Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

by Talia Lavin

the Christian Right rose as a reactionary counterbalance to progressive social change and peopled America with demons in the process.

Helmed by human yeast infection and slovenly right-wing ideologue Steve Bannon,

LOL

As surely as the turning of one year and the dawning of a new one, a sucker’s born every day; meat loves salt, and grift loves hate.

The commonality in all this is fear: the sensation of it, the stoking of it, the rage it generates. Like any strong emotion, fear creates an opening. To interrogate the mark, we have to track backward from the con. The person who seeks mushroom powder to secure immortality, the person preparing for a war against the Devil, the person who damns his country as full of delusional dog people is a fearful one and a rageful one. It’s someone who fits Konnikova’s definition of a mark perfectly: filled to the skin with unease at change and

The historian Randall Balmer called premillenarian dispensationalism a “theology of despair” because once it caught hold at the turn of the nineteenth century, evangelical Christians could look ahead to the Rapture and give up their previously held notion that the faithful should live better lives on an earth that would shortly be crisped to bits in the fire of Apocalypse.

Whether this entails theocracy at home or militancy abroad, Christian eschatology is an underrated factor in US government policy—one that has a direct impact on the lives of millions of people in the here and now.

In seeking to hasten the end of the world, evangelicals often make it worse for others who do not anticipate being snatched up into the clouds to sit by Christ’s side as the seas boil and Satan takes possession of the earth. For those who are not perennially looking out for signs of Armageddon and awaiting it as a child waits for a father to return, the drama of Apocalypse looks merely like a collection of people who, in waiting for the world to end, are actively worsening life in the present.

Christian nationalism, like other forms of nationalism, begins with the idea that the country, once thriving, has departed from the norms of a mythologized and ideal past. This is particularly and peculiarly reified in the Christian nationalist obsession with the nation’s founding documents, in particular the Constitution, which is treated as sort of a subsidiary Bible, an inerrant sacred text that sinners are perpetually betraying.

Christian nationalism requires imposing a particular view of sex, sexuality, and gender on the public at large regardless of any individual’s faith or lack thereof. In the case of gay and transgender people, this mandate is guided by bigotry and Leviticus; in the case of women in particular, it’s guided by misogyny and Leviticus again, with its death penalties for various forms of illicit fornication.

The people who could double-think so skillfully—who could advocate for laws that would surveil women until they were little more than chattel and for the return of sodomy laws that turned cops into bedroom-window peepers, while all the time trumpeting that they were the true and sole guardians of free speech, religious freedom, and every other form of liberty—were a useful bunch to keep around and keep fed on dark dollars until they grew bold enough to grasp the levers of power.

It is a signature of Christian-Right rhetoric to position themselves as the defenders of children; by extension, this makes their opponents adherents of child predation, a danger to the innocent and pure.

warped beyond recognition by the right-wing media sphere. Needless to say, reading a book about trans rights or learning that your female teacher has a wife is nothing close to grooming, which is the careful cultivation of a victim to make him or her vulnerable to sexual abuse. The conflation of homosexuality or gender nonconformity with pedophilia is a shopworn, long-debunked avenue of prejudice.

“The Appeal to Heaven,” which signifies that the bearer will find no justice among authorities on Earth and must look higher. It is more or less the unofficial flag of Christian nationalism in the United States, and there it flew above the baking asphalt in the shimmer of heat and the chant of hate.

Liberty is such a flexible word. It’s also a disarming one; who, after all, wants to stand in opposition to liberty, one of the values on which this country was ostensibly founded? It’s like going out and declaring that you’re against sunsets or world peace. But liberty, as used by those who go around painting it on banners and starting groups with Liberty in capital letters in their names, can also be a weapon.

Molding people like clay into preestablished gender roles—whether imbuing boys with macho swagger or girls with passivity and submissiveness—is in and of itself a violent process. People aren’t clay, bones aren’t malleable; children differ wildly from one another and change as they grow; if they don’t fit in, they can suffer for it along the way.

As construed by the American right wing, “parental rights” is the most milquetoast way of expressing that children are their parents’ property, subject to absolute control, and not accountable to any standard outside the nuclear family unit. In an interview with Slate, “parental rights” was the phrase used by the president of a charter school board that forced the principal of a local charter school to resign after an art teacher showed sixth graders an image of Michelangelo’s David on the grounds that a tiny marble penis on a world-famous Renaissance sculpture is pornographic. Incidentally, the school is called the Tallahassee Classical School.

A 2017 Journal of Pediatrics longitudinal study of 758 adults found that children who were spanked—even when controlling for other types of physical abuse—are more likely to be involved in violent romantic relationships, often as the aggressors.

I believe that evil can come in quiet places; that it is perpetuated by complacency; that complacency might be yours, if you choose, now, not to act on what you know; that no one deserves the kind of pain that makes you perpetuate it from within, that teaches you that you are irredeemable. That kind of pain is passed on, spreads around a country like salt over a crop field, leaving bitter earth.