In his recent address to the United Nations two weeks ago, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called President George W. Bush “the devil,” in reference to the U.S. President’s address the day before. Chavez said he could still smell “the sulfur.” Almost a week later, ultra conservative religious right evangelist, Jerry Farwell, stated that a Hilary Clinton run for the Presidency would be the most invigorating thing for “his base” (the so-called “moral majority” of Christian Fundamentalists), that “not even Lucifer could invigorate the base” more than Clinton. Farwell, who represents the most extreme elements of a Republican Party that has mastered the art of bible “verse twisting” in using God to affirm unpopular political actions of the administration, was inferring that Clinton was worse than the devil in the eyes of Republicans. He, more than most, knows that the use of the term “devil” is a polarizing term.

There’s nothing that Christians are more scared of than the devil. When the most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam told the world that “a white’s man heaven was a black man’s hell,” and that the “white man” was the devil, the term was called stigmatizing to racial harmony (where there was little) and he was called a heretic. Now they’re calling each other devils, and the world has joined in. Well, we know one thing for sure. Society has gotten to that point where we all acknowledge that “the devil” is real. But just who the devil is? Well…

The problem is that the devil is still a figment of everybody’s imagination and it is still just as polarizing. And as is the case whenever the devil is involved, when surety is absent, confusion reigns. America doesn’t know what to believe anymore and, more shockingly, America doesn’t know who to believe anymore. The polls indicate that; no matter how unpopular the war is, the public still somehow believes the President. We think we’re right in this war on terror largely because we’ve been told we’re in the right by our nation’s leaders. To disbelieve in “our cause” and to disbelieve that God is on “America’s side” and to disbelieve this is all “God’s will,” is to be a modern day heretic. We think we’re part of the solution but the world community, allies and enemies alike, tell us that we’re not just the problem but the cause of the problem. Our self-perception is thrown into doubt. We think we know who we are and where we stand, but do we really? The world sees it as us (Chavez got an ovation for his speech, by the way) and we (Americans) see it as them and now each other.

It’s moments like these, that the America media rarely show, that we give us a truer glimpse of ourselves—if not of who we are, then of what we may be becoming. At stake, of course, is the soul of America—a God-fearing nation that believes in everything but what God stands for. But just the word, God, still makes us all stop in our tracks. Invoking God has become a Republican platform strategy. Democrats, many of whom have the answer, don’t know what to do when the Republicans invoke God in the mix, other than go with it. The thing about practicing relativism in politics and religion is you lose sight of what is real…but more importantly, you sight of what is right. And those Democrats who know what is real are now having God invoked upon them, and the most stigmatizing term in religion, “the devil.”

I haven’t heard so much devil talk since NOI “prior to ‘75” (Black Muslims know what that means). But this is not the traditional battle between “right and wrong.” It’s a psychological battle between who’s relative and relative-er, in controlling the minds of the public for political gain. God and relativism is the ultimate oxymoron. God stands for right, not man’s relative view of right, which in most instances is a justification of something partially right, or completely wrong.

To treat rightness as relative, and God as a relativist, where one interprets his will as opinion (everyone has one), is essentially to say that what God believes doesn’t matter because it’s up one’s interpretation as to who God is and what He believes. Of course, we know it’s not true, or do we? The public’s state of confusion and indifference to the war are indicators to the contrary. The public doesn’t know what is right, but if you believe in God—than go with that because God knows what’s true, right? Only the truth that has become America’s reality is not God’s truth of what is right. It’s the interpreter of God’s truth (man) who has seemed to have lost sight of what is truth, but can always fall back on the name of God to defend his actions. And anyone who can see through that must, then, be the devil.

The public, not wanting to be labels “devils” and get in trouble with the “devil-labels” (society’s religious right, Pat Robertson, Farwell and the other religious polytheists who set up ideological injustice beside God—but can’t sell it to the public without invoking God), just banter on about whose truth is the real truth. Just look at the debate between Bill Clinton and Condi Rice on who tried harder to kill Osama Bin Laden as an example of relativism at work. The truth will never come out on this. Neither will we know the real devil here, America or those who attacked America or just when the real injustice occurred-before 9/11, 9/11, the day America invaded Iraq, when? We will never know because God is being invoked on both sides of the argument. The public, fearing trouble, has become indifferent to the socio-political state of affairs, while the real devils battle it out for the soul of America.

Famed editorialist, the late Carl Rowan once said (in 1963) about those who chose indifference over “causing trouble” to fight injustice during the Civil Rights Movement, “When we Americans reach the point of soft indifference where we hate trouble more than injustice, we shall have reached the dawning of our era of greatest troubles.” Well, America is in an era of its greatest troubles right now, and we know the devil’s in the middle of it. Everybody’s calling him out, so we know he’s busy. Now we just have to figure out who he, or she is, and be sure about it.

Anthony Asadullah Samad is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of 50 Years After Brown: The State of Black Equality In America. He can be reached at AnthonySamad.com.

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