ladies are nowhere to be found. So
who teaches my wife to breast feed? The “lactation consultant.” Yes – there
is such a thing! And who watches the baby when we have to take a shower
or get to work? Not a family member or friend down the hall, but a
professional babysitter, daycare center or nanny. The diminishment of
community is what fuels these new markets.[xxii]

Yet old language contains clues to better living, and we will now look at the
Garden of Eden, not as in the past, but in the realizable future now, GardenWorld.
But first, a few tough words about the dangers of fascism. In times of trouble the
urge to say “no” can destabilize a government.

During the crisis years of the inter-war period mainstream parties were no
longer capable of providing political solutions for these people. Fascism
offered them an authoritarian alternative which shifted social frustrations
onto the symbols of national decline and renewal, offering individuals who
felt powerless a sense of superiority through militant nationalism and
violence, initially against the labour movement, but later against all groups
considered a threat to the ‘community of destiny’.

‘In the atmosphere brought to white heat by war, defeat, reparations,

inflation, occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty
bourgeoisie rose up against all the old parties that had bamboozled it,’ wrote
Trotsky in the most urgent and compelling of all analyses of fascism. ‘The
sharp grievances of small proprietors never out of bankruptcy, of their
 university sons without posts and clients, of their daughters without dowries
and suitors, demanded order and an iron hand’[xxiii]
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=255&issue=112

The danger is ever present, and we need to be careful. Mass mobilization can lead
to mass mobs bet on destruction and violence, and in turn empowering their
leaders.

What set fascism apart from other forms of conservatism or authoritarianism

was its ability to mobilize on the streets. Fascism had to prove itself in
practice, not just as an alternative to political opponents, but also to the state.
The hierarchical structure of fascist organizations fuelled a desire to
dominate while reconciling members to their personal insignificance before
a higher power, summed up in Hitler’s maxim, ‘Responsibility towards
above, authority towards below.’ Fascist ideology was geared towards
building an independent mass movement and relates, as Geoff Eley has
underlined, not just to the party’s ideas or formal aims, but to ‘its style of
activism, modes of organization and forms of public display’. ibid
‘Fascism’, argued the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, ‘is a
movement which the bourgeoisie thought should be a simple “instrument” of
reaction in its hands, but once called up and unleashed is worse than the
devil, no longer allowing itself to be controlled’.4 ibid

The parallel with the Bush administration, ever more withdrawn from its
own base and hoarding power, should be a warning. GardenWorld is an
opportunity to keep people together in a more life loving project of voluntary
participation with many roles and relationships. The problem is general: people
will use what they have available to align themselves around perceived economic
survival (“advantage” is weaker but similar).
Hitler and fascism show that, using electoral politics, a small number can
gain control of the whole by the use of violence and intimidation. We, given the
American experience of moving into a war that was unjustified should have more
sympathy for the many in Germany who “went along.” The killing civilians in Iraq
from the start of Awe and thunder should have awakened everyone without
exception of the horror. What is at stake here is Escape from Freedom[xxiv] and
what not escaping from it could look like. “We shall avoid another century of
conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one — the dark forces
that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in
doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still.”

The weakening of nationalism leaves people feeling unaligned with

institutions that give security. Religious identification is the alternative, given its
deep cultural roots and ubiquitous presence. To show the historical depth of the
issues raised here, Adam Smith (see Smith quotes throughout this book to get a
balanced view) writes

In every civilized society, in every society where the distinction of

ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two
different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which
the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you
will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the
common people: the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what
are called people of fashion. The degree of disapprobation with which we
ought to mark the vices of levity, the vices which are apt to arise from great
prosperity, and from the excess of gaiety and good humour, seems to
constitute the principal distinction between those two opposite schemes or
systems. In the liberal or loose system, luxury, wanton and even disorderly
mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of
chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc., provided they are not
accompanied with gross indecency, and do not lead to falsehood or injustice,
are generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either
excused or pardoned altogether. In the austere system, on the contrary, those
excesses are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and detestation. The vices
of levity are always ruinous to the common people, and a single week's
thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman
for ever, and to drive him through despair upon committing the most
enormous crimes.[xxv]
 And this is a misuse of religion, the integrating culture of belief, whose
normal function, including science, draws us toward the better, each person has a
right for an environment that draws them toward their better self. If “All men are
created equal” is combined with “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” our
combined task is to work toward creating an environment with the possibility of
rewarding family life, and beyond, to some form of “religion”, some form of
science, art and surroundings that say “it is good, good, to be alive.”
All religions inculcate values that are opposed to hurting others. In the US
we have to consider that when a society turns toward dollar wealth as its definition
of success, those with a strong religious upbringing are at a great “disadvantage”
socially, and I am sure we have all met extremely loving non-narcissistic and
deeply religious people who carry the scars of marginalization because of their
humanity.
But we still need to recognize that the disaffected can be a base for political
gain – not theirs. Nikolas Lehman writes in the New Yorker

Rove never pushed for a policy unless he saw a group of big funders
or a significant electoral constituency which it might bring to the Republican
Party. Social Security privatization was supposed to attract middle-class
people whose pensions had been invested in the stock market; immigration
reform to attract Latinos and small-business owners; the No Child Left
Behind law public-school parents; and so on. Conversely, Rove was always
looking for neglected constituencies—the most important by far being
frequent churchgoers—and trying to figure out what mix of government
goodies and organizing techniques would bring them into the Republican
fold. (He was never a real conservative, except in the liberal-hating sense,
because the idea that everybody who participates in politics expects
something from government was at the heart of his thinking.).[xxvi].

I’ll write more about the positive integrating function of religion in chapter
13, On Belief. But let’s turn to the major frame for holding us together, and giving
us a believable goal, GardenWorld.