Suspended Disbelief and Religious Tradition

The Freedom to Dream...

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Every society, ours not least, is established on religious tradition, and all religious traditions require the suspension of disbelief. To be a practicing Christian requires an acceptance of fantastic narratives like the immaculate conception, feeding five thousand with five loaves and two fish, and the resurrection as divine truth. Likewise, to be a practicing Jew requires acceptance of equally fantastic narratives like the burning bush, the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and the miracle on Mt. Sinai.

The suspension of disbelief clears the way for faith in something unseen but far greater than our corporeal selves. That’s why the suspension of disbelief has always been the first condition imposed by religious leaders, village elders, artists, and court jesters alike on congregants, tribe members, and audiences for millennia.

Likewise, the suspension of disbelief has been a prominent feature of the political landscape forever, blatantly obvious over the past several years as we were told ad nauseum by government officials that the COVID lab leak was conspiracy theory, that the greatest domestic threat to the nation was white supremacy, that our southern border was secure, and that our president was somehow compos mentis — all despite our lying eyes.

Dreams — like religious tradition — also require the suspension of disbelief. Indeed, the suspension of disbelief is prerequisite to the translation of our dreams into reality, and from reality into all artistic interpretation of reality.

Absent theocratic authority, religious tradition is a liberating call to dream, not the opiate of the masses. The Founding Fathers, the great dreamers of the Enlightenment, understood this long before Karl Marx turned bitter and decided to take it out on the rest of the world. They understood that the real alternative to theocratic rule wasn’t the elimination of religious tradition, but the free, unencumbered, individual expression of it. There’s a reason why the free expression of religion is the first freedom cited in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights: there can be no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of assembly, and no freedom to petition the government without the free expression of religion first. The Founding Fathers understood that freedom is a spiritual endowment.

A society without core religious tradition, however, is a society that eventually stops dreaming. And a society that forsakes or denies the free expression of religion is a rudderless society that eventually turns nihilistic and authoritarian.

That’s why the Democratic Party can no longer dream about the future and can only focus on the tribal insults and injuries of the past. In the absence of dreams the wholesale introduction and weaponization of DEI across institutional America represents little more than a retrogressive return and celebration of systemic racism writ large as the historical imperative and DNA of the Democratic Party. In the absence of dreams they are compelled to return to their roots as plantation masters and Jim Crow enforcers.

That’s why they have turned so censorious, so intolerant, and so autocratic in recent years. And that’s why they are no longer the party of Martin Luther King Jr. They have chosen to replace religious tradition with transactional narcissism for profit, and now can simply no longer suspend disbelief in religious tradition long enough to share or even imagine his dream. Worse yet, they have turned that same working-class dream of equal opportunity into a dystopian class war against poor and middle class people of all colors and creeds worldwide.

The corresponding irony of ironies, of course, is that the MAGA Republicans, those who still profess fealty to core religious tradition, are now the party of Martin Luther King Jr. and the stewards of his dream. Who could have imagined just one generation ago that MAGA Republicans would emerge in the 21st century as the defenders of free speech and civil liberties? Who could have imagined just one generation ago that MAGA Republicans would emerge in the 21st century as the stewards of dreams? Go figure.

So go forth in faith, however miraculous, and remember this about your own dreams: far stranger things have happened. Believe in yourself and suspend disbelief long enough not only to dream, but to make your dreams a reality. Just remember to smile and give thanks…

Low Ceiling on the Loxahatchee