One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

I see the new right is demonstrating their sobriety and capacity to lead by throwing a performative shitfit about how the
deputy assistant secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition of the Department of Energy dresses. Serious people for serious times.

— TireSlashingHat (@Popehat) February 13, 2022

It’s telling that some folks are angrier that I wrote this piece than at the threats detailed inside or that a man who called for military intervention in the election is rallying Christians by the thousands in churches across America: https://t.co/jXbtiYypEK

— David French (@DavidAFrench) February 13, 2022

"Performative shitfits” are what the internet excels at. When they break out into real life, they run up against the reality of law enforcement (Jan. 6th; truckers in Canada). David French is making the journalist’s argument: “ if I’m pissing people off, I must be doing something right!” But pissing people off is not a standard of verification.

He lists all the ways the churches Flynn is touring are “non-elite” and “out of the mainstream,” and all I hear is Hal Lindsey and “Left Behind” redux. With maybe a dash of Rick Warren for good measure. Not Father Coughlin or even Jerry Falwell; both too mainstream for this discussion, but a great deal more influential in their day.

Then again, so was Jimmy Swaggart. And the Bakkers; another televangelist clown out of Dallas whose name I’ve forgotten. (Dallas was Ground Zero for televangelism once upon a time. Don’t ever think cities can’t change their culture radically. Even that heyday didn’t have a permanent effect. Yes, Jeffress was a big noise when Trump was in office. He was also solidly Southern Baptist (i.e., not fringe). And have you heard from him lately?). And where are they now? Falwell meant to lead a conservative revolution. Where did that end up?

Those who don’t remember The Late Great Planet Earth don’t remember the furor of Xian apocalypticism in the early’70’s, which I still contend was justified by the rise of disco. Or maybe it was inflation, the sexual Revolution, the final years of Vietnam, and just a need for extreme right wing Xians to feel special after the impact of Dr. King. No, Hal Lindsey was not the clear and present danger Michael Flynn may be, but he was briefly very influential in making everyone wonder if the End was not at hand. And arguably he paved the way for televangelists and Jerry Falwell (who led the return to/recovery of racism following the Cuvil Rights movement), if only by giving extremists in Xianity a public identity to rally around. And then came the Left Behind books, following in Lindsay’s footsteps. And almost as quickly vanishing 

Robert Tilton was the smiling set of teeth who taught everyone after him how to fleece the rubes for Jesus. Remember him? I almost don’t, yet for a time he ruled the televangelical airwaves from Dallas. He was soon supplanted by Jimmy Swaggart, Oral (and then son Richard) Roberts; Jim and Tammy Faye, of course. Remember any of them? Where are they now?

Remember when Rick Warren was such a big deal he hosted a candidate's meeting/debate between Obama and McCain?  Whatever happened to Rick Warren?  I'll even give you one from the other side of the aisle: Reinhold Niebuhr.  He wrote "The Serenity Prayer," although nobody really cares.  He was on the cover of Time Magazine.  Aside from obscure theologians and bloggers (raises hand!), who remembers him?  He was a major religious/theological influence in the '50's.  Where is he now?

The paranoid style in American politics is matched by the lust for power in American Xianity, especially among the right wing churches. This thirst for power that upsets Mr. French so is as American as tent revivals and Puritanism. This isn’t something new under the sun: its roots lie in Plymouth Colony.  It re-emerges from time to time, especially as denominations become socially dominant.  Baptists were once on the receiving end of the church-state split, and strongly favored the state leaving them alone.  Now that Southern Baptists are the best known denomination, and wield great political power in the South (in Houston, to this day, police officer funerals all but default to Second Baptist.  That practice has waned a bit in recent years, but only very recently.).  With great power comes great responsibility, and suddenly Southern Baptists feel responsible for keeping us all right-wing and very politically conservative.  Once you've saved souls, you have to save the world from bad politics.

'Twas ever thus.  Marginal Christian movements (like the Pentecostals Mr. French cites) either whither into obscurity (like the Primitive Baptist church of my grandparents, still a fringe group of loosely affiliated churches which carry on their ecclesiology without much worrying about worldly matters like politics, local or national), or get closer to the seat of power and like the taste of it.  I visited a UCC church in St. Louis whose heyday was in the days when St. Louis itself was prominent in the nation, and in Missouri.  It was the church the Mayor attended (almost by compulsion), the one the Governor visited when he came to town.  The church had its own china pattern and sterling flatware pattern, and a staff of cooks to prepare meals for all the important occassions and VIP's the church regularly hosted.  The staff is gone, the kitchen abandoned, the china and silver in museum cases in the church.  No one else cares, no one else remembers, and St. Louis itself is a ghost of the glory it once had.  The fairgrounds of the World's Fair there are more honored in neglect than in up keeping, although the aviary still stands.  Sic transit gloria.  And that church?  Practically empty when I visited; living largely on the memory of it's glory days, then almost a century gone.

So it goes.  So it always goes.

Mr. French identifies three claims about what he calls "MAGA Christian nationalism."  They are:

First, MAGA Christian nationalism is emotional and spiritual, not intellectual or ideological. 

Second, MAGA Christian nationalism is concentrated in the churches most removed from elite American culture, including from elite Evangelicalism. 

Third, MAGA Christian nationalism is often rooted in purported prophecies. 

None of this is new, or even news.  Most of the televangelists I grew up with had tenuous connections to denominations, and they never touted them. Their pitch was always emotional, never intellectual.  And far too many of them (Pat Robertson most famously would close his eyes on camera and "prophesy") dealt in purported prophecies.  It's what apocalypticism was built on, and that was wildly popular in the last 3 decades of the last century.

But now I’m supposed to be afraid of Michael Flynn, who doesn’t even have the star power of Oral Roberts (who never had the power if Falwell or Pat Robertson)? Because crazy white people are…crazy white people?  I mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr a moment ago.  He was writing about/against the slightly less crazy variations of this strand of American Christianity in 1932.  Slightly less crazy.  Not really less crazy. Same as it ever freaking was.

Frankly, this should be more disturbing:

Supporters raised $8.7 million for the truckers and other protesters through the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, and hackers found that many of the donors left violent or otherwise troubling messages alongside their contributions, reported Vice.

“We have 2A here in America send your mounties and see what happens,” “CABAL PIGLETS ARE CORRUPT CRIMINALS WHO NEED SEVERE PUNISHMENT UNDER LAW,” and “Death to all liberal traitors,” read some of the messages.

Go Fund Me made the right call.  But crazy white people gonna be crazy white people.  So what else is new?

And I’m not angry with Mr. French or what he posted. I’m just tired of the Chicken Littles and Cassandras screaming louder and louder to get attention.  The world is not coming to an end; and there is indeed nothing new under the sun.