The ancient Greeks grew weary of their gods and goddesses when the stories of Mount Olympus became hackneyed and too exhausting to bear. Religion can run out of gas when its symbols no longer speak to the people. And symbols run out of gas when they’re judged to have no good meaning for the majority of people.
The problem for human beings doesn’t reside in losing one’s faith. It’s possible to give up on the church and find a better calling by doing something that’s more meaningful in the civic world. The true problem is when human beings throw over the old symbols and fail to substitute them with better ones. This is often the case with human movements that celebrate demagoguery or that embrace tyranny. The Nazi’s threw out Christian symbolism and filled the void with pagan symbols, none of which represented divine love. The Russian Communists threw out Christian symbolism and replaced it with the ready made symbols of industrial manufacturing and history has showed the result.
I thought about this yesterday when I saw on TV a few short film clips of Tea Party protestors in Washington, all of them wearing 18th century tri-cornered hats and sporting vicious Tee shirts.
One fair imagines that the protestors believe that tri-cornered hats evoke the promise of righteous 18th century colonial resentment over imperial taxation and at face value this is fine. But tri-cornered hats also represent an age and social order that embraced slavery, poverty in the streets, social alienation for women, near slavery for children, filth in the gutters, no access to higher education for the majority of citizens, vast illiteracy, and a host of absurd political and social ideas too numerous to mention here.
Frankly, sporting a tri-cornered hat is as bad as flying the Confederate flag–each act is symbolic of an age that should properly be foreign to us today. Beware what you throw away in your symbolic life. Perhaps the best symbol I know of when thinking about our national life is that of Jesus breaking a loaf of bread. I’d trust the Tea Party crowd a lot more if they wore big foam bread loaves on their noggins.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
This is brilliant. I’ve been struggling with the fact that my own parents marched in D.C. — marches, despite the fact that they have a grandaughter, my daughter, who is severely disabled and desperately in need of healthcare reform.
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