There's a dodge that a fair number of conservatives who want to have a teeny-weeny bit of theological credibility have been using with Trump, which is acknowledging his un-Christian character but then saying his scriptural analogue is King David. What they then say is, "Ok, so King David, he was a sinner, but GOD LOVED HIM, because he was also a mighty champion of his people". It's a smooth move because it instantiates Christian nationalism right there in that single moment--that the Trumpist Christians are a people with enemies who need a sinner king to defend them--and even sort of appropriates the chosen-ness of the Jews and confers it upon Trumpian Americans. Of course, this also compactly not only rejects Christ's actual messages to humanity in the Gospels but also rejects the idea that Christianity is meant for all of humanity, which is pretty fundamental to the religion--it's how it went from being a Jewish messianic cult to the state religion of the Roman Empire. But it's a compact way for them to fend off the unescapable Antichristness of Trump and reinforce the appropriation of Christianity by white nationalism.
Back before I ditched FB, I was amazed at how so many folks I knew never darkened a church’s door except for weddings and funerals were sharing memes and rants about the Godless left and the evils of church COVID closures. And just recently a high up official in the Southern Baptist Convention almost got ridden out on a rail for tweeting that Biden withdrawing his candidacy was a good thing for the country. Even the most innocuous bland comment that wasn’t rabidly anti Democratic Party was treated as almost heresy.
For all their professed hatred of Iran and the Taliban, Mullahs gonna Mullah.
It's important to stress that a lot of us who stand against these choads ain't necessarily "atheists"; we're "anti-clericalists", in the tradition of Voltaire and Thomas Paine.
That's why the Mullahs hate and fear us so much; because we know the difference between Deities and those who merely think they are.
I think people can overstate the theological sophistication of even leading Christian intellectuals. Two bigshot evangelical intellectuals, David Brody and Scott Lamb, wrote a fawning “spiritual biography” called “The Faith of Donald Trump” that was widely regarded as preposterous, but it sold well because the appetite was there.
Polls suggest white evangelicals not only believe Trump is a sincere Christian, but is actually MORE religious than other Republicans.
It's race. It's not Christianity. Look at the polls.
Christianity has been culturally assimilated to whiteness. It's possible to use ANY religion in a supremacy scheme, though. Cf., India, Turkey, Israel, Sri Lanka, etc., etc.
It's also possible to have a supremacy scheme via opposition to religion. Cf., China.
MAGA is a white supremacy movement. Christians who were white supremacists have long used Christianity.
I don't mind people resenting Christians or Christianity. Unfortunately, the white supremacists have tainted it and stained it with their hatred, sadism, and crimes against humanity--so what can you do?
But please don't assist them in hiding the white supremacy USING Christianity. This is the PURPOSE of their use of it!
I think you might have nailed it with the notion of teams. Pick a side. Doesn’t matter which, but pick it and go all in. It’s a curdled version of what seemed benign enough a lifetime ago with Team Jennifer and Team Angelina: what, we now have to look at a celebrity break-up through a Manichaean lens? Now it’s endemic: if you won’t obediently if meaninglessly chant “Ceasefire now!”, you’re enabling genocide, which is tantamount to committing it yourself. Genocide Joe.
For a long time now I’ve mused on Hitchens’s argument that it’s mad of us to place an intrinsic value on the fact someone “has faith”, even if we don’t share it. The implication is that belief is an inherent virtue, whereas, as Hitchens contested, what it signals is your readiness to take things on trust with no evidential basis.
I think that your last few paragraphs capture the essence of it. What's important is that they wear the hat.
An enormous amount of people on the right side of the political spectrum are either explicitly Christian or they were raised in a community with Christian values -- by which I mean a set of cherished values that have been tied (by the people who teach them) to the Christian faith and that are presumed to be under threat if the faith is removed.
Many of the people on the right aren't religious or, if anything, they are quasi-religious, believing vaguely in a deity and in the idea that something about Jesus is important, but not according it too much thought as they go about their lives. But importantly, that linkage between Christianity and their cherished values remains.
So, politicians who refuse to associate themselves with Christianity are, in essence, positioning themselves as an outsider to those values, at best, and a threat to those values at worst.
The irrationality of this isn't the point. It's not rational: It's associative. The associative game is: Right Wing = Good and Christian, Left Wing = Bad and Satanic. Therefore if a person wants to be a right wing leader they have to get with the game and be Good and Christian. Once the most basic facts are established -- if you're not globally part of a category that's thought of as a "threat," then individual instances of behavior can be overlooked or rationalized away.
There's an unspoken corollary to this as well. If the right winger is supposed to be Good and Christian (but doesn't technically have to: what's important is that they profess just enough to associate themselves with the faith), similarly, the left-winger is supposed to be Bad and Satanic -- and right-wing Christians will very quickly bury any mention or thought of a front-runner's Christianity waaaaaay in the back of their brains, where they don't have to think about it, if that front-runner is a Democrat.
If you want to see it in action all you have to do is inquire with a right-winger about the faith of Obama, Clinton, or Carter. It's possible that Obama's faith is largely performative and social. It's likely that Clinton's was. Carter seems sincere. But what's most important is that they all have long track records of being visibly Christian and yet if you talk with right-wingers and try to bring that into the picture it somehow doesn't compute with them. It's pretty clear that even if they can acknowledge that Democratic candidates might be Christian, nominally, the right-wing Christians can't bring them into the "Christian Identity Tent."
They can barely even do it with Martin Luther King, Jr. Find a Christian Republican grousing about how black activism has gone too far and then try to have a good conversation with them about the Christian underpinnings of the Civil Rights Movement and you'll get to watch as they have to stop and compute the fact that yes, those people were actually Christian. For the most part, the extreme right-wingers I know block it out until it's put in front of their face.
Left-wingers seem much more versatile about the whole thing, at least in the interactions I've had with those of them who are strongly Christian.
“The GOP went frothing coo-coo bananas after the Paris Olympics opening ceremony had the audacity to involve a drag performance containing what they dubiously thought was Christian symbolism”
For all of your really solid and well-argued points, this one doesn’t fit. There was nothing dubious about that. I saw a lot of performative anger over it, but the last supper was plainly what they were going for. Had it been whatever Greek god explanation they came up with to explain it away when they got called out, it wouldn’t have taken the 48 hours or so it took for that to come out.
That said, the Trump conversion thing still blows me away. The man doesn’t live like any kind of a Christ-follower, and the embrace of his supposed conversion does far more to push people away from the church than toward it.
The connection between church and political party has also never made sense to me from a biblical perspective. Much of the message is about God’s ability to work under any kind of a regime. Jesus himself was born during a hostile leader’s regime, and he was put to death by the state for blasphemy. God works in mysterious ways indeed.
Political theatre is weird. On the right, it’s performative fealty to Christianity while often living contrary to its tenets. On the left, it’s performative fealty to environmentalism while often living contrary to its tenets.
They understand that polite people don’t look that closely, so they hide behind pretty and good words, like Christian, patriot, and truth. They know nothing about any of these things. They support Russia, not the USA.
So, good people need to do their part and look closer and push back on liars and manipulators as well. Know their tactics. Then they have nothing.
Cruel, judgmental, hypocritical Christianity has existed almost as long as the nice kind, and it’s tended to gather political power since at least the 4th century. It’s not new.
I am not sure to what degree the Church of Scotland still receives taxpayer funding. But it is considered at least quasi-official, and its history is very different from that of the Church of Wales, which was simply a subdivision of the Church of England before disestablishment in the 1920s. Scottish Episcopalianism exists and was supported by the Stuarts, but the people rejected it, and the later monarchs gave up on it.
It reminds me of what Vaclac Havel wrote about ideology in totalitarian states (while still living in USSR vassalized tcheckoslovakia) : everyvody embrace the lies, knowing they are lies, as it IS what makes the system work. Politicians are agents of the ideology as much as the ideology IS their tool.
There's a dodge that a fair number of conservatives who want to have a teeny-weeny bit of theological credibility have been using with Trump, which is acknowledging his un-Christian character but then saying his scriptural analogue is King David. What they then say is, "Ok, so King David, he was a sinner, but GOD LOVED HIM, because he was also a mighty champion of his people". It's a smooth move because it instantiates Christian nationalism right there in that single moment--that the Trumpist Christians are a people with enemies who need a sinner king to defend them--and even sort of appropriates the chosen-ness of the Jews and confers it upon Trumpian Americans. Of course, this also compactly not only rejects Christ's actual messages to humanity in the Gospels but also rejects the idea that Christianity is meant for all of humanity, which is pretty fundamental to the religion--it's how it went from being a Jewish messianic cult to the state religion of the Roman Empire. But it's a compact way for them to fend off the unescapable Antichristness of Trump and reinforce the appropriation of Christianity by white nationalism.
Back before I ditched FB, I was amazed at how so many folks I knew never darkened a church’s door except for weddings and funerals were sharing memes and rants about the Godless left and the evils of church COVID closures. And just recently a high up official in the Southern Baptist Convention almost got ridden out on a rail for tweeting that Biden withdrawing his candidacy was a good thing for the country. Even the most innocuous bland comment that wasn’t rabidly anti Democratic Party was treated as almost heresy.
It’s just tribalism all the way down.
For all their professed hatred of Iran and the Taliban, Mullahs gonna Mullah.
It's important to stress that a lot of us who stand against these choads ain't necessarily "atheists"; we're "anti-clericalists", in the tradition of Voltaire and Thomas Paine.
That's why the Mullahs hate and fear us so much; because we know the difference between Deities and those who merely think they are.
I think people can overstate the theological sophistication of even leading Christian intellectuals. Two bigshot evangelical intellectuals, David Brody and Scott Lamb, wrote a fawning “spiritual biography” called “The Faith of Donald Trump” that was widely regarded as preposterous, but it sold well because the appetite was there.
Polls suggest white evangelicals not only believe Trump is a sincere Christian, but is actually MORE religious than other Republicans.
It's race. It's not Christianity. Look at the polls.
Christianity has been culturally assimilated to whiteness. It's possible to use ANY religion in a supremacy scheme, though. Cf., India, Turkey, Israel, Sri Lanka, etc., etc.
It's also possible to have a supremacy scheme via opposition to religion. Cf., China.
MAGA is a white supremacy movement. Christians who were white supremacists have long used Christianity.
I don't mind people resenting Christians or Christianity. Unfortunately, the white supremacists have tainted it and stained it with their hatred, sadism, and crimes against humanity--so what can you do?
But please don't assist them in hiding the white supremacy USING Christianity. This is the PURPOSE of their use of it!
I think you might have nailed it with the notion of teams. Pick a side. Doesn’t matter which, but pick it and go all in. It’s a curdled version of what seemed benign enough a lifetime ago with Team Jennifer and Team Angelina: what, we now have to look at a celebrity break-up through a Manichaean lens? Now it’s endemic: if you won’t obediently if meaninglessly chant “Ceasefire now!”, you’re enabling genocide, which is tantamount to committing it yourself. Genocide Joe.
For a long time now I’ve mused on Hitchens’s argument that it’s mad of us to place an intrinsic value on the fact someone “has faith”, even if we don’t share it. The implication is that belief is an inherent virtue, whereas, as Hitchens contested, what it signals is your readiness to take things on trust with no evidential basis.
I think that your last few paragraphs capture the essence of it. What's important is that they wear the hat.
An enormous amount of people on the right side of the political spectrum are either explicitly Christian or they were raised in a community with Christian values -- by which I mean a set of cherished values that have been tied (by the people who teach them) to the Christian faith and that are presumed to be under threat if the faith is removed.
Many of the people on the right aren't religious or, if anything, they are quasi-religious, believing vaguely in a deity and in the idea that something about Jesus is important, but not according it too much thought as they go about their lives. But importantly, that linkage between Christianity and their cherished values remains.
So, politicians who refuse to associate themselves with Christianity are, in essence, positioning themselves as an outsider to those values, at best, and a threat to those values at worst.
The irrationality of this isn't the point. It's not rational: It's associative. The associative game is: Right Wing = Good and Christian, Left Wing = Bad and Satanic. Therefore if a person wants to be a right wing leader they have to get with the game and be Good and Christian. Once the most basic facts are established -- if you're not globally part of a category that's thought of as a "threat," then individual instances of behavior can be overlooked or rationalized away.
There's an unspoken corollary to this as well. If the right winger is supposed to be Good and Christian (but doesn't technically have to: what's important is that they profess just enough to associate themselves with the faith), similarly, the left-winger is supposed to be Bad and Satanic -- and right-wing Christians will very quickly bury any mention or thought of a front-runner's Christianity waaaaaay in the back of their brains, where they don't have to think about it, if that front-runner is a Democrat.
If you want to see it in action all you have to do is inquire with a right-winger about the faith of Obama, Clinton, or Carter. It's possible that Obama's faith is largely performative and social. It's likely that Clinton's was. Carter seems sincere. But what's most important is that they all have long track records of being visibly Christian and yet if you talk with right-wingers and try to bring that into the picture it somehow doesn't compute with them. It's pretty clear that even if they can acknowledge that Democratic candidates might be Christian, nominally, the right-wing Christians can't bring them into the "Christian Identity Tent."
They can barely even do it with Martin Luther King, Jr. Find a Christian Republican grousing about how black activism has gone too far and then try to have a good conversation with them about the Christian underpinnings of the Civil Rights Movement and you'll get to watch as they have to stop and compute the fact that yes, those people were actually Christian. For the most part, the extreme right-wingers I know block it out until it's put in front of their face.
Left-wingers seem much more versatile about the whole thing, at least in the interactions I've had with those of them who are strongly Christian.
I used to live in Saudi Arabia. The supposed "Muslims" there are much the same - say the shahada and you're good.
“The GOP went frothing coo-coo bananas after the Paris Olympics opening ceremony had the audacity to involve a drag performance containing what they dubiously thought was Christian symbolism”
For all of your really solid and well-argued points, this one doesn’t fit. There was nothing dubious about that. I saw a lot of performative anger over it, but the last supper was plainly what they were going for. Had it been whatever Greek god explanation they came up with to explain it away when they got called out, it wouldn’t have taken the 48 hours or so it took for that to come out.
That said, the Trump conversion thing still blows me away. The man doesn’t live like any kind of a Christ-follower, and the embrace of his supposed conversion does far more to push people away from the church than toward it.
The connection between church and political party has also never made sense to me from a biblical perspective. Much of the message is about God’s ability to work under any kind of a regime. Jesus himself was born during a hostile leader’s regime, and he was put to death by the state for blasphemy. God works in mysterious ways indeed.
Political theatre is weird. On the right, it’s performative fealty to Christianity while often living contrary to its tenets. On the left, it’s performative fealty to environmentalism while often living contrary to its tenets.
They understand that polite people don’t look that closely, so they hide behind pretty and good words, like Christian, patriot, and truth. They know nothing about any of these things. They support Russia, not the USA.
So, good people need to do their part and look closer and push back on liars and manipulators as well. Know their tactics. Then they have nothing.
Cruel, judgmental, hypocritical Christianity has existed almost as long as the nice kind, and it’s tended to gather political power since at least the 4th century. It’s not new.
Minor correction - in the U.K. Charles is head of the Church of England.
Scotland and Wales have no established church. Just like in the U.S.
Actually the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland is the official church in Scotland, but I think is Charles is not legally the head.
I didn’t know that, I just know in Wales we are disestablished. I assumed Scotland was similar! Thanks
I am not sure to what degree the Church of Scotland still receives taxpayer funding. But it is considered at least quasi-official, and its history is very different from that of the Church of Wales, which was simply a subdivision of the Church of England before disestablishment in the 1920s. Scottish Episcopalianism exists and was supported by the Stuarts, but the people rejected it, and the later monarchs gave up on it.
Another great piece! Right on the money!
FYI: “God works in mysterious ways” is not how Christians “justify any event.” No point in going into why! Just any FYI.
It reminds me of what Vaclac Havel wrote about ideology in totalitarian states (while still living in USSR vassalized tcheckoslovakia) : everyvody embrace the lies, knowing they are lies, as it IS what makes the system work. Politicians are agents of the ideology as much as the ideology IS their tool.
Matthew 19:21