White Christians and the Triumph of This World

From the final few frames of the January 6th Committee video

You already saw the ten-minute supercut of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection which the investigating committee broadcast during their prime-time hearings last week. Even we who couldn’t stomach it live, saw it anyway the next day, when the committee shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—sites that are, with Amazon, basically the Internet now. The only way to have not seen it, is to consciously take steps to avoid seeing it.

Different viewers reacted to different parts of the video. I’ll focus today on one aspect: the final few frames. This snippet shows clusters of insurrectionists atop the Capitol’s parapets, waving two flags. One flag reads “Trump 2020,” the other a white flag with a red cross on a blue union: what’s become called “the Christian flag.” For many in recent days, this use of Christian imagery in a violent situation has become the public face of American Christian nationalism.

Respectfully, I want to direct viewers’ faces away from the symbols these insurrectionists hold, however, onto the insurrectionists themselves. The faces below these flags, brandished in a manner probably deliberately modeled on Iwo Jima, are mostly male, and entirely White. These insurrectionists are vocally Christian in their beliefs and imagery, and tied entirely to Donald Trump’s person; I won’t diminish that. But I contend Whiteness matters most here.

Gorski and Perry write that Christian nationalist beliefs aren’t uniquely White in America. Belief that America has historically Christian responsibilities, that American nationhood is founded on Christianity and has a prophetic mission, is held by Black and Hispanic Protestants at roughly the same rate as among White Protestants. But Black and Hispanic Christian nationalists haven’t stormed public buildings or attempted to overturn elections. Yet.

What’s more, many Christian nationalists aren’t even united by religion. Though belief in what researchers call “Evangelical Christianity” unifies these nationalists, that’s a fig leaf. Not only do many Christian nationalists not hold theological positions consistent with Evangelicalism, as many as fifteen percent aren’t even Christian. And not in the “Oh, you’re not really Christian” sense; fifteen percent of “Evangelical Christians” hold some other religion, or no religion at all.

pic.twitter.com/Po7qA3xecf

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022

The defining trait that pushes Christian nationalists into violence to defend their beliefs, insofar as they have beliefs, is Whiteness. White Christian nationalists are more likely to believe their culture is under attack, more willing to endorse violence to defend it, and even though it’s difficult to corroborate race-based breakdowns of who actually performs violence, the footage from January 6th reveals an overwhelming sea of Whiteness.

This arguably shouldn’t surprise anybody who reads American history. Since colonial times, when racial distinctions were first codified following Bacon’s Rebellion, White Americans have had an implicit social compact allowing them to enact violence on Black and Brown bodies with impunity, a compact that doesn’t go both ways. History of America’s lynching era records that African Americans could be ritually murdered for muttering under their breath at White people.

Religion always provides justification for this violence. As James Cone writes, racialized violence serves the same role in America that crucifixion served in Rome, establishing for subject peoples that we own your lives. Such violence could never be justified without state-based religion, because taken strictly on its face, such violence is obviously unconscionable. Only a God-given social order could ever require such naked violence against resistant subjects.

Arguably, that’s why Christians felt compelled to design a flag in the Twentieth Century. We recognize, then and now, that Christianity’s role as America’s unofficial state religion, compromises our faith. Note that the flag is mostly white, the color of surrender in military operations. The Christian flag, waved on January 6th, was designed to refuse participation in state roles. The Kingdom of God is separate from human law.

But, like all symbols, people in power found ways to suborn that flag to support the already well-supported. And, citing Gorski and Perry again, America’s White power structure has performed rhetorical sleight-of-hand to conflate state power with racialized power. To challenge America’s powerful people in high places, is always to challenge American Whiteness. A racialized social order backed by an illusory state religion.

Don’t misunderstand me; as a Christian, I believe Christianity has done great good. But whenever religion gets entangled in state power, the outcome is terrible for people perceived as outsiders. Extermination of Indigenous nations and racialized slavery under the guise of “missionary” zeal is just one example. America hoards power along racial lines, and justifies itself using religion. And it’s unlikely to stop.

The Fellowship of YEE-HAW!

Bishop O’Connell, Two-Gun Witch

The Elves and their fiercest allies, the Lakota Nation, fought fiercely against the American settlers, but history already records that they lost. Now Talen, one of the Elven nation’s greatest warriors, lives the life of a colonized person. She hunts outlaws for a government that systematically oppresses her people, a paradox she’s all too aware of, thank you very much. So taking another bounty on a White settler doesn’t ruffle her moral feathers. At first.

Bishop O’Connell’s fourth novel reflects two authors whose novels influenced my heady youth: Lloyd Alexander and Zane Grey. Both authors, in their way, wrote about almost-historical lands that sort of existed, but not really, nations of moral clarity and larger-than-life conflicts, where survivors tested their mettle and emerged stronger. O’Connell’s novel treads similar ground, though he updates the moral symmetry for our more fraught times. The product is familiar and strange at the same time.

Talen is a Shadow Warden, a guardian of magical purity for her people. But after the war, when the Elves and Lakota alike were forced onto reservations, Talen bought herself a measure of freedom by becoming a U.S. Marshal, bringing in “the stained,” people whose souls have become so suffused with black magic, they can’t be saved, only killed. In the bleak desert southwest, Talen is terribly effective. This doesn’t save her from racism, though.<

In O’Connell’s telling, the Elves lived in harmony with nature and Indigenous society before White settlers came, partly because fighters like Talen kept evil away. But White society and its technological terrors brought something worse than colonialism: they brought moral complexity. This longing for supposed long-lost virtue is common to both fantasy and Western literature, a belief that people once knew right from wrong. Talen, more than most, understands the difference between “right” and “lawful.”

Though mostly centered in New Mexico, big money tempts Talen to pursue a bounty in the Dakota Territory. A White woman there has supposedly gone stained, leaving a wake of destruction behind. But even before finding her prey, Talen realizes something doesn’t smell right. Her supposedly morally rotten prey is a soft-spoken farm widow who loves horses and doesn’t handle a firearm correctly. Talen suspects she’s been sent after a false bounty for nefarious purposes.

Bishop O’Connell

Unfortunately, Talen isn’t the only half-official lawman pursuing Margaret Jameson. The Red Right Hand, a fanatic religious sect, hates the stained almost as much as it hates Elves and Lakota. And unlike Talen, who remains bound by her people’s unjust treaty with the federal government, the Red Right Hand has official standing. Talen is an accomplished warrior, but that matters little as she finds herself outmanned, outgunned, and fighting a second war against White colonialism.

It possibly isn’t coincidental that Talen’s name resembles Lloyd Alexander’s protagonist, Taran. Both heroes believe naively that they understand the moral implications of the outside world, but leaving their comfort zone, they quickly realize the world is a thicket of compromise and ambiguity. They also both become dependent on friends they didn’t know they had, much less needed. The outside world is a scary, murderous place, after all. Nobody should have to face it alone.

Despite the backward-looking nostalgia common to both Westerns and fantasy, though, there’s a distinctly modern component to O’Connell’s narrative. He populates his frontier America with groups like Elves, Dwarves, Native Americans, and White religious nuts, who all perceive the world in strictly binary terms: everyone believes they’re standing fast against implacable evil. Only when these groups come into friction does anybody realize things are possibly more complex—or that they themselves might not be heroes.

Talen begins the novel thinking that evil is an individual transgression, a single soul tainted by darkness. But Margaret Jameson’s plight forces her to rethink everything she believes. Soon she must gather a fellowship of others like her, survivors who, for various reasons, no longer believe their governments and the official story. In chasing the true source of corruption, they must soon leave their safe wilderness and venture into that darkest of unknown lands: Chicago.

O’Connell’s novel is both a continuation of the fantasy and Western genres, and a subversion. Readers find his initial language and imagery familiar, as genre audiences seek. But then O’Connell subverts genre expectations, not once or twice, but time after time. Each new revelation reveals deeper ways our characters, and therefore we, have believed widespread lies. We finish the book realizing, with Talen and her fellowship, that only one truth is sacred: your own conscience.

A Tale of Greek Love and Greek Fire

Kae Tempest, Paradise: a New Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

On a nameless island in the remotest sea, Philoctetes dwells marooned. He sleeps in a cave, hunts birds for food, and laments injustices done to him. One day, General Odysseus arrives with a promising young lieutenant, determined to fulfill a prophecy that requires Philoctetes return to the front. Unfortunately, Philoctetes doesn’t believe in the unending war anymore. Odysseus and Neoptolemus must decide how far they’ll go to get the old veteran back into the fight.

The Greek playwright Sophocles is best known for his Oedipus plays, staples of high school and undergraduate literature courses. His play Philoctetes isn’t as famous. Perhaps that’s because, unlike the Oedipus plays, it presents humans as passengers in the story, which commences with a prophecy, and ends with the demigod Herakles demanding a resolution. Or maybe because, unlike Sophocles’ Oedipus, his Odysseus and Philoctetes are one-dimensional characters arguing the age-old debate between glory and individuality.

British performance poet and White rapper Kae Tempest updates Sophocles’ play, resetting it in modern war and removing the literal deus ex machina ending. Tempest also gives these characters more to do, especially the Greek chorus behind the men. These characters and their modern setting, pitched against a war that’d dragged on literally for decades, bespeak the weariness of a generation which has grown up with interminable war in distant lands and poverty at home.

Philoctetes was once among Greece’s greatest warriors. (The homeland in Tempest’s retelling is studiously vague.) But a festering injury now leaves him largely crippled, and as the injury never heals, he emits an offensive odor; nobody can stand to be around him. Sometimes he wants to return to civilization, and laments how his sons have reached adulthood in his absence. But he no longer trusts the homeland he left behind, and almost loves his exile.

Odysseus, sometimes mistaken for noble and valiant, is the consummate general. His only ambition is victory, and he’ll lie, cheat, and steal to achieve that. This isn’t the Odysseus you read in grade school. Odysseus abandoned Philoctetes ten years ago when the great veteran’s wound became too noxious; now, knowing that only Philoctetes and his bow can secure victory, he’s come to reclaim what he previously abandoned. Unfortunately for Odysseus, Philoctetes isn’t ready to forgive.

Kae Tempest

Between Philoctetes and Odysseus stands Neoptolemus. Son of the late, great Achilles, Neoptolemus was bred for war, but has little stomach for it. Unlike Odysseus, Neoptolemus has a conscience, and hates being ordered to lie. But he does what he’s told, and almost succeeds. Throughout the play, Neoptolemus arbitrates between Philoctetes’ strong martial backbone, and Odysseus’ willingness to do whatever it takes to win. He never quite decides how to reconcile the two conflicting forces.

Tempest keeps the foreground story mostly intact, though updated for the War On Terror generation. Their contribution to the experience is the Greek chorus behind the men. In the original, the chorus mainly comments upon the action, providing clarification and moral guidance where it’s needed. Tempest transforms the chorus into a collection of women living on the island, whose efforts to survive the war contrast with the men’s deliberate attempts to make the war worse.

Some of Tempest’s women were born here; others are refugees, driftwood washed ashore after something terrible happened elsewhere. While Philoctetes mentally rehashes the war and laments the injustices he’s endured, the women have built a functioning society out of male civilization’s discards. They regard him with a range of attitudes, from contempt to pity to misplaced romanticism. We, the audience, aren’t sure whether he can even see them, except when it suits his perverse needs.

The resulting hybrid both is, and isn’t, Sophocles’ original Greek tragedy. Because Tempest, unlike Sophocles, believes humans have something resembling free will, Tempest changes the ending, condemning the characters to repeat their situation infinitely. This interpretation is pessimistic, but not wrong, given the current climate. (This play debuted approximately as America was finally withdrawing from Afghanistan.) No longer do spiteful gods define human choices in theatrical tragedy; humankind is terrible enough without questionable divine intervention.

Tempest’s play premiered in 2021 to mixed reviews. Some critics liked how Tempest handled the Greek characters, but felt confounded by the chorus; others had the opposite reaction. This was heightened because all parts, male and female, were played by women. But I think this misses the point: true tragedies resolve not in death, which is optional, but in disappointment, which is eternal. We humans are as small and regrettable as the gods we worship.

A Manichean Guy With a Gun

President & Dr. Biden at Robb Elementary, Uvalde, TX

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre popularized this bromide in the days following the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012. Like its close compatriot, “thoughts and prayers” LaPierre’s saying quickly became unmoored from its roots and warped into a caricature. It’s just another piece of faux morality clogging American rhetoric now.

But it’s also a demonstration of how American public morality has become meaningless. The division of humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys” is a form of Manichaeism: the belief that the universe is divided into the altogether good, holy, and virtuous, against the altogether bad, godless, and depraved. In traditional Christianity, Manichaeism is considered a heresy. And for good reason, too: because it makes us insensible to the world around us.

As usually happens following mass shootings, the narrative surrounding last week’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas, has turned on identifying the menace, the crime, or the “evil.” The shooter is described as a manifestation of ultimate evil—or perhaps of “mental illness,” which is frequently a sloppy shorthand for evil. Likewise law enforcement who dithered outside the school for an hour are described in terms from a medieval morality play: “cowardly,” “shameful,” “dishonorable.”

These attempts to define “evil” situate it externally, and in absolute terms. These people are defined by one overwhelming, Aesopic moral trait and, by implication, so are we. We’re reassured that we, mercifully, didn’t kill anyone, didn’t stop parents from rescuing children, didn’t cause or enable the violence. Therefore we can confidently condemn those whose actions or inactions violate our code. Calling others “evil” defends our perceived goodness.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, site of the Parkland, Florida, shooting

Problem is, things are never that absolute. The Uvalde police join a host of security professionals, school resource officers, and other armed guardians who protected their lives over those of schoolchildren. In schools from Littleton, Colorado, to Parkland, Florida, school police fled, and civilian teachers who resisted the violence were the first to die. Armchair strategists love claiming they’d rush into the fire, but few of us really would.

(On a personal note, I have personally rushed into violent conflicts between people better prepared than me. These conflicts only involved fists, though. I doubt strongly I’d ever have rushed optimistically into an active crossfire. That’s why I scoff whenever somebody says “I would’ve taken the risk.” No you wouldn’t, and neither would I.)

I remember taking exception to the “good guy with a gun” narrative when it first appeared. How do we define good guys and bad guys? One acquaintance, an NRA life member and gun rights advocate, insisted we could identify good guys by their licensure. He believed that good guys had training, certification, and permits to handle and carry weapons. Goodness, for this person, is bestowed by official declaration by esteemed professionals.

Sadly, I lost contact with this individual long before last week’s shooting. I wonder how his inner narrative of goodness as accord with authority has survived the knowledge that official local, state, and federal law enforcement did nothing while civilians died. If we’ve learned anything from COINTELPRO or Ruby Ridge, it surely must be that authority and goodness aren’t synonyms—yet many people, evidently, forget quickly.

The quest for external, measurable evil has produced terrible outcomes. By imputing “evil” to others and making that characteristic their defining being, we have, at different times, segregated people by race, economic class, national or regional origin, and the kitchen sink. When we believe that evil lives in cities, or has a certain skin color, or prays a certain way, we make it acceptable to keep others at arm’s length.

The now-infamous photo of concert-goers fleeing the shooter
at the country music festival in Las Vegas, 2017

One needn’t be Christian and believe in Original Sin, though, to realize that humans aren’t neatly symmetrical. We all have the inner capacity to do tremendous good or epic evil, depending on the choices we make, the influences we let inside, and how we react to how others treat us. Moral Manichaeism lets us assign blame, and most importantly, lets us assign it away from ourselves. But that’s always false.

People who quote the Manichean heresy inevitably see themselves on the good side of the split. Wayne LaPierre’s division of humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys,” or anybody’s reliance on good vs. evil, innately ignores that these words have no external meaning. Goodness and evil aren’t things we are; they’re descriptions of things we do. And as such, they’re completely meaningless in defining how we respond to external calamity.

“Once Upon a Time” Could Be Right Now

Sarah J. Sover, Fairy Godmurder (Fractured Fae Book 1)

Gwendoline Evenshine worked hard to become a fairy godmother, and blew it; her very first charge was murdered on hallowed ground, in broad daylight. So she hardened her heart and rededicated her life to bringing down the killer, a serial monster nicknamed The Brain Scraper. This mysterious beast stalks the soot-streaked streets of fairyland, murdering magical beings for mysterious purposes. But the case has taken a dark turn, and Gwen suddenly finds herself the target.

Sarah Sover’s second novel isn’t groundbreaking, but don’t consider that a knock against it. Sover follows a beat-sheet beloved by popular cross-genre novelists like Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, a hybrid of traditional paperback fantasy and midcentury noir mystery. The product is a darkly playful overlap that, to Sover’s benefit, comes with a built-in audience. Veteran readers will recognize when the next plot twist or brutal betrayal is coming, without truly spoiling the surprise.

The story proceeds along two tracks. In the present, Gwen haunts the midnight streets of Korranthia, a fairy kingdom roughly corresponding with New England. Haunted by her greatest failure, Gwen paused her personal and professional life, dedicating everything to chasing that one phantom. She works as a police consultant, but only on the Brain Scraper case, using her fairy godmother skills to examine bodies for evidence that ordinary forensics can’t find. It hasn’t helped much.

In flashbacks, we get Gwen’s backstory. Fresh from the Academy, Gwen is assigned fairy godmother status over Princess Francesca (that’s “Frankie” to you), heir of Korranthia’s royal house. Frankie expects to inherit authority over the precarious balance between her fairy kingdom and the increasingly volatile United States. But she lives with a dark foreboding that she’ll never actually live to receive her inheritance. Despite her power and skill, Gwen is powerless to prevent Frankie’s doom.

This dualism gives readers a jarring view of Gwen at different life stages. The present Gwen is hard-bitten, desperate to avoid building relationships or having feelings. Because she dared to care about Princess Frankie, and her big-sisterly guidance ended horrifically. We know from Chapter One that Frankie is doomed, and watch helplessly as, like Amanda Palmer, her story plays to its inevitable conclusion. Gwen is desperate never to fail, or be that heartbroken ever again.

Sarah J. Sover

However, boring old reality persistently intrudes. Gwen can only pursue the case by remaining in the Korranthia PD’s good graces, and the fuzz cares more about maintaining order than pursuing justice. And Gwen never formally completed her magical training, meaning she still needs her old Academy connections to decipher the scanty evidence she’s collected. Thus, despite her desire for independence, she keeps falling back on the two institutions dominating young people’s lives: law and school.

Not that Gwen’s truly alone. Two allies, a griffin homicide detective and a pixie true-crime blogger, continue supporting Gwen, despite her cynical façade. And her old Academy mentor makes frequent overtures to tempt Gwen back, promising the largess of power and old-girl-network connections. Gwen, like Harry Dresden, is extremely powerful, but needs guidance to channel that power. But Gwen finds the temptations of friendship, insidership, and power threatening. Especially in fairyland, there’s farther to fall.

Sover mixes contemporary and folkloric influences in different measures at different times. The flashbacks presaging Princess Frankie’s murder, and Gwen’s fall from grace, read like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, salted with allusions to contemporary politics and culture war issues. Sover’s “present” chapters read more like a conventional hard-boiled procedural. This duality hits harder because this is the first novel I’ve read which effectively uses the COVID-19 pandemic in its setting. Sover’s fairyland feels very real.

As an aside, Korranthia’s mythic beings come from European myth: fairies, gnomes, ogres. The characters swear by Danu, an Irish goddess. Nowhere do Native American mythic beings appear, despite the New England setting. It’s entirely the mythology of the colonizers, not the colonized. This feels like a real missed opportunity, especially in light of Sover’s use of contemporary politics in her mythological milieu. I hope she corrects this understandable but large oversight in future books.

This novel feels like the slipstream genre I read extensively ten years ago, but haven’t seen much recently. Sover uses the imagery of myth and folklore, but brings the stakes into a contemporary scope. She addresses issues that seem timely to modern readers, especially women, but narrates those issues in ways that seem sometimes almost whimsical. She doesn’t lecture or scold her readers, but like in the best literature, ultimately, the story is about us.