For example, I know of several Palestinian and Turkish women who started to wear headscarves or other traditional coverings of their native lands only after they had lived in the U.S. or Europe for a number of years. Similarly, some people who are not strongly religious at home begin to seek our support groups among peoples of their own or of other faiths while living abroad.
Living abroad, one often finds many opportunities to clarify who one is and what one believes (is more important). In short, distance in both place and time can become either empowering or a divisive force to one's sense of self or identity.
I recall feeling irritated one day back in 1994 when upon my arrival for a weekend of church service in Tokoyama, Japan, the wife of a pastor from California reported in one of our discussions, "Oh, I sometimes feel so outraged to see the large Buddhist statues and Shinto shrines all over town!"
I could tell that from her evangelizing background she felt called to denounce the "false Gods" of Shintoism and the statues of Buddha encircling and enveloping her life lived out in Japan. Admittedly, I had occasionally felt such anger or moral outrage in my life about certain forms of cultural and economic worship, but I have seldom directed such anger towards images of religious themes or figures-regardless of the official religion or faith being discussed.
I replied to the preacher's wife and questioned, "I feel the same way sometimes when I look across cityscapes in my homeland. Just look at the towers built encircling our urban landscapes as the 20th Century comes to an end! Many of them are constructed to commemorate insurance companies, finance offices or banks, and even world trade--or the Sears & Roebuck Company. Did you ever feel such a sense of condemnation back in San Francisco or some other part of the USA?"
I added, "It makes me shiver to think how man's vision of mammon is manifested in the great construction projects of every age-but particularly in the engineering feats of this age."
I recall how my history professors had made clear that every age is exemplified by the architecture it places at the hearts of its cities and among its connected rural landscape. In Roman times there was the coliseum, the pantheon, temples to a variety of gods, heated bath houses, and magnificence aqueducts.
In the Middle Ages, the Cathedral dominated the landscape of cultures across Europe. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, minarets, mosques, madressas (schools), fountains, and waterwheels dominated.
In the 19th Century, factory chimneys reached to the sky and the train station and railroad lines became the focus of city planning and architecture. By the late 20th Century tallskyscrapers, huge sporting complexes, and interstate highways dominated America's design landscape. In the meantime, the military industrial complex had not only sent spacecraft far from the Planet Earth. Amazing new stealth technology and robotic devices came to dominate America's place in the world as the 3rd Millennium started, and worshippers of USA's warrior technology spent billions-of other people's money-to try and build a new American Empire. I
t is no coincidence that the World Trade Tower buildings in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia were the targets on September 11, 2001 for a people named Al-Quaeda-a people who were intent on rolling back most of recent world history. In short, some people-like me-look at what kind of world is being worshipped by our wealth and mammon each year, and they see red!
This anger is misdirected, of course, but one cannot deny that images made by man can become the focus of our rage at a world-a world that is not on a good course to ensure the lives and security of our children and coming generations.
Many of us who marched against the nuclear arms races in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s felt that missile envy (and abuse of our financial resources on war) was a the root of great evil in our world. This was true whether one was a religious person or a so-called agnostic humanist. By the way, humanism was one way an agnostic (or someone who was dissatisfied with dysfunctional Christian practices) could find a voice against those who blindly took from Paul and Peter to pay an unending amount of tax dollars on John Doe Defense.
In the 1960s, this trend towards rejecting the religiosity of one's elders or the elder generations' manifestations of faiths was a reflection of the great discomfort a young generation felt at the shallow choices between a world at war and an international cold war.
People were told that through supporting consumerism and the "American Way", the world could conquer totalitarian communism. (This is not dissimilar to Bush's request that Americans go shopping after the WT Towers were bombed in autumn 2001.) The objective through the 1950s was spend, spend, spend. A promise was made or implied-everyone could attain a middle class lifestyle! Everyone could enjoy a day a Disneyland. Everyone could enjoy the American dream of home and lifestyle.
Despite the near financial collapses of the 1970s and 1980s in the USA, the strange polygamist marriage between capitalism, right wing conservative religionists and the world's largest military industrial complex continued to blossom.
This is where America found itself in the 1990s-i.e. with no evil empire in sight and with no apparent need for the post-1945 marriage of religion and capitalism to continue! This feared loss of a long-term oversea's enemy was one reason why-as early as the 1960s-a sort of culture war was promoted in the American landscape. This led to a growing division among Christians over the next few decades. It also led to a blind alliance between the so-called religious right and the new Republican party in the post-Vietnam era.
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