For What It’s Worth: The Cultural Origins of “Alternative Facts” (Original Version 10/27/2017)

[Unrevised, original I Warned Everyone / Told You So version]

Something’s happening here . . . what it is ain’t exactly clear, the opening line from For What It’s Worth, Stephen Stills’s rock-and-roll anthem from the Vietnam war era, has never been more timely or relevant. These days Donald Trump and his ilk are of course the perplexing something that’s happening here and what they actually are and it all means proves just as unclear. But even looking through a glass darkly, it is apparent to most that he’s taken the nation to a new, virtually unrecognizable low place. Talking heads and political pundits are still struggling to find the appropriate language to characterize, let alone explain that descent.

I suspect that we may be wasting precious time and energy trying to locate or identify that place or even explicate our new president in conventional terms. Trump’s a genuine outlier, a thing unto himself, largely but not entirely transcendent of time or politics. Party, ideology, compromise, consensus, rules of order—are all meaningless, expendable “nothing burgers” to him. Don’t even bother taking a bite. Even more roiling, seldom have so many individual and cultural dysfunctions coalesced in one public figure. Take just one that has seldom been singled out from among all the amateurish narcissism diagnoses, his penchant for chaos. As I discovered long ago about juveniles from dysfunctional families and backgrounds: placing them in a normal, decorous foster home or environment--like the White House--can prove disastrous. For they quickly set out to destroy the status quo in order to restore the greater comfort of dysfunction. Chaos just fits and feels better, like an old glove.

But aside from this predilection for the more soothing dysfunctional fallback position, is there really no center or intention to Trump? Is he truly nothing more than an egomaniacal shill of a ringmaster who has brought a very peculiar circus to town?

Here I thought I would never ever be caught accusing Trump of exhibiting depth of any kind, but there actually is something rather deep—however scary or unfathomable—about him. For although he usually has no idea what he’s thinking and doing--and could scarcely begin to articulate anything coherent even if he did--he’s actually operating on a grand scale, engaged in an enterprise that dwarfs any comparable Trump Tower project. However preposterous it may sound, I suspect that he aims to set in motion the complete philosophical re-orientation—nay even annihilation--of the modern Western world. Given his Lilliputian intellectual stature and dearth of vocabulary, this proves a rather daunting undertaking, surprisingly large canvass stuff. Over the course of one presidential campaign and more than a year in office this one man has literally, offhandedly voided the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Who really needs all that Enlightenment baggage, anyway? What is more, a third or more of the American public seems to agree, having fallen under this sorcerer’s spell. The earth might as well lie flat and the sun revolve around the earth. Who needs reason or evidence? Why not stare directly at an eclipse? Medievalism redux.

Now all that would prove a tall order for even the most monumental thinker or politician. Sheer chutzpah. But I suspect there’s more involved here than just an esoteric personal delusion or grandiosity, however nominally or inadvertently world-shattering. For aside from the anti-modernist cant, Donald Trump and his followers are throwing one of the most remarkable and lamentable cultural tantrums in American history, a venting of cultural disenchantment the likes of which there may ultimately be no precedent. At first it seemed less startling or probable because the Donald was a relative known quantity, having run for the highest office once before and until the last couple of years or so seemed to observe the traditional norms and etiquette of politics. He appeared just another gold-plated Lyndon Larouche (better yet, Ross Perot?) type who shows up every four years or so to remind us that just about any megalomaniac holding large purse strings can run for president. Then something really nasty got into his bloodstream, most likely during the notorious Washington Correspondent’s dinner in 2011, where political humor got way too personal for his notoriously thin skin to absorb or deflect. Yes, an alien political creature of sorts grew in that warped metabolism, festering, building, expanding, until it could no longer be contained, bursting out of that flabby, shrunken chest, showering us all with the bloody shards of accumulated bile. And we’re still scraping it off the body politic.

Add the ongoing grudge against Obama, part of a well-documented larger distaste for blacks in general and establishment types who too easily made him the butt of their jokes, those who so easily skirted the norms of white privilege, and voilà!--the Donald suddenly re-emerges as a viable right-wing presidential candidate.

A plausible scenario, but there is something even deeper going on here. We’ve profiled the humorless, insensitive, self-branding, self-promoting, narcissistic bigot for years. Nothing really new there. But two to three years ago, seemingly out of the blue, something completely unanticipated happened to Donald Trump. As though contracting a vicious strain of la grippe, he got religion. Really got it. Or at least his version of it, according to whichever account of the infecting event we can trust. Then too, perhaps the concept of conversion loses all meaning when applied to a creature like Trump. For indeed, who knew such a thing was even possible? No more improbable, perhaps, than winning the Republican nomination. More predictably and understandably, aside from a couple of articles by religion specialists at the Washington Post, Trump’s Pauline moment on the road to Damascus slipped by largely unnoticed or remarked upon by the national political media. Sure we learned of the Norman Vincent Peale “Positive Thinking” prosperity theology thread, grounded in a parental predilection and inheritance, and more recently of a Floridian mega-church Pentecostal televangelist, Paula White, who’s carried the prosperity theology virus forward herself and claims to have converted Trump to Christianity. Now she directs an evangelical prayer group within the White House and serves as his “main spiritual advisor” (and later there were reports elsewhere that Pastor Ralph Drollinger also conducts a weekly West Wing Bible study group). But beyond these two articles and a few other fragments scattered here and there, this religious dimension of the Trump story has not been fully explored and vetted.

No big deal? Au contraire--really big deal, perhaps central to understanding the Trump phenomenon, but obviously of limited media shelf life. And then too it is easy to dismiss the religion business as mere scraps thrown down from the master’s table to appease his largely evangelical base. Again, that’s plausible, but it should be noted that beltway liberals, in general, have no idea the role such alleged spiritual sightings—rumors of conversion experiences--play within the evangelical community. To such total reversals are attributed all sorts of life-changing consequences. Trump’s saved! One more confirmation that monsters can melt into mother Theresas. More cynically, it could just as easily be explained as one rich man’s flirtation with theological self-justification, apropos The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Observe how God rewards the virtuous, as evidenced by their accumulated wealth--one compelling indication, although no guarantee, of salvation. But would anyone be surprised if the Donald hadn’t presupposed such rewards? Or, even more on message, that God is, as the Joan Osborne song would have it, “just like one of us,” just one more in a long train of sycophants? After all, Trump has surely never stooped to wash the feet of any of his servants, let alone the big Kahuna.

But let’s shelve the authenticity question for the moment and pursue the servant angle. What might a queue of servants have to tell us? As with Watergate, let’s follow them (and the money). What gives with this motley crew? Whether or not Trump got flipped or turned belly up by the religious right, what’s the appeal for them? All the other Republican primary candidates presented the obligatory credentials of faith. What made Trump stand out?

Consider then Conway, Spicer, DeVoss, Bannon, Flynn, Sanders, Barr, Pompeo, and the notorious Apprentice contestant, Omarosa, who went on to become an ordained Baptist minister before later joining the administration. Among many likely others, what do they tell us about him? Notice first that although the whole lot of cabinet and White House appointees run the gamut of Christian ideology, they tend to list heavily to the far right. Eight or more out of fifteen cabinet secretaries are evangelicals. Loyality, extremism, and conservative Christian dogma, not experience or expertise, appear the main qualifications. Perhaps no one exemplifies these highly-prized qualities more than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas. Then too there is Trump’s most visible legal spokesman on the Mueller investigation, Jay Sekulow, who prior to joining the Trump camp was the most prominent defender of televangelists and the educational and political institutions of the religious right. (Re: The Manchester Guardian has run a series of investigative reports documenting traditional sleazy American evangelical practices of so-called “non-profit” organizations headed by Mr. Sekulow. “Authorities to Investigate Jay Sekulow non-profit after ‘troubling’ revelations,” The Guardian, June 27, 2017.) Vice-president Mike Pence is a rabid evangelical (and the constant butt of Saturday Night Live jokes about his insufferable Puritanism, a trait for which Trump is reported to have ridiculed him at times also). Yet at a special dinner for members of the president’s evangelical advisory board Spence spoke glowingly of Trump’s faith: “He and I have prayed together. . . . This is somebody who shares our views, shares our values, shares our beliefs.”

Indeed, if one examines, as I have in a larger study, the educational backgrounds of conservative politicians, their congressional staffs, and the leaders and foot soldiers of the religious right, one finds that they hail largely from an integrated array of evangelical Christian colleges and universities (the most prominent among them organized into The Christian College Consortium, the CCC, and the CCCU, The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities). Pat Robertson’s Regent University produced many of the lawyers in the second Bush administration’s Justice department and claims that “approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work.” Others who attended traditional secular state or private institutions joined organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU after 2011) or Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and/or worshipped and refortified themselves off campus. What they all bring to the national political arena has been reflected in the agenda of the Tea Party and the eventual triumph of Donald Trump.

But what does this tell us about Donald Trump? So what if he appears no different from any crass, self-righteous, hypocritical televangelist. Aren’t they all similarly blemished conmen and women? So what if he parrots “faith-based” clichés?

Actually, in his case there was and remains a noticeable before and after conversion difference. Aside from some marked surface similarities and carryovers, the Trump epiphany proved a cultural value-added watershed event, as suggested earlier. Yes, as might be expected, the conversion added a few more wrinkles to an already disagreeable gargoyle of a personality. But more importantly, although there were a few minor policy carryovers, the 2016 campaign had a markedly different feel from the unsuccessful 2000 run. For in that earlier campaign there wasn’t a hint of “Fake news” or sustained attacks upon the liberal media that would come later. Some reporting suggests he stole the expression from Vladimir Putin, who routinely applied it to dissident media. But is there more to it than just Putin envy or pathological projections onto rival politicians and media? What else might be driving the “crooked Hillary” mantra?

Why is it that Trump and his disciples can’t seem to let go of the “fake news” gambit despite direct, plentiful, contradictory evidence and truth? They have made notorious the expression, to “double down.” We’ve never really seen anything like this. In so many instances it would have been much easier or more politically astute to simple acknowledge error and move on. But no such admissions appear forthcoming any time soon. Why not? Where’s this relentless obtuseness coming from? Are they all simply pathological liars? Or just incorrigibly stupid?

I think otherwise. We’re missing the point because it’s a disguised, subterranean evangelical cultural “something” that’s “happening” here, completely foreign to most, grounded in what I have documented elsewhere as an expansive, all-inclusive cultural worldview and ethos. It makes perfect sense to them, just not to us who are on the outside looking in. Although these administration officials are very good at camouflaging underlying evangelical idioms, in January Kellyanne Conway inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. When pressed about the administration’s clearly erroneous claims about inaugural crowd size she responded that there was more than one way to calculate such things: hence the emergence of “alternative facts.” Now where’d that come from? Actually, straight out of an evangelical Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole (Lewis Carroll’s treatise on logic for children). The liberal media dismissed the slip as just one more of Donald Trump’s delusions, trickling down. To the contrary, it was pregnant with meaning and significance (central conceptual themes and schemes I explore in the larger study).

All this suggests some sort of alt-right parallel universe reality to which we are not privy. Among the “logics” driving the evangelical sensibility and worldview is a most fundamental epistemological one, as every American Christian college student learns from day one on campus. For in the reformulated post-modern (in the chronological sense here, not the current academic cant) “beginning” or origins story of evangelicalism, the world gets carved up into secular and Christian realms, a contemporary version of a traditional “pre-literate” sacred/profane cultural dynamic. From this essential Manichean principle flow a host of epistemological distinctions, a declension of persons, objects, relationships, and institutions into clearly demarcated Christian and secular terms. One literally discovers in such atavistic post-modern communities an entire re-ordering of the facts and contexts of existence. More formally than in any of their home church communities, academic neophytes are presented a uniquely Christian way of thinking, walking, talking, relating to one another, all set in direct opposition to diametrically-opposed secular equivalents. Thus it makes sense then that the local hamburger joint at the college I ethnographed would be called Paradise Joe’s and not some more compromised commercial variation. Modern vestigial versions of “pre-literate” trivializations of the sacred, like the Australian tribe, the Karadjeri’s, sacralization of a particular urination posture, whose members today still ritually imitate in remembrance of their two central mythological heroes, abounded. Nothing proved too mundane or crass to consecrate and distinguish, or as in the larger case and context of televangelists and Trump, to gild.

Among the most elemental declensions is this clear distinction between a world of Christian facts and truth, of alternative facts, and an altogether opposite secular world of falsehood and error. And as with any cultural apartheid, never the twain shall meet. Here the modern evangelical puts his own peculiar spin on a traditional Reformist conceit, as Sacvan Berkovitch (1975) reminds us, for Luther and his ilk were similarly predisposed to retain the “Augustinian significatio,” or the insistence that “all secular events. . . ‘being captivated to the trueth of a foolish world,’ taught the immemorial lesson of Ecclesiates. ‘God has collected a fine, splendid, and strong deck of cards’.” Evangelicals too feel they have been dealt a very strong hand.

As I have documented elsewhere, ever since the monumental triggering event of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision liberalizing abortion law (and in subsequent ideological alignment with growing opposition to the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, originally passed by overwhelming Congressional majorities in 1971 but never ratified by the states) and what Paul Weyrich, one of the gurus of the religious right, insists was the more incendiary event of the 1975 IRS attempt “to rescind the tax-exempt status from Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies” (Randall Balmer 2006), we’ve seen the rise of the religious right and evangelicalism’s deep plunge into politics. Coincidentally, tracing a very similar arc, there also occurred a subtle theological change within evangelicalism. Sin grew a new face. Once purely, indiscriminately, the property of all sentient individuals (or for some in the holiness tradition, erasable by an act of God called “entire sanctification”), sin began to morph into a transcendent social phenomenon, to increasingly characterize groups and entire sectors of society. Original sin became social sin. Over time one word came to identify, epitomize, and crystallize this change: secularism. Indeed, in what must appear heresy to some Christians, sin now occupies territory and observes social boundaries. It now assumes a predominately urban, liberal, secular, LGBT, off-white cast or face—categorical hosts and agents of a larger infection that threatens to seep into Christian havens from the secular outside. By and large, universal sin remains only a vestigial abstraction within evangelicalism, to which obligatory lip service is paid. But Satan has largely, ironically absconded, transformed into or reified as secularism, now the relatively exclusive external domain and exporting source of temptation and sin. What appears to the secular world as unrepentant hypocritical speech and behavior merely reflects this re-characterization and relocation of sin. By a monumental re-formulation, evangelical Christians no longer really fornicate or lie. The external secular devil is now largely responsible. False sin inside, real sin outside. And, of course, the reverse holds for appraisals of the media. Fake news without (MSNBC), real news within (Fox). One observes among evangelicals a perpetually wallowing in such total reversals, such creeping categorical oppositions.

No wonder then that the Donald, when presented with a cadre of acolytes who could so thoroughly and energetically embrace and align his alternate vision of reality with their own comparable rejection of the secular liberal world order, could revel in the almost mind-boggling apparent symmetry. These people share an alt-right world language and vision. Both decry and impugn a conventional world order rotten to the very core of its swampy secular-humanistic foundations. No wonder then that after September 2015 Donald Trump began to refer to Christmas in speeches like never before. Nineteen of twenty-three references “suggested that the holiday was under attack” (as reported in “Harper’s Index,” Harper’s Oct. 2017), a hard-core paranoid persecution complex venting straight out of the religious-right political playbook. In this respect, the Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman is a little off the mark when it comes to what she calls the “manufactured war against Christmas.” It has much more to do with anti-secularism than anti-Semitism, particularly the extension of the first amendment to the discouraging or banning of Christmas trees from public schools. And it’s not so much about reminding them that virtually all of our classic Christmas songs were written by Jews. No, evangelicals are offended that Christmas is no longer Christo-centric (if it ever truly was, historically). Some liberal talking heads have got the complaint all wrong. It’s not “Happy” Christmas versus “Merry” Christmas but the culturally diversified “Happy Holidays” that so riles evangelicals. Their point concerns political correctness and creeping secularism, as seen in the far-right television ad that thanks President for, among other things, “saving Christmas.”

The significance of such effusions escapes conventional media who have over the years failed to penetrate the ideological core of evangelicalism. The seemingly randomly dropped clues are all of a piece, and all over the place if we are just primed to call them out. They do indeed compose a larger puzzle that can be made sense of, for what it’s worth.

And so we can see how easy it was for a narcissistic pathological liar to embrace this sacralized epistemological apartheid of evangelicalism and run with it to new heights of political separatist accusation and implementation. Again, no wonder the Trump administration can never acknowledge error or apologize for mistakes or oversights; no wonder they double down and strike back. It is an irreducible core cultural principle or logic of evangelicalism. The secular world reeks of falsehood and error. From this elementary presumption flows a host of obvious characterizations and evaluations of issues, institutions, and actors on the national stage. No matter how many times the administration has been caught red-handed in a lie or factual error the cultural default breaker of evangelicalism is tripped and a cloud of obfuscation fills the room. By contrast, any Enlightenment-based cultural order that observes, extols, and enforces the rule of law and of evidence allows for—nay encourages and respects--the routine admission and correction of error. Not so a medieval evangelistic cultural vision that has proven unable to recognize and acknowledge such canons. From it flows the cultural-based religious-right agenda of the Trump administration, among other mimetic right-wing perversions of reality and policy.

These and other religio-cultural elements are of course getting lost in the national media’s challenging task of following the legal drift and ramifications of the Mueller investigation into the multiple apparent criminal violations of the Trump administration. We’ve completely forgotten or overlooked the point of the hacking and subsequent release of the cache of purloined Clinton e-mails, the so-called e-mail server controversy. Forget the technical issues or protocols or even the claims that she might have broken the law. Think back: What subject matter did the opposition pounce upon with such undisguised relish? Clearly it was the exchange of e-mails between John Podesta and other Clinton operatives that appeared to ridicule religion. Two or three weeks before the election an op. ed. piece by Marybeth Hagan, a pro-life conservative Catholic activist, appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post and other papers around the country under various headlines: “Hilary Clinton is a threat to religious liberty,” “Hacked emails show level of contempt for deeply religious,” etc. What was of course lost in the fog of the predictable feigned outrage was the quite accurate recognition passed back and forth among Clinton operatives that, quoting from Hagan, “high profile Catholics” chose Catholicism not for its inherent spiritual qualities and rewards but because it is the “most socially acceptable. . . conservative religion,” unlike evangelicalism, which their “rich friends” would find incomprehensible and unacceptable. In other words, they did it just for show, not out of any genuine religious commitment to the bland vanilla alternative. What is more, they couldn’t even get the Catholic camouflage right; their “bastardized” and “backwards” versions failed to conceal the underlying motive and animus of evangelical epistemological apartheid. Hence alternative facts. What could have been a more predictable eruption out of the lips of evangelical barbie babes?

Be assured that no Russian troll operation could have had any idea of their potential impact upon white women voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other contested swing states. No doubt evangelical-astute Trump campaign trolls seized the moment, directing and distributing cherry-picked e-mails en masse to networks of religious-right sympathizers. And surely that current of paranoia triggered all manner of persecution complexes, rippling through the industrial heartland, having far more impact upon the election than James Comey’s poorly-timed teasing announcement and reminder of essentially inconclusive findings regarding Clinton’s email server. The rest, as they say, is history. And, my, how the shit continues to hit the fan.