It doesn’t have to be that way, but for nearly all of us, it is.

I’m often inspired by the news to write a new blog. Today, Fareed Zakaria’s[1] weekly opinion article in the Washington Post has fueled my muse. This week, Zakaria documented the simultaneous movement of America as a whole away from religion, and the movement of evangelicals in America into hard-right politics. He says that when people discard religion, they experience “a sense of loss” that has to be filled somehow. He theorizes that for evangelicals, the religion of Trump fills the void. It also explains the phenomenon of Trump comparing himself with (or above) Christ.

That makes sense for me. Other pundits puzzle over how a philandering and morally bankrupt person like Trump can find such support in people who otherwise center their life around religious belief. I find parallels throughout history of the exact same thing. Medieval popes were easily as morally bankrupt as Trump.

Most opinion mongers just conclude that evangelical support for Trump makes no sense and they don’t understand why it’s happening.[2] Zakaria is the first person who has triggered the “Yeah, Right!” reaction in me.

A better understanding of something is always “good news”. The bad news, however, is that this discouraging trend will just get worse. Zakaria points out that the same trend is mirrored all around the globe. Wannabe dictators (and fully fledged dictators like Putin) are forming solid alliances with their local religious establishment in “Brazil, El Salvador, Italy, Israel, Turkey and India” according to Zakaria. In addition to Russia, of course. And most of them are dramatically different religions! While Christians can sing, “I know that my redeemer liveth!”, Moslems can chant, “There is no God but one God and Mohammed is his prophet.” Mathematicians have a Latin phrase for this kind of contradiction. “reductio ad absurdum”.

But Zakaria, wisely if he wants to keep his jobs writing opinions for the media, writes sympathetically about religious zeal as filling “a hole in the heart”. In my view, that’s like saying that heroin fills a hole in the brain. Just as DNA (and probably pre-and post-natal conditioning as well) creates an individual weakness to become addicted, it’s also the source of religious addiction.

I like to explain it this way. If you stand with your toes aligned on the edge of a square of concrete in a sidewalk, you don’t feel any fear that you will tumble over onto the square in front of you. But if you do the exact same thing at the edge of Hoover Dam, nearly everyone would be filled with overwhelming fear. I know I would. What’s the difference? The same innate source that creates “God fearing” people. Just like most people can’t stop themselves from fearing great heights, they can’t stop themselves from fearing God.

We (my wife and I) had a very good friend who was raised as a Catholic. (Now, sadly, passed away.) Intellectually, our friend had abandoned Catholicism early in her life. But once, when my wife allowed a casual reference to the absurdity of religion into her conversation, our friend still experienced involuntary horror for a brief moment.

You can take a person out of religion, but you can’t take the religion out of a person.[3]

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[1] Fareed Zakaria is in the top three of the living thinkers that I admire. I always find what he has to say about the world worth considering seriously. But, as a person, he illustrates something else: How America benefits from new blood arriving from outside our borders. Zakaria was born in India and came to the US to attend Yale University. His career rocketed to the top with his insightful and original work. To me, he’s more than a great political and social philosopher, he’s a premier example of how America has – at least historically – been continually re-invigorated by immigrants. To me, many of our worst problems rise from the old cultures here that have dragged their past into America’s present and future.

[2] Smerconish is a great example of someone giving up in confusion. Smerconish’s “brand” is occupying the center, no matter how wrong the center is. He would have to take a side if he really tried to explain it.

[3] My intent here is not to insult or demean religious belief. Some of the best people I know are deeply religious. I don’t believe I could ever “cure” myself of being afraid of heights but I don’t think it’s a defect or weakness. It’s really a good thing for most people. But other people manage to build skyscrapers and jump out of airplanes anyway. Religious belief becomes a bad thing when it makes you become a terrorist or vote for Trump.