Dori: Seattleites who replace God with government are 180 degrees from our founding principles

With all the election postmortems after the Tuesday vote, there was one pretty remarkable column, Danny Westneat’s weekend editorial in The Seattle Times. The headline? “Hey GOP: You’re dead around here. Time to dump Trump, and look to the ‘Nones.'”

First he writes that the Republican Party was “wiped out of existence in King County” last week. There’s no question about that. But I want to talk a bit about his analysis as to why this happened.

The exit survey shows that the core base of the GOP — white evangelical or born-again Christians — now make up only 18 percent of the Washington electorate. While the rarely talked-about ‘Nones’ — those who don’t identify with any religious tradition — have soared to twice that, 35 percent of all voters in the state.

RELATED: Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda thinks it’s alright to shout blasphemies against God at rallies

Again, no surprise at all to me. I’ve been telling you for years that the Seattle area is the most unchurched region of the United States; we are also the second-most childless major city. I know exactly why and I’ve told you why. It started 40 years ago when Seattle began implementing busing to make the city less segregated. The city started sending second-graders on a 45-minute bus ride from Ballard to South Seattle every day. Families said, “I don’t want that for my kid,” and began fleeing to the suburbs. Then you had a complete breakdown in the essential bedrock of every community. Church and school tend to be the institutions that bring us all together. For a lot of us, our good friends are the parents of our kids’ good friends; school provides that galvanizing point. Churches certainly do the same.

So when families started fleeing the city, you saw a lack of connectedness. It was replaced by what we have right now in Seattle — a lot of childless people and a lot of unchurched people. I would argue that you see the lack of community for that reason. We have become very disconnected as a city.

Danny Westneat then goes on to explain that he is one of the “nones.”

Nones may believe in God, or not. But they’re fed up with the influence of institutionalized religion, especially as it seeps into what is supposed to be a secular government. As an outgrowth of that, the Nones don’t trust government to police personal morality, are highly suspicious of any God talk by politicians or Supreme Court nominees, are strongly pro-science, and tend to be overwhelmingly socially liberal even as some may be fiscally conservative.

As you know, in many ways, I like a healthy separation of church and state. I do not believe that high school coaches should be praying with their players before a game; I have always been a firm believer in that. But to say that we should dump God from our politics — what have a lot of liberals replaced God with?

Here at our radio station, we have one host who has said on-air, “Government is my religion.” Liberals are always ridiculing people of faith. “Oh, you pray to the magic sky fairy.” That phrase, by the way, is proof of an unbelievably un-creative person because that line has been uttered about 22 billion times. But even more fantabulous than believing in a “sky fairy” is that you think government is going to be a steward of all that is good and right around here. Government has proven to be a horrible deliverer of things that bring us together as a community. It is filled with graft and corruption and waste. And it is 180 degrees from what we were founded on.

Whether people want to accept this or not, we had a lot of theists who founded this country. In the Declaration of Independence, they proclaimed this radical new truth upon which our country was founded. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I cannot impress upon you enough how radical that was. Prior to that, your rights were granted to you by a king. And what man gives, man can take away. But they said that God grants us these rights when we are born.

What we have now in the Puget Sound are a lot of people who are really extreme left and running things around here. They believe that they must be your alpha and omega. And there are a lot of people who are delusional, believing the government is a positive force in their life. Government is the god of people around here.

I just find it a little ironic when a columnist is gleeful that so many people have decided they don’t believe in God, but rather, in the power of government. You have to understand that that is taking us, as a region, in a direction that is 180 degrees different from where we were at this miraculous, wonderful, genius founding of our country. Our Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves at how overwhelming and powerful a force government is in our lives. So many people in this part of the country will march in the street to demand that government take that person’s stuff and give it to them. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, but I know that’s the prevailing mentality around here.

What has a government exponentially bigger than it should be done here in our region? We’ve got an unprecedented level of heroin addicts on our streets, of criminals committing property crimes in our region. Cops are leaving in droves because they’re demonized by the politicians who should be supporting them. We’re seeing a convergence of crime and de-policing that is incredibly dangerous.

So, you can ridicule people of faith all you want. But understand that when you substitute government for God, that’s pretty fanciful. And I would suggest that history has proven that government is far less capable of being a powerful force for delivering a good community. But I get it — that’s the trend line around here and it’s very powerful. “Let’s get government as big as possible so that it can take other people’s things and give them to me, because I deserve them.”

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