The War of Few Against All

So it would appear that writing about the whole contraception thing broke whatever was impeding the flow of writing to my brain.  This is good, as there is an important concept that’s something more than tangentially related to the contraception thing I’ve been wanting to get to, but just haven’t had the energy to handle.  It’s much bigger than that, however.  It’s more along the lines of, “This is why we have a culture war in the first place, folks.”

This is one of those topics that’s extremely difficult to talk about in a calm, clear-headed manner.  Your average culture warrior has way too much invested in the fight to really be particularly rational about much of anything.  Those on opposing sides of the war, meanwhile, can’t engage their opponents in a particularly rational manner for a whole host of reasons I hope I can tease out.  Ultimately, too, there’s the problem that the culture wars are ultimately over things that weren’t actually happening in the first place, but have been crated because of the fight.

It’s…it’s complicated.

I’m pretty sure that the only way to really get to the idea of what’s happening is by telling a few stories.

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I first learned about the BCE/CE shift in history when I was in high school.  I don’t recall where I learned about it, but I do recall almost immediately thinking, “What?  They’re trying to take Jesus out of history?  How dare they!”

Now, I suppose I could have just been something of a culture wars prodigy, but I strongly suspect that the first place I learned about the BCE/CE thing was in some sort of editorial by someone claiming it was an attempt to take Jesus out of history.  I don’t know.  I do know, however, that I was concerned about it enough to tell my pastor.

His response basically boiled down to, “Chill, dude, that’s not a big deal.”

A couple years later that same pastor stood in front of a group of my peers and told us that if we weren’t doing everything in our power to try to stop abortion we weren’t good Christians.  I ended up giving him the, “Chill, dude,” speech, but not on the grounds that he was off base about the abortion debate.  My complaint was that while trying to stop abortion was a noble thing and all, claiming that anyone who didn’t spend their entire lives fighting that particular culture war weren’t good Christians was kind of a dick move.

History, meanwhile, was one of the things that caused my initial drift away from Evangelical Christianity as I knew it.  I’d read something about Oliver Cromwell in England, John Calvin in Geneva, or the Puritans in America and think, “Wow, it would suck to live in those places.”  I realized one of the central truths of the church/state relationship: intertwining the two is bad for the state, but equally bad for the church.  That was the brilliance of the First Amendment.

The lesson didn’t quite sink in fully at first, however.  I still accepted the basic premise that the world needed Jesus and, as such, the best possible world was that which bowed to Jesus.  The problem wasn’t that the church and state were intertwined in Geneva or London.  The problem was that the state was intertwined with the wrong kind of Christianity.

It wasn’t until I was at Western that I finally completely broke out of that thought process.  I was in church one night and the pastor was talking about how great it would be if the entire world were governed by Jesus as a single, flawless monarch.  My very first thought was, “No, that wouldn’t be great.  That’s the lesson we learned from the Enlightenment.”

Interestingly enough, the pastor wasn’t talking about taking over the USA for Jesus.  He was actually talking about life in the Kingdom.  I’d gone so far away from the idea of religion as governance that I couldn’t fathom Jesus taking my right to self-determination in the next life, either.

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Maybe those stories don’t actually help, now that I think about it.  Maybe the point is that it’s confusing.  I can’t really parse where the culture wars begin because I can’t really parse how I thought about them.  I don’t know that anyone can, really.

The start of the problem is that Evangelical Christianity is a black and white world filled with black and white people.  Everyone is either for Jesus or, by definition, against Jesus.  There’s a verse in the Bible about that, but I don’t recall what it is and can’t be arsed to look it up.  That’s okay, though, since most of the Christians who use that verse as the be-all, end-all of human interaction couldn’t tell you which one it is, either.

It’s important not to ignore the implications of that idea, either.  Your average Sunday morning pew sitter in an Evangelical church doesn’t actually know what the Bible says.  They know what it’s said that the Bible said.  So you tell them that anyone who is not with Jesus is against him and they’ll take that to mean they, personally, are surrounded by enemies of the faith.  The next trick is to tell them that Jesus hates gay people and sluts and democracy and anyone who refuses to use the proper BC/AD system.

If that sounds overly simplistic, well, it is.  But just because it’s simplistic doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

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American Christianity is, at its core, a selfish and self-absorbed thing.  This is the continent upon which the idea of the Prosperity Gospel took root, after all.  This is the nation in which most Christians are obsessed over the notion of an actual relationship with their “personal lord and savior.”  It’s almost impossible for the followers of the American Jesus to conceive of a non-Christian or non-anti-Christian justification for much of anything.

The fight to legalize gay marriage, then, isn’t an attempt to extend rights to a group that has had its rights unfairly denied.  The fight over contraception and abortion isn’t an attempt to give women bodily autonomy.  The fight over teaching comprehensive sexual education isn’t about making sure that teenagers don’t do anything stupid when they’re setting out to do what they’re gonna do anyway.  Allowing any of those things is a direct slap to the face of Jesus.  None of those things can be anything but a direct slap to the face of Jesus.

The notion of making a decision that has nothing to do with Jesus is unfathomable.

This, too, is why Christians are fond of dividing the world between the real Christians and the fake Christians.  Any Christian who thinks comprehensive sex ed is a good thing can’t possibly actually be following Jesus, after all.  They must be arming themselves for the war against all that is good and right and righteous and true.

I think I run out of useful words right about here.

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All of this comes from the same place where Christians get the idea that atheists absolutely know god exists and Jesus is god’s son and the world’s sole and true savior but are in denial or outright rebellion.  Either you are with Jesus or you are against Jesus, after all.  Either you are black or white, evil or good, a tool of the Devil or a servant of Jesus.  No options but these are available.

As such, there are people in the Evangelical world who literally cannot fathom the idea that maybe we should make things that non-Christians do legal because there’s no rational reason not to.  Further, there are people in the Evangelical world who literally cannot fathom the idea that removing Biblical considerations from the public sphere in regards to laws is not, in fact, an attack against Jesus, but based on the realization that placing a wall between sectarian religion and secular governance helps everyone.  They instead see a tool of the Devil and a warrior against Jesus in anyone who dares draw a line between church and state.

I wish I could explain it better.  It’s something I intrinsically understand, since I’ve been on both sides of that line.  I’m on the side of the line I’m on now specifically because I realized how dangerous it is to mix sectarian faith and politics in a world that neither is nor will ever be merely binary.

For me, though, that realization required years of study and thought in order to become so firmly rooted.  I know for a fact that a lot of people I used to go to church with have never given the idea a second thought and, as such, are willing to simply accept the premise as laid out.  And, as with everything else in the funhouse mirror world of Evangelical Christianity, it’s impossible to figure out which people are the guards and which are the inmates.  It doesn’t help that they tend to change roles from time to time and issue to issue.

Comments

[Firedrake]

There's this idea that "brainwashing" involves water torture and rubber hoses. Nope. If you've got years to play with, it just means repeating something again and again, and making the victim repeat it again and again. That's all it takes. And at the end of the process you get someone who quite literally cannot see that there's another side to the argument from the one Pastor/Mullah/Dear Leader told him.

[Geds]

Yup. The most important step in brainwashing is to isolate the target. Evangelical Christianity does that very well. Tell people there is no source of truth but the Bible and eventually they'll police themselves and reject science and history and anything vaguely perceived as non-Christian thought.

That, ultimately, is how we end up with Ken Ham and David Barton. They make their money re-creating reality to match the Bible so that no one ever has to put reality and the Bible side by side and see that one does not match the other. And that's why we have Podunk Christian School and Bob Jones University and all the others. It completely isolates the target audience from reality.

Yet it's the damn liberals who are trying to indoctrinate kids...

[jessa]

I remember hearing over and over that the chances of conversion decline dramatically after eighth grade. Now I see why: because people are uncritical of their secularism or because they are too good at critical thinking.

They are really good at targeting vulnerable people for conversion, too. They swoop in to help people meet a big need, those people feel indebted, there are strings attached, they repay the debt with their conversion. Or they lie lie lie, tell people that Jesus will do X for them, the same sort of thing everyone does to make people feel better (things will be better tomorrow, everything will turn out okay, etc.) but with the specificity of it being Jesus who will make things better. And, of course, children are just as vulnerable, if not moreso.

[Janet]

I've had a hard time understanding why so many modern Christians have embraced this prideful and selfish identity displayed on all those godforsaken bumper stickers. The NOTW/"Jesus Freak" image thing seems a fairly clear violation of the first commandment. How did this happen to a religion that once held humility as its central virtue? The idea of a "proud Christian" aught to be self-contradictory.