Doctor Who and the Light of Truth

Douglas Adams and James Goss, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

The Doctor and Romana receive an alert that the universe is about to end, again. Must be Thursday. So they trace the signal to its source: Lord’s Cricket Ground, London. They arrive just in time to witness murderous robots in cricket players’ uniforms storm the field. It seems the consummately British game of cricket is secretly a reenactment of an ancient interstellar war, and after centuries, the Krikkitmen have returned.

If this sounds hauntingly familiar, well spotted. Douglas Adams pitched this story to the BBC twice: first with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, then years later, with the Fourth Doctor and Romana. When Auntie Beeb passed twice, Adams felt strongly enough about his spec script that he removed all franchise references he didn’t own. He rewrote it as the third Hitchhiker’s Guide novel: Life, the Universe, and Everything.

When the TARDIS crew return to Gallifrey, the Time Lords dismiss their urgent pleas. Everyone knows the Krikkitmen were defeated æons ago; the idea they might return is preposterous. But apparently, there’s a higher power at play. Some transcendent being is prepared to destroy reality itself in order to complete a mission left half-finished in dark and distant ages. So once again, the Doctor and Romana must fight alone.

James Goss formerly managed the BBC’s dedicated Doctor Who website, making himself a nexus of fan culture. Since then, he’s written (or ghostwritten) several DW-related novels, perfecting the ability to mimic franchise writers’ voices from ages past. Here, he perfectly channels not only Douglas Adams’ fast-paced Oxbridge humor, but his themes, particularly his disdain for warmongers and organized religion. It really feels like a Douglas Adams novel.

Douglas Adams

Dedicated Douglas Adams fans will recognize how Goss sets himself a difficult challenge here. Goss uses Adams’ final DW-branded notes, striving to recapture Adams’ sardonic but scientifically informed tone. But he can’t just recreate Life, the Universe, and Everything beat-for-beat. The hybrid story does resemble Adams’ previously-written plot enough to feel familiar, but also recaptures the smart, languorous tone of 1970s-era Doctor Who.

The resulting story recaptures what fans loved about the series during that era. It caroms among dozens of planets, features loads of explosions and dramatic cliffhangers, and drops punchlines at unexpected dramatic moments. It takes jabs at then-current politics, direct to the face. And it features the Fourth Doctor in his element: bored in the midst of galaxy-spanning conflict, tired of his extremely long life but unwilling to die.

It also shoehorns in Adams’ notorious erudition. While the story’s political jibes are overt and aggressive, its intellectual themes are more subtle. By stressing how cricket, the game, quietly recreates a terrible war that game-players have long forgotten, it emphasizes how much of everyday ritual is designed to memorialize [sic] historical events we’ve forgotten. Adams was a follower of Sir J.G. Frasier, which some readers will recognize.

Specifically, Frasier believed that certain traditions, like patriotism and religion, were rituals conducted to remember important events that happened in the honored past. Unfortunately, those rituals eventually become more important than the events they commemorate, and the original events get forgotten. People go to church, or go to war, to acknowledge important truths. Exactly what those truths are, however, becomes lost in the clouds. This story makes that symbolism explicit.

James Goss

In contrast, the Doctor exists entirely as he is. As a time traveler, he can’t lose track of the original meanings behind favorite traditions; chances are, he was there when those traditions were created. He has the ability to pierce the veil that covers the minds of mere mortals. Which, in this book, he does literally, bringing the light of truth to a civilization shrouded in generations of darkness.

It’s possible to read this novel as a fun, fast-paced, silly adventure. It captures what fans love about classic Doctor Who, which isn’t entirely surprising; Douglas Adams was showrunner during the series’ highest-rated years. But it also continues Adams’ longstanding pattern of using slapstick comedy to address the themes he considered important, particularly humankind’s tendency to cling mindlessly to traditions. For broad, dumb comedy, this story is remarkably erudite.

In reviewing books, I don’t normally recommend particular formats for reading. However, for specifically this book, I strongly suggest fans consider grabbing the audiobook. It contains the unabridged novel text, but voice actor Dan Starkey, famous among Doctor Who fans as Strax the Sontaran, manages to create a roster of distinct voices, including a Tom Baker impersonation so uncanny, I thought the Fourth Doctor was in the studio.

One Afternoon in Stull Cemetary, Kansas

Stull Cemetery

I’m unsure exactly when Stull Cemetery entered national consciousness. Before or after it appeared on TV’s Supernatural? Series creator Eric Kripke wrote the show’s protagonists, Sam and Dean Winchester, as originally being from Lawrence, Kansas, to incorporate the urban legends surrounding Stull into the series. Kripke originally wrote a five-season story arc, culminating in an apocalyptic confrontation between Satan and the Archangel Michael in Stull.

What I found in Stull Cemetery was far from horrific. Stull itself, never a particularly large town, has been reduced to a wide spot in the Kansas 1600 Road, very little remaining besides the cemetery and a United Methodist Church. The cemetery is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and is open only during limited hours. Sheriff’s patrols visit intermittently throughout the day, to discourage vandals and souvenir hunters.

For a reputed ghost town, though, Stull’s cemetery continues attracting numerous new graves. Though I didn’t perform a thorough survey, I saw over ten gravestones with dates in the last decade; one was dated January 2021. Stull, a community founded by Pennsylvania Dutch, continues to inter its honored dead in the same earth where their ancestors have buried their friends and neighbors since White settlers seized this land in the 1870s.

Urban legend holds that Stull Cemetery is one of the eight Gates of Hell, places where the living world and the afterlife of perdition sit perilously close together. This legend has made the cemetery a destination of Goth-culture pilgrimages, especially around Halloween. Gawkers come hoping to witness supposed in-person visitations of Satan’s minions, who supposedly manifest among the remains of the old, stone-walled Evangelical United Brethren church.

The grave of Essie P. Buck; note the broken
stone, patched with concrete

This legend, however, only dates to 1974, when it ran in the University Daily Kansan, the student newspaper at the University of Kansas, in nearby Lawrence. In 1974, fewer students had cars, so Stull, sixteen miles from Lawrence around Carter Lake, could’ve been on the far side of the moon. Maybe students got a frisson of transgression by thinking a manifestation of Hell existed so close, yet so far. They probably never dreamed the story would grow legs.

Stripped of paranormal woo-woo, Sarah and I found a place characterized not by terror, but by celestial calm. Many stones are freshly decorated with silk flowers. In late spring, fading daffodils and hyacinths surround several graves. Stones dated from the late 19th Century lie adjacent to stones from the last five years. Family graves, children’s graves from the Spanish Influenza, and veterans’ headstones from two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam mingle freely.

Kansas 1600 Road runs alongside the cemetery, and up a slope, one course of large, rough-hewn bricks marks the former EUB church building. Though it sits beside a heavily trafficked road, Stull Cemetery feels like a place removed, a bastion of peace. A gentle breeze, scented by the trees surrounding Carter Lake, urged Sarah and I to sit in front of a grave marked as Essie P. Buck, who died in 1878.

We wanted to simply be present.

Yet around us, evidence testified that others didn’t enter these grounds with open hearts. Several 19th-Century monuments had much newer pediments under them, several with visible smears of patching plaster. Sure signs that these stones had once been overturned, and been reset, probably with anchor bolts to prevent them being moved again. Some might’ve been overturned by subsidence and erosion. But the likelier culprit was vandalism.

Essie P. Buck’s five-foot obelisk has a large diagonal crack, filled with cement. The stone probably broke when somebody, presumably a student, pushed it over. These physical markers of bad-faith presence remind us of the conflicting forces driving places like this. Loved ones chose this place, its peaceful air and soothing nature, to memorialize their lives forever. And paranoid children, fearful of eternity, defaced that memorial.

The Houk family monument, victim
of subsidence and possible vandalism

“Look at the bird,” Sarah said, pointing. “What is it?”

Above us, a broad-winged hawk with a fringe of dark feathers around its cream-tinted wings, glided in a sweeping arc. Another matching hawk followed shortly after. Watching their massive wings and graceful spiral, I couldn’t help remembering the large wings that Renaissance artists painted on angels. Spirits that, unlike us mere mortals, weren’t confined to earth.

The salacious legends had attracted us to visit. Eric Kripke painted Stull as a frightening, apocalyptic necropolis. But we found a refuge, a place unsullied by our world’s violence and poverty. Media hucksters tell us our world is teeming with terrors and mortality. But this place reminds me that peace and beauty exist.

Who Are You When Everyone Stops Looking?

Ryan Lindner, The Half-Known Life: What Matters Most When You're Running Out of Time

Ryan Lindner was absurdly young when his first heart attack hit, requiring him to have a pacemaker installed. Since then, he writes, he’s lived in fear of another. Already working as a behavioral coach with some pretty high-profile clients, Lindner began reevaluating not only his own choices, but the advice he’d been giving others. He began an extensive reevaluation of what makes life meaningful, in the constant presence of death.

It’s always risky reviewing self-help books. Because different counselors have different talents, and readers have their own natural dispositions, a perfectly good, scientifically robust text might miss its audience. Lindner’s spirited, individual voice resembles less a psychologist than a motivational speaker, or perhaps a street evangelist. His deeply personal insights aren’t for everyone, but they contain enough incentive to spur the right readers to action.

We tend, Lindner writes, to seek validation outside ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing careers, possessions, and relationships. But these things are all about how others see us; they aren’t ourselves. The problem, for Lindner, arises when people lose perspective and think these external accomplishments are our identity markers. When that happens, we aren’t present with ourselves, but pursuing outside validation that never quite arrives.

Lindner circles this point, examining it from multiple angles: Who are we when we’re at work, or in relationships, or alone with our thoughts? Where do we stop owning stuff, and stuff starts owning us? How can we distinguish what matters from what’s transitory, what’s real from what’s an illusion? His writing less resembles scholarship than a non-religious sermon, an exhortation to examine unspoken assumptions about ourselves and our relationships.

I don’t mean this non-religious sermon comparison flippantly. Lindner’s writing resembles my first time reading Lao Tzu: the point isn’t necessarily any factual claims or how-to procedures for a better life. His point, instead, is to uncover the parts of our lives and experiences we haven’t considered directly, and remind us that these parts exist. He doesn’t give you step-by-step instructions, but questions he wants you to live with.

Ryan Lindner

Most self-help nonfiction follows two basic patterns: the author uses either long autobiographical vignettes to demonstrate points, or extensive evidence from hard science and psychology. Lindner does neither. After his autobiographical introduction, he mostly asks readers questions and demonstrates common patterns. His fast-paced writing breezes energetically, like a prose poem, carrying readers through the patterns Lindner has witnessed in himself and his clients.

I had initial doubts about Lindner’s approach. Literal-minded readers may find his intimate, informal approach off-putting. Post-Enlightenment rationalism has taught readers to seek supporting evidence whenever anybody makes broad claims about life and behavioral ethics. I pooh-poohed Lindner while reading him. Then I put the book down and felt myself strangely compelled to jump into a task I’d long avoided: cleaning the sink. Hmmm, almost like I felt motivated.

Don’t mistake my meaning. Lindner offers evidence, but not from science. He mixes his and his clients’ experience (he removes any confidential information) with quotes from respected sources like Clarence Darrow, Maya Angelou, and… um… Jim Carrey. Some quotes he uses in ways that contradict their original context; I suspect he found at least some of them with Google. This doesn’t mean he’s wrong, only that Lindner’s approach is casual.

Self-help is popular in America because, I contend, many people realize we need help. We realize something is wrong; we just can’t positively identify what. So we seek everything, from feel-good gurus like Tony Robbins to lite-beer scientists like Malcolm Gladwell, because they offer different approaches to fixing the gaping wounds we all feel in our lives. They’re mostly disappointing, not because they’re wrong, but because our needs are individual.

Ryan Lindner implicitly recognizes that your circumstances aren’t mine, or his. He doesn’t try to pitch corporation-friendly pablum. Instead, like Lao Tzu, Lindner wants readers to sit quietly with his enigmatic poetry, asking themselves the questions that daily life tries to muffle. No pseudo-Zen koans or six step plans here; Lindner wants you to uncover who you are when everyone else isn’t looking. And only you can answer that.

Around the halfway mark, Lindner writes: “Do you want change? Okay, be precise; that’s where the progress is. Let’s have a specific, civil dialogue. Offer solutions.” This is slightly ironic, since Lindner’s writing is often general and not solutions-oriented. But, I realized, that’s what he meant: offer solutions specific to you. Lindner can’t do that, only you can. He can ask the necessary questions, but only you have the answers.

“A Kinder, Gentler War on the Poor” Part 2

This essay follows from “A Kinder, Gentler War on the Poor”

A statue of Jesus Christ as a homeless man sleeping rough. (source)

It’s probably most obvious when it regards policing homelessness: our governments make it illegal to sleep under bridges, in public parks, or in cars. There’s only one reason to do this, of course. We might make some meaningless excuse about preventing unauthorized camping, but come on, Boy Scouts aren’t pitching tents in the park. The only reason to criminalize public sleeping is to create a crime that only applies to the homeless.

In other words, we don’t bust homeless people because they’re committing crimes; we create categories of crimes to bust homeless people. By this logic, “criminal” isn’t something people become because they commit crimes, but something people innately are, and we write laws to target them. Not coincidentally, these innate criminals match social categories we’ve been taught to despise on sight: the poor, the non-White, immigrants, homosexuals.

I’ve always been conscious of this on some level, though only recently have I processed how widespread the phenomenon is. Laws against “blocking the sidewalk” supposedly exist to stop street crime, but are enforced almost entirely against people who are poor, Black, or both. One of the first things that happens when well-off White people move into poor ethnic neighborhoods, is they start making nuisance calls to police about young people loitering.

Back in high school, I remember the administration writing new rules against students wearing “gang colors.” These standards were ominously vague, and largely meant bright, vibrant shades of red or blue. (This was the peak of media-driven paranoia about the Crips and the Bloods.) Notably, these rules were only enforced against Black and Hispanic students, who started wearing only faded denim and white t-shirts to appear as nondescript as possible.

Not that the rules were never enforced against White students. I saw White friends reprimanded for violating “gang colors” rules twice. Both times involved tying brightly colored bandanas around their neck or hair. In other words, White students were only targeted by anti-Black rules when they did something stereotypically Black. This means the rules did double duty, forcing Black students into mute compliance, while forcing White students into middle-class conformity.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his
favorite pose: angrily lecturing the crowd

Currently, we’re witnessing this same pattern evolving in Florida, where the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill is inventing categories of law specifically targeting LGBTQIA+ Floridians. Demonstrating conventionally gay behaviors, dressing in supposedly gay manners, or teaching schoolchildren about sexual and gender identities, have become unlawful in America’s third most populous state. Like the “gang colors” rule, the law nominally covers everyone, but will only get enforced against nonconformists.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has needed to manufacture claims of harm to justify these rules. Talk about “grooming,” kiddie-diddling, and protecting children’s innocence, is used to justify ham-fisted crackdowns. But I cannot believe, for one damn minute, that Governor DeSantis thinks talking about gender will spoil schoolchildren’s innocence. He knows as well as anybody what motivates this legislation: he’s creating rules to punish creepy out-group members.

It’s important how frequently Christianity, and specifically Levitical Law, gets cited to reinforce these rules. Like American law, Levitical Law involves definite claims of material harm: thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit murder, thou shalt not commit adultery. But other laws about, say, eating shellfish, wearing mixed cloth, and getting tattoos, aren’t about preventing harm. They’re about creating an in-group identity: Thou Shalt Not Do What Foreigners Do.

But I believe Jesus, a Jew who lived during times when a conquering Empire used the Temple priesthood as a proxy government, would recognize what’s happening here. An authoritarian central government is using state power to arbitrarily punish anybody who deviates from state-sponsored identity categories. Whether those identities are economic (sleeping rough), sexual (dress to match your genitals), or racial (don’t dress like the Black kids).

I don’t support total lawlessness. We need consequences for people who commit robbery, rape, and murder. But huge swaths of law exist to enforce conformity, punish deviance, and push certain groups into permanent outlaw status. When our legislatures pass laws that criminalize, for instance, whatever Black people do, the message is clear: Black people are criminals by nature. They don’t necessarily commit crimes; their actions just are crimes, in advance.

Homelessness, gangs, sexual purity: the rhetoric surrounding these actions exists entirely to punish out-group members for things they can’t control. We don’t punish people because they commit crimes; we create criminal categories because people’s actions cause responses of revulsion and disgust among the in-group. But, from high school cliques to Fascist states, history proves that the in-group is never appeased.

“A Kinder, Gentler War on the Poor”

1001 Books to Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 111
Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing

Since the middle 1960s, America’s catchall solution for gangs, widespread homelessness, sex work, and drugs has been more police. But has this solution accomplished anything? It’s certainly created entire classes of people guaranteed to spend part of their lives in jail. But sending police into poor communities for mass drug sweeps, roundups of street hookers, and to rough up street hoodlums has arguably not made Americans any safer.

If you’re like me, you never heard of sociologist Alex S. Vitale until Senator Ted Cruz waved his most influential book around on the Senate floor. Professor Vitale’s principles have been widely known in activist circles for years, and motivated the Black Lives Matter movement. His precepts, however, require a level of nuance not easily distilled onto cardboard protest placards or 240-character tweets. Thus, his words have been widely misconstrued.

Periodically, America convulses with anger because police officers somewhere did something awful, usually to someone poor or Black. These outbreaks lead to incremental reforms, like mandatory body cameras or inherent bias training, and the energy for protest dissipates. Yet these reforms seldom result in better outcomes for the poor, marginalized communities where police presence is most prevalent. The problem recurs, but America’s motivation for reform has been diminished.

The problem, Vitale says, stems from a fundamental conflict between these reforms, and the police’s underlying mission. Our society trains and authorizes police to enforce order, not justice. The police fundamentally serve the economic system, not the citizens, and will protect the former at the expense of the latter. Humanizing the police won’t fix that; as Vitale writes, “A kinder, gentler, more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.”

Vitale breaks this claim down into its most important components, and justifies his claims with evidence. Intensive police actions haven’t diminished America’s problems with drugs, homelessness, or sex work, because these problems aren’t motivated by mere criminality. They’re driven by economic factors, and will persist until economic destitution is eliminated. Police drive homeless people and hookers out of sight, but the need for money and shelter remains.

Alex S. Vitale

Worse, a willingness to delegate responsibility for economic inequality onto police and prisons, empowers organized crime. Not only have intense police crackdowns failed to eliminate gang activity, they’ve taught many poor Americans that only gangs provide them protection from intrusive police. The problem becomes circular: poor Americans need gang protection from police, while middle-class Americans need (or anyway want) police protection from gangs.

Every dollar spent on police crackdowns, Vitale writes, takes money away from social workers, mental health professionals, and other skilled workers charged with providing ways out. Yet that’s consistently America’s response to social unrest. From union organizers in the Gilded Age, to BLM protesters today, both major parties answer every demand for change by plowing more money into police and prisons. Funny enough, nothing ever gets much better.

America’s unwillingness to subsidize even rudimentary alternatives has costs for our poor. For many, the only reliable way to achieve mental health treatment, diversion from gangs or prostitution, or inpatient drug rehabilitation, is to first get arrested. O. Henry wrote, over a century ago, that hobos and other homeless could only find reliable winter shelter in prison. Arrestees, sadly, have lifelong criminal records that impede their job and housing prospects.

Professor Vitale addresses America’s most high-profile problems individually, though he acknowledges they’re often deeply entwined. He demonstrates how the popular rhetoric surrounding “crimes” like drug abuse and prostitution are driven by moralistic outrage, not measures of harm. Treating people who need pain control, or are willing to trade sex for money, as criminals, doesn’t fix the underlying problems; it just makes the problems less visible.

Every chapter ends with two sections: “Reforms” and “Alternatives.” In the Reforms section, Vitale breaks down what attempts America’s politicians have made to hold police more accountable. He credits those reforms where they’ve worked, but they haven’t always worked, certainly not reliably. The Alternatives section proposes ways governments have reallocated police responsibilities onto civilian groups, or could. Because fundamentally, this isn’t about fixing police, it’s about fixing culture.

Moving away from police-centered approaches to handling disorder will mean leaving the map, Vitale acknowledges. That’s scary even under ideal circumstances. But the existing map has proven unreliable, and has served to deepen rather than redress the inequalities that drive people to crime. Broken-windows policing has made life quieter, but not necessarily safer. It’s time to abandon America’s addiction to order, and try techniques that serve to broaden justice.

American Christians and the Longing for Martyrdom

I… cannot stop watching this.

It’s… a masterpiece 🥺😭 pic.twitter.com/zn4cDpT36g

— Trey Ferguson (@PastorTrey05) April 5, 2022

Regard, please, this lousy piece of half-religious propaganda. Like a train wreck in process, it’s impossible to look away. This man-child with a 2016 man bun and a fluffy beard that hasn’t come in yet, enacts a medieval morality play where a “shooter” targets him for his faith and politics. But everything’s okay, see, because in a psychedelic-colored flash of divine intervention, Jesus turns him into a superhero and absorbs the bullet damage! Somehow. Apparently.

Leave aside momentarily the knee-jerk objection to this terrible Easter pageant, that self-identified “conservative Christians” are more likely to be the shooter than the target. I’m more interested in the desires this video represents. The star, who looks like he could still be in high school, has fantasies of dying for his faith, like the earliest martyred saints. Yet simultaneously, he apparently believes that faith will immunize him against actual death, making him seem angelic.

I’ve long witnessed the White Christian yearning for martyrdom. Anybody who attended Protestant youth ministries in the 1980s or 1990s probably remembers their youth leaders recounting myths of early martyrs like Sebastian, Polycarp, or the Apostles. These breathless fables usually ended with the exhortation: would you willingly die to support the Gospel? I admit, I scoffed, but many of my peers legitimately believed they might have to choose between their bodily survival and their religion.

In fairness, there are places on Earth where Christianity is despised, and missionaries literally risk death—but not very many. In America today, you’re more likely to face persecution for challenging state authority; consider how often Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, got arrested. Instead, reactionary Protestants claim they’re being “persecuted” because they can’t economically discriminate against LGBTQIA+ persons, a position that exaggerates their own moral courage, while cheapening actual Christian persecution in other times and places.

But this anonymous TikTok slacktivist adds a wrinkle. He longs for death in Jesus’ name, while claiming he won’t actually die. Instead, his display of muscles and leaning-in rage face demonstrate that he expects personal vindication. Standing up for truth seemingly makes him invulnerable, but that invulnerability is demonstrated only afterward. Instead he must step forward and voluntarily die. In other words, he becomes immune to death only by embracing death through someone else’s violence.

As a Lutheran, I recognize this narrative. During the German Peasants’ War of 1524, encouraged by firebrand preachers Andreas Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, Lutheran peasants rose up against local Catholic aristocracy. Karlstadt and Müntzer believed such resistance was justified because the aristocracy derived its authority from Rome. (Luther, a fugitive from the gallows, was sheltered in Thuringia during these events.) Karlstadt and Müntzer wanted to smash painted icons, stained-glass windows, and other hated religious imagery.

Martin Luther

Their unlettered peasant followers, however, wanted more. They wanted aristocrats’ blood and, driven to passion by the pastors’ words, believed God would deliver it to them. They rushed into battle screaming that bullets wouldn’t pierce them, swords wouldn’t cut them, flames wouldn’t burn them. To the complete unsurprise of history, they were wrong. Though records were shoddy, evidence suggests that one-third of the peasants, around 100,000, were killed before Luther returned and stopped the carnage.

Our teenaged protagonist reduces this experience to abject silliness. He apparently believes, as the peasants did, that Jesus will make him invulnerable to death. (Eleven of the twelve apostles died violently.) But he accents this belief with camera effects pinched from MCU movies, and color trails more reminiscent of an acid flashback than Christian iconography. Then he finishes by showing the camera his “war face,” because apparently to him, Jesus is the ultimate drill sergeant.

This kid is, obviously, only one data point. But given what we’ve seen in recent years—petulant Christian resistance to mask mandates, for instance, or religious emblems in the attempt to overthrow the government—too many American Christians, mostly White, think Jesus immunizes them from consequences. American White Christianity has embraced a Nietzschean principle that only outcomes matter, that exerting our will to power is its own moral justification. The Bible I read says otherwise.

The expression “saying the quiet part out loud” has become a cliché. Too many Christians long for martyrdom, but they want it without dying. They want righteous recognition for their moral rigidity. That is, where the Apostolic Martyrs died singing “To God Be the Glory,” these would-be martyrs want to hoard the glory for themselves. In so doing, they become the opposite of Christian; they become secular gloryhounds who wear sacramental vestments as a costume.

“Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee Any Graven Image”

Max Ridgway, The Church of Trump: How Donald Trump Corrupted American Christianity

Chances are, we all remember where we were on the afternoon of January 6th, 2021, when thousands of insurgents overran the U.S. Capitol Building. But like most traumas, the path that brought us there is murkier. Multiple scholars, pundits, and journalists have written countless pages of speculation, reconstructing that path from one perspective or another. But every reconstruction has needed to acknowledge one contributing factor: religion.

Northwestern Oklahoma State University instructor Max Ridgway started out as a musician. But in recent years, he has remade himself as a scholar focusing on the collision between Christian pop theology and American politics. His latest book follows the flow of religious language over Donald Trump’s political career. What Ridgway finds is singularly disturbing, but also enlightening for anyone who cares about the role of faith in modern, post-industrial society.

Even before he formally declared for the presidency, self-proclaimed prophets saw something in Trump that would revitalize their vision of America. Once he became a candidate, Trump had the endorsement of celebrity pastors like Kenneth Copeland, Robert Jeffress, and especially Greg Locke. Their support, though, came with strings. Ridgway unpacks these highly visible Christians’ language surrounding their hero, language that doesn’t blush to describe Trump as a political messiah.

Highly public Christian leaders, and the parishioners who looked to them for guidance, saw Donald Trump as a harbinger for national greatness. They disagreed about exactly what that greatness would entail, but details mattered little; he appealed to their longing for moral rectitude, clear answers, and the simple nation they imagined once existed. For all his linguistic ineptitude, Trump used religious terminology deftly, though his living didn’t reflect such beliefs.

Just as important, Trump promised his White Evangelical base power. And he delivered, in ways voters rewarded generously: evangelists and pastors enjoyed an open door to the Oval Office for years. But they exchanged power for control, and Trumpism soon set the tone in America’s largest, richest congregations. Boring old doctrine like feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger disappeared from large swaths of White Christian discourse, apparently forever.

Max Ridgway

Other scholars have written about the particular beliefs of Christian nationalists; Ridgway addresses this topic only synoptically. Instead, Ridgway narratively reconstructs the religious language that has followed Donald Trump throughout his circuitous, weirdly short political career. Though the Trump Administration deployed religious language and symbols in ways that horrified secular voters, and even many Christians, he retained a loyal White Evangelical base that other openly Christian politicians could only envy.

Ridgway scrupulously reconstructs the weird symbiosis between Donald Trump and White Evangelicalism, and cites sources, Christian and secular.. But his prose is concise and energetic, moving briskly through a wide selection of evidence. This book isn’t long, and propelled by Ridgway’s zealous style, readers can savvy this entire book in one or two evenings. He writes with a sense of timing that would make many Hollywood screenwriters envious.

Admittedly, he’s sometimes guilty of overgeneralizing about Trump’s Christian loyalists. On a few occasions, he uses phrases like “most rank and file Christians” to describe reactions emerging from a primarily White evangelical demographic. Mainline Christians face deep clefts in their reaction to Trump, divisions more indicative of party affiliation than religious conviction. Sometimes Ridgway observes this distinction, other times he doesn’t.

It’s difficult to get a strong read on Ridgway’s own religious inclinations. Unlike other scholars of religion and politics whom I’ve read recently, Ridgway plays his cards carefully. He demonstrates familiarity with Scripture, which he deploys without liturgical pomp, and makes persuasive arguments about how Trump’s language jibes, or doesn’t, with the Bible. But through most of the text, Ridgway keeps himself out of the narrative, letting facts carry his message.

Then late in the book, Ridgway uses a powerful word to describe the White Christian nationalism which steered Trump into office: blasphemy. Most other writers, eager to maintain the appearance of journalistic or scholarly dispassion, have avoided such religiously laden terms. But Ridgway, who throughout most of the book avoids taking sides on religious controversy, finally comes down hard on this position. Trumpist Christian nationalism is blasphemous.

This final declaration sums up Ridgway’s entire book. He writes with the narrative urgency of a suspense novelist because he considers his topic too important for nonchalance. Donald Trump hasn’t only hurt America; he’s hurt the Church too. When organized Christianity gets entwined with individual politicians, it loses the ability to challenge them in their transgressions. If the Church doesn’t remain politically separate, it can’t have a political conscience.

How To Have a Socially Acceptable Personality(-ish)

Michaela Chung, The Irresistible Introvert: Harness the Power of Quiet Charisma in a Loud World

Introversion, a term from developmental psychology that most people hadn’t heard twenty years ago, is now a major trait in society at large. The Internet probably did this: because the net is mostly text-based and asynchronous, the development of read-write websites has enabled introverts to express themselves in ways prior generations never had. But that’s all pointy-headed jargon. How can introverts bring their online identities into the offline world?

Michaela Chung started an introverts’ blog after she escaped the corporate world. She wanted to document lessons she’d learned about how introverts, like herself, can navigate social rules written for extroverts. Her blog became successful, and she spun it, first, into a life-coaching consultancy, then into this book. Based on this book, I’d bet Chung’s consultancy is engaging and fun. But she hasn’t really made the transition between mediums yet.

Like millions of us, Chung thought she needed to feign extroverted characteristics to survive. She describes the different ways introverts and extroverts handle social situations: introverts need private time to recharge, where extroverts find energy in company. Loud social situations, which extroverts find exciting, introverts find overwhelming. And so on: Chung adds a personal touch to psychological concepts that the Internet has made commonplace in recent years.

These personal narratives are important, certainly. We introverts consistently heard from authority figures from childhood that our need for solitude and quiet were aberrant, and that our loud, gregarious classmates and co-workers were superior. I spent my first twenty-five years thinking I was maladjusted and doomed to loneliness because I wasn’t outgoing, because that’s what etiquette told me. Hearing that others have faced, and overcome, the same challenges, matters.

Then, Chung presents self-help precepts based on her experiences. Rather than teaching ourselves to behave like extroverts, as our parents and teachers probably did, Chung wants us to embrace the traits that make us unique. Introversion isn’t a problem to cure, Chung says, but a feature to embrace and utilize. We need to shift the self-blaming mindsets we probably learned in elementary school, and learn to love our introverted selves.

Michaela Chung

Huzzah!

Unfortunately, the more Chung talks, the more problems develop with her narrative. She describes introverts as naturally risk-averse, for instance—something that describes some introverts, but not others. She describes introverts as paralyzed between wanting to be sociable, and wanting to avoid overstimulating events—which describes most people, at least sometimes. These generalizations are too broad; I started feeling like she was talking past me.

Between her highly personal anecdotes, and her sweeping generalizations, it quickly becomes clear that Chung is actually describing herself. Which, again, is fine in context. But in reading a book like this, I need to know how I can adjust my thinking so I stop believing I need to behave externally and ignore my inner yearning for solitude. That’s a matter of doing, not merely accepting gnomic sayings.

Around the halfway mark, Chung writes: “In my online courses for introverts, I always include exercises for creating major mind-set shifts.” Great. But she doesn’t include any exercises in this book; she just quotes students expressing the epiphanies they experienced while performing those exercises. We know concrete, specific techniques exist, because Chung tells us so. But she doesn’t tell us what they are, or how to do them.

Don’t misunderstand me, Chung says plenty I concur with. Though she overgeneralizes many statements, her overall goal is to encourage more soul-searching and introspection, and when you’ve done that, you’ll have the skills to effectively decide which broad bromides apply to you, and you to utilize them. Her approach is way rockier than I’d prefer, but she says plenty that helps introverts appreciate themselves where they are.

However, in buying this book, recognize it isn’t self-sufficient. I chose this book, expecting the author would provide guidance in developing valuable social skills, but the actual text involves more personal contemplation. It more resembles poetry than how-to. Chung’s ultimate goal is to persuade readers to subscribe to her online life coaching seminars. Which, in fairness, I might do, because her personality shines through her prose.

I get the feeling, reading this book, that Chung does best working one-on-one or in small groups, where she can develop rapport with students individually. I sympathize; that’s why I resisted online schooling, back in my teaching days. That’s a common introvert trait, and we’re often afraid of alienating our audiences by saying things that don’t apply to them. Unfortunately, that’s a risk you must take in writing a book.

American White Jesus and the Drums of War

Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag + the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy

When insurgents swarmed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, they carried nooses and swastikas, but also crosses and “Jesus Saves” banners. This particularly violent manifestation of American religion will probably outlive the politicians and candidates who continue arguing about that day. But how did we reach this impasse, where a mostly White, Christian subculture attempts to literally overthrow the government? Many pundits have speculated, but few experts have researched.

Sociologists Philip Gorski, at Yale, and Samuel Perry, at the University of Oklahoma, were already investigating this question before the 2020 election. Not content opinionating from their ivory tower, they performed actual original research into public sentiments and their political manifestations. The results are often chilling. They present difficult insights into how we reached this moment, and the likely grim trajectory if something doesn’t stop these groups from growing.

First, though our authors use the term “white Christian nationalism” generously, this phrase isn’t necessarily religious, racial, or political. Rather, it’s all three melded together, a mulligan stew of racial grievance, Apocalyptic gloom, and dominion. White Christian nationalists see race, religion, and national origin as identity markers. Then, based on that, they divide the world into feuding “us-and-them” camps, and man the ramparts to keep “them” safely outside.

White Christian nationalists, in this figuration, don’t do things that Christians do: attend church, pray regularly, or feed the hungry. Rather, they’re defined by in-group status badges. They’re more likely to believe God divinely inspired America’s founding documents, that America has an anointed mission in the world, and that the federal government should explicitly declare America a Christian nation. Christianity isn’t something they believe or do; it’s a government platform.

Importantly, Americans of many political stripes might believe these precepts. But race changes how Americans behave politically. Black Americans who believe America has a holy mission, don’t necessarily believe it’s okay to violently overturn elections, but White Americans do. This unique admixture of race, religiosity, and politics creates an unparalleled paranoia. Gorski and Perry back this with copious data and histograms to demonstrate how they reached this controversial conclusion.

This position isn’t historically fixed. Our authors outline American history, demonstrating that we’ve had multiple opportunities—King Philipp’s War, the Revolution, Reconstruction—when Americans could’ve abandoned nationalist sentiments, but didn’t. And they assert that today, following the 2020 BLM protests and the January 6th insurgency, we have such an opportunity again. We’d better take it, too, because history records grim outcomes for states that don’t resist nationalist aggression.

Philip S. Gorski (left) and Samuel L. Perry

Reading their exposition, I recalled Émile Durkheim’s hypothesis of “savage” religion. Durkheim believed that humankind’s earliest religions involved tribes speaking their beliefs liturgically, then creating totem spirits to embody those beliefs. In essence, Durkheim believed pre-literate tribal religions worshiped their tribes, inventing gods to verify their beliefs. White Christian nationalists, in this description, do something remarkably similar, with matching pre-modern outcomes.

Throughout, the narrative remains anchored to Donald Trump and the January 6th insurgency. How, our authors wonder, did Trump accomplish a form of undisguised race-baiting that previous conservatives, like Reagan and George W., avoid? And why, following the ugly revelations of the Capitol insurgency, did the movement become more, not less, energized? The answers aren’t simple, and they’re also frightening, if the history of previous nationalist democracies holds true.

I appreciate an important balancing act our authors accomplish. Their analysis is data-driven, but they place that data into a narrative context, so we understand the real-world meaning. It would’ve been easy to deluge readers with numbers and charts, losing sight of the historical narrative that makes the information comprehensible. Or it would’ve been easy to craft a narrative that, like the nationalists, prioritizes the writers’ opinions, facts be damned.

Instead, Gorski and Perry thread the needle between dense information and comprehensible narrative. This book is remarkably slim, barely 140 pages plus back matter, and dedicated readers could finish it in one energetic weekend. But it contains enough information, organized in smoothly readable chunks, to sustain a closer reading. The source notes cite authors like Kristen Du Mez and Kevin Kruse, building upon an already robust body of research.

Multiple audiences should read this book. Secular progressives, Christians who believe America isn’t necessarily God’s kingdom, and anybody who believes small-d democracy is a moral good, will learn much here. Gorski and Perry make the book informative but readable, and hold a mirror to us readers who aren’t White Christian nationalists.. Because like all the best literature, this book, with all its chilling broadsides, is ultimately about us.

The First Reformed Church of the Founding Fatherhood

Mary Anne Franks, The Cult of the Constitution

Americans widely think we know what the U.S. Constitution says, and most think we know what it means. But according to research, most of us have never actually read it. Like the Bible or the Qur’an, we generally only scan the text seeking justifications for opinions we already have. Moreover, though we think the Constitution enumerates our “rights,” most of those rights are limited, positional, and tainted by history.

Constitutional law scholar Mary Anne Franks, a lapsed fundamentalist Christian herself, compares the American Constitutional fondness for legal prooftexting with religious fundamentalism of multiple stripes. What Franks calls “Constitutional fundamentalism” involves a selective, self-serving reading which true believers nevertheless consider obviously true. This fundamentalism manifests in various forms and, for Franks, resembles the structure of religion, for good or ill.

This begins with our veneration of the Constitution itself. In Franks’ description, our retellings of its drafting in 1787 have the reverential tone of an Easter pageant, eliding the aspects that cause us discomfort nowadays (Three-Fifths Compromise, anyone?) while highlighting the qualities that support our shared values. This nigh-religious acclamation inevitably soft-sells the reality that the Founding Fathers were entirely White, entirely male, and disproportionately likely to own slaves.

From this origin myth, Americans’ religious behavior breaks along partisan lines. While conservatives believe the whole Constitution rests on the Second Amendment, liberals place their trust in the First Amendment. (Franks admits this is an overgeneralization, but a useful one.) Further, both sides’ reading of each amendment is selective; Conservatives disregard the “well regulated militia” clause, where liberals overemphasize the Free Speech clause.

As Franks dives into these conflicting forms of Constitutional fundamentalism, I admit I started anticipating where her opponents are likely to find putative weaknesses in her claims. Like unbelievers attempting to describe religion from an outsider’s perspective, Franks sometimes uses hasty generalization to describe precepts True Believers handle with more nuance. She sometimes compresses difficult precepts into bullet points, stating articles of faith in terms which her opponents would dispute.

Mary Anne Franks

But, glossing Franks’ tendency to oversimplification, the real heart lies in her close reading of higher court rulings that reflect the fundamentalist precepts hidden in modern politics. In keeping with her religious metaphor, she reads court opinions exegetically, unpacking themes and parsing difficult or obscure passages. Like a seminarian trying to explain how Greek has evolved since Paul’s time, Franks guides us through what her 200-year-old source text actually means.

If this sounds like difficult reading, it is. Franks uses dense prose in very long chapters to elucidate how judicial history demonstrates her point. Though she’s good at explaining what she means in vernacular English, her tone is nevertheless unrelentingly professorial, and her meaning doesn’t always reveal itself at first face. Franks sets a fairly high textual tone early, and expects her reader to follow her, which isn’t always easy.

This difficulty matters because Franks’ theme isn’t light. In 1787, the Founding Fathers used the language of democratic equality in drafting the Constitution, though they clearly didn’t mean it. In the same way, whether we refer to Second Amendment fundamentalism on the right, or First Amendment fundamentalism on the left, Americans generally use Constitutional language in ways that benefit White men. Franks’ theme throughout this book is “white male supremacy.”

Our Constitutional rights nominally cover everyone; Franks cites the Fourteenth Amendment to assert that. But in practice, that isn’t so. While Second Amendment fundamentalists turn mute when government agents murder Black men with guns—think Philando Castile—First Amendment fundamentalists have frequently shown similar disregard for women’s and minorities’ speech. Consider the “free speech” pushback against anti-revenge porn legislation.

(It bears saying that, for Franks, these fundamentalists are embodied in their most outspoken organizations, the NRA and the ACLU. As with Christians, the church doesn’t uniformly represent all believers.)

Franks’ analysis culminates on the Internet. Though early webhead visionaries imagined the Internet as a libertarian utopia, the guise of anonymity has made it a haven of violence and ugly language, usually targeted at women and minorities. But whenever anybody proposes addressing this, somebody cries Constitutional impingement, inevitably defending White, heterosexual men, the American group least likely to need defense.

Every reader will find something to dislike in this book. True Believers will claim that Franks misrepresents their respective faiths. Franks turns harsh language on Donald Trump that will alienate the White men who most need her message. But Franks provides an important lens for analyzing important controversies of American case law. Because here as elsewhere, justice should outweigh dogma.