Breaking the Promise of the Promised Land: How Religious Conservatives Failed America

By Johnny Townsend

Many Christians in America see this country as the Promised Land, reserved for them and them only. They want a theocracy. Almost every decision is made to exert more control over citizens of every faith. Their punitive, coercive policies have caused mass suffering which they blame on the people they've crushed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Johnny Townsend
• Release date: Jun 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781961525139

Johnny Townsend

A climate crisis immigrant who relocated from New Orleans to Seattle in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Johnny Townsend wrote the first account of the UpStairs Lounge fire, an attack on a French Quarter gay bar which killed 32 people in 1973. He was an associate producer for the documentary Upstairs Inferno, for the sci-fi film Time Helmet, and for the short Flirting, with Possibilities. His books include Please Evacuate, Racism by Proxy, and Wake Up and Smell the Missionaries. His novel, Orgy at the STD Clinic, set entirely on public transit, details political extremism, climate upheaval, and anti-maskers in the midst of a pandemic.

Book preview

The Power of Positive Giving Up

Corporate and business leaders insist that to be successful, we must be positive. We’re encouraged to read books on The Power of Positive Thinking, The Magic of Thinking Big, and The Secret. If we have doubts about a project, we’re scolded for our weakness and bad attitude. If we fail to plan, we plan to fail. We can’t win unless we play. We’re told to make it happen, do more with less, that the difference between an obstacle and an opportunity is our attitude.

And yet these leaders are the first to say, Medicare for All? Tuition-free college? Guaranteed childcare? A Green New Deal? You’re asking the impossible! Be realistic!

Managers tell their employees that only the insecure blame others for their personal failures. We need to take responsibility for our lack of success, they say, accept ownership, and do better. But pro-corporate Democrats routinely blame liberals, progressives, and socialists when their lackluster moderate candidates lose.

During my seven years at a credit union, one of the other employees made the same proclamation every morning: "It’s the best day ever!" Other employees marveled at his good attitude. The supervisor praised him for thinking like a winner. But you can’t honestly have a better day every single day of your life. If things are going great on your 23rd birthday, what happens 20,000 days later? Will you have sixty billion dollars, a perfect body, and the serenity of Buddha?

It’s okay to have a bad day and say so. It’s okay to be realistic.

But to claim that the programs we need are too big to succeed just means they aren’t banks and auto manufacturers.

If my coworker at the credit union had instead told our supervisor, I’m not even going to try eliminating discrimination in the loan process. People just aren’t capable of that level of decency, would the supervisor have praised him for his cannot-do attitude?

Having a positive attitude toward accepting injustice is to have a negative attitude toward creating justice. Having a positive attitude toward the wealthiest 1% is to have a negative attitude toward 99% of humanity.

One of the teachers at my Baptist high school quoted scripture regularly. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me, he told the class one day.

I can pass Algebra? I asked.

All things.

I can win the Olympics? asked another student.

All things.

I can jump to the moon and back?

I wished I’d been the one to ask that. I’d certainly been thinking it.

You have a bad attitude, young man. You need to stop listening to Satan.

Moderate Democrats insist we nominate bland candidates who won’t offend Republicans. I can’t think of a worse winning attitude. I’ve read The Secret. Nowhere does it advise aiming low and settling for only the smallest of dreams.

When I volunteered as a Mormon missionary in Rome, one of my mission leaders promised, If you have faith even as small as a grain of mustard seed, you can baptize 40 people a month, 100 people. Every single one of you. If you have faith.

With my bad attitude, and because I did pass my math classes, I made some quick calculations. With 120 missionaries in Rome, we’d be converting 12,000 Catholics a month, 144,000 a year, 288,000 by the end of our two years in Italy. Since there were four missions in the country at the time, that would mean 1,152,000 converts by the time we left.

A core principle of capitalism is eternal growth, higher sales every month, indefinitely. "We had the best quarter ever."

Yes, some things are impossible. Other things that seem impossible are just hard.

For years, running a four-minute mile seemed a physiologically unattainable goal. Then someone did it. And thousands more runners have since beaten his time.

Other countries have already achieved universal healthcare. Other countries have already established tuition-free college, subsidized childcare, and fare-free public transportation.

When a job applicant tells us, I simply can’t do what your job description says, and I won’t waste my time trying. When do I start? we know not to hire that person.

And when the job is mayor, or city council member, or senator, or representative, or president, we don’t need a job applicant whose lifelong dream is to write the worst-seller The Power of Positive Giving Up.

Victim-Blaming the Religious Right

When religious fundamentalists of any denomination force their morality into secular law, I become angry. Christian politicians routinely decry Sharia Law but then enact laws reflecting their own religion’s theology on everyone else in their state or even the entire country.

One common religious attitude I especially abhor is victim blaming. And it finally dawned on me that by voicing my continual dissatisfaction with American Christians, I was doing the same thing. Religious fundamentalists of all stripes are victims themselves of religious leaders who have trained them to be intolerant.

When I worked as a Mormon missionary in Rome, I encountered Roma—not to be confused with Romans—many times. Gypsies could be found almost everywhere, begging for money.

And not just begging but demanding and even stealing. Groups of Roma children surrounded some of the sister missionaries, distracting and grabbing at their belongings. I remembered handing one woman a 500-lire note, surprised when she then struck me. That’s not enough! Give me more!

I watched as a Roma woman seated on the sidewalk with an unconscious toddler in her lap sent an older boy, maybe five, to beg two businessmen for money. One of the men, clearly annoyed, also seemed to feel a pang of guilt, eating an ice cream cone in the presence of this destitute child in rags. He handed the boy his ice cream and then moved off to avoid further emotional discomfort.

The child, elated, ran back to his mother and showed her his prize. She grabbed the ice cream cone, smashed it against the sidewalk, and slapped the boy in the face. Jabbing her finger at him angrily, she hissed, You only take money! Then she sent the boy back to continue begging.

I was repulsed by what I’d seen, but over the two years I lived in Italy, I learned more about these people. Roma children were born at home—there was a large Roma camp along one of our bus routes—so the children had no birth certificates. Whether as a result of missing documentation or simply as a cultural choice, the parents didn’t send their kids to school.

Ultimately, generation after generation grew up without either legal evidence of their existence or a formal education. What else could they do besides steal and beg, especially if they were trained from infancy to do so? Even with documentation and education, the unemployment rate in the country was a difficult obstacle to overcome.

The problem, though, was that despite my finally understanding the culture better, Roma were still folks I didn’t want to interact with. Whether anyone in their situation was at fault morally wasn’t the issue. Given their particular social structure and their limited opportunities, they were almost certainly doing the best they could.

And yet…

At some point, don’t people ever have to take responsibility for their behavior? Is respecting everyone’s culture an adequate way of dealing with antisocial behavior?

I’ve done and believed terrible things. As a child, I wore a Confederate cap and waved a Confederate flag. I used the N-word like everyone else in my family. In my segregated high school, one of my friends was an ardent fan of David Duke. I just laughed off his support of the KKK the way I laughed at racist jokes my grandfather told.

My appalling conduct and beliefs didn’t end there. Of course, there were the two years of cultural imperialism when I told Roman Catholics in Rome they needed to convert to Mormonism. There was my participation in an anti-ERA rally back in the States. There was my self-righteous judgment of my sister’s teenage pregnancy.

I am far from blameless.

When I hear of something scandalous in a politician’s or celebrity’s past, I can’t say I’m surprised. What would be surprising is the discovery that someone in the spotlight now had never done anything insensitive or inappropriate.

What does matter to me is whether the person being accused of long-ago transgressions denies an undeniable incident or pretends he or she never really believed the terrible thing it’s clear they did believe. We can own up to our mistakes, whether those mistakes were born out of ignorance or even out of malice, and show that we’ve made efforts to progress.

And by progress, I don’t mean that people simply change their position out of political expediency. Sure, Obama and Clinton came out in support of gay marriage but only after years of speaking against it. Did they really have a change of heart, a burst of intelligence and education, or did they simply accommodate rising public support? When people are behind the curve rather than ahead of it, it’s difficult to trust their epiphanies. Should the tide turn back, I have no confidence they’d be able to sustain their insight.

A year after I completed my missionary labor in Italy, I returned to participate in an advanced Italian course in Florence. Nicla, one of the sister missionaries I’d worked with before, came up from southern Italy so we could get to know each other as civilians. We soon became engaged and shortly thereafter had a conversation that taught me a principle I’ve needed to learn again and again since.

A friend of mine is married to a man with a good job, Nicla told me. But she still wants to work outside the home. What do you think about that?

As an American, it sounded good to me. The woman was contributing to society. And surely it was healthy not to be dependent on a man.

The unemployment rate in Puglia is 20%, Nicla went on. "If my friend wants to stay active and do interesting things, she could volunteer somewhere. She doesn’t need that job and someone else does. She should not take a paying job if she doesn’t need to."

The idea had never occurred to me, and I learned how important it was to see things from more than one perspective.

One of the first books I read after coming out was written by a physician in New York who lived in a separate home from his partner. They weren’t really a couple, I thought, not if they didn’t even want to live in the same house together.

But over the next few years, I saw more variation in relationships than I thought possible. Some men were coupled traditionally. Others chose to remain single. They weren’t always searching for the one. Still other men had committed relationships, but both partners were allowed to play on the side. I saw men in permanent threesomes living together and loving each other. I met a man with two husbands who lived in separate residences. It wasn’t a threesome. The two husbands loved the shared husband but not each other. The idea that there was only one way to do love, or do life, became preposterous.

All the more reason the narrow-mindedness of many Christians grew more and more galling.

I stopped dating a former Catholic priest when he told me he believed women who were raped got what they deserved for dressing like sluts.

One of my freshman college students wrote a paper in support of legalizing prostitution. I rolled my eyes when I read his thesis sentence but was convinced only three pages later that he might have a position worth considering, after all.

Whatever flaws his paper might have had, he got an A for making me think.

When my mother complained that her cancer diagnosis had been hidden from her, that my father and the doctor had conspired to start her on chemotherapy without her knowledge or consent, she said, If I’d known I had leukemia, I’d have stayed home and blown my brains out, but now I’m here, trapped, and I can’t escape.

I was horrified and thought maybe my father had made the right decision. But a mere two and a half weeks later, after watching this woman I loved more than anyone suffer the most miserable death imaginable, I began to wonder if maybe she shouldn’t have had some say over her last days.

I haven’t changed every single one of my ideas and opinions over the years, but I try to keep only those that withstand scrutiny. Some do and some don’t.

My political views shifted rather quickly from conservative Republican to liberal Democrat (and are continuing to shift as we speak), but I was still irritated to see so many of my Democrat friends treating the Democratic Party like a religion, the same way Republicans treated the Republican Party. When Bill Clinton said he didn’t inhale, I knew he was lying. How could so many supporters believe that nonsense? When he insisted he did not have sexual relations with that woman, why did only Republicans seem to doubt him?

It’s the undying devotion and defense of any institution or leader at all costs that I find reprehensible. If Republicans had a bad policy, I felt free to say so. If Democrats had a bad policy, I felt equally obligated to protest.

So when Mormon friends and family defend hurtful or hateful policies because the Prophet told them to, I think that at some point they have to be responsible for those positions themselves.

When other religious fundamentalists defend hurtful or hateful Republican policies because evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics have become a new hybrid religious force that must be obeyed no matter what, I think that at some point, even if they’ve been brainwashed, even if they’re afraid of going to Hell if they demonstrate any degree of dissent, even if it’s unfair of me to expect better behavior, they must accept personal responsibility for the damage they do.

Maya Angelou famously said that when we know better, we need to do better. But we have a responsibility to open our minds wide enough in the first place to give us the opportunity to know better. We may not all reach that same point at the same time, but when it takes religiously political zealots seventy years before they’re woke enough to behave humanely toward their fellow man, perhaps it’s not the most judgmental action on my part to go ahead and blame them even if they are victims of their religion as well.

I’ve learned I can be against monopolies without being against business. I can be against capitalism without being against America. I can be against religion without being against morality.

Being rigid isn’t healthy, like a brick house in an earthquake or hurricane.

When people boast, I’ve never wavered in my opinion, it’s not a point in their favor. If you’ve never changed your mind in the last forty years, you’ve proven yourself untrustworthy of interpreting new information. If you’ve never learned a new approach to solving a persistent problem or grown in any noticeable way, that’s not something to put on your resumé.

I feel a special need for Mormons, my people, to be open to new information and ideas because their theology specifically promises them eternal progression. When my Latter-day Saint friends and family bear their testimony to me that they know everything necessary regarding every moral (i.e., political) issue, I wonder how they can even want to believe they’ve already reached the pinnacle of all human understanding. If they have, then what great new insights await them in the hereafter?

The psychology of groups is complicated and messy. Thinking for ourselves is as well, but the alternative is to be trapped.

At some point, Republicans, Mormons, Democrats, Capitalists, Baptists, Socialists, Americans of all backgrounds, must take responsibility for doing and believing only what they’re told. If fear of being labeled an apostate or traitor prevents us from examining our beliefs, even if that fear has been instilled in us from infancy, sooner or later we cross a line from victim to perpetrator. The way an abused child grows up to be a child abuser.

Is it fair to blame the religious right for the pain and cruelty they inflict on tens of millions of their neighbors? Even though they sincerely believe they’re fulfilling God’s will?

Yes, it is. Sometimes, the victims are to blame. And the victims of those victims have an obligation to say so.

Only Lazy People Demand a Life of Ease

I recently heard an acquaintance bemoan the socialist demand for free college education. "I worked my way through college! If these spoiled kids want to succeed in life, they’d better learn how to work hard without expecting everything to be handed to them!"

She waxed poetic like H.G. Wells about the tragic future of our society.

But I couldn’t help noticing that this acquaintance drives her own car. She doesn’t take the bus to work. She doesn’t ride a bike to the grocery. She doesn’t saddle up her horse to visit her children in another state. She doesn’t even walk to church.

Why isn’t it morally bankrupt of her to want an easy mode of transportation, simply because it makes working, shopping, worshipping, and maintaining relationships more convenient?

When I was taking high school Algebra, we were forbidden from using calculators. We’d end up mindless sheep, our teacher claimed, unable to function. By the time I started my Biology degree fifteen years later, we were required to purchase calculators.

Our professors even told us the necessary functions those calculators needed to perform. We brought those calculators to our exams. We were even allowed to bring a single sheet with every major formula or equation we might need to help us solve the problems. The same in my Physics and Chemistry classes.

No one is expected to build a house without using tools. My professors didn’t expect us to solve complicated problems without them, either.

Classmates went on to become physicians, professors, and engineers.

Perhaps if we’d made class harder for them, they’d have become more successful?

Every single conservative friend or family member I know uses electricity. They don’t go to bed at sundown or light candles to study before bedtime. They don’t cook their meals in a wood-burning oven. They don’t save chunks of ice in their barn, padded with straw to prevent premature melting. Are all these people with the moral decrepitude to take hot showers destined for the gutter because of their self-indulgent nature?

Not a single conservative in my circle refuses medical care. They don’t feel they’re being weak to take an antibiotic for an ear infection. They don’t feel sinful for receiving an injection of novocaine before a dental procedure. They don’t wallow in shame for their pathetic dependence on asthma inhalers.

Making life easier, making life bearable, making life possible doesn’t offend these conservative friends and family members one bit…when it improves their lives. It’s just those other people who want an easy, bearable, possible life that disgust them.

It’s entirely possible that remote controls make us lousy people. Being able to call friends on our cell phones may ruin us. GPS, contact lenses, microwaves, dryer sheets, umbrellas, Scotchgard, and email may all turn us into moral parasites. But I don’t see any of my conservative friends or family giving them up.

Of course socialists want an easier life. So do Democrats and Republicans and Independents and everyone else.

Well, there are the Amish. And Christian Scientists. And a few others. But I don’t see any of my former Mormon missionary colleagues converting to a religion of self-denial to save their souls from the moral burden of technology and medicine.

Until the labor movements of the late 19th century began forcing change, seven-year-olds might have to work full-time in factories. Adults couldn’t conceive of a 40-hour work week. There was no such thing as paid vacation. Or sick leave. Or a two-day weekend.

I don’t see any of the conservatives I know donating all their leave to fellow employees to avoid the corrupting nature of receiving a paycheck when they’re at home sick in bed. I don’t see a single conservative in my circle of friends and family who refuses to take a vacation with their loved ones because they believe paid leave is the first step toward moral disintegration.

We accept taxation to support a military to defend us from enemies, to support police and fire departments that protect us from criminals and property loss, to support prisons that keep bad guys away from our families. While many of my conservative friends and family strongly believe in owning guns for self-defense, none of them feel a moral need to perform every single act of self-defense on their own. They not only welcome but demand that society make this task easier for them.

We have washing machines and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and can openers and electric toothbrushes and lawn mowers and Excel sheets and indoor plumbing. There’s hardly any aspect of life for which we haven’t invented—and use at every opportunity—devices to make our lives easier. We embrace the laws and programs and policies that ensure us time away from work to spend with those we love doing activities we enjoy.

Even the moment our distant ancestors first began wearing animal skins marked a desire to live an easier, more protected life.

And let’s be honest, even if your college tuition is paid by someone else, is it still easy to understand Shakespeare? Is it truly easy to master Organic Chemistry? Is it really easy to become fully competent in HVAC repair? No one’s asking for honorary degrees. They’re simply asking for the chance to earn their degrees without spending the next thirty years of their lives deeply in debt.

Making college or vocational training available to everyone who wants to improve their minds, their skills, and their lives is not going to turn our nation into a mass of drowning Eloi.

I do wonder, though, why so many conservatives insist on making every effort to transform the poor and underprivileged into Morlocks whose only purpose is to make their lives easier.

Reparations, One Family at a Time

There’s been much discussion of reparations over the years and, while several countries have made progress in repairing some of the harm committed against historically oppressed populations, the U.S. government has remained resistant. But as we continue to fight for justice on a larger scale, we can start considering reparations on a personal level. Whether we’re white or not,