Does God have a political bias? This age old question can be read in the old antiwar song, “With God on Our Side.” But does God really care whether Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders will be the next president of the United States?

Naturally, the answer to this question depends on who you ask. Believers with firm political beliefs — whether it’s helping the poor through something called Democratic Socialism or guarding the nation’s ‘soul’ by outlawing abortion — see God “blessing” as their particular point of view.

The ‘God politics’ roulette players remind me of die-hard sports fans who pray to God to help their team win, as if God really cares about home runs, touchdowns and whether Pete Rose should be inducted into the Hall of Fame (he should). Mostly, I think, we are an ailing society that has lost its moorings, especially when it comes to theology and religion. We fashion an idea of God to suit our beliefs and sometimes cannot imagine a creator outside that comfortable framework. The unbelievers among us cite ethics as their code of conduct, which I suppose is better than oozing through life with a self-serving amorality. Whatever our faith, this much is true: There should be a certain level of respect for all people, even for those with whom we disagree and find objectionable.  

I’m thinking of the heated vitriol after the death of Justice Scalia. Scalia was not someone I agreed with very often. After his death, I thought, “His judicial opinions have now been archived into the annals of history. The Scalia era is over… let’s move on.” Put another way: disagree with him politically, but don’t drag the man through mud and infamy or go to the extreme lengths that some went to on Facebook, which is to say that they offered the idea that if an accidental death hadn’t taken him, they would have gladly been there with an extra pillow to usher it along.

Others on social media delivered more benign attacks: “I’m dancing on his grave,” “Ding dong the witch is dead” and “Yippee!” were posted onto the news streams of Facebook’s many users. Our culture has become so fiercely partisan that some even said that President Obama had Scalia snuffed out.

Another Scalia hater wrote that the Justice now knows “the truth” and is “in shock,” presumably because he has discovered that God does not share his legal opinions or philosophy. Scalia, the presumption went, is currently being given after-life instructions on the tenets of non-reactionary political philosophy.    

I had to read this post twice to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me, but the implication was there for all to read: God is a political liberal. God is Pro-Choice, loves Bernie Sanders, and more! Behind the ethereal veil, Scalia is now a liberal Democrat.  

This pop theology sauerkraut is just as bad as comments from fanatical evangelicals who claim that people who die on “the wrong side of the moral fence” are suffering in hell. This means that all pro-choice feminists are burning up like Home Depot Duraflame firelogs, that writers like Susan Sontag, vilified after her death because of her New Yorker 9/11 essay and because she called the “white race the cancer of human history,” is straddling hot coals in a lake of fire.   

When Susan Atkins, one of the Manson killers, died in 2009, the “you’re going to hell” people couldn’t wait to gleefully write that the killer of Sharon Tate and her unborn baby was now roasting like a chicken in hell. These hardcore “no forgiveness” people said this despite the fact that for the last 30 years of her life, Atkins had turned her life around and had become, at least according to prison records, “a model Christian.”

Some hardcore evangelicals have a Celebrities in Hell list they like to share on YouTube and other social media. Some of the unlucky roasters include:

• Michael Jackson
• John Lennon
• Selena
• Princess Diana
• Whitney Houston
• Amy Winehouse
• Kurt Cobain

What’s missing here is the story of the Good Thief who was crucified next to Christ. Now, The Good Thief’s life of crime probably included some heinous crimes, a life as deadly and treacherous as the most despicable criminal one might read about on Philly.com. Despite this, with just five words — “Lord, remember me in your kingdom” — all this was wiped away by the forgiveness of God. I need not remind readers how the Good Thief was answered, but it was not what we hear today among those who pretend to speak for the one on the cross.

You have to love the old saying “man’s justice is not God’s mercy,” meaning that God is much more merciful than man. Humankind is tougher and always less forgiving than God. Which brings me back to those Facebook comments about dancing on Scalia’s grave.

I believe the only time that dancing on a grave would ever be appropriate would be if the dancer knew for a fact that they would never die. Then the dancing could really be a cheerful victory prance. Not to mention that even saying that you’re going to dance on someone’s grave opens up (at least for me) a superstitious feeling that somewhere down the line someone would dance on your grave just as “you” danced on Scalia’s.   

All this partisan hatred got me thinking about political fanaticism and its roots in history, especially Russian history. I’m thinking of the time of the last tsars, when student uprisings were common in cities like St. Petersburg and when students vying for a revolution were ready to die for their point of view.  In 1868, for instance, a well known Russian radical writer, Petr Tkachev, who came from a wealthy family, was in and out of tsarist prisons and dreamed of the day when a revolution would destroy people like his parents.

“Only people under twenty-five are capable of self-sacrifice,” he wrote, “and therefore everyone over that age should be killed for the good of society.”

This is how far extreme partisanship can take us.  

A popular book in Russia at this time was Catechism for the Revolutionary by a man named Bakunin. Bakunin wrote:

“The revolutionary was a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no work, no feelings, no ties, no property, not even a name. Everything is subsumed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion — revolution… He is for anything that promotes the triumph of the revolution. Anything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.”

There were shades of this in our country in late 1960s during the Vietnam War, when some student radicals and activists were actually planning a complete overhaul of the U.S. government. Many decent protest of the Vietnam War were hijacked by radicals (like the Students for a Democratic Society) who wanted a violent second American revolution.  

Bakunin writes that Russia at that time was filled with “young fanatics who know no doubts, who fear nothing… They are believers without God, heroes without rhetoric.”

People in pre-1917 Russia danced on the graves of their political enemies after assassinating them. Partisan politics became the new religion and even gave birth to the   idea of a suicide bomber. The birth of the suicide bomber or terrorist occurred when a man named Alexander Solovyov shot Tsar Alexander II five times during his morning walk. Solovyov, who was a bad shot, missed and then when he went to kill himself by chewing a nut with cyanide in it. But the cyanide had deteriorated, so he lived to be hanged although at the gallows he refused absolution from a priest saying he didn’t believe in God.

The only God for Solovyov was partisan politics and revolution. Of course that revolution failed. Perhaps there’s a lesson here.

Bonus Book Review

Thom Nickels’ Literary Philadelphia: A History of Poetry & Prose in the City of Brotherly Love

By Marita Krivda Poxon

Thom Nickel’s latest book “Literary Philadelphia” profiles centuries of Philadelphia’s most well-known writers, revealing quirky and often salaciously intimate details of their lives. Nickels spares no one from his list of Philadelphia’s best, including Ben Franklin, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Owen Wister, Christopher Morley and Pearl S. Buck. But the glory of the book is how Nickel’s brings back to life forgotten writers whose literary star has long since faded: Writers like George Lippard, Charles Godfrey Leland, Agnes Repplier and John T. McIntyre. These are writers whose names do not ring a bell for most and who will never be required reading in any American Literature course. However, “Literary Philadelphia” is invaluable to those among us who seek new insights into our city’s famous writers and familiarity with our lost writers. The published work of the forgotten can offer insights into worldviews formerly relegated to the literary dust bin.

Nickel’s first chapter, A Bawdy and Unruly City, gets our attention right away when Philadelphia is christened “Sin City” filled with licentious bawdy houses and raucous taverns. Nickels makes a case for Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin as world-class rabble rousers rather than the darlings of the Age of Enlightenment. Writers need not have spent much time in Philadelphia to warrant considerable coverage. For example, Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, lived only two years in Germantown with her family which is enough for her to make the book. Just visiting Philadelphia got the “Hoosier Poet” James Whitcomb Riley a few paragraphs. Nickels recounts a little known story of Riley’s trip to Lockwood, a Victorian Gothic mansion owned by a wealthy collar manufacturer.

Nickels structures his first three chapters chronologically, emphasizing prose writers. But poet Walt Whitman gets equal treatment with the 19th Century novelists Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard. Included are tidbits that keep the reader’s attention like a list of Whitman’s special male friends, one of whom might have been Oscar Wilde. Wilde is purported to have said: “Of course, I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips.” And who knew that Poe wrote religious poetry including “A Hymn to the Virgin Mary” and even befriended Jesuit Catholic priests. Poe found the priests: “highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars, they smoked and they drank and they played cards, and they never said a word about religion.”

Agnes Repplier has been dubbed the American Jane Austen and has nearly been all but forgotten.  Nickels champions her sixty-five year long career and quotes Edith Wharton: “There isn’t a writer in the country who hasn’t been trying to achieve the perfection of style of the distinguished Miss Repplier.” In her book “Philadelphia: The Place and the People” she foretells her own future marginalization with the words: “the Quaker City lacked discriminating enthusiasm for its own children.” On the other hand, Pearl S. Buck, author of seventy books and winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for her novel The Good Earth, has had nothing but accolades. Nickels describes her Beaux Arts Delancey Street town house replete with Chinese décor. These same furnishings are still preserved at her foundation located on her sixty acre estate in Bucks County. Fame eluded Agnes Repplier but sure blessed Pearl S. Buck.

The book’s final chapter, Poetdelphia, weakens the success of the book since its coverage of the contemporary scene is sparse and limited. It reads more like a Who’s Who of today’s hip, trendy writers who are contemporaries of Nickels. It is an idiosyncratic choice of today’s best bards.  The strength of “Literary Philadelphia” is its first three chapters that weave the narrative of forgotten writers whose achievements are given equal weight alongside the canon of Philadelphia’s greatest.

Marita Krivda Poxon is a writer and retired academic, research librarian. Two of her regional history books are published along with two shorter books of short stories.  She writes regularly for the Irish Edition, a monthly newspaper.