American Jihad

The Unacknowledged Religious Elephant in the Room Has Stirred and Shaken Us to the Core (2/4/21)

So it’s about more than just Donald Trump. Look at that mob, and earlier those 70 million votes, and now the current polls. Suddenly it has dawned on some that the disastrous American political experiment of the last four years was no mere aberration. Something deeper’s going on. That it’s much more than just one bumbling megalomaniac who originally managed to “rebrand” correctly but now has lost the Midas touch, or has finally gone too far, triggering a long overdue backlash. It’s gone way beyond just The Donald, for in large measure, somehow or other, it has now come to reflect down upon us all, upon who we all actually are. And it’s not a pretty sight. Kiss goodbye whatever vestige of American exceptionalism malingers on. But, as of yet, are we truly woke? Do we really get it?

So we can’t blame it on Fox News or social media alone. There was something more to those 70 million votes than the alternatively exhilarating and surfeiting experience of constantly winning, of constantly coming out on top, and something more than being “left behind,” that canard of a narrative we should have jettisoned long ago.

In this instance, there’s an expression that gets to the bottom of it, one that we ought get used to uttering and advancing. I’ve outlined this intangible something elsewhere at considerable length, crystallizing it in a phrase, existential cultural insecurity. More simply put, there’s a whole range of moods and feelings—or even moral intuitions, as Jonathan Haidt and others have put it—that have gotten themselves triggered or unleashed here. For we’ve got a lot of disenchanted, disgruntled folks out there—out among the red crop-duster flyover states in particular—and it’s high time we begin paying attention to and exploring where they’ve been coming from, and why. Space forbids more than few brief observations on the nature and source of their seemingly malingering angst. Something’s gone wrong, or has it always been wrong, from the get go.

As introduced above, notice first of all that lately we’ve been thinking about this bowel movement of the MAGA Trump phenomenon a bit differently. Now pundits are examining this cult of Trump notion more critically, looking underneath or beyond the figurehead. Some even express surprise. Did he really con and manipulate millions of good, decent Americans, or was there something already roiling much deeper beneath the bread and circus performance surface? Might we instead view him as one large suppurating boil that surfaced on one ugly butt-face of the American populace? In other words, were these disgruntled folks in fact already there, as some are now suggesting, like low hanging rotten fruit ready to be picked? Were they poised in anticipation, just waiting for some demented demagogue to come along and light a fire under their cheeks? Such that although they appear a world apart economically from Donald Trump, might they not have found common ground elsewhere—in a sort of shared disenchantment, for example? Let’s take a closer look at these feelings of grievance and resentment. New York City high society never accepted or welcomed Trump into their flattering inner circles, as is well known; similarly, artsy-fartsy secular American society—liberals, Hollywood, academia, Silicon Valley, the deep state, you name it—have ridiculed and persecuted evangelical Christians for decades, constantly, unrelentingly, or so they tell us. Both sets of wounds have only grown and festered over time. Given these parallel tracks of tears, as someone else once wrote, it was a match made in heaven, or hell, they huddling together in a shared, never-ending winter of discontent. What is more, academicians, journalists, and the news media alike have dwelled too long upon the obvious emotional dysfunctions of Trump, largely overlooking the deeper vein of evangelicalism that runs through him like fool’s gold. For unlike Elmer Gantry, he’s a true believer, no different from your average overwrought televangelist. And yes, I believe he and they actually do believe, really believe. That’s what it takes to override the evidence. Unremitting belief. And both haven’t a clue as to what the Bible actually says and means; both live in an alternative universe. Seek not thine own understanding.

These are just two of the latest in a long list of misperceptions about the political revolution of Donald Trump. And so now it’s time to get real. What have we missed?

Given the most recent spate of events, we seem to have forgotten all about the “evangelical base.” Like the duplicitous “there’s good people on both sides,” Trump’s cynical play upon journalistic norms, for far too long the liberal media establishment has fetishized the principle of objectivity, observing rules that only they adhere to; equally so the hapless Democrats in Congress. And so while for years the Religious Right vented all sorts of noxious nonsense about secular liberalism, the media continued to honor a strange passive code of impartiality. As though steady streams of deliberate deceit, dishonesty, and falsehood could be treated as just another side of the same political coin, and no less valuable. And while it has become fashionable to call out conspiracy theories and white supremacy for the sheer ideological ignorance and malignancies they are, somehow or other we still handle religion with kid gloves. Around it, we act dumb, putting our critical faculties on a desktop sleep setting. For one recent example, few noticed that the only symbols brazenly displayed by the January 6 insurrectionists that received any attention or emphasis whatsoever among the media establishment were non-religious.¹ By marked contrast, the photos or videos of several signs that captured the Bible, Jesus, crucifixes, and other evangelical Christian icons in their lenses were largely ignored, as though extremist American religion played little part in the attempted coup. They only made their way onto Bill Maher’s Real Time. Again, no surprise.

Yet every one of the ten Republican senators who called for the rejection of the electoral vote are evangelical Christians; and the overwhelming majority of the one hundred and forty-seven Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted to de-certify the election are conservative Christians. Marjorie Taylor Greene (henceforth MTG) is a rabid evangelical Christian who has ranted for years about “family values” and the evils of abortion. Macho macho babe. Guns for Jesus; bullets for Nancy Pelosi. And yet the liberal media appears constitutionally incapable—fearful even—of calling out a religious spade for what it is, from a very dark and insidious full suit of spades.

The Trump revolution has been fueled and fired by an evangelical social, political, cultural, and theological revolution a half-century or more in the making. The Donald has simply ridden the crest of that revolutionary wave. The liberal media has employed all sorts of conventional narratives—psychological, ethnic, social, and political—to explain away his rise to power. But Paula White and the evangelical core are no mere pawns of a “narcissistic” Don Vito Corleone wannabe. Thirty years ago both Donald Trump and I routinely stayed up late at night watching televangelists—he enthralled, I also, but more appalled than enthralled, and furiously scribbling notes. He regularly called them up to talk shop and Ms. White claims to have chaperoned his final conversion deal. She had her own designated suite at Trump Tower for whenever she cruised into town (during which she also conducted Bible studies for the Yankees baseball team).

And so now we’ve hopefully come full circle, returning to our senses, to the long overdue realization that the evangelical-invested-and-driven administration of Donald Trump was no mere accident; that those Republican Congressmen/women represent a significant slice of an uniquely American dementia. We can no longer claim ignorance of the fact that to a large extent evangelical religion occupies the ideological heart of American society and politics. Ideological in the sense that it represents an extraordinary source of meaning and motivation for the express purpose of defending and promoting a particularly exotic and extremist world view, ethos, and political agenda.

No doubt these observations will kindle a host of objections, such as: but wait a minute, isn’t Joe Biden a devout Catholic? And are not all of our still-living former presidents acknowledged Christians? Indeed, few realize that years ago Nancy Pelosi actually attended the christening ceremonies for televangelist Joel Osteen’s new pavilion in Houston. And then there’s Hilary Clinton, a devote Methodist who regularly attended Senate Republican prayer breakfasts while serving in Congress and occasionally frequented “The Family” mansion in a Washington D.C. suburb, home of a secretive conservative Christian organization that Jeff Sharlet so incisively exposed. And we shouldn’t overlook the vice-president. Quite a few of the insurrectionists were chanting “hang Pence,” even though he’s the poster boy of frosty-white evangelicalism. Go figure. How to make sense of these apparent incongruities?

Well, actually, we do so by touching here upon the theological revolution that sanctioned the evangelical political revolution. Very briefly, in reaction to the perception of a clear and present danger from a liberal secular society and an intrusive federal government, evangelicalism began to develop over many decades a revolutionary dogma, a heresy even. They got rid of universal original sin, deep-sixing it into the Potomac, as was the fate of another kind of evidence in the days of Watergate. For sin now transcends mere individuals alone. The new theology brings groups of people, institutions—social categories—into the larger fold of damnation. Sin is now social, and in many cases even more social than individual. This all occurs through an ideological mechanism, what we call an evangelical epistemological apartheid.

Let’s take this claim apart. Yes, sin is still original and everyone harbors it, but they have to come to embody and exhibit it quite differently; things secular are set apart and stigmatized. Their sin corrupts the entire corporate enterprise; they sin as a body, indiscriminately, which makes grace virtually impossible to earn or receive, quite unlike the full pardon the body of Christ or the army of Jesus enjoys. Evangelicals in their large meta-churches have collared redemption like the offerings they collect after worship and the ownership they assume over their garish church coliseums and acres of parking lots. They retreat into holy, redeemed spaces and communities of mind and body. These entities are whole, redeemed, sanctified, a condition the social categories of the secular world can never achieve. They are set quite apart from secular others, those wallowing in a swamp of categorically-designated fragmentation. Those others who will be, somewhat ironically, left behind.

To elaborate a bit more, across the length and breadth of the evangelical cultural landscape one observes a sharp idiomatic division at work: the declension of persons, objects, relationships, and institutions into diametrically-opposed Christian and secular terms. Just a few of the many possible examples: they have Disneyland, we have Heritage Park; they had Liberace, we have Dino. They have ABC/NBC/PBS, we have TBN and the Hillsong Channel (let alone Fox News). On and on it goes, this barely the half of it.

We observe a characteristically uniform damnation of those who occupy secular social categories. Love the sinner, hate the sin has been irrevocably retired from the evangelical canon, no matter the lip-service evangelicals may occasionally pay to such creedal anachronisms. Hate them all, damn them all now proves the deeper cultural reality. Hence the evangelical Christian war of all-against-all wherein corporate entities are now personified and reified into disparate, socially-transcendent wholes much greater than the sum of their parts. Accordingly, they are more fallen, more separated from possible grace and redemption than any solitary sinner. Hence the seemingly irredeemable, irreconcilable division of contemporary American society and politics.

And so, caught unawares of this internal cultural revolution and dynamic, few could understand Donald Trump’s particularly egregious denial of Nancy Pelosi’s claim that she had been praying for him at their final National Prayer Breakfast together. He scoffed at the mere suggestion of it, and implicit within that rebuff was this idiom of social sin. Democrats, as a class, are not really Christians. Pelosi was praying for “the other thing,” if at all, and no doubt the other thing involved Satan. And so at the very heart of an evangelical vision Trump so thoroughly embraces is this creed of social sin. Observe the broad brush of condemnation that sweeps across Democrats, Hollywood, liberal universities, homosexuals, large cities of diverse populations, the LGBQT community, Muslims, and others, such as the “shit-hole” nations of Africa. They are categorically denied entry to the kingdom; they are “fake news” socially personified—just as real, just as undeniable; one of many complete reversal dynamics operating within evangelicalism. For opposites are those things alike in all ways except one.

Such a doctrinal heresy lies behind twenty years or so of near total division of our political discourse and practice. The memory of John McCain is long gone, as are the “regular rules” of the Senate. It has led to revealing off-hand expressions like “alternative facts,” deliberately coded “signals of difference” directed towards, and pregnant with meaning for, the evangelical core. Trump frequently emits such things, and yes, the liberal media hasn’t a clue how to detect, understand, and interpret them.

All told, evangelical religion occupies the very heart of what separates us so markedly from our closest European ancestors and kin—why most likely we will never be able to achieve a European-like social democracy, eliminate the last vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow, significantly reduce legal and economic inequality, enact universal health care, or dampen the trans-regional animosity between rural and urban America. Given the rigid anachronistic, undemocratic structure of the American constitutional apparatus, these categorical cultural imperatives may prove an insurmountable inertia to such long-overdue change. But hope still lingers as long as we recognize the true nature of the evangelical-driven MAGA Trump insurrection. And as for the cultural challenges ahead, and despairing of the power of sheer reason to change fanatical minds, there is still a lingering hope that with a strategic emphasis and appeal to experience the currently more dominant sway of feelings and moral intuitions among a certain sector of the public may begin to shade over into the increased acknowledgment of facts and evidence. Perhaps one refreshing approach might be to pepper any unavoidable encounter or conversation with a member of the Trump cult with coy questions along the lines of: How’s this idea of the Covid-19 fraud working for you? And what about it just miraculously disappearing into thin air? How’s that working for you? (Notice the near universal tendency of the media to turn “like a miracle” into “magically.” Again they missed another evangelical signal of difference: we are talking Christian miracles here, not the occult.) Then again we might ask California Trumpites, How’s this climate denial thing working for you all out west? Perhaps it is only encouraging that Republican Senator James Inhofe, author of a book about global warning, The Greatest Hoax, at least made an appeal to some form of evidence when in 2015—in February no less—he brought a snowball into the Senate and threw it at Joe Biden. Take that! So much for global warming! But then again, that was before Trump.

January 6 brought not just an insurrectionist mob to the Capitol, but a religion-infused-and-enraged crusade against a liberal, secular humanistic democracy. This was our own version of blood flowing two-feet thick through the streets of Jerusalem in 1099. What is more, it was also an American jihad. We have been divided into evangelical Shias who harbor deep resentments, promote a “religion of protest,” and are thereby rendered incapable of governing successfully (Trump, Hawley, Cruz, et al), in direct opposition to more moderate Christian Sunnis, who reject the radical alternative reality show in favor of a more conventional Christianity that embraces a less improbable, less immediately apocalyptic vision (Lynne Cheney, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, et al), one allowing for some compromise and actual governance. Are we then surprised that American Shiites shoot American Sunnis (“hang Pence”)? That MTG can imagine a bullet exploding through the brain of Nancy Pelosi? That is the nature of warrior religions seeking to exterminate the Great Infidel. Here’s hoping for a third way, an AOC way out of this socio-cultural political morass.

Given all this, most likely the following concluding observations will render this piece unpublishable by the cowering-from-any-genuine-discusion-of-the-role-of-Christianity-in-American-life national media. Such was the lesson learned by politicians and media alike after the evangelical-assisted, Russian-directed internet fusillade unleashed upon Hilary Clinton in 2016. For even the Washington Post published guest editorials a month before the election (and similar screeds appeared in local papers around the country) that feasted upon the Podesta e-mails, descrying a few isolated truisms as evidence of an elitist campaign—of the candidate, in particular—against religion. Upon her election, no doubt pogroms would rain down upon the heads of evangelicals. White, suburban church-going ladies in the key swing states certainly got the message. More broadly, the point was well taken: Thou shalt not touch religion with a ten-foot pole. Don’t even joke about it.

What the enablers and the perpetrators share is not so much the embrace of the current “Big Lie,” but the biggest lie or falsehood of them all, and I’ll leave you hanging in limbo as to what that refers. For if one so gullibly accepts the trickle-down whoppers—that the world/earth is only six thousand years old, that a historical record of the existence of Jesus actually exists, and that prayer can heal cancer and alter the course of hurricanes, among other things—well then it is only a hop, skip, and jump from there to Obama is a Muslim born in Africa, Covid 19 is a hoax, ingesting bleach can stop a virus, and the election was outright stolen. Perhaps one of the very few truisms Hilary Clinton ever uttered is that Trump supporters are largely “deplorable” and do not live in an “evidence-based” world with the rest of us. But, as I have recounted elsewhere in great detail, all of that didn’t suddenly emerge overnight.

There are some very good reasons, for example, why the godless Nordic-way-of-doing-things nations generate quality-of-life indicator data that put the American leviathan of a society to shame. Indeed, as Oprah Winfrey once wondered out loud during a visit to Denmark: how do you people live without God? Unfortunately, that might prove way too much of a stretch for the cultural heirs of Puritanism. We can’t even manage bumbling our way through living with Jesus—the army of Jesus, in particular—let alone the big enchilada shorn of all the sectarian trappings. As it stands now, acknowledging the simple truth that it was actually the army of Jesus (aided, abetted, and egged on by conservative Christian politicians at all levels of government) that stormed the Capital will test our mettle as the descendants of Thomas Paine.

We can do much better for our children.

1. Actually, Fintan O’Toole quotes a few others’ spottings of Roman Caesarian garb and tropes in pushing a “true Romans” / “true Americans” parallel. He neglects to mention, however, that Trump did not hold up Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Virgil’s The Aeneid underneath the Doric columns of the Capitol Building Crypt, but an upside-down Bible across the street from St. John’s Episcopal Church. An excusable oversight, but he also fails to cite one of the most common observations about Trump’s brazen disregard for “correct” evangelical appearances. The Bible, acolytes rationalize, is filled with examples of deeply-flawed monarchs whom God uses to achieve his own inscrutable ultimate ends. (“The Trump Inheritance,” The New York Review of Books, February 25, 2012.)