There are times, when reading the sprawling “Shadowland” package at The Atlantic, when one is tempted to think that the goal was to weave a massive liberal conspiracy theory about the role that conservative conspiracy theories play in Donald Trump’s America.
At the center of this drama — of course — is evangelical Christianity. After all, evangelical Christians are to blame for Trump’s victory, even if they didn’t swing all those crucial states in the Catholic-labor Rust Belt.
It’s almost as if evangelicals are playing, for some strategic minds on the left, the same sick, oversized role in American life that some evangelicals assign to Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates and all those liberal Southern Baptist intellectuals who love Johnny Cash and Jane Austen
Let’s focus on this piece: “The Prophecies of Q.” Toward the end, a fervent supporter of Trump and the mysterious QAnon offers her credo. It’s clear that she speaks for, you know, millions of people hiding like terrorist sleeper cells in ordinary pews from coast to coast.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/I find stories like the above frustrating because I still identify as an evangelical and even as a moderately conservative one in doctrinal terms, but as I've gotten older I've realized that growing up Pentecostal and shifting to the Reformed scene my rapid and emphatic rejection of dispensationalist futurism meant that I couldn't agree with a lot of American Christian ideas with respect to the church and society, whether the legacy of smug entitled mainlines that have become liberal and progressive in the last century but whose earlier legacy was in some ways brutal with respect to Native American cultures; or the Christian Right's craven attempts to take up the dominionist tendencies that were in the mainlines during the Manifest Destiny period under some kind of dispensationalist-futurist panic system rather than postmillenialist entitlement. In other words the Religious Right took up those aspects of cultural engineering a sacralist American system that I found most objectionable in the mainline traditions while doing so from an alternately postmillenialist perspective (more common in the nineteenth century mainlines) or a dispensationalist approach (more evangelical and charismatic in the last century).
I've touched on this at a page here but my theological/political convictions are a perhaps uneasy mixture of Edmund Burke, Roger Williams and Jacques Ellul. I do not think Christians follow the way of Christ using the power of the state to implement or enforce what only the Spirit can bring to life in the heart of believers. When Paul wrote that we are not to judge outsiders I find that something worth taking seriously, and that is in a sense a core error in progressive and reactionary wings of American politicized religion because the aim in both cases is a kind of sacralized state, a conflation of Christian life and practice with civic religion that I find objectionable in the duopolistic directions it tends to go with the DNC and GOP. You can vote for whomever you want as a matter of personal convictions, just don't use Jesus as your excuse, okay?
I think that the United States is more likely to be the latest iteration of Babylon the Great than a light to the nations. From my perspective it's the people who see "Jesus" in or at work in the activity of a Trump or a Clinton or a whomever who have reverse-engineered Christ to fit an Americanist civic religion that I regard as a falsehood. Maybe it's partly due to having that split Native American Calvinist/white Arminian background but I grew up hearing that the American Civil War was a conflict in which the white racist assholes from the North fought the white racist assholes from the South about how to treat black people and once that was over they all agreed it was the Manifest Destiny for them to conquer and/or massacre the Indians. When you grow up hearing from Native relatives that, no, son, there weren't any "good guys" in the American Civil War even if we can be glad for the sake of black people that Lincoln's side won rather than Davis', that may impact your sensibilities about American history. The founding fathers were guys who owned slaves but the ideals they failed to live up to can still be ideals we can affirm as good ideals to aspire to.
As the post Cold War United States has balkanized the blue and red partisans seem to have regarded each other as both sides used to regard the Soviet threat. It's as though generations of Cold War propagandistic techniques and ideological battles turned inward in lieu of having any external enemy and thus we're at a point where an author at The Atlantic can consider this in the smaller context of QAnon, although my sense is that the paranoia spans the entire red/blue or blue/red divide in the United States. I have a lot of doubts about the loss of the "deep literacy" that has been discussed by a George Steiner or at National Affairs.
I have been frustrated by a sense, which may just be my own perception of things, that thought leaders among white progressives and reactionaries have had an easier time scapegoating each other for the cumulative sins of white supremacist ideologies and policies than considering the shared legacy of harm. Does that mean critical race theory is correct across the board? I'm not so sure about that. I've registered my concern about the Wesley Morris approach to African diaspora pop music in the United States as being too beholden to the Romantic era scripts that I believe we need to reject.
There can be a kind of Romantic era millenarian philosophy of history in a Marxist and an American Calvinist camp in which there's core ideas in common. I actually have a begrudging admiration for Theodor Adorno now that I've read half a dozen of his books. I think he was catastrophically wrong about a lot of things but the dour Calvinist in me can't help but admire how his fusilades against the American idol factory can line up with the historically Reformed concern about how the human heart is an idol factory and it's possible for me to say that and say that Adorno's chauvinistic elitist tendencies were maybe less racist than R. L. Dabney's but that both men were beholden to the bigotries of their time in ways that doesn't have to impel me to say they can't be worth reading.
We live in an era where I have come to believe that Americans across the spectrum are functionally totalitarians and have exempted themselves from seeing themselves as totalitarians on the basis of the stories they tell themselves. The problem may not be fast and lazy reading as ideologically driven reading. Marxists read Marxists, super Calvinist Americans read super Calvinist Americans as though the European Reformers were but a precursor to John MacArthur or Jonathan Edwards. Americans treat too much of world history as functionally a prelude to America as the salvation or damnation of all human life as we know it. I've vented some spleen about how Americans would rather make movies about the end of the world than imagine a world that isn't saved or doomed by the United States and my thoughts on that have not really changed. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy superhero movies like The Dark Knight, Black Panther or Into the Spider-verse. I plan to catch Wonder Woman 1984 when it comes out, for instance. The entitled messianism of Americans in superhero films is at least more upfront than it is in films that have a patina of historical drama like The Post or Argo.
The kinds of people who believe there's a plandemic would be even more crazy in their conspiratorial thinking of Clinton had won in 2016. I was once advised by a history teacher to avoid resorting to conspiracy theories to explain things that are as readily or more readily explained by incompetence. A lot of people have a history of responding to disasters in disastrous ways and disastrously making disastrously wrong calls about what is likely to happen. To translate that advice into contemporary terms, I've gotten a sense in the paranoid conspiracy theories across the left, right and center that it's possible for conspiracy theorist types to impute to others totalitarian impulses that exist within them.
I just finished Eric Oberle's monograph on Adorno and negative identity, by the way, which I was 3/4ths done with a month ago, and so I have had time to read about Adorno's comments to the effect that fascist personalities can have a propensity to impute their own totalizing views on to the Other they regard as a class/caste/race enemy and that this is endemic within liberalism rather than being some outlier or splinter. Every American, in other words, can be some kind of paranoid Nazi on behalf of a cause, whether ostensibly "conservative" or "liberal" and that the distance between a "normal" person and an ideologically motivated participant in a technocratic oligarchic surveillance state system is shorter than American liberals have generally wanted to believe.
In that sense, okay, maybe Adorno and Horkheimer sorta kinda anticipated the possibility of totalitarianism in the United States, it just turned out it wasn't Eisenhower; it's a half century later in the era we live in during which has a Cold War postlude--we seem to be at a moment in which the right is constantly regarding anything that isn't some form of neoliberalism as communism within the progressive scene regardless of whether or not Marx is ever name-dropped (and I guess I might as well say I can have some sympathy for non-Marxist progressives who want the United States to consistently live out and live by ts best stated ideals), and some within the DNC wing have literally sold a story that Russia hacked the 2016 election in a way that seems far too conspiratorial, as though epic gerrymandering and voter suppression/identification policies and redistricting the U.S. so that Trump gained an electoral college beat down on Clinton couldn't more readily explain HRC's loss than the Russiagate account.
We're in a pandemic in which people who want to talk about how many rights would be taken away have, in the Reformed neck of the woods, been relatively sympathetic to the kinds of Reformed theologians and pastors in the past who would have been just fine with denying the franchise or state education to blacks. I'm part of a PCA church, okay, so it's not lost on me that the PCA has had some baggage related to racism and the South that at least some of its leaders are dealing with.
All of which is rather indirect about the Atlantic article. The conflation of reactionary racist ideologies with evangelicalism didn't come from nowhere and there are no doubt hundreds of books on the topic. On the other hand, a David Treuer can point out in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee that progressives in the early twentieth century who disenfranchised Indians or attempted to obliterate their culture in the way they implemented schools were, as best they understood things, trying to help American Indians move up in society. One of the frustrations I have had with contemporary progressive/reactionary discourse is that it has tended to treat race narratives in totalitarian contemporary terms that seem more indicative of generations of Cold War and post Cold War media saturation than a nuanced engagement with historical materials--it's possible for someone to have been very progressive on womens' suffrage and the race question with respect to blacks who could envertheless turn around and want to see Native Americans erased from the American cultural landscape. This may be something I can't help thinking about because my dad was Native American and my mom's white. I have not had the luxury of thinking about these questions in terms as binary as people on Twitter or in mainstream coverage have too often made them. The legacy of evangelicalism and what would now be called Christian fundamentalism is not quite as monolithic as tends to be said, even if that's 80 to 90 percent the case. :)
That a Religious Right that denounced Bill Clinton twenty years ago has embraced a GOP Bill Clinton is aggravating to me because I have found both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump ... unsavory ... as human beings ... to state my convictions in a delicate way. I don't take the power brokers in the DNC and the GOP seriously with regard to the double standards that have had to be in play about "us" vs "them". So for me the Religious Right has harmed its credibility not for being conservative as such but for the pitiless realpolitik with which some of them have decided DT is the man of the hour because as derived from the kind of End Times dispensationalist eschatological systems I rejected twenty years ago Trump may be bad but the alternatives are worse.
My frustration with evangelicalism in the last twenty years, despite still considering myself one, is that American evangelicalism has tended to fixate on matters of status and prestige, matters of politics and political influence. Being a musician and writer by hobby I find it frustrating that evangelicals have, as Mark Noll put it, not had much concern about the life of the mind. So, at the risk of referring to my own work, one of the reasons I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms was to demonstrate that someone with an evangelical low church Protestant background can devote a hundred and thirty pages to thinking through the aesthetic and formal problems involved in bridging the gap between American popular styles developed and pioneered by African American musicians (and others, too, even if Joplin remains King of Ragtime with all possible cause) and "European" eighteenth century musical syntactics. I don't think anyone has to be a Christian of any kind to find what I wrote useful or beneficial, if it is in any way beneficial or useful, but for any possibly Christian readers Ragtime and Sonata Forms can be thought of as a kind of objection to the tendency in conservative evangelical writing in the United States or U.K to fixate on 1) politics 2) sex 3) status with respect to why people don't think evangelicals have any intellectually serious contributions to make to society. The fixations on 1 and 2 tend to explain 3 as a matter of course.
Seeing as one of the most troubling and fractious divides in musicology, music history and post Cold War debates abut the arts has been the chasm that is imagined to separate African diaspora popular styles and the European canon as distilled by nineteenth century pedagogues and critics and has been exacerbated since the high modernist trends of the late late Romantic era known as the 20th century (HT to Leonard B. Meyer for that hilarious phrase "late, late Romantic", I have felt obliged both in Christian terms and in terms of being the son of an interracial marriage, to try to make some contribution to bridging the gap between pop and classical.
It's hard to take people who take QAnon seriously to begin with, but American evangelicals are still distinct from Pentecostals and charismatics, and there are times when I get a sense that religiously illiterate journalists by background and choice tend to collapse all of these groups, which is something Mattingly gets at in the GetReligion piece linked above. Gospel scholar Anthony Heilbut has correctly noted in The Fan Who Knew Too Much are actually not the same as the traditionally evangelical, and has pointed out that once you know the distinctions between evangelicals and charismatics/pentecostals it is easier to notice that the Trump era ascent of Paula White was partly presaged by a rise in the status of Pentecostals during the Obama terms. To translate it a bit for those who are not religiously observant, the evangelical Religious Right that emerged and evolved in the Carter/Reagan/Bush I era and was a foe of Clinton twenty years ago is not necessarily the Religious Right in which Paula White and other prosperity teachers who are spiritually descendants of T. D. Jakes (whose anti-gay stances Heilbut considers bad among the black churches, whom he regards as even more virulently homophobic than white conservative churches have been). If journalists don't keep up with the mind-bending insider baseball it will be easy to just use "evangelical" without understanding that many historically evangelical groups would consider prosperity teachers like Paula White to be utter heretics.
Whether it's Russian hacking or pulling a Frank Schaeffer and holding all evangelicals singularly responsible for the election of Trump conspiracy theories may be easier to see others holding than if you hold to one or any of them yourself. As an evangelical I find the Frank Schaeffers and the Eric Metaxas types to be unscrupulous grifters whose business literally depends upon being able to sell paranoid theories about how someone else is to blame for everything that has gone wrong with America and how this one president, whether it was Obama for a Schaeffer or Trump for someone like a Metaxas, is the incarnation of some divine plan for salvation for the United States and, of course, by extension the world.
Members of the press who are literally selling stories and books on all of the ways that the systems of governance have been delegitimized by the nature of recent conspiracy thinking probably don't intend to contribute to the problem they chronicle but we seem to be in a moment where a ripple effect can kick in anyway. Thinking in terms of a United States post-World War II pax Americana that was dismantled after the Cold War by dint of American policies across the two parties may have its legion of problems but I have found that thinking in that way, thinking that the United States took itself down from the pedestal it placed itself on for the world's veneration by dint of graft and military overreach and outsourcing too much of its manufacturing base during the era of deregulation to be able make America great again regardless of who gets voted in and that the empire was going to over-extend itself anyway has one possible point in its favor, it makes a person less likely to feel a need for conspiracy theories that Russia hacked the election of that Pizzagate is the least bit plausible. Explaining why American is no longer looked to as the "leader" of the world isn't necessary to me and leading the world isn't something any nation should want because it's only possible to be a light of the world in your own eyes if you have too high a view of your national value.
Whether in its red state form or blue state form a sacralized American state isn't something I think any of us should want, liberal, conservative or whatever--and if evangelicals or religious right leaders err in wanting that now a more searching investigation into how and why they might have gotten the idea of a manifest destiny that stops at the point where the mainlines can be exonerated because they don't officially endorse that stuff now is stopping at a point that is still beholden to a story in which it's only the religious right that has sought to or actually wielded the power of the state to create America in its own image. The religious right has by and large never had anyone even close to smart enough to come up with those kinds of ideas but if you read about the roles some mainline intellectuals played in the World War II and Cold War era there was enough intellectual capital in the Protestant mainlines, which makes evangelical bids at replicating for the right what the mainlines did within a more liberal context in the Cold War United States come across as a teensy bit ironic.
POSTSCRIPT 4.30p
https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/05/22/eric-metaxas-goes-twitter-blackface/
Last time I paid any attention to Metaxas was because he was willing to write an endorsement for the Driscoll book Win Your War.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/10/mark-and-grace-driscoll-book-win-your.html
Now I consider it unfortunate Michael Heiser was willing to endorse the Driscoll book ...
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/01/dear-jim-west-michael-s-heiser-wrote.html
but Heiser is not an author whose basic credibility on his set of subjects I doubt, whereas Metaxas has come across to me as basically a high-level shill. Some folks I know think he started off okay but then became famous and sold out, and that could correspond to some comments from some progressive folks I know who thought Matthew Paul Turner started okay and then became a hack sell-out. Which is a perhaps unhappily terse way of saying that the self-help gurus and political hack activism that is rampant in evangelicalism and the emergent scene for the right and left or the red and the blue seems to be down to the nature of the very literal business of making the books. Thus fans of Nadia Bolz-Weber and Mark Driscoll will convince themselves they are fans of "opposite" people despite the fact that if a careful reader with a theological and literary background that can span the liberal/conservative doctrine and political divides can find out that both of these self-help gurus have used the same gimmicks to sell self-help books.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/04/nadia-bolz-weber-mark-driscoll-20-for.html
Something similar can be done for Mark Driscoll and Dan Savage, men whose combative brands were intertwined for a good decade in terms of how they would play their respective fanbases against each other's fanbases. Whatever your confessional/convictional team people like Savage and Driscoll are the kinds we need less of in American popular and mass media.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-dan-savage-age-of-mark-driscolls.html
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