The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

In 1959, Belafonte was playing Vegas for $50,000 a week. Every night he looked out across a sea of White faces. Most Black people couldn’t have afforded the show even if Vegas hadn’t been segregated.

He joined the Navy, 1944, and was sent to a camp called Robert Smalls, after an enslaved man forced to work on a Confederate ship in the Civil War until he commandeered it and sailed it to freedom. Eighty years later, Camp Robert Smalls was still segregated.

“As long as I was onstage, crooning love songs, I had a certain power over them,” he’d write in his memoir, My Song. “But when the lights came up, I was just another colored man hotfooting it back to Colored Town—or else.”

And not just the Klan; Robert F. Kennedy deemed Belafonte’s interracial marriage, opposed by 96 percent of Whites—as if his love life was subject to public survey—to be “a sign of instability,” proof that he was a “questionable character.”

Black critics, meanwhile, accused him of betraying the race, and specifically Black women. It was a big enough issue that Ebony ran an article with the opinions of Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, among others. “We didn’t marry to prove a social point,” wrote Belafonte. “We did it for love.”

That’s your writing.’ ” He’d smooth the wrinkled pages and store them away, the sacred texts of a man he insists even now must not be deified. King, to Belafonte, was a comrade.

“Faster, man!” shouted Belafonte. Uh-uh, said Willie Blue. Deputy would pull them over and they’d wind up just like the three boys the feds pulled out of the river. The three boys who, they’d later learn, had been chased just like this, by a lynch mob led by local lawmen.

There’s doubt in Belafonte’s voice. A note of confusion. How long? Not long. But it’s been more than four decades now, and the movement he helped make he believes has been stolen, turned into an uplifting story, a Hollywood fable with a happy ending that isn’t yet real.

“They’re gonna let you know you didn’t win,” Belafonte says. That’s why he’s been so angry, so long. It’s what keeps him alive. “Where your anger comes from,” he says, “is less important than what you do with it.”

“Books are no longer like commodities here,” another librarian once told me at two a.m., standing near his sleeping colleague. “We’ve had to give them away.” One word for that is surplus, but a better word—the biblical word, the rabbinical word—is abundance.

on high to make the dissidents look like fools. In fact, the protesters were fools—but in the holy tradition, the one that speaks not truth to power but imagination to things as they are.

Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure had channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.

he watched Billy Graham on television “for hours and hours,” but what he took from it was merely method, the hard sell presenting as a soft one.

It was from Peale that Trump learned “a very positive feeling about God,” he “wrote” in his stream-of-consciousness campaign book, Crippled America, “that made me feel positive about myself.” The point wasn’t God; it was him, Donald J. Trump, alpha and omega. Peale, Trump boasted, “thought I was his greatest student of all time.”

Positive Thinking—still in print and popular—“makes no pretense to literary excellence,” Peale wrote, “nor does it seek to illustrate any unusual scholarship on my part.” “Positive Thinking” isn’t about serving God; it’s about using God, through what Peale called “applied Christianity,” to achieve “a perfected and amazing method of successful living.”

“BELIEVE IN YOURSELF!” Peale began the book, and the rest was commentary, fables of status drawn from the lives of sports heroes and businessmen, “competent spiritual experts” whose authority was demonstrated not by quoting Scripture but through the visible evidence of their success.

Peale’s message resonated in its time most with the affluent—those, like Trump himself, who saw themselves as winners. The prosperity gospel recasts the same promise to those, like Trump’s followers, who feel lost.

On the surface, the prosperity gospel is a simple transaction. It begins with a kind of sales demonstration, a preacher who shows you his wealth as evidence of his anointing. He’s blessed; and you can be too. All you have to do is invest. How? The usual way: You give him your money.

The Christian Right that has so long dominated the political theology of the United States emphasizes a heavenly reward for righteousness in faith and behavior; the prosperity gospel is about what Peale might call “amazing results” you can measure and count. The old political theology was about the salvation to come; the Trump religion was about deliverance, here and now.

Rather, it proposed supernatural intervention as a force you could direct through faith, as revealed through tithing and by putting the wealth that resulted on display.

There is no “Black person,” he continues, no “White person,” no yellow, no red; “there is only green people!” He froze his face in a giant grin. “Green is money!”

Trump’s religion was that of Norman Vincent Peale, but the religion of Trump was even bigger, a more amazing prosperity gospel, secularized.

Trump knew his followers wanted what he had, and that what Trump had, that for which the plane and the gold and all the “green,” too, were merely symbols, was the freedom from want, economic and racial. Trump did not want, Trump was.

He couldn’t believe his friends were crossing over. “Trump’s not just a racist, he’s a fucking psychotic racist!” “So are half the people who walk into this fucking bar!” Shawn shouted back.

“Well,” said Shawn, grinning as he wound up what he considered a zinger, “she sucks the president’s cock, don’t she?” It was the essence of Trump’s rhetorical style: vulgarity masquerading as candor. That the accusation made no sense only made it, in Trumpian terms, more “perfect,” since, lacking any appeal to logic, it could not be rebutted.

Shawn nodded, seriously, and raised his glass. Solidarity forever. Together they drank to the beautiful dream of the steel mills Trump had promised to revive. The steel mills they both knew, they allowed, were not really coming back. No politician could perform that resurrection, but at least Trump said he would. “Don’t it feel good, at least, to believe?” asked Shawn.

The “human moment” was when Trump, who was by his wealth freed from the concerns of ordinary people, nonetheless felt what his followers felt, said what they wished they could say.

He did not try to claim, “I’m like you.” His promise, his selling point, was that he was better than you. Not a servant; a leader. The one who acts.

So General Pershing, tough, tough guy . . . fifty terrorists . . . what happens is he lines ’em up to be shot. [A man shouts, “Yeah!”] Lines people up to be shot. . . . And as you know, swine, pig, all of that is a big problem for them. Big problem. He took two pigs, they chopped them open. [Trump chops his hand.] Took the bullets that were going to go and shoot these men. [Holds up an imaginary bullet pinched between thumb and finger.] Took the bullets. The fifty bullets. Dropped them in the pigs, swished them around [swishes] so there’s blood all over those bullets. [Cheering.] Had his men, instructed his men [voice rising] to put the bullets into the rifles [thumps lectern]. They put the bullets into the rifles and they shot [he shouts the word; another man shouts, “Yeah!”] forty-nine men.

Then, Trump says, they dumped the bodies into a mass grave—he waves his hand across the podium, sweeping the corpses in—and threw the gutted pigs on top of them. They took the final bullet—he holds it up again—and they gave it to the last man. “And they said, ‘Here, take this bullet’ ”—he mimes handing it over—“ ‘go back to your people’ ”—he jabs a finger at the last man’s “people,” and yet another man shouts, “Yeah!”—“ ‘and explain what we just did!’ ” Trump pauses. The crowd cheers. “This is history, folks.” (It’s fiction, but to Trump that doesn’t matter.) He’s not going to say whether it was “good” or “bad.” We can choose to win, or we can choose to lose. “We have to do,” he says, “what we have to do.” It’s who we are. Winners.

Trump counted the reasons. “Bad things happening!” he shouted. “Crime all over the place!” Yes, exclaimed the crowd, because “crime all over the place” is the reason towns like Fountain Hills exist, a walled cluster of walled clusters in which people dream of the biggest wall of all.

The memory of the fight dissolved into his tide of good feeling, as if the dream of violence, Trump’s and the crowd’s, had simply been a prelude for the winning to come. It was filling them already, now that the losers were gone, vanished, as if loss itself, the very concept of grief, had been disappeared.

The happy couple wore Givenchy; Pastor Rich, impeccably stubbled, wore a vestment of white and gold. He had also “guested” on another Kardashian production, the E! network’s Kourtney and Khloé Take the Hamptons, and attended to the soul, such as it may be, of Justin Bieber.

There are no hymns. The “praise songs” are indistinguishable from secular Top 40, the music too denuded of signifiers to belong to an actual time and place.

Jr.’s spiritual authority is rooted not in his knowledge of suffering but in his removal from it; he is blessed and unabashed.

the arch of his brow and the tilt of his smile. “My pastor,” comments one of his 941,000 Instagram followers, with double heart-eyed smiley-face emojis. Hot, another expresses with twin fire emojis in response to one of the hundreds of selfies he posts as part of his ministry.

each era of American Christendom giving rise to competitive strains of faith, one that curses the culture, one that coddles it. Sometimes the latter is liberal, but more often it reveals the shallowness of liberalism’s aesthetic trappings, the ease with which secular music and fashion and art can be repurposed to serve a religion of control—over sex, over emotion.

Bible’s subtler teachings to draw the masses. Rich Jr. is the latest avatar of a tradition common to Christianity and capitalism, the so-called new-and-improved. His new is burnished with vestiges of the artisanal; “vintage,” Rich likes to say, meaning that which is artfully rendered to reference an idea of the old. It’s like sampling from a song you’ve never actually heard.

Cost estimates for the week ran from $5 million to $12 million, possibly more than $1 million for each of the seven years the union endured.

He could, he allowed, talk the five points of Calvinism (memorizable as an acronym, TULIP, the first letter of which stands for “Total depravity,” as in our natural condition). But he’d rather just “do life,” awesomed by God. Of sin he said, “I think we think about it not as much as you might think we think about it.” Of social justice, he said, “the moral conversation is one I don’t get into.” His church is diverse but he deflected my attempts to engage him on White evangelicalism’s history of racism by dismissing it as “deep.” Not cool. Then he just smiled; we were sitting on the balcony, it was dusk, gray-violet over the water. His teeth were radiant. “I think fun is a big word,” he said.

“I love this line,” he said, shaking his head and grinning: “ ‘Whatever he does’ ”—a righteous man, that is—“ ‘prospers.’ Prosperity follows him.” What do you need to do to be righteous? “It’s how I walk, how I sit, how I talk—these are, like, lifestyle things.”

Rich believes that your lifestyle is the product of your habits. Good habits equal a good lifestyle equals “righteousness,” not so much a morality as a look. And if you are righteous—if you look good—prosperity follows. Where there is prosperity, there is “positivity,” since what’s not to be happy about if you are rich in fact as well as faith?

To be fair, Rich believes prosperity is relative. For him it’s a penthouse, for another it might be simply—well, Rich doesn’t really know. Knowing poor people is not his calling. Poverty, in his theology, is like a bad habit. The happiness that flows from wealth, meanwhile, is a just reward. Happy people are good people.

“This was not the agreement,” he said. Chris’s idea of “the agreement” seemed to be that I was not to wander beyond Chris’s supervision. “Do not enter the laundromat,” he told me. Again: “Do not enter the laundromat.” I entered the laundromat.

“Nice car,” I said. Brandon stepped back and admired it. “I am so blessed, man,” he said. “God gave me a Mercedes.”

Secular folk sometimes accuse evangelicalism of theatricality, as if that were a departure from the faith, but the traditions from which Rich descends have always embraced spectacle.

Fun as a calling, fun as a demonstration of grace, fun as a way of living what Joel Osteen, another celebrity-pastor son of a celebrity pastor, calls “your best life now.” Fun is what God wants for us.

Rich’s revelation is that for the souls he wants to reach, the light, in America now, emanates not from the Son but from the stars.

I’m Jewish, I said. What a coincidence! His wife was a Jew too. But loving Jesus was easier than being a Jew, he told me. Jewish prophets—Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, “let justice roll down like waters”—were grumblers, interested only in what was wrong with the world. The New Testament—Jesus—was everything the Old was not. “It’s about happiness!” said Romeo.

Then, too, there was a wrinkle in Romeo’s own testimony, I’d learn: While he may have in fact retired, not long beforehand a court had levied $16.4 million in fraud penalties against his two brokerages, naming him a central figure.