Civil Commotion

I discussed REVOICE here:

Revoice is a model of what Christian thought is evolving toward, no matter how anxious that makes such as the Southern Baptists. It won’t save Christianity, because Christianity is untrue, but we should all hope it helps to mitigate the Pious’ indecent intrusions into the lives of others.

This is the beginning of the end for such as Albert Mohler, Franklin Grahaam … that whole complex of smug, oily Holy Men whose influence rests upon ignorance and fear.

It will go slowly, though. Consider this response to the tweet reproduced above.

Syncretism is the merging together of multiple ideologies — and all religions, no exceptions, have syncretism in their history. There is no such thing as an authentic Christianity, or an authentic Judaism, or an authentic Mormonism, or an authentic anything else.

Andrew Sullivan makes a remark in today’s column that closely parallels a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist that I was thinking of quoting earlier in a (slightly) different context.

Con men usually know that a con has a life span, and not a long one. At some point, it will collapse because it is, in fact, bullshit. By then, the best con men have made the sale — think of “Trump University” — and moved on. They also know that keeping the suckers sealed off from other sources of contrary information is essential until the deal is done. You have to maintain a fiction relentlessly, dismiss or delegitimize external information that might get your marks to think differently, and constantly make the sale. You have to humor and flatter and bullshit all the time, until you’ve sealed the deal.

And Trump is really, really good at this. In fact, it’s his chief skill, along with his instinct for the easy mark and another human being’s vulnerable spot. It has worked many times before. It’s at the root of his entire shady business career. His problem now, however, is that this is the biggest of all cons, if you’re playing at a presidential level, and is also the longest. It has to be sustainable for at least four years. And that’s an extremely long time to keep it alive.

This is why, it seems to me, Trump tweets so often and so aggressively. It’s his chief mechanism for keeping his dupes under his spell, for sustaining the narrative of the con while reality tugs at it.

The corresponding passage in Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §9:

Against this theologians’ instinct I wage war: I have found its traces everywhere. Whoever has theologians’ blood in his veins, sees all things in a distorted and dishonest perspective to begin with. The pathos which develops out of this condition calls itself faith: closing one’s eyes to oneself once and for all, lest one suffer the sight of incurable falsehood. This faulty perspective on all things is elevated into a morality, a virtue, a holiness; the good conscience is tied to faulty vision; and no other perspective is conceded any further value once one’s own has been made sacrosanct with the names of “God,” “redemption,” and “eternity.” I have dug up the theologians’ instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, really subterranean, form of falsehood found on earth.

Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion of truth. His most basic instinct of self-preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in. Wherever the theologians’ instinct extends, value judgments have been stood on their heads and the concepts of “true” and “false” are of necessity reversed: whatever is most harmful to life is called “true”; whatever elevates it, enhances, affirms, justifies it, and makes it triumphant, is called “false.” When theologians reach out for power through the “conscience” of princes (or of peoples), we need never doubt what really happens at bottom: the will to the end, the nihilistic will, wants power.

Donald Trump is trapped by the same dilemma that traps preachers, the same dilemma that eventually traps every scammer — a fake reality has to be maintained. Trump attacks the media as “the enemy of the people.” The church used to dispose of them by just burning them at the stake.

It’s not a coincidence that so many Holy Men have rallied to Trump; he is their brother in the most meaningful sense of the word.

David Brooks begins today’s column with a story sure to sound familiar to anybody who has spent time paying attention to church scandals.

Sarah Hemminger grew up in Indiana understanding the debilitating power of social isolation. When she was a girl, her father discovered that their pastor was dipping into church funds and reported it to the congregation. Instead of doing something about the pastor, the community shunned her family. Sarah and her siblings would sit at parties and neighborhood events and nobody would talk to them. She spent eight years of her childhood ostracized.

Once again, then: Most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians; it’s the ones who don’t that you have to watch out for.

The only good thing about the election of Donald Trump, albeit at terrible cost to the country writ large, is that evangelicals’ unflagging support for him has made plain to everybody with two eyeballs how sickly hypocritical they actually are.

I think the world is going to wonder for a long time how a man so corrupt, so egregiously dishonest, ascended to leadership.

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