Party Politics and the Art of Forgiveness

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

This weekend, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the Democrats “a big tent…. that’s got room for Marjorie Taylor Greene.” This statement deserved the immediate blowback, as Greene’s history of race-baiting, antisemitism, and harassing school shooting survivors doesn’t just go away. But it exemplifies two problems with American politics. First, that our parties have been reduced to the Trump and anti-Trump parties, without underlying principles. Second, we keep steadily eroding the relationship between forgiveness and repentance.

Raskin’s invitation is only the latest Democratic effort to dilute their brand. The Democrats continue providing a nurturing cocoon to aggressive nationalists like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, simply because they personally refuse President Taco. Former Representative Joe Walsh, who holds truly noxious views, has become a resistance leader. Yet the party leadership, including Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, still haven’t endorsed Zohran Mamdani, even after he won the party primary and the majority vote.

Throughout the last decade, we’ve watched America’s mainstream parties reorganize themselves around one man. Republicans, who had legitimate policies in the 1990s when I was one of them, have become the party that endorses whatever dribbles out of President Taco’s mouth. Those who disagree, the party deems “traitors.” Meanwhile, Democrats, once the party of Civil Rights and the New Deal, have jettisoned all principles to pursue whatever and whoever opposes this President. This isn’t sustainable.

To accomplish their agenda, Democrats have ushered their onetime opponents up the leadership ladder. Although professional pundits claimed Kamala Harris lost last year’s election behind issues like queer, trans, and racial rights, Harris actively avoided those issues. Instead, she spent the campaign’s final weeks touring as a double-act with Liz Cheney, whom observers have described as “arch-conservative.” Democrats have pivoted away from their base, including labor, minorities, and queer voters, to chase the ever-shifting center.

Democrats have made conservatives like Cheney, Walsh, and now Greene their preferred leaders, despite their voting base’s opposition. This rush to promote former enemies makes sense if, like I suspect many Democrats did, you read Clausewitz in high school, without prior context. Many military strategists contend that former enemies make the best allies. Which is probably true, if your only interest is winning. But because the Democratic base has certain principles, winning alone isn’t enough.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

“Forgiveness” has become the defining stain of contemporary American life. News reeks with commentators who demand forgiveness, not as a culmination of a penitent journey, but as a precondition. From ordinary criminals who want forgiveness without facing consequences, to widespread abuse in religious congregations, to loyalists eager to excuse treason, we’ve witnessed a reversal of the forgiveness process. It’s become something powerful people demand from their perches, not something the wronged offer from God-given mercy.

I can’t unpack the full underpinnings of forgiveness in 750 words. In brief, “forgiveness” is half of the continuum, one face of a coin. The other half is “repentance,” the process of taking account and changing one’s life. This isn’t merely verbal contrition, as I learned in White Protestant Sunday school. Repentance, or metanoia in Greek, means literally walking a new path. We know somebody’s repented, not by their words, but by their changed life.

Cheney, Walsh, and especially Greene have shown no inclination toward changed lives. Though Greene has verbally apologized for past violent rhetoric, observant critics claim her manner hasn’t shown signs of authenticity. More important, this change in Greene’s loyalties has happened too suddenly to reflect in her actions. Perhaps Greene has literally reversed herself, and she’ll demonstrate a more cooperative, nonviolent, and restrained manner. But it’s too soon to know whether her words match her actions.

Please don’t misunderstand me: verbal apologies matter. Humans are language-driven creatures, and speaking with one another is a necessary part of bond-building. But who among us hasn’t known somebody who says they’re sorry, while showing no acts of repentance? This may be innocent—small children think “I’m sorry” is a blanket ticket to forgiveness—or malicious—abusive spouses love voicing their regrets. But only when words and actions come together do they make a difference.

Part of repentance includes asking whether one will handle power better in the future. Current or former elected officials, including Greene, Walsh, and Cheney, want the Democratic Party to offer them unconditional leadership, like they had before. But from my vantage point, they’ve shown no signs that they’ll use that leadership to uplift the downtrodden, heal the hurting, or support large-D Democratic principles. They haven’t shown a new life, so they haven’t yet earned forgiveness.

Why Ostara?

A 19th century engraving depicting
Ostara (source)

Each year during Lent, social media surges with claims that Easter derives its name and mythology from the Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess Ostara. These memes often include claims about how Ostara gives us numerous Easter myths: that rabbits and eggs were her sacred symbols, that her worship involved sexual rituals which early Christians suppressed, even that Ostara died and rose again. These claims are largely fictional; Ostara’s actual mythology is lost.

Less interesting than what Anglo-Saxons believed, or didn’t, about Ostara, is the eagerness with which online critics invent Ostara mythology. No information about Ostara, beyond her name, survives, yet commentators assert a panoply of just-so stories, many beginning with “it’s said” or “the story goes,” variations on the folkloric “Once Upon a Time.” Some such stories are pilfered from Germanic or Near Eastern religions; others seem to be purely fabricated.

Such attempts to revive otherwise lost pre-Christian religions seem counterintuitive. The so-called New Atheists, like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, claim that scientific modernity doesn’t need creation myths and just-so stories to organize society. Yet even as Christianity seems ever-further removed from today’s culture, at least a vocal contingent seeks moral justification, not in science, but in ancient myth. The very antiquity of pre-Christian myth gives it exotic appeal.

Multiple factors contribute to why Christianity, and its myths and practices, are fading in Western Civilization. Clergy abuses, past and present, surely contribute. Christianity’s association with warlike, nationalistic, and racist factions doesn’t help. Even its ancient texts, unchanged since the Iron Age, makes it seem weighted with antique baggage. But I’d suggest one important reason Christianity seems distant from modern culture: the religion focuses heavily on death.

Why does Jesus’ suffering and death dominate Christian theology? The Apostle Paul highlights Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, far beyond Jesus’ moral lessons. Christianity originally spread amid conditions where death was commonplace; most people died, not in hospitals, but at home, surrounded by family. Funerals were massive public gatherings signified by music, food, and other festival trappings. Such events still sometimes happen in rural areas, but have become uncommon elsewhere.

A 19th century Easter card (source)

Rather, modern death has become aberrant. The most common causes of death throughout history—tuberculosis, malaria, bubonic plague, polio, tetanus, whooping cough—have become rare in the last century, the time when Christianity saw its fastest decline. Even industrial accidents and war wounds are treatable in ways past generations didn’t know. Death, once so ever-present that people discussed their funeral preparations over family dinner, has become rare, distant, and distasteful.

Theologians have created convoluted justifications for Christ’s death and resurrection. As Fleming Rutledge writes, virtually no such justifications withstand scrutiny. But for early Christians, no justification was necessary; Christ died because we’ll eventually die, probably sooner rather than later. That camaraderie with God brings comfort. I’ve known two atheist friends who embraced faith and prayer when loved ones were dying, then returned to unbelief when the crisis passed.

But death doesn’t define Ostara. Though some online stories claim she dies and is resurrected every spring, these stories are peripheral. The made-up myths generally highlight fertility, growth, planting, and sex. Concocted myths prioritize life, flourishing, and birth, which seem closer to modern daily experience. In a culture where death seems abnormal, a unifying spiritual narrative privileging birth and life arguably makes sense. Penicillin rendered Christianity obsolete.

This stumbles on one important problem: we’re still going to die. As someone who recently watched a loved one struggle on life support before the merciful end, I find the Easter narrative of God’s mortality comforting in new ways. But we’ve made death distant and antiseptic, hidden inside hospital or nursing home walls, no longer present with daily life. Death has become atypical, but we’re still going to die.

Speaking personally, in past years, I’ve found the romantic mythmaking of Ostara merely treacly. This year, it’s become something more pointed, something harsher. It’s become an active denial of human inevitability, and a shared refusal to accept the human condition. Modern technological society hides death, and dying persons, in antiseptic conditions, pretending they don’t exist. Life has become an eternal present, a permanent now.

I’ve written about this before: myths are ultimately not about the truth, they’re about the people who create them. But in this case, the attempt to invent new “ancient” myths about a lost folk religion aren’t just explanations. They reveal a way modern society denies an important aspect of life, and hides our mortal end like a shameful thing. These myths look cute, but they’re subtly dangerous.

Luigi Mangione and Political Messianism

The martyrdom of Luigi Mangione

When accused assassin Luigi Mangione gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, the initial response was surprisingly bipartisan. Even we who abhor violence as a political instrument, nevertheless acknowledged that the wealthy, protected by law and supported by our political establishment, need consequences. After all, the only thing rich people love more than money, is being alive to spend (or hoard) it.

Mangione represents the latest manifestation of a popular phantom haunting American politics: the yearning for a secular Messiah. Americans long for a unique individual who will, like Jesus before the money changers, sweep uncleanliness from our sacred places and restore the hope we all believed America had in 11^th Grade American Civics class. This powerful unitary individual always seems just across the horizon—and, like the horizon, never quite arrives.

Political messianism has a dual nature: it supposedly galvanizes people around moral principles, but it does so through a singular personality. This may mean the speculation, repeated on basic cable and social media, that Mangione’s actions will galvanize American class consciousness. Or it may mean attributing the kingdom and the power, forever, as QAnon purists believe Donald Trump will purge the halls of power.

This yearning is bipartisan, or perhaps nonpartisan. I’ve written before that both parties look to presidential candidates for deliverance, especially when the other party controls the Oval Office. We saw something similar with what Democrats and dissident Republicans expected from the Mueller Report. In each case, those standing outside the political establishment expected a singular personality to purge “sin” and restore the Eternal Kingdom.

Sometimes this means imputing moral clarity to a conveniently absent figurehead. Political junkies either attribute Ronald Reagan with rescuing America from catastrophic moral decline, or ruining everything with cack-handed mismanagement. Either way, they selectively remember Reagan’s Administration. His adherents elide Iran-Contra, and the fact he left office in disgrace; his critics forget he performed necessary triage on outdated FDR-era programs.

Importantly, political messianism, like the religious variety, heavily emphasizes either the past or the future. Many messianic figures, like Jesus, Socrates, the Buddha, and Confucius, left no written record during their lifetimes; their followers recorded their teachings only posthumously. Likewise, messianic movements, from Hasidism to John’s Revelation to Marx’s Grand Synthesis, await a future where sin is somehow expunged, and humanity made pure.

Sin always exists in the present. The past, whether the Hebrew Eden or the Greek Golden Age or Taoist Pangu, is simple, morally clear, and benevolent. Likewise, the Revolution taught in American creation myths lacked doubt or nuance; it was inarguably good. The emergence of sin corresponds with the emergence of complexity. The more subtlety and finesse necessary to explain doctrine, the more tainted it becomes with doubt and sin.

Against this complexity, religions consistently promise a messiah. Besides Jesus of Nazareth, other proclaimed messiahs include Simon bar Kokhba, Moses Maimonides, and Cyrus the Great. Islam promises the future appearance of the Mahdi, whose military purge will precede the final judgement. Modern Judaism promises not an individual messiah, but a messianic age of moral clarity—which, again, disturbingly resembles Marx’s promised Grand Synthesis.

Whenever somebody promises Donald Trump will “drain the swamp,” or promises that Kamala Harris will “save democracy,” that’s messianic language. Similarly, whenever social media pundits gush over Luigi Mangione’s blows against capitalist resource hoarding, or consider him an emblem of class consciousness, they channel their own moral principles through his person. Sin is abstract; Mangione’s actions are concrete. Violence is harsh, but it at least makes sense.

Such reasoning stumbles, however, in the one messiah whose promise outlasted his person: Jesus of Nazareth. Though his message gave hurting peasants hope during an epoch of imperial conquest, his blows against the empire were philosophical, not militant. Violent uprisings against kleptocrats usually end in crackdowns and purges, and functionally strengthen the status quo. Durable rebellions embrace complexity, they don’t replace it with the simplicity of a gun.

Jesus’ messianic message had a class component. He blessed the poor, fed hungry masses, and prayed to forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors. From a secular reading, Jesus’ teachings underscore messages of class solidarity, especially in Luke’s Gospel. But he acknowledged, at his arrest, that warriors don’t live amid their victory; they die, and others reap the profit. He accepted his death so others could receive the benefit.

Luigi Mangione might yet engender such a messianic legacy, but I doubt it. No individual will save us from the conditions we’ve created collectively for so long.

For the Kingdoms of the Earth

“And you will cry out on that day before the king you chose for yourselves and he will not answer you on that day.”
—1 Samuel 8:18, Robert Alter translation

Artistic representation of King David

Samuel, the Hebrew leader who oversaw Israel’s transition from the age of judges to the age of prophets, specifically warned Israel what would happen if they selected a king. The monarch would seize and redistribute the best farmlands, a massive injustice to an agrarian society. He would seize Israel’s farm implements to reforge them into weapons of war. Kings would spend tax revenue on palaces while farmers squatted in huts.

This maintains a pattern recurrent throughout the Bible, the declaration that power hierarchies are inevitably unjust. To theistic minds of the post-Bronze Age Levant, human hierarchies seize power that belongs uniquely to God. As Robert Alter writes in his extensive footnotes, the God of Samuel was explicitly a Hebrew deity, and had literal political dominion over Israel and Judah. Power belonged to God; humans could only act as God’s deputies.

God’s sovereignty worked well while Israel remained poor, agrarian, and simple. A loose confederation of hill-dwelling tribes working the land with bronze implements, Israel needed little, and God provided commensurately. But the Levant witnessed the rise of political empires like Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Straddling the footbridge between Africa and Asia, the Levant became a necessary possession for any empire hoping to expand.

It's easy to forget, centuries removed from the “Divine Right of Kings,” that king isn’t originally a political title, it’s a military rank. Kings occasionally made and enforced laws, time permitting. But civilian laws basically existed to organize the population for military purposes: strong sons for recruitment, tradesmen to make arms, crops to resupply the front lines. As I’ve written before, the political state exists fundamentally to bolster the military.

We’re witnessing this in our time. As Israel’s pummeling of Gaza continues after over a year, international Jews loom large among those protesting the violence. While the Israeli state channels national resources toward killing despised outsiders, those who define themselves according to Jewish traditions and values are among the state’s most vocal opponents. The cleft falls along loyalty to the state versus loyalty to Judah.

As Samuel prophesied, King Saul became tyrannical and paranoid—but not without reason. As his military needs became increasingly prominent, he needed constant resupply of resources. Though Saul didn’t undertake many significant military adventures away from the Israelite homeland, his defenses against Egyptians, Philistines, and other flatlander empires became increasingly costly. In the end, Saul died defending the homeland.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Meanwhile, as Saul became increasingly despotic, David became increasingly popular. The description of young David in 1 Samuel seems remarkably like a combination of Robin Hood and Joan of Arc, a folk hero rallying common folk against the occupying despot. David roams the Levant, gathering followers, but notably never attacking God’s anointed king. Only when Saul’s own overreach gets him killed, does David’s rabble army seize power.

My childhood Sunday School tracts always depicted this David: not necessarily rebellious, but certainly young, a friend to commoners, active and popular. The David described in 2 Samuel barely exists, because the longer David holds power in Israel, the more he resembles Saul. He’s arguably worse than Saul, because at least Saul died manning the fortifications. David instead sends others to fight, staying home himself and having sex with generals’ wives.

International Jews lived in diaspora for two millennia before Zionists reestablished the state of Israel. Jewish tradition holds that, eventually, the Israelite homeland will return, but throughout scripture, that’s always in the future. Diasporic Jews suffered massive oppression for centuries, and in places still do; but they didn’t have to absorb the moral compromise of governing an earthly kingdom. Now some do, and that’s made them massively unpopular.

Consider other world leaders chosen for their outsider status. Barack Obama and Boris Johnson both achieved national power by promising to break with stultifying political conventions. Both accomplished mere shadows of what they promised. In America, Republicans running on anti-statist platforms, like Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump, all needed to compromise their values to actually govern.

Oh Samuel, you warned us. Kings may require power to defend us, but power will always turn the powerful into the instruments they hated. And now it’s too late, we can’t return to our hill-country farms and our uncomplicated agrarian lifestyles. Because we, too, have become what we once hated: subjects of an occupying force that values only itself.

Trump’s Bible, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting

R.J. Rushdoony

Let’s assume that most readers outside certain theological circles probably haven’t heard of Christian Reconstructionism. This Protestant sect, with roots in strict Calvinism, deals with relationships between religious truth and political power, in a mostly American context. Reconstructionists believe secular power derives from Christianity alone, and therefore Christians should have political dominion over, well, everything.

R.J. Rushdoony, the theologian who pioneered Reconstructionism, specifically demanded that the law of Leviticus be enshrined in American law. He used rhetorical hand-waving to ignore Levitical laws his modern audience found reprehensible, like the death penalty for disobedient sons. Rushdoony remains little-known outside narrow circles, but his strict dominionist theology has tainted swaths of American Christianity, including the Religious Right and the homeschool movement.

Many Christians find the Levitical law tempting because it provides ironclad definitions of right and wrong. I don’t want to seem unsympathetic, because in today’s morally fraught, pluralistic world, the desire for God-given absolute rules makes sense. Many people might want to follow the law, and therefore avoid making decisions, blind to the long-term consequences; but that’s only possible when we think the law itself is morally right.

However, I also think that’s the attitude religious leaders showed in Jesus’ time. They assumed that, by keeping the forms of law, they necessarily did right, regardless of their actual actions or their inmost intentions. Obeying the Law of Moses, which God purportedly handed down verbatim, allowed them to only shallowly understand the situation directly before them. One simply obeyed, and then succeeded, much like a dead fish floating downstream.

(I realize this statement heavily attributes intent. The First Century CE is a poorly documented time in Jewish history, and Christian scriptures the only source. Let’s stipulate their reliability for this argument.)

Jesus, an observant Jew who did significant teaching inside temples and synagogues, rejected this hierarchical interpretation. No longer could the law apply only inside Israel’s borders, real or metaphorical; the law convicts the contents of your heart, demanding right action even at personal cost. The tax collector Zacchaeus, for example, followed ritual law precisely, but he flourished by taking from others, until Jesus convicted his heart.

Donald Trump

Christianity, therefore, requires a moral order beyond this world. Like Plato, Jesus believed capital-T Truth wasn’t circumscribed by heavy matter, but exceeded this world. God’s Kingdom is perfect, clean, and free of this world’s conflicts and moral compromises. But that world lies somewhere beyond, and we won’t comprehend it or the truths it empowers until we escape this burdensome flesh. We see through a glass darkly, indeed.

We cannot know capital-T Truth, therefore, by following the law. Humans write rules in response to past conditions, but doing right means facing the present, and its future ramifications, without blinders. I must observe the source of Truth, fluid and dynamic, to answer this world, with its frustrating tendency to change. Even in Jesus’ time, Israel had changed into a settled nation with iron tools, no longer the hill-dwelling herdsmen for whom Moses wrote the Law.

Donald Trump was baptized and confirmed Presbyterian, but the church hasn’t much influenced his morality. His actions have equated “right” with “what the law allows,” and his fondness for lawsuits demonstrates an elastic attitude toward even that morality. He’s spent his life pursuing his appetites, at the expense of consequences for others. His pandering Bible salesmanship, forging American law into a Third Testament, reflects this strictly make-do ethic.

The devout must exceed the letter of the Law, and observe the Spirit. As I’ve written before, Levitical law has multiple provisos addressing how we treat the poor, disfranchised, and weak. Our treatment of the poor isn’t hypothetical; it bespeaks whether we honor the spirit of the Law, or only its letter. Merely obeying the Law as written is lazy, passive. Doing right means actively engaging with the Law’s purpose.

Trump’s legalistic morality inevitably gets deployed to hurt those already disadvantaged by human systems. His maltreatment of immigrants, dissidents, and minorities is extensively documented; he’s promised to exceed this, and actively make life harder for the indigent and unhoused. Christians who equate devotion with obedience will go along to get along, as many already have. The consequences for “the least of these” will be dire.

Rushdoony wanted to engrave the Bible into American law. Trump wants to bind American law into the Bible. Both cases reject Jesus’ mission which taught that we must know God intimately, and then act accordingly. One can use Biblical language, these men prove, and still lack a Christian core.

Follow-up: Trump’s Bible, Part Three

Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting

Donald Trump, Bible salesman

Throughout my Christian life, I’ve struggled to wrap my had around Psalm 137, which usually gets used liturgically in abbreviated form. The first several verses, written during the Babylonian exile, lament the experience of alienation from homeland, nation, and God. We see here beginning traces of the “foreigners in a strange land” ethos which undergirds much modern Judaism and Christianity. Then verse 9 veers abruptly:

“Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.”

The earliest Hebrew scriptures describe a national religion and an explicitly Israelite deity, not a universal one. The G-d described in the Pentateuch of Moses sides with Israel and aids Israelites in murdering “foreigners.” Not until the prophet Amos does Judaism begin embracing the idea that worshiping G-d is about honoring principles. Moses never intended the Levitical law to govern everyone, everywhere; he wrote the laws of a hill-dwelling agrarian nation in the Late Bronze Age.

Which brings us to two important current events. Israel’s ongoing pummeling of Palestinians in Gaza has reached a threshold which UN officials are willing to tentatively consider genocide. The Netanyahu administration’s continued strafing of civilian targets is merely the inevitable conclusion of Israeli policy which protects Israelis (as distinct from Israelites) at everyone else’s expense. Amnesty Internation has termed the Israeli government’s longstanding policies as “racism.”

Meanwhile, to cover mounting legal debts, former President Donald Trump has begun hawking Bibles online. This salesmanship doesn’t surprise me, as his core voting bloc conflates being Christian with being American. Rather, I take profound exception at the contents of Trump’s Bible. According to press reports, the King James translation comes bound together with the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance, and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

In other words, Trump’s Bible includes American national law and an American patriotic psalm—erm, I mean “song”—bound together as a rudimentary Third Testament. American conservatives have long considered the Declaration and Constitution as divinely inspired documents, a position that’s literally Mormon doctrine. Yet in literally binding American nationalism into the Bible, Trump is dragging Christianity backward into a proto-Hebrew Bronze Age.

Netanyahu and Trump share a theological worldview founded in the Levitical notion that whatever benefits the nation, and especially whatever benefits the nation’s oligarchs, necessarily benefits the faith. It bears noting, as Obery Hendricks writes, that the High Priesthood of Solomon’s Temple, described in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, wasn’t merely an airy-fairy religious grouping. The priesthood governed the nation, often on behalf of conquering empires.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Let me state, before I continue, I realize my “Judeo-Christian” language is sweeping. Though Judaism and Christianity germinated in the same Levantine soil, they historically parted ways following Bar Kochba’s Rebellion, and are substantially different now. Yet because both religions share common ancestry in Moses, Amos, and Isaiah, we can, for convenience, address them syncretically for the moment. Because we’re seeing both being degraded right now.

Isaiah and Jesus shared the recognition that worldly empires can break the body. Kings anointed by G-d die, whether through violence or through age and entropy. Investing religious sacrality in human governments means placing trust in something which inevitably rots. Rather, the deity extoled by prophets and Christ wasn’t bound to any nation or land (though Third Isaiah still called Israelites to come home). Ha-Shem dwells, instead, among the believers.

In this regard, global Judaism has perhaps handled the prophetic call with greater integrity than Christianity. Since the days of Nehemiah, global Judaism has recognized that one becomes Jewish by honoring Jewish heritage and maintaining Jewish practice, even when resident in strange lands. To be Jewish, in today’s Judaism, means accepting the world as transitory. Don’t conform to kings and kingdoms, but stand fast in Truth.

Christianity, by contrast, regularly conforms to kingdoms. Though conservative Christians think themselves pure because they dump on out-groups like Muslims or LGBTQIA+, they nevertheless seek worldly power, something Jesus abhorred. Ever since Emperor Constantine, Christians have thought themselves worthy to govern, and to enforce their moral code on everyone. Or anyway, as Gorski and Perry write, White Christians have thought that.

Netanyahu’s Israel has something global Judaism hasn’t had for over two millennia: state power. Therefore Netanyahu makes the same mistake which Trump and other nominal Christians have made throughout those same ages, thinking state power comes from G-d. Whether through adding new Biblical texts, like Trump, or ignoring the prophets’ convictions, like Netanyahu, the effect is similar: both leaders drag their nations backward into the Bronze Age.

Follow-up: Trump’s Bible, Part Two and Trump’s Bible, Part Three

Those Who Escape the Cult

Daniella Mestyanek Young, Uncultured

Daniella Mestyanek grew up in a Brazilian compound with dozens of other children and adults, but not really in Brazil. Her home was an international colony of the Children of God, a strange Christian splinter group notorious for its isolationism and weird sexual mores. When she finally escaped the group at age 15, she found it had warped her thinking and left her permanently vulnerable to exploitation by powerful, amoral people.

Mestyanek, who writes under her married name Young, divides this memoir into three main thematic parts. Each involves her increasing awareness of private abuse and covert violence hiding behind smiling systems. Her time with the Children of God (proper name, The Family International) is perhaps the strangest and most pointed, as it differs most remarkably from her audience’s likely experience. Yet it sets the tone for power abuses which dot her entire life.

The Children of God arose as merely one among the Jesus Freak youth ministries of the 1960s. However, the group’s leader, David Berg, like his rough contemporaries Jim Jones and David Koresh, internalized his culture’s Woodstock-era grandiosity, and believed himself a prophet. He began issuing apostolic decrees which his adherents believed carried God’s signature. His pronouncements became increasingly weird, especially when he gave God’s blessing to sexual exploitation.

Unlike comparable cults, the Children survived years without a conflagration. Because of this, not only was Daniella Mestyanek born into the religion, so was her mother; Daniella was a third-generation True Believer. Except she lacked the fervor her faith community demanded. She asked questions, demanded respect, and felt free to express her doubts—challenges which a leadership appointed by God couldn’t accept. This resulted in increasing tensions.

The problem isn’t that Family leadership believe themselves right; it’s that they believe themselves chosen by God. Such absolute leadership cannot brook doubts, questions, or challenges. The longer little Daniella defies their dictates, the more brutal and repressive their tactics become. Tactics include isolation, physical violence, and sex. But rather than force her back into line, these tactics harden Daniella’s resolve to leave.

Daniella Mestyanek Young

Once out, and forced onto her own resources at only fifteen, Mestyanek must negotiate another power dynamic that also doesn’t permit doubts: the American education system. It takes time, but she eventually learns school’s intricate, unspoken rules, even when the occasional petty dictator uses those rules against her. She achieves the book learning she always wanted, but which her religion denied, since Armageddon was always happening soon.

Her formal education, however, culminates in graduation into two new power dynamics: marriage, and joining the Army. Her first husband makes her feel included and desirable, two traits she never felt previously, notwithstanding the Family’s mandatory sexual inclusion. But she quickly realizes that he considers her a consumable resource, not a partner. The Army authorizes her to stand on her own two feet, which empowers her to escape him.

If this sounds familiar, I appreciate my long-term readers. Lauren Hough’s memoir is pointedly similar, with the arc out of the Family, and into the only organization bold enough to provide the structure she needs—in her case, the Air Force. Both women find strength enough to free themselves from learned shackles, which in Hough’s case means her closeted sexuality. But they achieve that strength only after enduring systemic abuse.

Mestyanek initially flourishes in the Army. She rises through the ranks quickly, and becomes one of America’s first women officially authorized into front-line combat. But she also quickly notices the overlap between the Army’s conditioning, and the Family’s. Both rely on name-calling, shame, and in-group behavior to enforce desirable behaviors. Both are riddled with sexual violence. And both actively squelch independent women.

This isn’t a surprise revelation; Young declares this realization early. She doesn’t, however, deeply analyze the parallels; this isn’t a scholarly monograph on cults and their organization, it’s Young’s memoir of coming to grips with patterns of power and abuse in her life. Our author becomes aware of the power structures most of us take for granted, and rebels against them. But this isn’t a how-to, it’s her life story.

As such, Young’s memoir makes for gripping reading. She struggles to maintain her identity when confronted with powers that see her, a woman, as a lesser person to exploit. Though she escapes from the unspoken rules governing life in the Family and the Army, she’s still, in the final pages, finding her own beliefs. She gives us reason to believe that we, too, can escape the exploitation dominating our lives.

For the Love of Armageddon

“It’s pure spiritual abuse to tell children we’re living in the end times,” an acquaintance said recently. “It causes trauma to tell kids, at the beginning of their lives, that the entire world is about to end.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory.) This acquaintance has suffered years of religious trauma from her evangelical upbringing, and is dedicated to ensuring no kid endures what she endured.

However, this comment underscored for me exactly how much younger my acquaintance is than me. She believes that this apocalyptic message is both uniquely religious, and particularly new. Since I don’t travel in highly conservative religious circles, and I don’t have kids, perhaps some parts of the message have changed. Yet I grew up in Reagan’s America, where the constant threat of massive nuclear conflagration defined my, and everybody else’s, childhood.

I’ve written before about how my generation grew up with two all-encompassing cultural messages:

1. With hard work and determination, you can be anything you can dream; and
2. We’re all going to die at any minute

I came along late enough that schools had abandoned the delusion of duck-and-cover drills for nuclear war. Nevertheless, we grew up hearing how the bombs would inevitably drop a week from next Tuesday, and nothing we did could prevent it. In the 1980s, Armageddon wasn’t a religious dogma, it was a looming reality permeating American lives. Religious and secular Americans differed only on what we believed would follow: salvation, or devastation.

Perhaps most important is that, in the popular memory, these years enjoyed (if that’s the word) a degree of popular unity scarcely seen before or since. As the Cold War reached its climax, the Reagan coalition managed to corral Americans into a political alliance that swept the presidential elections three consecutive times, the only time one party has done so since World War II. All powered by fear of imminent flaming death.

This unity didn’t really exist, of course; memory has a whitewashing effect. Oh, the Reaganite electoral domination was real. But America’s largest-ever anti-state protest occurred on June 12^th, 1982, when a ban-the-bomb rally pulled a million people to New York’s Central Park. Reagan, as President, dominates our 1980s mythology, but that was also Gary Hart’s heyday. Hart’s 1988 presidential bid was considered a cinch, before Lee Atwater blitzed him.

Support for the Cold War gave Americans a shared sense of identity. Ironically,
opposition to the Cold War often had the same effect.

But for many American conservatives, that perceived unity was totally real, and totally tied to two facts: religion, and the Cold War. They forget that a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, ushered the term “born again” into America’s political lexicon. Instead, for them, it was the power duo of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. Reagan, like Donald Trump, spoke the language of Christianity, without much darkening a church door as an adult.

People who believe their culture’s heyday existed in the past, usually pinpoint that heyday approximately thirty years ago. And thirty years ago as I write is 1993. Thirty years ago, the Cold War had ended, putatively behind Reagan-Bush’s muscular displays, giving America over to Bill Clinton, who guided the country through a profoundly diffuse era of moral wishy-washiness. Conservative Christians in 1993 already mourned the unity provided by death from above.

Seriously. To my eternal regret, I was one of them back then. I know what it means to miss the moral certainty you once had.

When Christian Conservatives, at least of the American stripe, yearn for the Apocalypse, they aren’t really asking for anything described in the Bible. Maybe they want the Lion of Judah, but they have no patience for the Lamb Who Was Slain. What they really want, is the perceived social unity and moral swagger they remember themselves having when Reagan’s muscle and Falwell’s religiosity dominated America’s political map.

Western civilization has always contained the ability to destroy itself. Indeed, Western civilization has already collapsed, twice, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t do so again. This time around, though, the consequences will be much more dire. Whether through nuclear war, as I grew up anticipating, or through climate change, as currently seems more likely, when this civilization collapses, it will leave the Earth a lifeless, uninhabitable husk.

I’ll agree that telling children Armageddon is imminent causes trauma. Perhaps that’s why so many elder GenXers shuffle through life, dead-eyed and disengaged, because we’re still recovering from Reagan’s malaise days. But the apocalyptic message also offers something to unify behind, and that’s something today’s body politic sorely lacks. Apocalyptic Christians aren’t malicious; they simply miss the days when imminent death offered cheap, easy unity.

Monty Python and the Problem With Religion

The six members of Monty Python on the set of The Life of Brian in Tunisia, 1978

My target audience largely catches the reference when I write: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” Brian Cohen's climactic sermon in Monty Python’s 1979 classic The Life of Brian is among cinema history’s funniest scenes. Brian desperately wants the crowd that has adopted him as Savior to think for themselves, but they won’t listen. Brian’s domineering mother just wants the crowd to go away, but inadvertently riles them up.

Brian’s only fully-developed homily turns on one statement: “You’re all individuals! You’re all different!” But his followers respond, in the paced unison viewers remember from hearing congregations pray together: “Yes, we’re all different!” To the Monty Python members, all unbelievers, this statement probably summarizes the ways religion encourages groupthink and steals autonomy. But rewatching the movie recently, for the first time since VHS days, something struck me about his crowd:

They’re all Jewish.

Jews have maintained their collective identity since the Late Bronze Age, in substantial part, by maintaining their rituals. Jewish religious observance doesn’t rely upon individual belief, the way Christian and Muslim rites do. Instead, Jewish traditions involve reënacting pivotal moments in Jewish folk history, like the Passover or the Maccabean rebellion. Whether these events happened as enacted doesn’t much matter, though; what matters is, they do them together.

This doesn’t mean Judaism has always benevolently maintained that authority. By the late Second Temple Era, when Jesus preached, Judaism had developed stark sectarian divisions over “correct” observances, divisions only closed when the Second Jewish War saw most sects destroyed. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus’ repeated complaint against religious leaders holds that Jewish observance had become robotic, and deaf to the cries of the poor and dispossessed.

Monty Python mocks this robotic tendency through the “People’s Front of Judea,” a revolutionary sect comparable to the Zealots. We can encompass everything wrong with the PFJ in leader Reg’s legendary line: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Life under Roman occupation sounds pretty nice.

Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman) approaches his denouement in The Life of Brian

I might find this less jarring if it weren’t spoken by John Cleese, who was born relatively rich and attended Cambridge University, a bastion of British imperialism. The parallels between the feuding Jewish revolutionaries, and divisions within separatist groups like the Irish Republican Army, are too obvious to not support deeper analysis. Under Monty Python’s analysis, freedom fighters look ridiculous, while the empire, though hardly benevolent, never hurt anybody who didn’t deserve it.

Because of its strategic location along trade routes linking Africa, Europe, and Central Asia, empires have repeatedly conquered Judea and attempted to assimilate its people. Though Jewish ethnic identity arguably dates to Moses, Jewish religious identity dates to Jeremiah and the Babylonian Captivity. The Maccabees revolted against the Greek-speaking Seleucid Empire because the Greeks tried to forcibly assimilate the Jews, pollute their temple, and defile their women.

These tactics sound remarkably similar to techniques the British (English) Empire used to conquer other peoples. Closer to home, they’ve been remarkably successful, as Irish and Scots are minority languages in their homelands, and Cornish is extinct. Further afield, British forces caused native nations of India, Africa, and the Americas to abandon their separate identities and local wars, and create racial and ethnic allegiances to expel the invading empire.

Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not suggesting Monty Python is objectively pro-Empire. That exceeds the remit which the movie provides. However, like Agatha Christie or Roald Dahl, the Pythons emerged during the British Empire’s dying wheezes and, as a bunch of White, male, mostly heterosexual Oxbridge boys, realized the dying Empire was taking their privilege with it. To them, the dying Empire was their culture’s ambient background noise.

Yes, religion can steal followers’ individuality and autonomous thought. But turning people loose hardly works better, as post-Christian Western Civilization demonstrates. Without religion’s catechistic approach to building a soul, atomized individuals glom onto whatever political party, commercial enterprise, or pop-culture fandom offers them a desirable group identity. Despite Nietzsche’s claims, no person becomes fully individualized without a foundation to build from.

Brian’s followers aren’t stupid and mindless, as the movie implies. They’re simply an occupied people, seeking a leader to offer them a shared identity, goal, and strategy. Without their devotion to Brian, they have only commerce, arena sports, and worst, Roman imperial politics. There’s no guarantee Brian could’ve saved his people, certainly. But the alternative is assimilation. Look around you and ask how that’s working out.

Corporal Punishment, the Church, and Me

My defining moment in the Amazon documentary miniseries Shiny Happy People happens about midway through the second episode. An invited speaker at an Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP) seminar invites a child volunteer onstage to demonstrate the speaker’s precepts of Biblically appropriate spanking. The child was volunteered by his parents, not of his own volition, and never speaks or is even identified by name onstage.

The speaker (who shall remain nameless here) takes the child volunteer over his knee and pantomimes the spanking incident, backed with a monologue about how the misbehaving child simply needs discipline to grow with God. Because the speaker mimes the spanking so gently, the effect appears downright predatory. This appearance isn’t helped when, upon letting the child rise, the speaker demands a hug from the kid he just finished disciplining.

Back in the 1990s, I attended a United Methodist congregation in a small Nebraska town. For those unfamiliar with Protestant denominationalism, the Methodist tradition doesn’t have even a shirt-tail theological relationship with most American Evangelical or Fundamentalist churches. Most such churches are theologically Five-Point Calvinist, while Methodism descends from Arminianism, a deliberate rejection of Calvinist absolutism. Methodism shouldn’t be compatible with Evangelicalism.

Yet much of White American Christianity in the 1980s and 1990s trended toward Calvinist conservatism. Pushed by the ideological bloc of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, many White Christians yearned for the doctrinal certainty which Evangelicals seemingly enjoyed. Congregations which had no theological truck with Five-Point Calvinism snapped up books by Tim LaHaye, Charles Swindoll, and Francis Schaeffer. Their theology soon bled into regular worship and teaching.

As the pro-spanking speaker finishes his ganked, almost fetishistic mock spanking, he demands a hug from his volunteer. But he immediately rejects the hug he receives, declaring it insufficiently enthusiastic. He replaces the kid across his knee and resumes the spanking. This repeats a pattern, perhaps unknowingly, visible in Christian thinkers since at least Augustine: that if you’re sufficiently righteous, you can threaten children into loving God, and you too.

My small Nebraska congregation brought a local pastor aboard who, as part of his ministry, demanded the congregational council hire his son as youth and young adult minister. The son was highly charismatic, and quickly gained acclaim among his intended young parishioners. He introduced a rock concert-influenced evening worship service, and accordingly, local Christians treated him like a rock star. Eventually, he seemed to start believing it himself.

Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar became the celebrity face of Bill Gothard's IBLP

I wanted to believe it, too. In my early twenties, I was considerably more conservative and doctrinaire than I am now, both politically and theologically. This father-and-son team verified that my primarily emotional spirituality was justified. But before long, I realized they didn’t treat everyone equally. They wanted congregants who were extroverted, but submissive. Those who conformed received preferential treatment; everyone else watched from outside, confused and scared.

Don’t misunderstand, my desire to separate wasn’t a Daniel-like stand on morality. I was simply lonely. The ministry focused on highly demonstrative episodes, “mountaintop moments,” and gregariousness; it left no opportunity for thoughtful contemplation, much less deep discussion performed in our “indoor voices.” I attempted to peel myself off simply because I needed time to catch my breath, while their ministry was breathless, breakneck, and quick.

My only mistake came in trying to announce my separation. Instead of just quietly not showing up—as an increasing number of the congregation’s introverted members started doing—I attempted to make my polite apologies before going. The youth minister responded by angrily deploying a laundry list of “sacrifices” he’d made to support his “ministry.” The list rambled on, voluble and extensive, until I finally relented just to escape the situation.

I’ve seldom faced literal violence in my life. I realize how privileged I am to even say that, but I haven’t faced state repression, violent crime, or relationship abuse. Even given my frequently adversarial relationship with my father, he seldom spanked me; he reserved corporal punishment for extreme circumstances, and discontinued it early. Therefore, until I saw a self-righteous spanking enacted onscreen, I didn’t make the connection to what happened that day.

But on a key level, when leaders believe themselves appointed by God, they start demanding love. They demand obedience and adherence from those beneath them. Some enforce those demands through violence, while others enforce them through guilt and shame. But in both cases, they believe they have God-given authority to make demands. Listening, learning, and adapting are for lesser people. Leaders make demands, and the first demand is for love.

Bad Calvinism in Modern American Politics

John Calvin (etching by Konrad Myer)

Back during my teaching days, one classroom discussion circled the myriad influences that molded colonial and early post-Revolutionary America. One student threw out a name I personally wouldn’t have considered: John Calvin. But the student made a persuasive case that, through the New England Puritans, Calvinism has become a dominant force in American politics. Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” statement comes from Jesus Christ, certainly, but it also comes from Puritan John Winthrop.

Last time, I concluded my invective against falsely “pro-life” politics by noting that hard-right American politicians love every human life while it remains an unrealized potential. Ask many conservatives, and the Evangelical pastors who support them, why they oppose abortion, and they’ll praise the undeveloped fetus as potentially the next Einstein, Beethoven, or Jane Addams. While human life remains abstract, it remains a receptacle of our society’s hopes and aspirations, simply waiting to be filled.

However, once that life actually becomes human, with visceral needs and wants, those same politicians begin scheming ways to destroy it. The minute an abstract fetus needs food, or prenatal medical care, or—heaven forfend—defense against civilians hoarding military-grade firearms, hard-right political support dries up. I compared this to “original sin.” However, thinking back, I suspect my student foresaw this situation. The barrier problem isn’t original sin; it’s Calvin’s theology of Total Human Depravity.

Before I get carried away, this isn’t a literal Calvinist problem. Calvinist churches, like Baptists and Presbyterians, have landed on both sides of pressing issues. Nor is the problem conventionally partisan, as these problems persist, and even get worse, regardless of which party controls our government. Rather, sloppy thinking and half-informed opinions muddy everything they touch, if they can find a halfway-serviceable moral justification. Bad-faith actors have sullied science or art as badly as religion.

For a useful analogy, let’s start with homelessness. Consider briefly how people react if you give a panhandler a buck. “They’ll just spend it on booze or drugs.” In American political mythology, homelessness doesn’t arise from our economic system, or an individual’s momentary circumstances. We deem homelessness a reflection of the homeless person’s moral core. The indigent are “bad people,” suffering the consequences of their choices, and anything to alleviate their suffering reinforces their sin.

The same analogy of “consequences” arises whenever we consider providing even the slightest assistance to pregnant persons. If they need prenatal medicine, or nutritional assistance, or affordable childcare, our political and business leaders recite shopworn moral language about rights and responsibility. Pregnant persons and their families have a moral responsibility to look after themselves, and if they can’t, they’re bad people, and any provided assistance simply reinforces their bad choices, confirming them in material sin.

But if that same pregnant person admits their inability to support a child, and opts to terminate the pregnancy, that’s also interpreted moralistically. If you choose to have sex, official legislative reasoning goes, you’ve perforce chosen to give birth. Even if you cannot support the child, or you’re fleeing a violent relationship, or the fetus has terminal abnormalities and cannot survive, birth is nevertheless a moral imperative which you cannot shirk without compounding your sins.

Either way, the Calvinist precept of Total Human Depravity (stripped of its Christian ethic) defines you. The secular Calvinist interprets every adverse circumstance as an outcome of individual sin, never a product of economic systems, or damaged families, or just bad luck. Secular Calvinists believe the universe is wholly just and morally complete, and therefore every bad circumstance is a moral judgment upon the individual. Helping the poor only makes them likely to sin again.

I’m using pregnancy and abortion as my touchstones, because of the current political fad of harshly restrictive abortion bans. But the problem exceeds one hot-button issue. America remains the only developed nation which hasn’t ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, because America refuses to consider food a natural human right. Food! Since the Reagan administration, America has refused to protect children from starvation because doing so would reinforce parents’ sinful ways.

America refuses to protect healthy pregnancies, or end unhealthy ones, because either choice protects “sinners” from “consequences.” Likewise, we won’t feed the starving or house the homeless because they haven’t “earned it,” and therefore are sinners. America has Earth’s largest prison population because we believe, despite all evidence, that extreme punishments will stop people from sinning. And so on. Our lingering bipartisan consensus only makes sense if our politicians uniformly believe in Total Human Depravity.

Reality Has a Lousy Plot and a Slovenly Editor

There was no thunder and lightning the day my mother fell and injured herself, which, as a writer, I found anticlimactic and disappointing. We writers are always taught that we need appropriate foreshadowing before a big plot event, but life isn’t so obliging. My mother’s injury—a frustrating reversal of all the progress she’s made in a year of physical therapy—wasn’t heralded by meaningful story elements. It just happened.

It was Easter Sunday, April 9th, 2023. She was headed to church, where her daughter, my sister, was scheduled to play with the bell choir; my sister’s music has made her a small-time local celebrity. Mom stepped out of the truck, something that would’ve been impossible for her a year ago as her joints were becoming increasingly brittle, but which she’s been handling with grace and ease, supported by only a telescoping trekking pole.

There was no pavement crack to trip over, no surging crowd pushing her back. Nothing in the plot to justify her falling backwards. She simply lost her balance and fell against the truck’s bumper with sufficient force to break three ribs, one pretty severely. Lying on the emergency room gurney later, she wracked her brain for explanations why she fell so suddenly, but explanations weren’t forthcoming. It just happened.

In writing, as in other mass-media arts—filmmaking, game design—storytellers need justifications for life-altering events. If somebody falls, shattering bones and becoming paralyzed, we need somebody to first portentously say, “Y’all better fix that sidewalk before someone gets hurt.” Because in storytelling, we recognize the existence of a storyteller. There’s a genuine person present, making decisions, and those decisions need support.

Roland Barthes called this tendency to value the author’s choices “theological.” Centering the storyteller’s choices too closely resembled looking for God’s mission in life, and like many mid-20th Century French academics, Barthes pooh-poohed the idea of a personal God. But Barthes replaced the storyteller’s choices for those of the audience. He disparaged theology, while arrogating theological power to the reader. This, to him, seemed a reasonable trade.

Roland Barthes

Thus, even as the literary world has moved away from its belief in a just and ordered universe, it nevertheless persists in believing in human agency. Whether we believe that God ordained universal values, or humans make values where we find them, we still look for an orderly world, because we recognize that there’s a storyteller and an audience, and both of them make choices.

Early novelists believed that, because they were making choices in writing, they needed to have a moral thrust. Before the Twentieth Century, the novel’s denouement needed to reward the virtuous and punish the culpable. Moving into the modern era, novelists increasingly recognized that the universe is seldom so just, and made their stories reflect this change. But they often followed the opposite extreme, visiting sadistic cruelty on the innocent.

Modern audiences have become savvy to these authorial choices. We recognize that authors are either moralistically pious, or nihilistically savage, and instead of traveling where the storyteller takes us, we often start the book, movie, or game by looking for clues. We don’t want to undertake a journey, we want to “beat the game,” anticipating whatever twist or convoluted conspiracy we assume the author has buried in the story.

Then we act surprised when some people seek those same clues in the outside world. QAnon cultists and Flat Earthers look for fiddling, insignificant signs of an organized universe in frivolous word choices or inconsistencies in flight plans. They’re engaged in a pattern Barthes would disparage as “theological,” looking for concealed truths of an underlying storyteller making choices. And their behavior is every bit as silly.

As Christian as I am, I can’t help laughing at people looking for God (or a God analogue) in worldly clues. It’s about as nonsensical as making offerings to Babylonian water spirits to propitiate the rain and create a bountiful harvest. Even if you believe that God exists, faith doesn’t exist to ballyhoo evidence in the past; that’s arrogant and self-justifying. Faith doesn’t justify the past, it helps you make the next right choice in the present.

My mother’s injury is a frustrating, disappointing setback and loss of progress. But it wasn’t foreshadowed, because reality isn’t a story. Maybe there’s a God, but that doesn’t mean every life event represents a choice. Sometimes things happen because they happen, and humanity’s vainglorious tendency to look for purpose is ultimately disappointing. For us writers, that’s a very bitter pill to swallow.

The “After” Part of Revival

A recent photo of the Asbury University revival

As I write, an event being termed a “revival” continues in the Asbury University campus chapel in Wilmore, Kentucky. Since Wednesday, February 8th, hundreds of faithful have permanently occupied the chapel building: singing, praying, preaching, and lifting hands unto God. The 24-7 religious outpouring is giving some Christians hope, in a time of seemingly unbridled selfish behavior and the continued numerical decline of American Christianity.

I’ve sat through two previous “revivals,” and therefore have definite opinions. Wrapping oneself in the moment of transcendent unity with fellow believers can definitely feel like communion with God. But, like Jesus tempted in the desert or Buddha planting himself resolutely beneath the Bodhi Tree, that moment only matters in light of what we bring back into the world. The historical track record of that “after” moment leaves me skeptical.

My first “revival” took place at a Christian rock concert in high school, the only Christian rock concert I attended. People were dancing on chairs, singing along, becoming one with the crowd, and then the lead vocalist finished with an altar call. Yes, I responded. But when the crowd dispersed, and we returned to our normal lives, the moment of exultation passed. Without the “worship high,” motivation to repent quickly dwindled.

Years later, a charming young associate pastor at the local United Methodist Church began holding Sunday evening services with a full band. Once again, the experience of crowds, music, and emotional exaltation created a perfect storm of transcendental giddiness. Unlike the rock concert, this service happened regularly, and also involved group Bible study, prayer circles, and other sustained community. This “revival” showed signs of lasting.

This pastor successfully packed a mainline Protestant sanctuary wall-to-wall every Sunday, something most conventional services only accomplish on Christmas and Easter. Donations rolled in, and money was channeled toward common good, like scholarships, community improvements, and overseas disaster relief efforts. Weekly altar calls were warmly received; even my dad, Christian but ordinarily allergic to displays of overt religiosity, walked up to “receive Jesus.”

But as the program continued, something happened: numbers began falling off. Members of the worship band, which peaked around forty-five members, began begging off. The congregation, which briefly held over 750 worshipers—remarkable for a small-ish town—began capping at a hundred, then seventy-five. While worship song instrumental breaks ran longer than the Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East, worship service electric bills started exceeding what the collection took in.

A recent photo of the Asbury University revival

Because the service happened weekly, the falling-off didn’t happen abruptly, as happened after the concert. Rather, things gradually tailed off. People experienced the transcendent worship high, but then returned glumly to regular lives of jobs, school, and cooking dinner. Without discipleship efforts to offer anyone a genuine new life, a genuine straight-and-narrow to walk, the worship high began feeling hollow. Interest waned, and soon, so did the service.

Don’t misunderstand me, what happened in those moments wasn’t hay. The dissolution of self that happens in concert environments distinctly resembles the ego death which Christian and Buddhist mystics describe at moments of salvation or enlightenment. However, concert transcendence depends on the crowd, and ends when everyone goes home. Likewise, when religious people leave the sanctum, if there’s no continuation of community, the emotional response dissipates.

Events like what we’re seeing happen at Asbury University make True Believers feel connected to God and one another. But eventually, everyone has to leave the sanctum and return to daily life. If revival offers nothing beyond that moment of emotional bliss, the pull of ordinary tedium quickly overwhelms grandiose feelings. Like cocaine, a worship high requires greater and greater quantities to overcome the flesh. Mere mortal pastors just can’t provide that.

However, churches can provide community. When “church” is a temporary respite from a world of exploitation, and we return to lives where others profit from our efforts, religion (or anyway religiosity) seems frivolous. Christians need forms of continuing discipleship, opportunities to participate in something larger than themselves. Living the Beatitudes is tiring when you do it alone except for an hour on Sunday. But it’s easy when Christians work together.

I don’t want to diminish the Asbury revival, or the feelings its participants share in that time and space. The defining question, though, is: will they carry those feelings, that experience, into the world? Historically, White Protestant churches are pretty bad at the “after” part of revival. I hope I’m wrong, though, because this world really needs weekday Christians to get busy living by the words we claim to believe.

The Trouble With the Chosen One

The last days of a dying Chosen One

Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, and Neo from The Matrix were all destined for greatness before birth, and recognized as The Chosen One by others. Science fiction and fantasy love the Chosen One mythos and recycle it endlessly. The Chosen One’s coming is always foretold; indeed, the Chosen One may be the last to recognize his own (and it’s usually “his”) greatness. But once he does, he unleashes righteous fury on the nations.

While science fiction loves literal Chosen Ones whose presence purges humanity’s impurity, other genres love a more subdued Chosen One. Hero teachers like Jaime Escalante in Stand By Me and Erin Gruwell in The Freedom Writers, or hero cops like Popeye Doyle and Dirty Harry Callahan, serve the same role, though their reach is circumscribed by their form. Seems like storytellers love finding that one superlative individual who will instantly repair all our woes.

Sort of like Jesus or the Buddha.

Most people, I suspect, would agree that we don’t fall on hard times because one person did us dirty. We might point fingers at an unpopular president, or the public face of a designated “other” like Hitler or Saddam Hussein. But realistically, most people realize these highly visible individuals didn’t cause widespread social crisis, they simply exploited it for personal or ideological ends. Society feels like it’s been skidding for a while.

Yet despite knowing individuals didn’t cause our unhappiness, we nevertheless seek individuals to reverse that perceived skid. Whether we seek that salvation in fictional characters, like Luke Skywalker or Katniss Everdeen, or in (putatively) factual individuals like Jesus or Muhammed, we want one person to take responsibility for solving the crisis. Solving social problems collectively is hard; we’d rather throw everything on the person of a Chosen One.

That’s where things get sticky. Jesus Christ claimed a unique ability to guide his people out of darkness. So did Donald Trump. The former president’s 2016 mantra of “I alone can fix this” seemed, for many people dispossessed by a changing economy, to be a necessary tonic for the Obama Administration’s embrace of collective responsibility and systemic reform. Obama’s approach was difficult, slow, and unpleasant; Trump’s response was easy and instantaneous.

Not every Chosen One necessarily brings salvation through their person. (I use the word “salvation” loosely here; please bear with me.) Jesus Christ said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light,” making himself individually the bearer of transcendence. The Buddha, by contrast, placed his teachings above his person. Had Siddhartha Gautama not achieved Enlightenment, somebody else would have, and the Truth would’ve shone through anyway.

A Chosen One and his girlfriend walk into a bar...

Few modern Chosen Ones would be so modest. Whether religious messiahs like Jim Jones or Sun Myung Moon, or secular deliverers like Donald Trump or (dare I say) Adolf Hitler, they always proclaim themselves, personally, the source of redemption. Jesus, Buddha, Hltler, and Trump all arrived at times of deteriorating empire, when old ways of government and religion weren’t working anymore, and promised deliverance. Some succeeded better than others.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean Hitler and Trump are morally equal to Jesus and Buddha. Others might say that, but I won’t. Rather. Jesus and Buddha promised to free humanity by stepping outside this world’s social, political, and economic limitations. Jesus promised to make all things new, while Buddha promised knowledge from this world’s ignorance. Political messiahs, however, inevitably pledge relief by reinforcing this world’s doctrinaire tendencies.

For this discussion, the particular deliverance each messiah offers matters less than their promised methods, and how their congregation receives them. The Chosen One always promises to relieve the suffering congregation’s pains, whether that congregation is genuinely oppressed, or merely feels themselves oppressed. Peace and consolation await True Believers willing to invest their every hope into the Chosen One.

Secular Chosen Ones generally don’t end well. Donald Trump’s congregation progressed from nodding agreement at his campaign rallies, to the violence of January 6th, 2021, with almost Life of Brian-like haste. And while Jesus told his disciples to sheathe their swords and not answer evil with violence, two millennia of people speaking on Jesus’ behalf have fomented Christian crusades and sectarian holy wars. That’s pretty bad PR for the Prince of Peace.

Fundamentally, a Chosen One lets True Believers relinquish their agency. When 909 people commit suicide in Jonestown, no individual congregant is truly responsible. Indeed, it’s likely that hundreds looked for one other person to say “no” first. Because when a Chosen One goes bad, the only hope is another Chosen One.

What Marie Kondo Means To Me

Marie Kondo (Netflix photo)

The internet collectively lost its mind last week at the revelation that home management guru Marie Kondo has largely abandoned tidying up. Now a mother of three, Kondo simply has other priorities. The online response has been an embarrassing pile-on, in which I bashfully admit I participated. Millions worldwide felt validated by the revelation that Kondo’s household management strategy doesn’t work if you have kids, a job, or a life.

Now the heat of excitement has largely dissipated, I’d like to consider what Kondo’s admission really means. Because I don’t think it means we have permission to live sloppy, chaotic lives. Though I can’t confirm it, I’d imagine that the messiest parts of Kondo’s apartment probably look more orderly than the cleanest parts of my bachelor pad. She practiced habits of cleanliness long before real life derailed that ethic.

We humans enjoy seeing the mighty brought low. The public schadenfreude demonstrated whenever Elon Musk finds another way to mismanage Twitter is just one current example. We feel gratified knowing “the great” are fragile like us. Unfortunately, I know something about falling short of goals. As a Christian, an American, and a progressive, I’m a member of several groups that are historically bad at living up to our own standards.

Rhetoricians speak of the “Fundamental Attribution Error,” a fallacy of informal logic. Briefly put, we assume our own misbehavior is a consequence of circumstances, but we assume other people’s misbehavior stems from their personality. When I personally fail to uphold my voiced values—my religious morals, intellectual standards, or just proper etiquette—I’ll tend to blame something outside myself. But when someone else fails, they’re personally culpable.

I see something similar happening with Marie Kondo currently. People who previously rushed to defend themselves against criticism for haphazard housekeeping because they have demanding jobs, small children, or whatever, now see Kondo having to schedule her life around her kids, and construing it as a failure of her philosophy. People who would never blame their politics or religion for their own failings, cast the same aspersions on Kondo.

But I’d contend that no philosophy ever encompasses every possible circumstance. The entire point of Marie Kondo’s tidying philosophy wasn’t to live permanently inside a Better Homes & Gardens display; it was to practice in moments of limited pressure, training yourself how to think. Because when the pressure hits, when you have kids demanding your time and attention, it’ll be too late to learn how to maintain your house.

Previous moral scandals have erupted because people thought their religion or philosophy protected them from failure. Famed televangelist Jimmy Swaggart preached against sexual indiscretion, then got caught with a hooker. Swaggart wept on television, pleaded for believers’ forgiveness, and then… got caught with another hooker. Because he believed his faith didn’t just direct him from sin, he believed it made him invulnerable to sin.

Other examples accumulate. We know teenagers who sign “virginity pledges” are no less likely than the general population to actually have premarital sex. However, because they believe they’re morally immune to premarital sex, they’re less likely to have birth control available when it actually happens. Because these teenagers didn’t practice their moral responses in low-pressure conditions, they had no response when the pressure was on.

Paging Bristol Palin, stat.

Moral philosophies, whether Christianity or pragmatism or Marie Kondo’s systematic cleanliness, aren’t intended to last forever. One doesn’t rest on moral accomplishments like a fat puppy. Rather, we need to exercise our moral positions in safe environments of controlled pressure, just as athletes practice weight training in the gym between bouts on the field. Practice doesn’t make perfect; rather, I’d say that practice makes prepared.

Permit me to overextend the athletic metaphor. Anybody who’s worked out knows the person able to lift the heaviest gym weights isn’t necessarily the strongest person. Rather, somebody with practiced form and moderate strength can outlift somebody with sloppy form and great strength. That’s what Marie Kondo, and other philosophers, should offer us: not strength, but form. Because we still have form even when our strength inevitably fails us.

We haven’t seen Marie Kondo’s post-kids house. But I’d bet money that we’d enter and, while she blushed and apologized for the mess, we’d gawk at nearly everything in its place and free of dust. Because through years of practice, she’s learned the habits of making good decisions about what to keep or discard. She knows what she values. And unlike us, she knows the right way to get it.

Pie in the Sky on TV's “Firefly”

Promotional cast photo of Firefly

“Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me.” Bluesman Sonny Rhodes’ theme-tune performance nailed the tone of TV’s Firefly. The nine crewmembers of the bucket freighter Serenity have, for individual reasons, abandoned life on terra firma and elected to live in the vacuum between planets. Over fourteen episodes and one feature film, those individual reasons dribble out slowly, equating to various forms of injustice.

American theologian Howard Thurman insists we understand Jesus best by understanding historical context. Jesus’ message of humble resistance makes most sense amid Roman occupation and Jewish subjection. Before Jesus, Jews had three responses. “What must be the attitude toward the rulers,” Thurman asks, “the controllers of political, social, and economic life?” Some, like the Sadducees, adopted Greco-Roman styles, while others, like the nonviolent Pharisees and violent Zealots, doubled down on Jewish identity.

Thurman’s third option is simply absenting oneself from society. This was the option favored by the Essenes at Qumran. Rather than submit to Rome’s bootheel, the Essenes fled Judea altogether, tended flocks among the caves, and refused to participate in society. This allowed the Essenes to maintain Levitical purity by simply not having their practices challenged. The empire can’t threaten us if we simply walk away from the empire.

This third option seems appealing when the empire’s yoke is intolerable, but also inescapable. Religions in particular, but also certain philosophies, urge True Believers to leave the empire. From ancient Essenes and Benedictines to modern hippies and Maharishi followers, morally pure people often yearn to rebuild society. The simple fact that these communities seldom outlive their founders doesn’t dissuade True Believers from trying again.

Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm Reynolds

Captain Mal, commanding the Serenity, takes this impulse to an uncommonly literal level. Saint Benedict promised believers they could, by following simple rules, reject the empire and live in the Heavenly City now. Captain Mal literally lives in the sky. Because his empire, yclept the Alliance, controls every planet in the ’Verse, he simply rejects the empire, leaves the planets, and—despite being outspokenly atheist—tries to go to Heaven.

I’m reminded of Swedish-American labor activist Joe Hill, who wrote folksongs to unify the labor movement. Among his most famous, his song “The Preacher and the Slave” coined the phrase “Pie in the Sky When You Die” to mock conservative Christians’ belief that passive compliance with unjust laws guaranteed a beneficent afterlife. Going to Heaven, in Hill’s view, seemingly meant selling out to unjust authorities here on Earth.

Both Captain Mal and his creator, Joss Whedon, would seemingly agree there. Whedon, like Mal, has nothing generous to say about Christianity. Yet throughout his works, characters continue believing in capital-T Truth, which is found through first leaving human society, then returning to it. Many Joss Whedon narratives, like Buffy or The Avengers, have a contemporary setting that, while altered, reflect our world. Firefly uniquely leaves Earth altogether.

This lets the protagonists do something seen frequently in other Whedon properties: go to Heaven now, before they’re dead. Captain Mal makes explicit something only lurking tacitly behind Buffy or Captain America. Whether fighting the Alliance, vampires, or Chitauri, Whedon’s protagonists must first leave this plane, often multiple times, then return armed to fight this world’s battles.

Joss Whedon

(As an aside, Captain Mal provides a perturbing metaphor. Whedon modeled Mal on ex-confederates who refused to surrender, like Frank and Jesse James, and headed West as outlaws. This seems like Lost Cause apologia, and former fans have turned against Firefly for this. But the episode “Shindig” specifies that the victorious Alliance, not the defeated Independents, practice slavery. Historically, this makes sense. As James McPherson writes, the Confederacy lost the war, but arguably won the peace.)

Unfortunately, fleeing the world never works. The world eventually barges in. Throughout history, peoples have used the cloak of religion to seek solace in isolated locations like Qumran, Monte Cassino, or Canyon de Chelly. The empire eventually overrun and destroyed all these locations. Each one is now a national park or historical center, demonstrating the ultimate fate of those who flee: their lives are frozen in time, as artifacts.

Like the Essenes at Qumran, or the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, the Serenity crew attempts to disavow participation in the empire. But the empire keeps dragging them back in. That’s because, as Joe Hill realized, Heaven isn’t a place to camp during this life. Capital-T Truth will only be found by facing the empire on the ground. Because eventually, they will take the sky from you.