We're Not One America

When I awoke Wednesday morning I felt terribly alone. I lay in bed, thinking about my liberal communities and four years spent railing against the administration, wondering if indeed those friends really existed. Having spent four years trying to convince myself that �we� were in the majority, that the �real� American people would vote in their own interests, I faced the day, and the facts, needing a support group.

After all, that�s what it�s been the whole time, right? I�ve done my liberal duty, browsed Salon and Slate, read The New York Times, tried to avoid Fox as much as possible, worshipped at the church of The Daily Show. In doing so I have convinced myself that my anger was not only my own, and that �most people� were on �my side.� True, I live in Iowa � a state that, 48 hours later, still can�t decide whether to be red or blue. But I also live in Johnson County, home of the University of Iowa, where Kerry took close to 70% of the vote, where, a year ago, the town was split evenly between Dean and Kucinich supporters. I should feel at home.

In my loneliness I have spent two days crawling back to my old hangouts, desperately looking for consolation from my favorite liberals and comedians. Friends in blue states have expressed their outrage, their incredulity, that the rest of the country could be that stupid, that rich, or both. Overwhelmingly, more loudly than anything else, I have heard proclaimed the death of the Enlightenment, the death of reason. Evangelism, I have been told, is behind this recent trauma. Christians are to blame, Christians who think that all liberals are latte-drinking, Huffington-reading, America-hating, (well, you know the rest of the line from here). A friend suggested that �we should have let the South secede when we had the chance.� I think he was joking, but maybe only in part.

I�m a liberal, but I�m also a Christian. I voted for Kerry, and I voted with my brain, my heart, and, yes, my moral values.

I have been a Christian in blue states. I have been a liberal in red states. I do not provisionally exclude my faith when I vote democratic; rather, I embrace it. My moral values abhor photographs of my fellow citizens standing over tortured piles of Iraqi bodies. My moral values abhor identifying myself with a country that commits international acts of murder on a mind-boggling scale to further its policies of economic hegemony. My moral values support a woman�s right to choose, everybody�s right to love, and the scientific imperative to understand the universe we are fortunate enough to inhabit. My moral values have overdosed on CNN and, today, cannot bear to look.

I�m not the model for anything. I�m not evangelizing; evangelism per se makes me uncomfortable, and I strictly support the separation of church and state. But this does not mean that I separate my faith from the electoral process; nothing could be more integral to my citizen duty than the God I believe in. I refuse to be hated for my faith by a bitter, disheartened left, and yet in the past two days I have heard people whose political views I very much respect refer to themselves as �anti-Christian� out of what, I think, is simple misunderstanding. Not all Christians are Evangelicals. Not all Evangelicals are Republicans. Not all Liberals are Latte-Drinkers. I don�t like coffee at all; I live in the Midwest; I think whatever voices George hears in his head are his own problems, not Jesus giving him directions.

We are clearly not one America. Nostalgia for the so-called national unity that followed September 11 seems to me misguided, and a misremembering of what was always already a divisive and difficult time; a manufactured ideology of consent is not the same thing as consent itself. That nationalism, a rhetoric that clearly fueled the Bush re-election, is as simplistic as it is dangerous.

Equally dangerous, however, is the idea that we are somehow two Americas, one blue, one red. I have read this too many times: one believes in the enlightenment, the other in Mel Gibson; one thinks before choosing, the other chooses without thinking. As Jon Stewart put it, one has coastal access, the other doesn�t. These binaries fuel the fires of anger and escapism, and those fires may comfort in some small way, but they are ultimately just as destructive as trying to pretend that we�re all the same.

There are, in truth, millions of Americas. It is a frightening sort of loneliness to begin to think this thought, but it is valid nonetheless: none of us think exactly the same. None of us believe exactly the same. Evangelical Christians are not a large, mindless horde, something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, descended into our midst to steal our souls and eat our children. This makes just as little sense as painting all liberals with the same broad strokes we�ve all read before. As a Protestant Democrat, I do not conform to most expectations about the demographics of the liberal left in America; yet, it is that very nonconformity that fuels my liberalism and my passionate defense of my own rights and duties as a citizen.

But being different doesn�t mean I have to be alone. Recognizing my own identities allows me to find community, and communion, with as many fellow citizens as the horizon will hold, to the boundaries of this country and beyond them. Pluralizing our identifications doesn�t have to be a lonely thing � in fact, it is the only way we can ever hope for real democracy.

We have so conveniently accused Bush voters of reactionary, irrational politics. We claim to resent being labeled as Ivy-League, Yankee elitists, and yet are so quick to lash out just as simplistically and bitterly against an electorate that is clearly too large and diverse to cohere to our expectations. This reductionism is fundamentally opposed to the very evolution of American liberalism, a progress in recognizing our own differences and allowing for our own self-identifications. I will be a Christian, I will be a Democrat, you can�t make me choose. But please don�t try, because I don�t know if everybody else can resist that choice.

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Matt Gaventa is working on a Ph.D. in film studies at the University of Iowa. He previously wrote for TheBaseballPage.com