Having put Hope to examination last week, it is natural to now look at Faith.

Faith however is a bit slipperier to decipher.  looking at the definitions, it can mean dramatically different things:

• religion: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny; “he lost his faith but not his morality” .  
• an institution to express belief in a divine power; “he was raised in the Baptist religion”; “a member of his own faith contradicted him”

These two meanings, while very crucial, are somewhat outside the scope of my musing.

I am more concerned with the practical applications of Faith in these two definitions:

• complete confidence in a person or plan etc; “he cherished the faith of a good woman”; “the doctor-patient relationship is based on trust”
• loyalty or allegiance to a cause or a person; “keep the faith”; “they broke faith with their investors”

I think that our current situation in this country has really taken faith and put it to the test.

You see, I defined hope as the dreams and goals that people have.  If that is true, then faith is the path they chose to achieve them, and more importantly, it defines the people and institution they trust, and the belief that the actions they take to achieve the realization of their dreams and the fulfillment of their hope, will succeed.

Conservatives tend to place their faith in people, in the human spirit that drives us.  Rush Limbaugh spoke to this in his Key note speech at CPAC:

 We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims. We don’t see people we want to exploit. What we see — what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not see that person with contempt. We don’t think that person doesn’t have what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government.

We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. Liberty, Freedom.  And the pursuit of happiness.

We want the country to succeed, and for the country to succeed, its people — its individuals — must succeed. Everyone among us must be pursuing his ambition or her desire, whatever, with excellence. Trying to be the best they can be. Not told, as they are told by the Democrat Party:  “You really can’t do that, you don’t have what it takes, besides you’re a minority or you’re a woman and there are too many people that want to discriminate against you. You can’t get anywhere. You need to depend on us. “

Well. Take a look, someone has to say this … take a look at all the constituency groups that for 50 years have been depending on the Democrat Party to improve their lives. And you tell me if you find any. They’re still complaining, still griping about the same problems. Their problems don’t get fixed by government. And those lives have been poisoned. Those lives have been cut short by false promises, from government representatives who said don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of you. Just vote for us.

The president’s stimulus package, the TARP, the whatever, the budget, relies on one thing for its success. Well, aside from authoritarian government power. It relies on the complacency of the American people.  It relies on their belief that they can convince the American people that there’s such a crisis that only government, the only entity that can fix it is government, as Obama has said. So they get complacent and they sit around and they wait. See, this is something liberals will never understand about the United States of America and it’s right under their noses, right in front of their faces, we are a competitive people. We strive, enough of us do, to be the best. We strive to win. We strive to avoid defeat. Enough of us still do. Don’t believe otherwise.  The liberals have made efforts to shut that aspect of our nature down.

While I might have phrased some of this differently, he does touch on what I feel is a elemental difference in focus:  Liberals tend to want to solve the problems, and have you rely on the government to solve the problems for you.  Conservatives, real conservatives anyway, tend to believe that there are no problems that people cannot overcome, and they want to enable the people to be able to do so.

Granted, the last 8 years has not reflected that well.  The conservatives in America lost their voice and their direction.  They lost the spirit of Reagan.  While he is not my perfect ideal, he does embody the spirit of real conservative values.  Consider this part of his inaugural speech:

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we’re not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we’ve had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick–professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “we the people,” this breed called Americans.

He was coming into a country in a horrible recession, facing higher unemployment than now.  This was his response, and note how different it was from Obama’s, who has clearly said that only the Federal Government can save us.

And in those two people I see the differences in how they want you to place your faith.

Obama wants you to have faith in him and in the government.  Most conservatives want us to have faith in ourselves and in the people around you.

Faith is as fragile as hope is, and yet at the same time it is as brutal and unyielding as hope also is.

Hope endures in the face of hopelessness and despair, and faith endures in the face of breaches of trust and faithlessness.

Our politicians, of both parties I must note, have as a whole broken their faith with the American people.  They have ruled us out of self interest.  They have allowed partisan politics to override common sense and need.

They have all willingly and gleefully perpetuate a system that encourages and rewards corruption while piously claiming to be the party that wants to stamp it out.  Obama promised to shun lobbyists then allowed several in his administration.  He promised transparency than refuses to allow it.  He has pledged the most ethical administration but staffs it with tax cheats and people with ethical dilemmas.

And don’t get me wrong.  The republicans are no better, not at all.   The reality is that  our elected leaders, as a rule, have not been faithful to their pledges of service.

And we as a rule keep electing them.  Over and over.  Ignore the ethical blemishes, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And we do it because we want to trust them, to have faith in them.  Faith is hard to break.

Too many American’s have lost the their true faith.  Not religion, though I may have some personal beliefs about how the lessening importance of religious faith has impacted our nation.

No, we have lost our faith in our abilities and in ourselves.

And we have let the people who take our hopes and our dreams and twist them into ammo to use to manipulate us, and we have handed them our trust and our faith to play with as well.

Faith… must be enforced by reason…. When faith becomes blind it dies.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

How true.  Too easily have the pirates we call politicians taken our faith, stripped the reason from it, and then handed it back to us and told us to trust them.  They pamper us to gain our trust, then do whatever they want.

And yet, what are we to do, for without faith, we have no path to our dreams.

So like hope, we have to take our faith and own it.  We have to keep faith with ourselves, and with our peers. 

And most of all, and long overdue, we have to hold accountable those who break our faith, or who in their own self interest are acting faithless.  Faith is not trivial.

So what is the bottom line?  Simply this:

We cannot lose our faith.  We just need to be more demanding of where we put our faith, or more importantly, who we put it in.

lsu