The Pagans Are Coming! Bar the Gates!

What Lil Nas X Means To Me, Part One

A still from Lil Nas X's “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” video

If I gather one important lesson from the controversy surrounding Lil Nas X’s Satan Shoes, it’s how utterly predictable the faux controversy is. LNX says something photogenically blasphemous, flogs a product, and waits. Then hordes of televangelists and pundits, claiming to represent the public face of Christanity, express their crinkum-crankum outrage. It’s wholly inevitable to those of us who remember Madonna’s dullsville 1989 blasphemy video, “Like a Prayer.”

It’s so wholly predictable, in fact, that one suspects LNX probably engineered that outcome. His track “Montero,” with accompanying video of him engaging in sexual exploits with the Devil, has the same earworm quality as “Like a Prayer,” which had similar video imagery. LNX performed the same basic actions, producing the same basic outcome, with such precision, that he probably followed an Excel spreadsheet of how Madonna propelled a pleasant but undistinguished album to quadruple-platinum status.

LNX’s “Montero” and its marketing tie-in demonstrate the moral bankruptcy among Christianity’s public leadership. Christians, as an aggregate, have embraced recent trends toward militarism, sexual paranoia, and worship of mammon. The degree to which Christians embraced our two most recent Republican presidents, both of whom cut taxes on the rich and entangled America in overseas wars, demonstrates how American Christianity has strayed from its biblical roots.

Mainline Christian denominations have aggressively opposed recent trends toward militant nationalism in American politics. The Catholic, ELCA Lutheran, and United Methodist churches, among others, officially opposed Operation Iraqi Liberation, our decade-long entanglement in Levantine politics. The Roman Catholic Church’s recent declaration that it can’t bless same-sex unions shocked many people, despite being Catholic policy for literally centuries, because so many other churches have reversed position recently.

Yet despite this, you wouldn’t know it from most church actions. Many pulpit ministers flinch from expounding their churches’ policy positions from the congregational lectern, because they know their parishioners would exeunt en masse. When the ELCA Lutheran church reversed its longstanding position and agreed to ordain openly gay clargy, nearly 150,000 Lutherans walked out, organizing the North American Lutheran Church specifically around excluding gay Christians.

Meanwhile, as clergy representing the Christian center-left are reluctant to court controversy, right-wing clergy have no such objections. Paula White’s famous, highly public prayer ceremony to reverse the 2020 election outcomes for the former President, became a disgraceful spectacle of global proportions. Right-wing clergy have closed ranks around a form of nationalist conservatism that privileges the wealth, like the former President, often at the expense of “the least of these.”

A still from Madonna's “Like a Prayer” video

This communal prayer, not for victory over the forces of this world, but for dominion, results in Christianity expressing a fortress mentality. Religious leaders willing to express their political views assert that Christianity is under attack, despite over seventy percent of Americans identifying as Christian. Public Christians, despite reams of evidence, have rhetorically backed themselves into a fortress mentality, and preach faith as constantly under siege.

American history, of course, demonstrates that this isn’t new. The New England Puritans fled England because they thought they were under siege, then quickly provoked King Philip’s War because they thought they were still under siege. American Christians have historically been unified, not by a mission to serve the disadvantaged like Jesus commanded, but by a fear of a monolithic world of malign barbarity. Lock the gates, Pastor, the savages are coming.

I wouldn’t even mind this martyrdom mentality, if Christians were martyred for following the Gospel. Many American municipalities have laws against feeding the homeless or welcoming immigrants, things Jesus actually talked about. Yet many of the public Christians now whimpering about a hip-hop video on YouTube, are the ones enforcing laws against protecting the poor. Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, not by their doctrines, but by their actions.

LNX, like Madonna before him, has exposed public Christianity’s moral vacuity. Given the opportunity to repent of its sectarian, exclusionary history, the Church, or anyway its public face, has chosen to double down. Banshee-like screaming about American moral decay, which televangelists see everywhere, nets ratings and donations. And Christians in the pews, inundated with this messaging, believe that actually represents the preponderant Christian opinion.

Meanwhile, American church membership is falling precipitously. Especially following a Presidential administration that used Christian language to justify literal violence against minorities, this probably isn’t surprising. People aren’t walking away from Christ; they’re abandoning a Church that has forgotten its sacred roots. If Christians don’t take this opporunity to scrutinize ourselves (and so far, too few leaders have), we will see this is only the beginning.

 

See also Part Two