According to surveys, 84% of people worldwide identify with a religion. Those who do identify with a religion typically derive comfort and joy from it. This is true of most Christians. Christianity, at its essence, is about sharing blessings. For those who believe, the very existence of Christ is a blessing. And that blessing is to be shared with others, so that others may be blessed. Indeed, all of life for a Christian is about sharing one’s blessings and blessing others.
So, for example, if one is in good health, one thanks God for the blessing of good health. And one uses one’s blessings to bless others. In one’s life, and actions, and beliefs, and yes, in one’s votes, one chooses to bless others. Which would mean, and this is not a difficult concept, voting for measures, and supporting them and enacting them, that support the good health of others. One votes for health. Not just for one’s own health, in gratitude, but for the health of others. As a witness to the abundance and blessings of God.
Put bluntly, you believe universal health care is a human right. You believe it is a human right because God has shown his blessings by making health care, and good health, something that humans can achieve. You thank God for this grace – and you share it with others.
The anti-Christian religious right does not support universal health care. The anti-Christian religious right does not believing in blessing others. The anti-Christian religious right disavows the core tenets and principles of Christianity. Because the anti-Christian religious right hates Christianity.
And because the anti-Christian religious right hates Christianity, it is trying to destroy it from within. The anti-Christian religious right likes to keep its references to the Bible, Christianity, and all the other things its co-opts nice and superficial. It discourages a deep dive into the Bible or anything else that might help the moral sense of its adherents flourish.
Selling Fear
What the anti-Christian religious right is selling – is not Christianity – but fear. The idea is to take people who are already anxious, perhaps justifiably so, and amp up the fear until their lives are so emotionally painful that they become dependent on the very people who make their livings frightening them.
If you actually believe in the Lord of Christianity, then you believe that the Lord is revealed by gifts – not punishments. The Lord is revealed through beauty – not ugliness.
Now I will admit that the Republican party has been a gift to the anti-Christian right wing. You can kind of tell by the presidents they help elect – who are often neither church-goers (Reagan) nor Christian (Trump). Because although the religious right brands itself as ‘Christian’, it despises those (like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama) who are truly devoted Christians.
A Christian heart is filled with gratitude. A true Christian heart worries less because it is supported by faith in the Lord, and it is not inclined to listen to the siren song of fear and hatred and ugliness, because in God it has nothing to fear.
The true Christian makes enemies of no one. True Christians buoy themselves with faith and belief in themselves as they believe in God and believe in others. True Christians enjoy life, and the company of others, and the society that supports them. And a true Christian is always ready to help others.
It’s not that true Christians don’t have issues in life or regrets or any of the other ills that make us all human. It’s that true Christians have a specific source of pain relief in the form of the Bible and that makes it unnecessary for them to lash out at others.
Albeit, a true Christian isn’t conservative either. A true Christian believes in the bounty of the Lord and does not seek to deny it to anyone. If Christ is the model of excellence on which Christianity is based – then the true Christian takes kindness as the ideal to strive for.
Pride and the anti-Christian religious right
Kindness is not the ideal that the anti-Christian religious right lives by – it is pride. The religious right is not about religion at all. It is about pride – and the attempt of people to restore it when they feel they no longer have it.
This is an interesting, not to say happy, twist (perversion) on deeply religious, philosophical and psychological themes. So now even some scientific researchers say that the religious right’s emphasis on pride is closing the door on virtue in those adhere to the religious right’s tribal identity.
The researchers aren’t taking out against the anti-Christian religious movement so much as they are pointing out the importance of pride’s opposite – humility.
Pride, in this formulation, makes a person particularly prone to error. It makes a person particularly prone to error because pride makes it impossible for the person to admit when they’re wrong.
This is a hazard because we all get things wrong, and frequently. A person who is too proud to admit their errors by necessity must repeat them, double down on them, amplify them, and ultimately be made prisoner by them.
The trap of conspiracy theories illustrates this. The anti-Christian religious right loves to exploit conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories trap their believers into an ever more taxing loop of justification for error. The believers expend the ever-increasing effort to maintain their beliefs because their beliefs reward them with a sense of pride, superiority, and exclusivity. The club of fellow conspiracy believers validates them by adopting the attitude that believers are better and smarter than everyone else.
How exhausting to be better than everyone else all the time.
The only thing that justifies the exhaustion of maintaining such a belief – is that it is a defense against the opposite and underlying true belief – which is that the conspiracy believer is actually worse than everyone else.
Political extremism is a form of pride that works in much the same way.
Since the anti-Christian religious right busies itself fulfilling fundamental human needs of its followers to feel better than, it will probably keep its hold on people until and unless those needs can be met in other ways.
Perhaps it’s worth examining the sin of pride engaged in by the religious right and its opposite, the virtue of humility. These concepts may hold the keys to loosening the ascendancy of anti-Christian ideals in a supposedly Christian movement.
The Bible devotes quite a bit of attention to the concept of pride, and not in a good way. Pride is one of a number of recurring themes the Bible wrestles with repeatedly – because the lessons of pride are hard to learn.
What is pride exactly?
Well, it’s many things depending on the circumstances. Pride could be the willingness to hold yourself to high standards, to hold yourself with dignity, to refuse to take the easy way out. With this type of pride, you don’t allow yourself to bend to your whims or your laziness or your temptations. You stick to your standards even when it’s difficult.
That’s one form of pride. Another form of pride is being proud of yourself for doing something difficult, achieving something you thought you couldn’t achieve – or for being better than others.
In all these cases, you contrast yourself with something else, and decide that other thing is more lowly and you are up higher.
These senses of the word pride show up in the Bible but the root of the concept is something even deeper. The basis of pride in the Bible is often a fundamental attribution error. Or an error of estimation.
The prideful attribute their achievements to their own internal superiority and refuse to recognize the importance of external power – i.e., the power of God’s grace in allowing their seemingly exalted status. Or the prideful rise in their own estimation to a level beyond that which the facts support. The prideful think they’re all that and a bag of chips – and they’re wrong.
Basically, the error of pride is failing to recognize the might of external power. It might be the power of God to humble the prideful. It might be the power of others to gain ascendancy in their turn, or to revenge themselves against those who’ve flaunted their power, wealth, or position and used them against others.
The sin of pride is not just a concern in the Bible, but shows up in many other traditions. In Greek philosophy it was known as hubris. The idea of hubris addressed humanity’s seemingly inexorable tendency to get too big for its britches.
Both hubris in the Greek and pride in ancient Hebrew refer to the concept of going beyond one’s proper bounds. The prideful and the hubristic try to take for themselves some of the functions and glory that belong to God or to the gods. And that never works.
Stay within your bounds.
Your bounds are dictated by the truth of the situation. You are exactly as responsible for your own success and luck as you are – and no more. You think you’re a successful entrepreneur because you worked harder and are just smarter than everyone else. But God could literally strike you with lightning on the golf course and make a mockery of all your success. You could end up with brain damage you never recover from.
Anyone could. Any one of us could be struck by lightning and all our successes could be made mockery of. The opposite of pride is humility – and humility is remembering this simple, fundamental aspect of existence. As it is given so can it be taken away.
You don’t have complete control over the universe or fate – or anything else. Acting like you do – that’s the sin of pride. Acting like you’re invincible and can do whatever you want without consequence – that’s pride. You’re making the fundamental error and engaging in the original sin – of being wrong.
The Bible concerns itself with multiple (multiple, multiple) illustrations of pride going before a fall because the fate of the prideful (and the humble) is a fundamental human concern.
It’s a fundamental human concern because the poor are always with us and forever watching the rich ride around town like they’re God’s gift, abusing others, reveling in their greed, cruelty or arrogance, convinced their relative status protects them from all harm. The rich in the Old Testament often seem to be the precursors to the modern celebrity who says ‘Do you know who I am?’
God knows who they are. The Bible continually reassures the poor of spirit (the humble) that those rich folks gonna get what they deserve. Certainly, it’s all gonna come back and bite them. Karma’s going to be a bitch. The lowly will be exalted in the end and the rich will become the lowly.
The Longing for Justice and the Anti-Christian Religious Right
There will be justice.
This is the fundamental promise of the Old Testament and the theme is echoed in the New Testament. The fundamental human need for justice will be fulfilled.
It’s a very unjust world we live in, always has been. A visibly unjust world. The lucky and the unlucky. The poor and the rich. The wicked and the saintly. The loving and the hateful. Both sides of every coin exist, right along side each other, so different but separated by the thinnest of barriers – circumstance.
Circumstance that seems so mighty, so inviolable, so impervious. The rich will never fall; the poor will never rise – or so it seems. And yet all can change in an instant. And there will be justice in the end – the Bible reassures us of that.
Because the Bible does reassure us of that – the anti-Christian religious right co-opts this message from the Bible to lure and ensnare people who want to be Christian – but who feel that the promise of justice is not being fulfilled. The anti-Christian religious right says ‘step right up, you wanna-be Christians, we got your justice right here. Step right up. Step right up.’
The people most susceptible to the stratagems of the religious right are those who feel they have been humble – and humbled – for far too long.
Remember my original definitions of pride? The ones that included dignity, holding yourself to a high standard, recognizing yourself for achieving something difficult in spite of the odds? The ones that meant you didn’t bend to gratify your temptations?
Those are the forms of pride that those lured by the religious right lack. Pride can be a form of steel in your spine – and the religious right preys on those who lack that steel.
The Spinelessness of a Jellyfish
Pride tells you that you are better than everyone else. Consequently, the spinelessness of the jellyfish person tells them at they’re worse than everyone else.
It’s a terrible feeling. The feeling of spinelessness. The humiliation. The lowliness forced upon you not by choice but by fear. Most of us have experienced it at some time. And some of us have experienced more than our share of powerlessness, by temperament or circumstance.
The religious right preys upon those people who feel they have been forced to suck up and kiss up to the external powers in their lives – for generations – without recompense. They have no choice but to be humble, and rather than seeing this as a virtue, they see it as as that crushing powerlessness. A powerlessness so pervasive that it distorts the spirit and turns the heart evil.
This is no small matter. Evil is no small matter.
The anti-Christian religious right finds its most fertile grounds in the American South. This is not a coincidence.
The anti-Christian religious right finds its most fertile grounds in the white folks of the South. Especially the white folks with deep roots there. This is not a coincidence.
If ever there was a group in the US with the fewest grounds for the legitimate pride of holding themselves to a high standard, recognizing one’s difficult achievements, affirming one’s willingness to forgo temptation and the easy one – it’s those white folks in the American South.
The Anti-Christian Religious Right Preys on the American South
Correspondingly, if there’s one thing white folks in the American South grow up knowing – it’s that white folks in the American north – the Yankees – look down on them. They are born humbled. Born despised. Born labeled as morally inferior. Born scarred with the mark of the sins of their fathers – slavery.
This slavery thing. They can’t seem to outrun it, outlive it, deny it, hide from it, or be redeemed from it. Despite all they might try to do – slavery stares them in the face every day. And if these white folks with the deep roots ever want to forget it – well, the powerful who profit off the humility and humiliation of those white folks – well they make sure that Confederate flag is flying right in front of them every where they go.
Many people think the Confederate flag is hung from statehouse flagpoles as a symbol of the enduring racism of the American South. Well the racism endures but I guess it’s always easy to overlook the obvious. The Confederate flag is a symbol of loss. Of losing a war. Of being a loser.
Undoubtedly, it’s meant to act as a symbol of oppression. It’s meant to remind those white folks in the South who don’t run the place, that they are oppressed by the Yankees.
But it’s an even more potent reminder to those white folks of just how deeply they are oppressed – by their own kind. Every lynching, to use a grotesque but effective example, was a reminder to every single white person living in that county – ‘this is what we do to people who challenge us. NEVER FORGET IT.’
Every single white person in a county with lynchings becomes morally compromised – as a participant or a bystander – and the message of cruelty is not lost on anyone. If the powers-that-be are cruel enough to hang an innocent person – well they’re damn sure cruel enough to wreak terrible vengeance on you if you cross them.
Every single white person in a county with lynchings becomes, de facto, without explicit consent, but as just as irrevocably, a murderer – or a jellyfish. Take your choice. The cruel, the arrogant, the rich, the prideful – or the humble, the jellyfish, the lowly, the oppressed.
Take your choice.
You will never, in either case, be able to stand up straight before God or your peers. You will always be morally less than. And that less-than-ness gets passed down from generation to generation, guarded like a precious resource, the precious gold that the keeps those in the South that were born to power – in power forever.
In the American South, you are born humble. You’ve got to stay within your bounds as a power-broker, or you have to stay within your bounds as a jellyfish.
Oh, it gets so tiresome all that humility. Lord deliver me from my humility. Lord let me experience pride again.
These are not unreasonable prayers. The problem is – it’s not the Lord that’s been answering them.
The key to restoring legitimate pride to the prey of the anti-Christian religious right is simple. Overthrow the traditional Southern power brokers, grow a spine, denounce slavery and racism, tear down those waving flags of loserdom and reclaim your true dignity. Grow some vertebrae.
But that’s hard and that’s scary. If it wasn’t hard and scary, everyone would have done it a long time ago.
White Savior Movies
Have you ever heard of a ‘white savior’ movie? In it, some white person, typically the hero of the movie, emphatically faces down racism on behalf of someone else, and saves the day for that someone else.
People call those movies ‘white savior’ movies because they’re looking at those movies from the point of view of the person ‘saved’. The victim of racism rescued by the white folk.
But those who identify with the ‘saved’, the targets of racism, those aren’t the people those movies are made for. They’re made for the white folks. To remind them, lest they ever forget, that fighting racism and existing power structures, is hard. It’s hard. Not just hard, but terrifying. It’s dangerous. You will pay a price. You will be offered every incentive to become a jellyfish. The power structure will entreat you to have your balls snipped and accept things as they are without protest. Just because you’re white doesn’t mean you’ve any power, and the people with power will let you know that over and over again.
I watched such a movie just the other night. The white savior aspect was not especially glorious. But the scene was there. The scene where the white guy was offered a choice between having his balls snipped off or being court-martialed. He could let something on the order of 1400 people die – or get arrested and tried for a crime.
The movie was set in Texas. One might say the moral of the story was that even if you win, even if you manage to scrape together enough vertebrae to keep your pride – Texas will still be Texas after all. Your victories will be small; your defeats will be large.
Eventually you will realize the hard way that you’ve’ got nothing to be proud about in Texas. You’re either the oppressor or the oppressed and neither side can lay claim to any pride.
That’s a harsh punishment for the sin of slavery. Who would want to accept such a depressing assessment? Even unto the nth generation, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. It’s not hard to understand why people would want to escape the inescapable and claim some pride.
It Isn’t Fair
It isn’t fair, is it, that generations of a wide swath of a large country should be condemned to ‘less than’ status? Poorer, less educated, unhealthier, more dependent on government assistance. Those Yankees really wreaked their revenge didn’t they?
Of course it wasn’t the Yankees. It was their own. Their own aristocracy, their own elite. Reagan did the white folks of middle America less than zero favors, in spite of his rhetoric. And why be surprised?
People willing to sacrifice of quarter of the male fighting age population for wealth and power (that’s how many white men died during the Civil War) – well they’re not too put out by making sure the surviving white folks don’t get Medicaid or access to abortion or even affordable hospitals. And they’re not too put out to remind those surviving white folks that if they don’t like their lot in life – well, just look at what they do the gays and the lesbians and the non-white folks and count yourself lucky.
It’s not fair, is it? To lose the blessings of God even unto the nth generation. Dust Bowls and hurricanes. Heat waves and floods. And relentless, relentless less-than-ness. Doesn’t seem right, does it, that God would deny His divine favor to a people for so long.
Ah, but the Bible is full of such stories, isn’t it? God forgives quickly for those who repent. God forgives not at all for those who do not.
Well, who wouldn’t want a different God then? A God who was not so Christian. A God who was not revealed in the Bible. A God who encouraged pride in the prideless and exalted in the perversion of basic morality. Who among the relentlessly humbled is so strong as to have no attraction whatsoever to such a God? Redemption with no effort.
No wonder a lot of people signed up. The people who have signed up for the anti-Christian religious right, who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, waved the banners, and proclaimed the slogans – they think they are owed something. They’re due. It’s their turn. This country owes them.
They’re right. But they’re wrong. The things they put their faith in – Republicans, mega-churches, big corporations, low taxes, ‘free market’ ideology, anti-government sentiment, anti-science rhetoric, anti-immigrant hatred, anti-abortion extremism – these things owe absolutely nothing to anyone. Nope, they don’t owe you Christian nationalist theocrat wanna-be jack.
No, the backers of those things lied to you – but they don’t owe you.
Nope, the pundits and the politicians owe you nothing. Neither does the Fox News Channel.
The nation would owe these people something – if they’d voted for fairness, and charity, and humility, and all the Christian virtues. If they’d voted for the Christian virtues at the ballot box. In the pew. At the school. On the job. In the neighborhood. You put those pro-social virtues in, and yes, you become part of a web of interdependent obligations and connections, of respect, and mercy, and friendship, and good will.
If you vote against good will, you earn none back.
This isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to all the people boondoggled by a faithless bunch of lying opportunists who never had their best interests at heart.
It’s not fair.
It’s curable, like so many ills are, with hard work, a clear mind, and diligent effort. Things like investing in education. Valuing knowledge. And thought. And yes humility and charity.
Accepting that you’re not going to get a free ride. That you’ve got to educate and improve yourself and your lot in life and no, the false prophets of the anti-Christian religious right aren’t going to help you one bit.
Repenting Still Works
Further, understand that there are no shortcuts. That repenting still works. That humbly accepting your part in the ills you face is still important.
I can’t blame a person who’s drunk the Kool-Aid of the anti-Christian religious right for their feelings.
I can blame them for their thoughts.
God, and the universe, and life itself, resist the proud and give grace to the humble. It’s not fair. It’s just true.
Tough as it is – it’s time for the disaffected religious right folks to stop following the liars and scammers around like dogs with hopeful eyes – and start thanking the God they claim to believe.
They could start by thanking that God for nature, for beauty, for sunrises, for birdsong, and cool breezes. They could start by thanking God for the gifts the false prophets are destroying. And then they could start humbly acting to preserve those gifts, as a way of worshipping and exalted those forces of the universe that will show them every mercy, if only they will open their hearts to that grace.
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