W-a-a-a-y back in June, after the church shooting in Charleston, I pointed toward a Promise Keepers conference announcement that was, by even the dismal standards of the evangelical right, egregious.
But speculation is rampant, and not without reason, that this is yet another instance of the south’s (and spreading) sick fusion of fundamentalist religion, tribal racism, and extreme right-wing ideology. Recall the perverse imagery used by Promise Keepers to promote its conference:
Those armed and camoed guys advancing through a dystopian bleakscape are the good guys, according to Promise Keepers. As I said then:
That text, in combination with that imagery, is frightening stuff; these people are out of their minds, and it is only a matter of time before some ignorant yahoo, stoked on malice for a world he no longer understands, decides God wants him to go shoot-up a gay bar or who-knows-what.
The recklessness is downright breathtaking.
Now, after years of denunciations and harassment so fierce and unrelenting — and usually dishonest — that Planned Parenthood feels obliged to design secure ‘safe rooms’ into their facilities, a pious nutjob has shot-up one of their clinics.
By any sane reckoning, the evangelical right has lost the culture war, and lost big. That doesn’t mean that the sickness has run its course, however. The cultural Christians are mostly gone, so there is nobody left in church but the crazies. What is more, frantic for revenue, the preachers give the crazies what they want. So every Sunday morning, all across the country, howling and bellowing pastors are denouncing abortion and preaching sedition. This is no joke; it’s really happening — and happening, incidentally, with a public subsidy in the form of tax protection.
We are nowhere near the end of it. Our godly neighbors, ever more marginalized and out-of-step with a world they are increasingly incompetent to live in, are a lot more dangerous than a few thousand Syrian refugees who want to get away from True Believers.