My friend and philosopher Keith Parsons reported to me last week about a health problem and treatment that left him with “brain fog”—and he said he doubted if he’d be submitting any columns for a bit. Then he submitted this, saying the fog seemed to have cleared. Agree or disagree with his words here, I think you’ll agree that there’s not a hint of brain fog to be seen.
I thank Keith for his kind words about our book and these Letters… .
CHRISTIAN FEMINIST KICKS BUTT
Keith Parsons
I remember conservatism. I used to watch William F. Buckley's Firing Line for Buckley's witty and polysyllabic exchanges with various interlocutors. I read his columns in the op/ed section of the newspaper as well as the essays of George Will and James J. Kilpatrick. I enjoyed Kilpatrick's spirited sparring with Shana Alexander on the point/counterpoint segment of Sixty Minutes (I equally relished Dan Ackroyd's parody on SNL: "Jane, you ignorant slut!"). I seldom agreed with the conservative pundits, but there was always content for intelligent debate. Conservatism was a coherent philosophy that could be defended with evidence and argument, however vigorously liberals like myselfmight dispute those defenses.
What passes under the name of "conservatism" today is not a coherent viewpoint but a noxious stew of resentments, conspiracy theories, religious fundamentalism, authoritarianism, racism, sexism, gun fetishism, assorted phobias (xeno-, Islamo-, homo-, trans-), antiscience, and sheer lunacy. More than anything else it is a vitriolic, visceral (and violent) hatred of anything and anybody that can (however absurdly) be identified as "liberal." The Republican Party, formerly the moderate-to-conservative party, is now a cult consisting (except for a few remaining "RINOs") of true-believing Trumpists and cowardly enablers. "Conservatism" now willingly embraces groups of extremist thugs such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
What happened? That question will keep cadres of historians, sociologists, and political scientists busy for years. I think, though, that one central factor that surely has been both cause and effect of the decline of conservatism to "conservatism," has been the rise of Christian Nationalism (CN). The basic affirmation of CN is that America is a Christian nation. They do not mean this in the innocuous demographic sense that the majority of Americans have historically and do now identify as Christian (evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, or other):
https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/
They make the much stronger claim that the American polity was founded upon explicitly Christian principles and that, except for precluding the establishment of a national church, the principle of separation of church and state is false and pernicious. Government at every level and in every branch should function to promote Christian doctrine—as such doctrines are interpreted by the ultra-conservative proponents of CN. In short, fundamentalist Christians should be in charge of everything.
From the founding of the country there have been theocrats, those who sought to base the American project on their version of Christianity. They were solidly opposed by the founders, who created the first constitution in the history of the world that invoked the authority of We the People rather than God, and who consistently affirmed the secular basis of American law and government. Yet the theocrats abided, sometimes in the shadows and sometimes out in the open. Now they are numerous, wealthy, organized, politically influential, and dead serious in pursuing their Christian America project. Donald Trump, their meretricious messiah, delivers the goods—like a Supreme Court packed with anti-abortion zealots. Their ultimate goal is to produce an America not very different from the Gilead of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale—authoritarian, patriarchal, and repressive.
In an effort to understand the history and substance of CN, I read Michelle Goldberg's 2006 book Kingdom Coming. I reviewed that book here:
https://infidels.org/library/modern/keith-parsons-kingdom/
For those who do not feel like reading the entire review, allow me to quote myself:
Goldberg is an investigative journalist who spent a great deal of time getting to know some of the religious right activists and attending their conferences and gatherings. She found many of them to be personally affable and cordial, but, she notes, when she was a reporter assigned to the Middle East, she observed a similar phenomenon: People, all warmth and smiles, would invite you into their homes and serve you tea but the next day would cheerfully send a suicide bomber to blow up people like you. Likewise, when the cameras are rolling, Pat Robertson can turn on the good ol’ boy charm and the “aw, shucks” grin that would make you think he was Andy Griffith. But,Goldberg makes clear, these are not nice people. Their easygoing demeanor masks deep and virulent hatreds and crusading zeal. They are self-righteous and confident to a degree that is possible only for those who have achieved the sublime certainty and clarity of the fanatic.
Though now eighteen years old, Goldberg's book remains relevant and informative. The only problem with Kingdom Coming is that it is largely a work of investigative journalism and not a critique. Two new books bring us up to date and expose the pathologies at the heart of CN. From a Christian feminist perspective, there is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University. The fact that a Calvinist university would have a feminist on faculty is itself a sign of progress. From another Christian perspective, we have The False White Gospel by Jim Wallis. Wallis is a professor at Georgetown and a longtime thorn in the side of hypocrites and the complacently self-righteous (To see how much he threatens them, look at the hysterical comments of the one-star reviewers on Amazon.)
Here I will review De Mez's book and save the Wallis book for a later post.
Why not include a critique from the atheist perspective? This has been done superbly by our host Ed Buckner and his son Michael in their book In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty. The Buckners take up many of the claims of CN and dismantle them one-by-one. Readers of Letters to a Free Country have already been familiarized with much of its contents in Ed's regular Friday posts. Further, my reason for focusing on Christian critiques is that the arguments of an atheist, however cogent, are easily dismissed. However, critiques by those with impeccable Christian credentials have to be taken seriously. Nothing scares bad religion as much as good religion.
For outsiders like me, the enthusiasm of white evangelical Christians for Donald Trump was an enigma. Here is a man of the grossest vulgarity, the basest character, and the most ungodly demeanor imaginable. An enthusiastic and utterly unrepentant sinner, Trump wallows in all seven of the deadly sins: pride, sloth, gluttony, rage, avarice, envy, and lust. He doesn't miss a one. Weren't evangelical Christians the ones who shouted loudest that "character matters" during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal? I recall my short-lived sense of relief in 2016 when the Access Hollywood video came out with Trump bragging about how he could grab women by the genitals. Surely, I thought, this is it for the Trump campaign. Anybody claiming to be a Christian cannot possibly support him now. Wrong. The support of white evangelicals did not waver. How could this be?
Du Mez argues that for evangelicals the Trump persona was a feature not a bug. That is, the evangelical support of Trump was not at all hypocritical, but perfectly consistent with their real values. Despite abundant lip service, the Jesus of the Gospels means nothing to them. They want a tough guy, a badass, someone who, far from turning the other cheek, will kick butt and take names. They want Rambo, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, or John Wayne—the all-American hero who never backs down and wins every fight. They want rugged masculinity not the Lamb of God. Du Mez explains it like this:
...for many evangelicals, Donald Trump did not represent the betrayal of many of the values they had come to hold dear. His testosterone fueled masculinity aligned remarkably well with that long championed by conservative evangelicals. What makes for a strong leader? A virile (white) man. And what of his vulgarity? Crudeness? Bombast? Even sexual assault? Well, boys will be boys. God-given testosterone came with certain side-effects, but an aggressive and even reckless masculinity was precisely what was needed when dealing with the enemy (268).
I do not have anything against masculinity. I like beer, football, and war movies. You got a problem with that? Further, we absolutely need tough guys. There is a famous quote attributed to George Orwell: “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” We need cops, and sometimes cops have to hit people or even shoot them. We need the US Marines. We need Navy Seals. However, we also need people and policies in charge of these tough guys to make sure that they display their toughness where and when it is needed and only then.
To my mind, the timeless paradigm of tough-guy masculinity is Hector of Troy. In a heartbreaking passage (Iliad, Book Six) --one of the greatest in all literature—mankilling Hector, victor of a hundred combats, returns from battle and is met by his wife Andromache and their little child. She begs him for their sake to let others lead in battle; surely, he has done his share. Hector is deeply grieved, but tells her that to be a coward, to forsake his people in their time of direst need, would be to abandon all honor, and that he cannot do even for her and their child. In ancient Greece, where the works of Homer were the closest thing to a bible, if a boy asked how to be a man, the answer was "Be like Hector."
Du Mez is not offering a hackneyed rant against "toxic masculinity." She brilliantly traces the development of modern evangelicalism and how it abandoned Christian principles for a cult of hyper-masculine violence. She traces the history of evangelical Christianity since the First World War, showing how its ideals of masculinity developed over time. I cannot summarize all those developments here, so let me focus on two that are very revealing: the idea of the "tender warrior" as defining the ideal Christian man and Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman as defining the ideal Christian woman.
In the nineteen nineties, Bill McCartney was the head football coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes. As Du Mez tells it, he got a wake-up call when his daughter became pregnant by one of his players (150). He converted from Catholicism to evangelicalism and founded the Promise Keepers, a Christian men's organization, that quickly grew to hundreds of thousands of members. The Promise Keepers [not to be confused with the Oath Keepers] offered a new understanding of Christian masculinity. A real man does not have to be storming the beaches of Iwo Jima or shooting it out with Frank Miller at high noon. The theory of "servant leadership" articulated a softer, gentler masculinity:
...servant leadership framed male authority as obligation, sacrifice, and service. Men were urged to accept their responsibilities, to work hard, to serve their wives and families, to eschew alcohol, gambling, and pornography, to step up around the home, and to be present in their children's lives (153).
Yet one thing was still clear. The man was to be in charge. As Tony Evans, one of the leading Promise Keepers authors insisted, men should not ask for the role of family leader; they should take it (154).
I remember when the Southern Baptists endorsed the concept of "servant leadership." They said that a man must treat his wife and family with pure agape love; he leads to serve. They implied that any woman should be struck dumb with gratitude for the opportunity to be part of such an arrangement. No matter how you sliced it, though, the man was still the boss. Servant leadership was still what Du Mez calls "soft patriarchy (154)." It was never the idea of a genuine partnership between equals. Even in its softer phase, the evangelical conception of the family remained strictly hierarchical and patriarchal. Besides, the tender tone was short-lived. In 2001 John Eldredge published Wild at Heart, which reverted back to a militant conception of masculinity—and sold more than four million copies (173).
The 1991 movie Fried Green Tomatoes has a hilarious scene in which Kathy Bates' character tries to recharge her dead-battery husband by greeting him at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap. He responds, "Good heavens, woman! Get away from the door before someone sees you!" Contrary to popular belief, Marabel Morgan never recommended Saran Wrap seduction, but, according to Du Mez, she thought it was a "great idea (62)." Morgan's The Total Woman, published in 1973, presented her ideal of Christian womanhood. Clearly, it resonated with many women. Half a million copies were sold in the first year, and eventually ten million were bought (60). In a decade of flourishing feminism, The Total Woman was the complete antithesis.
Morgan told women that their job was to make their husbands feel virile and sexy. A man's ego should be nurtured, and his authority not questioned. Women were to enthusiastically accept their subservient role and not to emasculate their husbands by competing with them or ever nagging or belittling them. Above all, women were to be sexy and sexually available. In short, the ideal Christian woman does everything she can to make her husband meet the Christian ideal of masculinity—to be a tough, confident, sexually potent, take-charge kind of guy. Her success consisted in being a reflection of his success.
It is clear why feminists referred to Morgan's book as "The Totaled Woman" and venomously vituperated it. Yet they had to face the fact that millions of women preferred Marabel Morgan to Betty Friedan. Du Mez explains:
For many housewives, the new opportunities feminism promised were not opportunities at all. To those who had few employable skills and no means or desire to escape the confines of their homes, feminism seemed to denigrate their very identity and threaten their already precarious existence. It was better to play the cards they were dealt (64).
Millions of women regarded feminists as overprivileged and overeducated elitists who looked down on them and insulted their beliefs. This resentment was made politically powerful by Phyllis Schlafly who harnessed that energy to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.
Du Mez's book is fun to read, a real page-turner. She is also unquestionably right that "traditional" concepts of gender roles are basic to the evangelical worldview. God has put men in charge. In a Christian America, women would be second-class citizens, and would not be sovereign over their own bodies. Some on the fringes are even saying that women should not vote. We have seen, though, how fringes can become mainstream. Gilead, here we come!
So, is Du Mez's book the definitive analysis? Should we see the rise of militant evangelicalism as an excrescence of hyper-masculinity? One thing I share with the postmodernists is a skepticism of metanarratives—grand narratives that purport to tell the whole story. A history of the rise of militant evangelicalism could just as plausibly see racism rather than sexism as the key factor. The point is that human events are complexly caused, and no reductive analysis can give the complete story. The human mind craves simplicity, and we all have axes to grind, so we tend to elevate a factor to the whole story.
For one thing, we should not forget that fundamentalism is, inter alia, a religious movement. All religions offer a sense of orientation, laying a grid of coordinates on a threatening and confusing reality. You are here. This is who you are. These are the things that matter. Fundamentalism is the extreme example of this, a kind of spiritual algorithm, that tells you in every situation what to do and how to think. There are no ambiguities, no gray areas, no uncertainties. In no area of life do you have to make your own decisions, and hence you take no risks and are spared the hard work of thinking things out for yourself. Every question has a right answer and a wrong answer, and you are given all the right answers.
CN extends these personal certainties into the political realm where fundamentalists invert the feminist mantra that the personal is the political. For CN, the political is the personal, that is, your personal life is made a matter of public concern and control. I said earlier that CN is authoritarian in nature. Actually, it is probably better to say that it is totalitarian, seeking to bring every aspect of life under ideological control. To find out what life in Christian America would be like, read Orlando Figes' The Whisperers about life during Stalin's Great Terror.
Finally, I think I would expand a bit on Du Mez's analysis of Trump’s appeal. How does an obese septuagenarian who never served in the military and who has never demonstrated any physical prowess fit the macho image? He may be a physical blob, but he sure talks tough. Real tough. And he doesn't care what anybody thinks. Mexicans are rapists. Liberals are vermin. Criminals are animals. Journalists are enemies of the people. He never apologizes, never explains, and never backs down. If he is called out for a lie, he just lies louder. Trump is the quintessential bad boy, and every bad boy wannabe can vicariously kick ass through Trump as he sticks it to the libs, calls out the snooty Europeans, derides the journalists, and defies the smarty-pants experts.
A few years ago, many bumpers sported a sticker informing us that their child was an honor student at XYZ school. Other bumpers, often on pickup trucks, jeeps, and hummers, had a sticker reading, "My kid beat up your honor student." Now that is Trumpism in a nutshell.
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And, surprise, surprise, "Fifth Down" Bill McCartney is a thoroughgoing homophobe.
Love the illustration! When Trump embraced the flag, I expected to see him fling it away screaming, "It burns! It burns!"