Essay:The Church - the Mafia - and You

by Seamus

In the New World, since it was first settled by our forefathers, there have been two strongly disparate elements in the social body. One was anarchistic and tolerant; the other, sternly authoritarian and fanatically moralistic.

It is a mistake to believe that the Puritans came here seeking religious freedom. On the contrary, they sought a place in which to exercise their own brand of religious totalitarianism, after having fled Merry Ole England and being driven from such a famously tolerant nation as Holland. It is probable that the religious persecutions and moralistic intolerances practiced upon dissenters by the colonists of New England were more severe than any from which they had fled.

It is surprising that the Constitution contained an apparent guarantee of religious freedom. This seeming oversight may be attributed to two things: the mutual suspicion with which each colony viewed the other, and the staunch feeling for liberty felt by the man who wrote the provision.

It is very significant to note that the religious freedom clause was an injunction to the federal government, but did not limit the several states.

At one time the state of Virginia had an established church, and religious intolerance had been practiced, under the law, in every state in the union.

In addition to the Puritanical factor in the American culture, there was the Roman Catholic strain, strong in some parts of the country, which supported many, if not most, of the same intolerances as the Protestant churches.

All forms of organized religion are alike in certain social respects.

Each claims to be the sole custodian of the essential truth. Each claims to speak with final authority on all ethical questions. And every church has requested, demanded, or ordered the state to enforce its particular system of taboos. No church ever withdraws its claim to control absolutely, by divine right, the moral life of the citizens.

If the church is weak, it attempts by devious means to turn its creed and discipline into law. If it is strong, it uses the rack and thumbscrews.

To a surprising degree, churches in the United States were able, under a governmental form which formally acknowledged no religion at the federal level, to have placed on the statutes of the several states the individual church's code of moral taboos, and to wrest, from the state, enough privileges and special concessions to amount to subsidy. This was especially true of the evangelical churches in the Midwest and South, but it was equally true of the Roman Catholic Church in its strongholds. It would have been equally true of any church: Holy Roller, Islamic, Judaism, or whatever. It is a characteristic of all organized religions, not of a particular sect.

To cite a few examples: Sunday closing laws; tax exemption for church property; income tax exemption for church proceeds (ever wonder how those college football players are paid? The money is donated to a church, which rakes a percentage off of the top and distributes the rest; churches don't open their books); practically all laws relating to marriage and relations between the sexes, including laws forbidding divorce, nation-wide rule permitting only monogamous marriages, laws against fornication and other taboo sexual relationships, laws forbidding birth control; laws prohibiting the teaching of certain scientific doctrines - especially man's kinship to other animals; all laws of censorship, for moral reasons, of the press, stage, radio, and television; certain taboos of word and speech forms; laws prohibiting certain parts of the body being exposed to view; laws limiting the consumption of spirituous liquors and laws forbidding the use of recreational drugs; any law which takes a paternalistic attitude towards the citizen with the purpose of ensuring his moral compliance rather than the purpose of regulating his conduct to avoid damaging others, and to prevent others from damaging him.

"Nature abhors a vacuum."

Enter the Mafia.

The "blue" laws created a grisly, perhaps unconscious symbiosis between organized crime and the organized churches, for the greatest bulwark of the underworld was always the moral creed of the church. You think that unlikely? Consider this: the churches have great political power. In some places it is almost impossible to be elected to public office if the churches disapprove.

It is a matter of fact, easily verified, that every public leader of every corrupt political machine was invariably a prominent member of a large, powerful sect. He always contributed heavily to the church, especially to its charities.

On the other hand, every church stood (publicly) for honesty in government. At the same time they demanded of the government that it suppress all manner of facts, harmless in themselves, but offensive to the creeds of the churches (sex education comes immediately to mind; the churches fought public sex education savagely, and still do in some places). Churches and clergy were usually willing to accept the word for the deed. Protestations of integrity, combined with tithing and psalm singing, plus a willingness to enact into law the prejudices of the church, were usually all that was required of a candidate.

Gang leaders, though, were hardened realists; they cared nothing about a candidate's virtues if he were willing to protect the gang from prosecution. Furthermore, they wanted the blue laws on the books as long as such laws were not well-enforced.

Illicitness was the thing that made their stock-in-trade valuable, and they knew it. The blue laws they broke gave them a weapon to destroy competition, since the same machine which gave them protection could be used to destroy a competitor who did not own a piece of the government.

And so it has gone, for decades in America: the gangsters and the preachers, each for his own purpose, supporting and electing the same candidates. It was inevitable, because the churches demanded of government those things that government cannot or should not perform: things that came under the heading of forcing a man to be 'good' for the sake of his soul, instead of interfering only to prevent him from damaging another. The churches had unlimited rationalizations to prove that their nosy interference was 'good' for the welfare of all.

Sometimes the concatenation is very involved, but at the end in every case you will find the churches using the state to coerce a man into complying with a creed which the churches have been unsuccessful in persuading him to adopt without coercion. Wherever that occurs you have a condition which inevitably results in the breeding of a large, powerful underworld which will seize the local governments first and then work its way up the ladder to the top.

With the rise of the Corporate State, Big Business (and I include the media) muscled up to the trough. At first, many in the clergy feared the coming of the Corporate Age, but their fears were groundless. The Corporate State needs the mind-numbing church dogshit (excuse me; church dogma) to instill docility from an early age.

It took no great leap of imagination for government, with the urging and support of Big Business, to expand the idea of Sunday school to fill up the rest of the week, loosening family ties and rendering the citizenry helpless against the concerted onslaught. With the full week brain-deadening of the educational system, and the preachers convincing their flocks on Sunday that their suffering here would be rewarded later, all that remained was for television to provide the mind candy that would deflect any real contemplation of the status quo.

Yeah, kids, our enemies are powerful and we have a tough row to hoe.

But let me leave you with this thought:

"Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead