In my diary Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--pt. 1, I argued:
It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group.
In that diary, I talked about the conservatives' creation of the truest form of shadow elite-the non-existent "Bavarian Illuminati" who had been disbanded a decade prior to the French Revolution they were accused of master-minding. In this diary set, I want to talk about shadow elites and religion-a topic which necessarily evokes a much earlier point in time, peg some further observation look much farther back in time, to the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337), the first Christian Roman Emperor.
The changes that took place in Christianity as a result gave rise to or intensified contradictions that are with us still, as a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral was transformed into an imperial religion. Although tremendous intellect was devoted over the ages to attempting to perfect this transformation, it was, at bottom, an impossible task. This partly explains the distinctive nature of America's Black Church, since its practitioners are in the same position as the early Christians and their Hebrew forbearers-a fact which Black Christians seemed to have grasped almost immediately, though it seems to have entirely escaped the understanding of their slavemasters.
White Christians, OTOH, are all too vulnerable to sliding into Crusade mode, as this new release from Brave New Films-highlighting John McCain's excessive praise for holy war enthusiast Rod Parsley--reminds us:
In the heat of a presidential campaign, it is perhaps understandable that Reverend Jeremiah Wright should be castigated for causing trouble for Barack Obama, yet, whatever one thinks of his actions, he does have a point: He is acting out a traditional Christian role, and he is correct when he claims to be articulating Biblical principles. He seems a cantankerous outsider, and so he is. So were all the Hebrew prophets, so was John the Baptist, and so, too, was Jesus, as were his followers for generations, up until the time of Constantine.
In contrast, the Christian elite, from at least Constantine onward, has struggled with the contradictions of its own existence, and often, in doing so, has resorted to projecting its own contradictions, its own hypocrisy, its own confusion onto others, including, of course, its shadow elites, and rival religious traditions.
In this diary set, I want to focus on a four main contradictions underlying imperialist Christianity, as a cultural mainstream, and the religious right as it has specifically articulated itself since the 1970s....
|
| Four Main Contradictions
The first contradiction is simply that of being imperalist Christianity-as I said above, "a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral ... transformed into an imperial religion." The second contradiction is the religious right's tortured roots in Southern segregationism, recast as moral superiority, based on issues that are almost entirely cultural, not Biblical-abortion, school prayer, homosexuality, etc.
The third contradiction is the broader conservative movement's long-time dependence on a profoundly anti-Christian figure, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who financed what was the central news/propaganda organ of the conservative movement-The Washington Times-for well over a decade, until its importance was finally matched by the Fox News Channel. Moon's claim to his own divinity is so clearly heretical that it's mindboggling he should have played such a central role in the building of the contemporary "conservative" movement. It's precisely this sort of crazy-making contradiction which only makes conservatives all the more fanatical in projecting their own shadows, and attacking the perceived transgressions of others.
The fourth contradiction is the similarly heretical Pentecostal offshoot known as "Word of Faith," a sort of New Age prosperity cult that turns its back on all the social justice teachings of the Bible. Both Rod Parsley and John Hagee are "Word of Faith" huslters with an Armageddon fixation, who show no compunction whatever over draining the bank accounts of their less affluent followers.
Whatever one's religion-or lack of same-it should be obvious that each of these configurations is hardly the pure Christian Gospel it claims to be. They are each of them riddled with their own contradictions-contradictions in which demons gestate over time, until out of those contradictions, unguarded, unfaced, anacknowledge, full grown demons come.
The five minute hate directed at Jeremiah Wright derives at least some of it instensity from the simple fact that so many of those who condemned Wright and demanded others do the same are themelves driven by those demons that they still have yet to face.
"Just War Theory"-Or Just War?
Originally, Christianity was understood as a pacifistic religion, and was most popular among the Empire's underclass. But as it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it necessarily underwent a change, giving rise to the origins of just war theory. Indeed, Wikipedia notes:
In 316, Constantine acted as a judge in a North African dispute concerning the heresy of Donatism. After making a decision against the Donatists, Constantine led an army of Christians against Christians. After 300 years of pacifism, this was the first intra-Christian persecution. More significantly, in 325 he summoned the Council of Nicaea, effectively the first Ecumenical Council (unless the Council of Jerusalem is so classified), to deal mostly with the heresy of Arianism. Constantine also enforced the prohibition of the First Council of Nicaea against celebrating Easter on the day before the Jewish Passover (14 Nisan) (see Quartodecimanism and Easter controversy).[151]
What we see here is not just the speed with which Christianity is adapted to a war-fighting stance, but also how readily it is adapted to suppressing one form of Christianity by another. Wikipedia also notes:
From the beginning, Christianity was regarded as completely pacifistic, due to a strict interpretation of the Bible as well as constant persecution by the Roman Empire. However, when Christianity became the official religion of the empire "all of Christianity began to embrace just war theory, as an attempt to be realistic about evil and harm-doing", a critical transition for the church.[142] Another consequence of Christianity being the state religion was that clergy members were given preferred status and exempted from military service and forced labor. There was a growing divide between clergy and laity as conversions were often more about socioeconomic status rather than faith. Converts were baptized in order to abuse Christianity for political influence, a problem unheard of before Constantine, when converts to Christianity willingly risked their life for their faith. [143]
None of this is should be surprising. This is precisely what one expects from a union of church and state-the two reinfore one another, and lose certain defining attributes which they would have if standing alone. Of course, the Roman Empire had previously had another state religion, so its defining attributes were already religiously inflected. But Christianity was profoundly transformed. What three hundred years of persecution could not accomplish, a few short years of power managed quite handily. It moved from the right hand of God to the left:
Matthew 25:31 "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
37 "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
40 "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
41 "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
44 "They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
45 "He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
46 "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."
From the Crusades to the colonization of the New World to the spread of imperialism throughout Asia and Africa, Christianity would prove itself a potent driving force, spurring on the imperial lust for wealth, power and control over the lives of others-all a far, far cry from its origins and its original orientation as a religion of the dispossessed. Naturally, imperialist Christianity was always eager to see the demons in others, it had so many of them itself.
Parsley's Place: A Foretaste
Rod Parsley is a very important figure in the religious right, and I will have much more to say about him in a future instalment. He was a major player in helping Bush to win Ohio in 2004. But first, I need to lay the proper groundwork, which will take some time. For now, however, what's worth noting is how well his religious extremism fits into the larger mainstream of imperial Christianity. Over the past hundred years or so, historical forces have worked to greatly mitigate the ferocity of Christian imperialism. For four hundred years, Christian imperialism had grown increasingly dominant on the world stage, until it reached a breaking point, as the Christian powers fell on one another in World Wars I and II.
At the same time, many different missionaries to the Third World went native in one way or another. The more perceptive and open-minded of them often noticed that the people they were evangelizing were a good deal more "Christian" than the powers at their backs. To a significant extent, as Walter Russell Mead argues in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, both multi-culturalism and the Wilsonian multi-lateral tradition have their roots in America's very high level of overseas evangelization. Non-white Christian voices-from the black South to black South Africa-added to a mix that was also softened by the emergence of a more humane secular outlook. Consequently, there was a clear trajectory of mainstream Christianity to move away from its earlier, longstanding blind embrace of imperial power. This distancing was even evident in the Pope's condemnation of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Parsley is not shocking to many, I assume, because there is a long, long history of imperial Christianity whose attitudes are echoed in his own. But it's important to realize that Christianity as a whole has learned some lessons over the last 100 years or so, and Parsley represents a very deliberate forgetting of those lessons, a willful embrace of the darkest aspects of our collective imperialist madness.
Fast Forward To Our Times: The Segregation/Christian Conservtive Connection
Imperialist Christianity was one of the great bulwarks of slavery, even as the Black Church and Quakerism were amongst its greatest foes. In his book Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, Larry E. Tise reveals the overwhelmingly dominant role that the Bible played as a source of Proslavery arguments in the generation leading up to the Civil War, as slavery finally became the object of sustained attack. Of course, religion played a powerful role in mobilizing opposition to slavery as well, and the same clashing views persisted down to the Civil Rights era, when mainline Protestents joined the Black Church and progressive Jews to form a powerful religiously-inspired coalition to eradicate segregation from our land. In the South, White Curches played a powerful role in legitimizing the existing segregationist order, some by directly justifying and defending it, others by insisting on the need to "go slow"-which everyone knew really meant "don't go."
The obstructionist role toward civil rights that white churches played in the South is not well known, but that doesn't mean it wasn't important-particularly given how influential religion has always been in Southern culture. When Jerry Fallwel died last year, there was nary a word in most places about his anti-civil rights past. At The Nation magazine, Max Blumenthal sought to set the record straight with an article, "Agent of Intolerance" that included some notable highlights-not only Falwell's segregationist roots, but the initial tolerance of abortion by Southern Baptists-in stark contrast to the Catholic hierarchy at that time.
[F] or Falwell, the "questions of the day" did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality--nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell's life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race--not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues--that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher's own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell's jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration.... He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."
What's significant here-among other things-is how little of anything had changed in 100 years. This can be seen on at least three major points: (1) God was still the justification for keeping blacks separate, and for keeping them down. God was the original segregationist. Segregtionist society creates a segregationist God in its image, and then feels duty-bound to abide by his commands.
(2) We are assured that blacks themselves do not want their own freedom. The logic imputed was absurd on its face-"He realizes his potential is far better among his own race"-since a black man with a college degree was still the social inferior of a white grade school dropout. That simple fact might escape Falwell's intellectual grasp, but few indeed were the blacks who were quite that stupid.
In fact, what's happening here is that the White elite projects its unchanging image of the social order into the minds of the black underclass. They cannot possibly conceive of a different social order. They must surely accept that whites will always, uniformly, be better than blacks. There is no possibility of bettering themselves individually, and it's inconceivable to the White elites that the downtrodden blacks should think of themselves as a people, and act in terms of their common destiny. Therefore, because he accepts all the unspoken assumptions his imaginative creator White creator projects into him, the "true Negro" wants precisely what his imaginative creator wants him to want-things exactly as they are.
Of course this "logic" is preposterous, but it is also utterly necessary for the conservative project. For if people themselves want political reforms-if the French people themselves revolt against monarchic misrule, if the slaves want to be free, and 100 years later the segregted black masses want the same-then one cannot blame their challenge to the established order on a hidden shadow elite of troublemakers, whose only real agenda is to take the rightful place of the estabished conservative elite. Instead, one must confront their actual demands, and their actual arguments head-on, and this is one thing that conservative elites simply cannot do. It revolts them to even think of talking to a black person-or a common French peasant-as any sort of equal whatsoever. And if they somehow could stand the insult, their arguments would be blown away like so many dead leaves in the wind, since they are all based on rootless assumptions, conjured out of thin air.
(3) Miscegenation is proffered as the ultimate segregationist argument, as if nothing more need be said. But, of course, it was the Southern slaveowners who began the practice, under the threat of the lash. It only became abhorrent when it passed beyond the control of lecherous powerful men. Like any other trespass in the eyes of conservative elites, notwithstanding what they said, the problem was not the act itself, but who was doing it, and who was being served.
I spend so long reflecting on Falwell's brief remarks because they provide such direct continuity, not just with the slaveowning/slavery-justifying past, but also with the authoritarian sexual morality to come. Just as God blessed slavery and segregation, he will bless the war on abortion, and gays and lesbians as well. The fact that others moved by their own understandings of God come to opposite conclusions-that is simply unthinkable, just as it was unthinkable for the slaveowners of the 1830s. Likewise, just as the "true Negro" knows that segregation is for him, so, too, the "true Woman" will come to know that male dominance and anti-feminism are for her, and the "true Gay" will know that the only "true Gay" is an ex-gay, which is why they have to exist--even if they don't. Lastly, the "self-evident" evils of abortion, homosexuality, and secular humanism in general will come to be denounced-or forgiven, denied or ignored as the case may be-in an a totally relativistic manner, just as miscegenation was denounced, forgiven, denied or ignored from the earliest days of slavery right up to Falwell's day.
Blumenthal continues:
As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
Falwell concluded, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners."
Priceless!
Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as "a private school for white students." It was one among many so-called "seg academies" created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.
For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell's Christian soldiers.)
Yes, folks, "Liberty University," so named because it was free of blacks!
Now we get to the good stuff:
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right's genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court's ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
Indeed, there was long a belief that life started with the first breath, just as God breathed the first breath-and his soul--into Adam. As Blumenthal goes on to explain, the Catholic right's concerns about abortion failed to interest White Southern Protestants for years to come:
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Because, of course, a Christian school could not be integrated.
Blumenthal continues:
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
Yep! "So-called" segregation!
Blumenthal:
In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."
Of course, millions of those who were mobilized by Falwell and his cronies sincerely believed that abortion was the issue, and that it was against God's word-despite the fact that such words could not be found in the Bible. There were words against homosexuality, however, along with words against shrimp and polyester blends. (The war on Red Lobster and Sears will begin any day now, I promise!) What really mattered was that provincial elites and would-be elites, like Falwell, had a chance to reclaim the moral high ground they had once inhabited, when just to have black skin marked one as morally inferior.
The Civil Rights Movement had turned the moral universe upside down, and by God, Falwell and his cronies were going to set it right again, with themselves on top, and their enemies accused of all the shameful things they could imagine-both recycled charges stretching all the way back to slave-time, and their own experience of humiliation when all the world looked at their racism and found it morally repugnant. Indeed, this was the whole point of the Moral Majority, and the other similar groups: they were out to emulate the success of the Civil Rights Movement, copying everything about it that had washed away their precious moral authority. They wanted payback, and they wanted it bad.
And, you know what? That's exactly what they've given us, for lo these many years.
But to get it done, first they had to do a deal with the anti-Christ, Sun Myung Moon.
To be continued in Part 2. |
STATE BLOGS
