Why Abortion? (original 12/4/2021)
{Once Again: I Warned You--Back Then}
Update (6/28/2022)
The Surface Rationale, In a Nutshell
To briefly address two of the most bizarre, perplexing claims and dogma that are often overlooked or dismissed outright. Obviously, forbidding abortion in cases of incest and/or rape makes no existential sense out in liberal America. But for the evangelical Religious Right, although such acts may produce pregnancies, the resulting fetus is an innocent victim (although not so with respect to original sin). And each saved baby could potentially turn into a Billy Graham. God’s ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. Seek not thine own understanding.
Moreover, aborting or killing “millions” of unborn babies is certainly more horrific than a few isolated episodes of incest or rape, however notorious and publicized. And fetuses taken to term can be adopted or supported (ideally, theoretically, that is). Such that no matter the inconvenience or trauma, immeasurable benefit can result.
But what actually lies behind this and other white evangelical noise? What’s the deeper ideological ploy?
Update (6/17/2025) Just an additional subtitle only—or “Why Vance Luther Boelter?”
Prior to Covid-19, the Pro-life movement could still claim to be about life. When push came to shove, they could at least play the we’re-saving-the-lives-of-innocent-babies card. Given the current train of events, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes almost sheepishly confessed the other night, no doubt we’ve been too generously giving them the benefit of the doubt, too journalistically polite to call their bluff. But no longer. Now that any semblance of decorum has coincidentally vanished from the public arena, the kid gloves have come off; finally some refreshing no-holds-barred venting of long-overdue skepticism, if not ridicule. Sanctity of life? Really? What a joke! Get a load of these so-called Pro-lifers. For years they waxed maudlin about screaming little fetuses. And yet now the so-called (henceforth capitalized) Religious Right barely raises an eyebrow as tens of thousands perish from Covid. If only we had branded the injections in utero vaccinations. Add all this on to their having turned cheek after cheek to the highest gun violence and infant mortality rates in the modern Western world. We’re running out of pot calling the kettle black metaphors. Who and what could be more hypocritical? They could care less about life after birth.
But why don’t they, actually? Because they’re hypocrites? We’ve spent years peeling away layer after layer of the hypocritical façades of the Religious Right without really getting to the core of this particular one. Perhaps it is the malingering influence of the Trump administration, or just Republicanism in general—with their big whopper lies, double-downed, that have us double-dimmed. We’re settling too easily for just hypocrisy. For little white lies instead of the biggest lies of all. Recall Mary McCarthy’s indictment of Lillian Hellman: even the “and”s and “the”s are lies. Forget the grand banalities of evil, there’s nothing more enervating than one petty false claim after another piled higher and deeper. The eyes glaze over. Who isn’t numb to it all by now?
But let’s dig deeper. What does the Christian Right, which occupies the eye of this bad faith hurricane, actually care about when it comes to abortion? What truly drives them? Let’s set aside for the moment at least the important matter of a woman’s right to control her own body. Of course it is hypocritical to force women to carry pregnancies to term and then turn right around and “gaslight” on vaccine mandates. How dare they stick needles in my body? No matter how actually life-preserving? Force is justified in the first instance but not the second? Give us a break! These the very same folks who barely ruffle their feathers over flu vaccinations? Recall the earlier smoke screen of they just rushed untested vaccines onto the market—unlike hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and bleach? Now they’re screaming bloody murder and stalking school board members over mask mandates, of all things, just like they once threatened abortion clinics. Same life affirming imperative, right?
But why even bother asking what’s really behind or driving the Pro-life movement? What more could we or they possibly add to that contentious mix? Take this well-worn God is in charge claim, for example, wherein every fetus is God-stamped from the get go, even in the case of rape or incest. So it’s kind of about not messing with a God-intended model, no matter the event that produced the fertilization. Not an indefensible position, mind you, if one actually believes in such a morally-compromised divinity. Then too, let’s face it, pro-choicers can’t evade the fact that something does indeed get killed—“murdered” even. And so there’s that one Achilles heel of a decision to rationalize away. Fair enough. But then there’s a leftover can of worms on the shelf of often ambiguous reckoning that has been largely rendered irrelevant.
Why? Because, as we’ve seen, pro-lifers have morphed directly into anti-vaxxers. So much for the sanctity of life, in any guise. Kiss any remaining shred of higher moral ground goodbye, forever.
Which leaves what? Well, again, how to explain the now blatantly obvious contradiction for one thing. And pretty much all we’ve heard drop so far is the low hanging fruit of hypocrisy; that far too easily gathered indictment. It has quickly become a truism, almost a cliché, which should give us pause.
As is well known, conservative Catholics spawned the Pro-life movement, not evangelical Christians, who followed along a bit later, clinging to their coattails. Sampling the Catholic literature today, one finds an altogether different playing field shrouded in mist. Then too the original ideological thrust of the evangelical-right Pro-life movement has largely disappeared from our contemporary radar screens, if indeed we ever truly caught sight of it. Given the sexual smorgasbord of the entertainment-industry-media culture of today, we too easily overlook the anachronistic strain of Puritanism that still infects red-state America. More than a decade or so of televangelist sex scandals in the 1980s, ripples of which still surface from time to time—and horrendous Catholic priest scandals to boot—have taken a toll. Piety? Abstinence? Self-denial? Virtuosity? Sublimation? Really? Even academicians who should know better assume that a good deal of “acculturation” has infiltrated the ranks of evangelical America (they are avid television viewers, after all, and vulnerable to “secular” poaching). Goodbye the prototypical evangelical prude. Two or more decades ago, for example, Susan Harding wrote about what was happening back then in her 2001 Princeton University Press book about Jerry Falwell and fundamentalism, a study which no doubt influenced academic opinion. Most intriguing is her analysis of two televangelists in particular, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, an account (demanding due diligence from the reader) that has some retrospective relevance for us now:
The narrative generation of sin in order to extirpate it—of gaps in order to close them, discrepancies in order to harmonize them, excesses in order to regulate them, indeterminacies in order to fix them—is a piece of a specifically fundamental Protestant populist apostolic tradition. The character—and often the ministry, as well, of many great fundamentalist preachers—is dual in nature. The pattern of repeated undecidability-which-demands-decisions produces intense narrative relationships between the preacher and those who would follow him. Believers must decide to believe in him over and over, must ceaselessly read the gaps not as ploys or lies or sins, but as little miracles, as signs of election, as the travails of a monumental man, and in so doing, join him in a kind of divine complicity. (104)
In sync with the Arminian pulse of reversible, hence repeatable, salvation, pentecostals Swaggart and the Bakkers punctuated their autobiographies with episodes of moral backsliding, devil wrestling, and deep spiritual crisis. . . . From the beginning, Heritage [theme park] troubled many Christians who noticed the internal countercultural message—its suppression of sacrifice theology—but few guessed how far the Bakkers had gone in the direction of antinomian heresy, of rejecting all earthly restraints. At the time of their fall, the Bakkers not only promised their partners material abundance and well-being but were refining a gospel of infinite forgiveness, a folk theology that seemed almost to sanction sinning by guaranteeing God’s perpetual forgiveness in advance. (261) {emphases added}
Hmmmm, really? In a crowded nutshell, the claim here is that for all their apparent novelty, these spun “narratives” or “rhetorics” were not inventions (or evidence of hypocrisy) but throwbacks, idioms drawn from biblical precedents (King David, most notably) which were then shaped into “folk theologies,” wherein enormous, even continuing, episodes of debauchery precurse equally compelling fits of remorse, the depth and intensity of which elicit and excuse a level of forgiveness and rejuvenation equal to the profundity of the depravity. Quite a mouthful of an assumption, and mythology. In short, think of it as a kind of proposition: the worse the sin the greater the forgiveness generated and granted (and vice-versa, if you’ll pardon the pun). So whereas the innocent non-evangelical television channel-hopper may have chanced upon the almost pathetic weeping and pleading antics of Jimmy Swaggart and no doubt found it an appalling, embarrassing, perhaps even disingenuous spectacle, the more dialed-in believer was in fact experiencing something altogether different. For Swaggart was caught in the throes of what adherents of the evangelical cultural worldview and ethos understood all too well, the never-ending battle between good and evil. The televangelist had returned from the wilderness to spin a tale. Only in this version Satan gets recast into the temptations and predations of the external secular world; against them and it Swaggart mobilizes the purifying wholeness of an internal evangelical re-sanctification. This “rhetoric” brings a reckoning, and possible redemption. What was once a simple confrontation grows more complex and nuanced by the minute. Again, think of it in terms of a proposition: the deeper and more intense the prior experience of sin, the greater the passion and joy of the recovery, and the more gratifying the outcome of what I’ve come to call for my own purposes (here and elsewhere) complete reversal, triggers of and variations upon which evangelicals are all too familiar. Observe a tapping into a quite traditional prodigal son narrative of epic perverted proportions. Understandably, we might expect that few congregants could actually make such an articulated sense of things—by astutely drawing any number of “rhetorical” connections and conclusions—during these moments of apparent spiritual crisis; most likely not even the supplicants themselves. All told, one simply wonders at the daunting exegetical challenge such moments present, but apparently not so Professor Harding. She observes the two collaborators—televangelist and audience—locked in this rhetorical tango of a dance wherein the further he histrionically descends into hell, the higher he will eventually be lifted up, the greater his elevation in the ultimate re-calibrated estimation of his followers. Only by pushing the right story-line buttons can disbelief be suspended and temporal terrestrial salvation found. And his congregation—and evangelicals everywhere—got the gist of it, irresistibly drawn into the mysterious meaning and significance of the unfolding passion play. The greater the agony on the cross, the more welcoming the ultimate homecoming in heaven (albeit here on earth). Given the dazzling academic gymnastics performed, it’s pretty compelling stuff. Can’t take our eyes off the gyrations. And she’s nailed the landing too, right?
Well, not so fast. Problem is, after all was said and done: they didn’t get it. Their congregations and wider audiences weren’t moved to forgive and forget. And certainly not to read into these two contemporary figures rhetorical echoes of King David. Unfortunately, contrary to Harding’s impressive analysis and interpretation, no such transformative moment or event actually occurred. Both televangelists fell immediately from grace. Swaggart was “defrocked.” Both lost their “ministries.” And both tried to resurrect their constituencies later on with newly formatted television programs—but they failed miserably. The overwhelming majority of their audiences voted with their feet—out the door. More importantly, those crucial “love gifts,” the true measure of televangelistic buy-in or “seed faith,” went out the door with them. Forget toleration and acculturation. Whatever the apparent leakage, the occasional recurring ripples of impiety or hypocrisy within American evangelicalism, the vast swamp of evangelical Puritanism remains undrained, to this day. Sexual prohibition rules. The implication for abortion in America proves enormous.
Here’s why, but bear with me as we set the stage. Without a brief sketch of the larger ideological infrastructure and context, where all this has and continues to play out, none of this makes any sense. In other words, how do the abortion and vaccine controversies fit into the big picture?
Although the overwhelming majority of conservative Christians harbor a host of complex internal ideological and emotional contradictions that belie easy ascription or attribution of attitudes and motives, especially that of hypocrisy, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that, at base, most evangelicals feel singled out, set apart, persecuted. That’s the big picture. And they have grown to feel these things willingly, over many decades (but not without some perceived provocation). For behind every bush lurks a secular beast. They literally dread the so-called secular “world.” About such apprehensions, most outsiders are vaguely familiar, just not whence they came and why (hence the second subtitle of my book, . . . . the Meaning and Significance of American Evangelicalism). For herein lies the ideological rub or heart, the larger cultural context, of American evangelicalism. “Secularism”—the “world”—appears like an apparition. To use a piece of academic jargon, evangelicalism has reified an ideological abstraction into an actual alternative social entity or world. Just as more contemporary evangelical political drones have conjured a “deep state” out of thin air. Same cultural dynamic. Such things exist largely, but not exclusively, in their imaginations.
Central to this entire process is a heresy, the crucial theological mutation of “social sin.” Original sin, characterizing all humans, all individuals indiscriminately, absconds from the evangelical orthodoxy and worldview. Now social entities, whole groups and societies in fact, can be riddled by sin. This heresy proves the essential theological driver of the evangelical revolution.
Accordingly, we do well to call the source of these apprehensions a secular Leviathan, which harkens back to the famous book by the Englishman Thomas Hobbes. In his equally mythological world, so fallen and broken is the timbre of humanity in a state of nature that unbridled passions and deceits must be reined in by an absolute monarch. However, unlike the Christian commonwealth envisioned by Hobbes, these days, over the course of many decades, an altogether different kind of sovereign power has emerged, a creation or hypostatization (as Marshall Sahlins might put it), as I’ve suggested, that has thoroughly horrified and mesmerized evangelicalism. It harbors reified meanings and motivations that bear little resemblance to the reformational Christian infrastructure of the Leviathan of Hobbes. It has been called many things: secularism, secular humanism, and now more recently, the deep state. It is a reformulated secular beast of a sovereign. But what kind of monster? And ideological heart or context in what sense? In this instance, what we mean here by ideological has great import. Accordingly, from Paradise Joe’s:
When I write of an ideological dynamic I am referring to an acceleration of meaning and motivation. For my purposes, ideology represents an extraordinary source of meaning and motivation employed in the aggressive promotion and/or defense of a particular group, community, society, or “worldview.”
Ideology seldom emerges or develops unprompted. It requires a foil. Just as the light of day unspools directly out of its dead of night opposite, and vice-versa. In our case here, one Leviathan set in direct opposition to another; one evangelical Christian America against one secular America. So we are talking two sides, the yin and the yang, of an ideological coin here; in our case the tensions and antagonisms of society and politics as the seemingly perennial tossing of that coin. But much more than just a religion or a religious context (for not all religions are necessarily ideological or aggressively accelerated) gets triggered or deployed here. Ideology implies and demands much more than just a cultural infrastructure or system. It requires a culture on steroids.
In the case of modern American evangelicalism, for example, what could be more threatening, a more clear and present danger, than a secular liberalism that slaughters babies and persecutes Christians? That sticks needles into the arms of believers? What could more directly trigger rage, and evoke and symbolize the larger ideological context of secular oppression, than mask and vaccine mandates? What comes next? Maoist re-education camps? (Indeed, no more than a week after I had composed the above sentence, Glenn Beck appeared on Fox News’s highest-rated Tucker Carlson show to claim that Governor Inslee of Washington State was about to round up anti-vaxxers and send them off to “internment camps.”) No wonder the mobilization against abortion and vaccination; no wonder the ranting and raving of Religious Right politicians about masks and mandates, against penetrations of all sorts. No wonder also the rise of secessionist movements like American Redoubt (out in Idaho and Montana, etc.). What is more, that a kind of glee appears to accompany these episodes of rage ought strike the innocent onlooker as somewhat odd, intriguing also. But then again, glee and rage, like so many other elements in the evangelical emotional periodic table, trace two opposite orbits around the same ideological core, as is usually the case with all sorts of expressions of, or variations upon, the quantum-mechanic-like dynamic of complete reversal. Just like mass and velocity the one plays hide and seek with the other.
And so for many decades now evangelicals have reified a significant portion of the American society into a sprawling, threatening secular Leviathan. No wonder “baby killers,” “sex traffickers,” and “pedophiles” slither and swirl about in the decadent “swamp” of secular liberalism. As I discovered in my own ethnography of a very representative Christian college community, students were both receptive to and deeply schooled in an ideological geography that divides the American nation into respective Christian and secular territories and categories. The latter occupy a nether region wherein shadows are cast that inspire nothing short of fear and loathing. Although Robert Pogue Harrison was thinking and writing more generally about how a developing adolescent mind could relate to the “world” outside most beneficially, his insights apply even more directly to evangelicalism. As noted in my Paradise Joe’s:
. . . . rich, life-enhancing cultures maintain a vibrant relationship between youth (novelty, imagination, innovation) and age (wisdom, tradition). Healthy cultures ease their young charges through “the most crucial maturation process of all, for it turns self-love into world-love. . . . amor mundi both suffuses and sustains the world . . . its withdrawal leaves the world ever more vulnerable to the forces that provoke its withdrawal in the first place.” Even more importantly in the particular cultural context of this book: “. . . . education’s unofficial currency is love . . . its mission is to educe a love of the world [esp. its history and achievements]—the kind of love without which there could be no love at all.” Instead, we have found among these students and evangelicalism at large an “odium mundi. . . a world loathing.” Indeed nothing proves more diminishing, more personally and socially impoverishing, than odium mundi. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that such fear and loathing of the larger world—the secular world—ultimately robs one of wholeness, supposedly the conditio sine qua non of an evangelical Christian college education. (Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age, 118, 127-8, 132 / PJ’s ff# 675, p. 402)
Unfortunately, it is an odium mundi—more specifically, an odium secular Americana— that lies behind and has driven an evangelical social, cultural, theological, and political ideological agenda and revolution of several decades now, culminating in an insurrection that has breached the walls of the secular sovereign. But upon closer examination one discovers an even deeper, more fundamental alternative reality social and cultural vision in play here, an epistemological apartheid in fact, that draws every aspect of that revolution together into a whole. It is an odium mundi that has sent a metastasizing wave of social, cultural, and political insecurities and phobias—of cultural separatism—crashing against and over a shuddering “secular” portion of American society. No wonder then that trash-talking hate mongering dominates the airways, “social media” especially. All too many of the disenchanted malinger in “cloud”(s) where tongues tend to loosen and wag all too easily. Indeed, were they only hovering there in anticipation of the returning commandant of the Army of Jesus.
Unfortunately again, what goes around comes around. For as is generally the case with such all-consuming rage—and as with mendacity in general—such feelings and actions get projected onto perceived enemies. What were once mutual admiration societies have turned into their opposites. Recall the “regular order” of the Senate. Dole, McGovern, Kennedy, McCain, among many others, were friends, great friends; they broke and passed bread across a common table. Now that the contagion of evangelical cultural apartheid has spread over the Republican party, politics has lost even the remotest camaraderie, let alone any meaning. There are no elections or bipartisanship in Trumpian heaven. You’ve either won or lost, beforehand.
This relatively minor derivative false equivalency ideological dynamic, “there are good people on both sides”, ensures that since the Religious Right lies, cheats, and steals, the secular enemy must do so also; and so we must beat them to the punch. Pre-emptive first strikes are in order. A rather peculiar cognitively-dissonant inverse cultural rationale prevails: we are going to steal the next election, because they obviously stole the one before. Once upon a time only thugs like Richard J. Daley even thought of applying the first part of that warped syllogism. And what goes around keeps coming back around. Such is the nature of pure opposition in the alternative evangelical cultural universe. For opposites are those things alike in all ways except one.
But I reference here only random derivative symptoms of a much deeper cultural disease, disorder, dysfunction—the three d’s. As indicated, politics has actually absconded from the scene, as have and do gods. No wonder then the seemingly ineluctable result, as Harrison warns us, of an evangelical worldview and ethos, of a community and culture, that has grown up fearing and loathing the world—a coded, categorical apprehension seething with odium secular Americana. No wonder we have a Congress and red states filled with brain-dead grifters who rant and rave Don’t Look Up. Or, again, as with the opposite, do look up. Our very own American jihadists. Alternative reality double-downed.
And so now, to come full circle, the evangelical right’s seemingly different approaches to vaccines and abortion do not contradict one another; they have risen out of the same ideological miasma. Over many decades, evangelicalism has succeeded in creating an entire ideological categorical canon, or epistemology of opposites, to make sense of, clarify, and solidify their precarious position vis-à-vis the ever-looming clear and present danger of the secular world, their odium mundi. Virtually everything modulates or oscillates in terms of perceived opposition or threats, these both generating and issuing out of complexes of meaning and motivation that drive the labelling of the world around them. This infrastructure proves extensive and expansive, irrespective of outsiders’ lack of familiarity with it. No doubt few non-evangelicals can name the Christian Smithsonian Institute (Creation Museum), the Christian Disneyland (Heritage Park), the Christian Liberace (Dino), or the Christian Grammys (The Dove Awards); and there are hundreds more such commensurate pairings. They dot the evangelical Christian mindscape. Once upon a time, Tammy Bakker even convened a conference of Christian hairdressers at evangelical-world-famous Heritage Park. What appears on the surface as an acculturating blend of materialism and “moral market” thinking (the phrase is Gary Wills’s), so-called Prosperity Theology, is in fact merely an evangelical sacralization of greed and profit. Where wealth signals moral distinction and worth in this world, by at least a factor ten-fold, much more so than in any world to come. Evangelicals peer out into the secular world and monopolize whatever they’d like for their own purposes. Their versions—agape love, for example—are the genuine article; secular love, by marked contrast, a phony approximation, emotional fake news. Quite understandable then that the latter expression was first uttered, I believe, by Vladimir Putin. And of course fully adopted by the Orange Jesus. He also sowing the seeds of Holy Roman Empire love.1
Over the length and breadth of the evangelical landscape, one observes the near universal declension of objects, relationships, and institutions in diametrically-opposed Christian and secular categories and terms. Evangelicals literally eat, drink, sleep, and breathe a toxic ideological mix of Christian/secular difference—isolating, targeting, and duplicating desirable secular genotypes like an invading virus. Only the occasional lingering resistance allows undesirable compromised hosts to survive the onslaught. And so for the time being at least, Roe v. Wade, voting rights, the separation of church and state—and even American democracy itself—hang on a slender thread, on the cusp of annihilation. We can expect that, at the very best, American democracy will limp along in name only, as an emasculated evangelical Christian appropriation, with a white Religious Right Republican minority in charge of a scorched-earth shell of a formerly “exceptional” nation state.
Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, evangelicals wake every morning to the same clock radio alarm. Day after day the same alternative reality message pounds their categorically-damaged imaginations. And just try getting a word or glimpse of the real world in edgewise. No doubt somewhere else in the globe, among some undiscovered or forgotten pre-literate tribe, an equally exotic message is getting drummed into the minds of much more innocent infants. Hence the anthropological mantra of exotic so appropriate for evangelicalism. Conservative American Christians recoil in horror at the barbaric treatment of women in Taliban territories, in one more of the many “shithole” nations that lie in perpetual darkness; yet still they have slept soundly for four years now, waking every morning to the re-invigorating message that the virus will soon disappear “miraculously,” and that the election was stolen.
You name it—either through sterilization, duplication, neutralization, sacralization, and a host of other strategic deployments large and small—the evangelical campaign, the Army of Jesus, marches on. Amish-like cultural accommodation or isolation are no longer viable options, as they were occasionally in earlier periods of our roller-coaster history. One anticipates hearing only death rattles in the throats of once seemingly forever ideas and institutions, secular phenomena that have now become bullseyes in the sights of evangelical sharpshooters. Is it any wonder that Marjorie Taylor Greene took dead rhetorical aim, envisioning—no, exoticizing or fetishizing—“a bullet to the head” of Nancy Pelosi? Just one of many categorical targets dotting the odium secular Americana shooting gallery.
No surprise then these controversial matters of abortion and vaccination. Observe no internal contradiction or hypocrisy here; neither in Kellyanne Conway’s seemingly inexplicable iteration of “alternative facts,” one among a host of other inanities. (Being wrong or deluded about reality or the meaning and significance of consequences is not necessarily hypocritical, just more likely—ultimately or hopefully—inconsequential. Having been repeatedly proven wrong is an altogether different matter.) No wonder again also that we still find this surprising.
Indeed, and of course, we still do not understand them; never have, probably never will. Evangelicalism is indeed an exotic civilization unto its own rebarbative self, upon whose strange shores we tourists have suddenly landed, with no passport, and not speaking the language. And they certainly do not welcome strangers, as we’ve seen.
I am reminded (as though it were yesterday) of a conversation many years ago with a fellow graduate student, a young lady from Korea, concerning Max Weber’s notion of competing “ethics”, as sketched out in his famous lecture “Politics as a Vocation.” She was having trouble with one of the two ethics, “The ethic of ultimate ends” (or “sheer commitment,” as one of my mentors, Guenther Roth, translated it). Weber directly opposed it to an “ethic of responsibility.” Quite ignorantly, I repeated an example often used, that of Japanese kamikaze pilots in WWII, to illustrate the principle. “See, they were so consumed by an idea that they became oblivious to the personal consequences of their actions. They were totally, sheerly committed, consequences be damned.” Gay Yung was patient with me. “You Americans use that example a lot. But you don’t understand. Those young fighter pilots were thinking of the glory and legacy they would bring to their siblings and family. That was their sense of duty, of responsibility. They were dying in the service of that legacy.”
Although she didn’t say so then, I will do so now: so it’s a cultural thing. Weber’s two ethics emerged out of a Western academic tradition. Although he was well-versed in eastern religions, his thought in this particular instance reflected a more general European theoretical sensibility that has somewhat limited application.
When I explored these matters in my own larger study, Paradise Joe’s, it soon became apparent that individual and community meanings and motives likewise often became entangled in what Clifford Geertz called cultural “webs of significance.” Such meaningful complexes, as Weber thought of them, require direct sustained observation, description, identification, and unraveling. This proves particularly relevant to the American abortion controversy. No wonder then that, for our purposes, these questions, demanding cultural sensitivity and interpretation, concern or butt up against another pair of opposites, life and death, where such things matter most.
And so, why abortion? As we’ve seen, the campaign against abortion has next to nothing to do with preserving the life of any fetus. Accordingly, given the demonstrable resilience of Puritanism within evangelicalism (incorrectly denied), it begins to make more sense if we achieve an understanding that the Pro-Life movement was originally grounded not in higher ideals, but in deterrence and punishment. (But again, to add a necessary qualifying note of ambiguity, a sense of responsibility may nonetheless also flow out of an ultimate end, and most importantly, vice versa. Even abstract ideologies may iterate and re-iterate themselves with respect to empirical consequences. However, one must also acknowledge that dysfunctional megalomaniacs—Donald Trump, one telling example—exhibit neither idealism nor any sense of responsibility. Hence appeals couched in either terms likely fall upon deaf ears; obsessive self-interest overrides any even vaguely redeeming ulterior motives.) As such, promiscuous sexual behavior must be either denied or deterred, if not eliminated altogether, along with all incorrectly-obtained pleasure; contraception should be discouraged or banned, family planning clinics hounded out of existence.
Deviance also demands punishment. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term is the flogging pro-lifers seek to inflict upon promiscuous secular females; they must suffer. And collateral damage among one’s own only accelerates conformity within. In the “moral hazard” scheme of things, lax deterrence and punishment only encourage greater promiscuity; better to snuff out the source. Currently in Texas, vigilantes hold the hammer of pregnancy to term over the heads of frightened females. The ultimate goal? Reverse the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s; restore Norman Rockwell’s America. Recall Mencken’s take on Puritanism: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.” Indeed, were that only the half of it.
Concern about the external control over the bodies of women merely piles a more general principle higher and deeper upon this more fundamental imperative and issue. In addition, a more particular kind of angst complicates matters even further. Recall my earlier reference to a fear of complete reversal. Observe here a direct link to the proverbial evangelical “conversion” experience, a crucial relationship not always obvious or easily understood. Anyone who has chanced upon televangelist broadcasts will occasionally receive a lesson in the mesmerizing power of conversion. “I was lost but then found, raised up.” Weeping, heart-rending accounts, more weirdly passionate than most mortals can bear. And those shaking limbs! Life-changing experiences. But there is an equally powerful dark side to the complete reversal coin: lust, about which evangelicals receive constant warning. Beware! Temptation can totally overwhelm the faint defenses of unguarded souls! And so even among the faithful, backsliding must be deterred and/or punished at all cost. Bromides about love and life get tossed casually about, but these prove mere window dressing, partisan sloganeering by comparison. When push comes to shove, believers cower before the ominous threat of complete reversal. It commands their attention, inspiring a usual pair of opposites, in this instance, both worship and fear. Above and beyond the joys of conversion lurks the dark side of the force (and yes, Star Wars seethes with Christian tropes). Hence the deployment of the Puritan force fields of deterrence and punishment against the evil empire, odium secular Americana.. Thou shalt not enjoy one’s own body or that of another. Or any pleasure whatsoever.
Given their ideological intensity, no wonder again that these cultural dynamics generalize. Witness the correlated campaign against homosexuality and the LGBTQ community. Forget reasonable biological explanations of human variation. No, one day you are straight as an arrow and the next, boom, through the power of a demon-driven complete reversal (or just plain old secular social engineering and marketing), you get bent in half, thrust into the categorical social sin of LGBTQ. For Christian/secular opposites are, again, as with opposites in general—like night and day, cold and hot, black and white—those things alike in all ways except one. And so deterrence and punishment are deployed against the omnipresent possibility of reversal, of going over to the dark side; for like “assets” in the television series, Homeland, previously faithful operatives can be turned on a dime into their opposites. Hence note the broader contextual rub. The Pro-life movement is but one of the most visible tips of a much larger, more deeply submerged ideological iceberg of a revolution. Strategy-wise, the Army of Jesus must defend against them, in all their various insidious forms; complete reversals represent just one of many internal cultural dynamics that come into play. One must remain on constant guard.
Are there some deeper historical theological precedents or dynamics that get triggered or brought into play here? Was sex and sin always so thoroughly set in opposition. Did the one perennially counterpoise the other? Or was something else, something entirely different, going on?
I think that one of the thorniest paradoxes in the history of Christianity and sexuality is this: for more than a thousand years Christian scripture and theology offered the most beautiful and elaborate imagery—metaphors, allegories, liturgies, rituals—to transpose physical need into deeply meaningful, interior scenes of fantasy. But it was the same scripture, the same theology, and the same liturgy that provided the principal implements of shame used to construct boundaries of acceptable desire and correct gender roles, and to invent ever more punishing ways to transform sexuality into sin. For every desert ascetic touched in his inner parts by the Holy Spirit, another was applying a serpent’s fangs to a stubborn erection. . . . Early Christians needed to distinguish themselves from Jewish and Roman cultures; some, like the desert ascetics and monastics, developed the idea of celibacy as a countercultural and messianic alternative. Others, like Paul, developed a sophisticated theology of sexual reciprocity: “The wife does not rule of her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.” This ideal of marriage as mutual devotion has more in common with the erotic exchanges of the Song of Songs than with the rigid Roman hierarchy of penetrator and penetrated.2
How can this be? Whereas the very same urge molts into its opposite. It’s alike in all ways except one, and then it was no longer, again. And so what’s the only difference? Well, obviously, good, wholesome, enriching, rewarding sexual expression can morph into its opposite—into bad, disgusting feelings and behavior. Over decades, or in an instant. Just ask any televangelist. Again, performing another complete circus-like somersault. Then again, don’t ask, don’t tell.
And so now, given this larger ideological dynamic or frame of reference, we can understand why, from the outside looking in, evangelicals might appear hypocritical about the value or sanctity of life. For we are not privy or beholden to this perverse apartheid vision. The survival and expansion of the evangelical community agenda, advanced by the army of Jesus, holds greater sway. Forget agonizing over life and death, over larger Enlightenment-tainted ethical concerns. Ideologues have more important apocalyptic fish to fry. An apartheid cultural sensibility and angst sets them apart. In the war against the evil empire, soldiers become disposable droids; and they’re millions more in the army of Jesus. Similarly, and more particularly, with respect to Covid and vaccines. No matter the outcome—life or death—the ultimate end of eternal bliss beckons. Responsibility be damned. The clouds await.
One final thought concerning the deeper cultural origins of this surface noise. Most evangelicals view Donald Trump as a damaged vehicle (a modern-day Persian King Cyrus) chosen by God to restore America to its Christian roots, as in the new-world Jerusalem of the Puritans, that transitional site awaiting the end-times, the fast-approaching Parousia. A few Republican politicians have said so directly, which should be common knowledge by now. Like any number of equally-compromised televangelists, the Donald has ridden this dark horse of an exemption to power with a vengeance. So embedded are these various subterranean scriptural and other Morse codes of evangelicalism that he need only drop an occasional hint to his followers. As mentioned before, when he claimed early on that the Covid thing would soon disappear almost magically, he didn’t say magically, of course, as most readers just remembered incorrectly, but “miraculously.” He was speaking in tongues. Indeed, had the coup succeeded he would now be reiterating miraculous God-given vaccines, and evangelicals would be lining up in droves to accept them into their arms; afterwards, they would be heading out to Wednesday night Bible studies instead of school board meetings.
Need I remind those who still feel Donald Trump has next to no knowledge of the Bible and has merely played evangelicals like a fiddle, you’ve missed the tell-tale arc of evangelicalism. He’s the genuine article. As with abortion and vaccines, among a host of others, American evangelicalism has very little to do with any mythical Jesus of Nazareth, or the New Testament. The unread Bible is just a prop to be held up in front of a church. Appropriately enough, upside down. Complete reversal.
Currently, in the evangelical alternative-reality schemes of things, vaccines are the invasive product of secular science, of deep-state machinations. Evangelical apartheid drives the anti-vax hysteria. And that aggressive science denialism trickles down to the fringe political extremist groups and other “freedom”-loving malcontents. For without the evangelical revolution of the last few decades filling the Congress with Religious Right politicians and a Trump administration seething with enabling acolytes, these groups would still be malingering only on the periphery of the political arena. And no, as one prominent political scientist has argued, evangelical religious currents—and the January 6th insurrection—are not the result of mere political ideas and motives; they in fact undergird and drive the latter.
For like Jihadists flying planes into tall buildings, the holy war of evangelicals against vaccines demands demonstrations of faith, the shunning of the bad medicines of the deep secular state as though they are poisons. Of course, the internet bristles with one pastor or ideologue after another denouncing vaccine mandates as yet another Holocaust-like pogrom against Christians. No wonder they gladly swill their own Hemlock. Unvaccinated acolytes choke on intubation tubes attaching them to machines that are marvels of secular science and engineering, devices taking the very last breaths of life from them as they succumb one last time to having “owned the libs.” Unlike their much smarter, more competent Jihadist suicide bomber counterparts, these morons’ understanding of collateral damage rarely extends beyond themselves; à la Bill Clinton, it’s the infidels, stupid, not just us. Anti-vaxxers end up owning neither the Truth nor the liberals, just caskets in graveyard plots.
Evangelicals are the local warriors who have sent Christian Republicans to Congress, whirling drones equally subscribed to a cultural logic and imperative of pure black/white opposition. Indeed, looking back upon the likes of John McCain and Bob Dole we can now anticipate the coming end of all political compromise. Like Shiites, the army of Jesus has only one gear, that of pure, unadulterated opposition; like Shiites also, their Republican enablers have morphed into a party of protest alone, with no longer even the pretense of governance. They are fighting not a war of attrition but of worlds in collision, as Velikovsky might have put it, all in anticipation of an eventual abrupt end to this one. As modern-day Illuminati, they have no doubt chafed under the reins of concealing their own special knowledge and ownership of the Truth. But with Donald Trump, all caution has been thrown to the wind. For indeed if one believes that the world is only six-thousand years old and televangelists can cure cancer, then the ideas that the Clintons are running a child sex ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, Representative Omar is an Islamic terrorist, and the election was stolen are only a hop-skip-and-a-jump away. Belief in Jesus walking on water segues quite seamlessly into belief in Q.
Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has correctly surmised that there’s only one speed bump in the road to the unilateral takeover of the House and Senate by the Army of Jesus. But it’s huge: the national debt. Defaulting on the debt would bring disastrous economic consequences, blame for which could be too obviously laid at his doorstop alone. Yet he appears the only adult left in the Republican room. Even Wall Street demands that he stand down. Unlike anti-vaxxers, he’s not quite ready to slit his own throat.
Hence the rage against vaccines proves no different from the rage against abortion, and no different from the rage driving the evangelical cultural revolution, the Tea Party, the Religious Right, the obstructionist Republican Congress, the Trump administration, and finally, seemingly ineluctably, the January 6th capitol insurrectionists.
Liberal talking heads and academicians alike still seek to uncover a purely political motive and agenda from among the rubble of the January 6th coup attempt, even though by their own admission, the Poor Boys, QAnon, Oath Keepers, and Three-percenters, etc., comprised only a small portion of the mob. For some inexplicable reason (as explored elsewhere in my book) talking heads of the national media and academia—sociologists of religion, in particular—are reluctant to call a spade a spade. Lukewarm, status-quo Christianity still casts a spell over the likes of Morning Joe Scarborough and the virtually unflappable, borderline insufferably-cheery John Meacham. For them, the Trump revolution can be explained away as no more than a blip on their radar screens of faith, a disagreeable perversion of more wholesome, rarefied versions of conservatism and Christianity. They prefer letting it be, for this dicy moment will pass. Perhaps if we only click our heels together the insurrectionists could be to made to conform to their powder-puff versions of Jesus; as though a genuine conservatism or Christianity played no role in any of this madness.
Unfortunately, back in the real world, we have instead come under the throes of a seemingly inevitable working out of the developmental arc of American evangelicalism. We head towards an equally seemingly irreversible dénouement, a drawing together of all the malignant loose ends of the American social, cultural, and democratic experiment that will most likely result in our very own version of national de-capitation and replacement by an exceptional American Caliphate. As some of the founders feared, we are staring directly in the face of their worst nightmare: rule by a fanatical, ideology-driven minority.
Without evangelicalism, Congress would still be applying John McCain’s regular rules of order, Donald Trump would be back on the set of The Apprentice, or in jail, and the January 6th riot would never have happened.
Margaret Atwood warned us years ago. Although I didn’t have the benefit of working under a similar poetic license, with all those imaginative tea leaves and tools, so did I.
Batten down the hatches. We hang on the cusp of the end of American democracy. Forget the annoying distractions of political extremism. Again, à la Bill Clinton, it’s the evangelical base, stupid. And here we’re talking truth even stranger than fiction. We’re talking Republic of Gilead, Paradise Joe’s, and Jezebels unleashed.
Perhaps cooler heads will prevail; perhaps not.
“Sowing The Seeds of Love: The Real Conspiracy Theory.” Why have Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Tucker Carlson, and their MAGA Republican Party accomplices become the willing dupes and apologists for Vladimir Putin? And how do Ginni Thomas & Mark Meadows fit into the mix? {original 3/7/2022}
Erin Maglaque, “Vexed by Sex,” (a review of Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower Than Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity), The New York Review, 4/24/2025.