In God’s $ervice

Christianity has come up a long way from its origins in a humble Bethlehem manger. It is now a very big business in the United States — which means the religious right naturally tends to align itself with the interests of big business writ large. Wilson meticulously chronicles how the largely white religious right became a militant core constituency of the serial adulterer and many-times-alleged sexual predator who now occupies the White House. Her story begins mid-century, as movers and shakers like Don Wildmon expressed “theological indignation at the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s,” motivating calls for organized religious protests.

From these humble beginnings came tremendous things. Gradually the religious right cohered around leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who integrated the movement ever more closely into the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Its message and voice were amplified by burgeoning media attention to religious politics. In Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision, Diane Winston notes that this amplification wasn’t carried out only by conservative media. The mainstream centrist press often uncritically began to parrot Reaganite evangelism about the importance of individual responsibility, the vices of liberal and left-wing economic policies, and the “dangers” posed by AIDS-ridden gay men.

All this was facilitated by the religious right forming close tactical alliances with the forces of Mammon. Though tracking financial support for religious right organizations can be tricky post–Citizens United, Wilson notes, she nevertheless chronicles how many of the United States’ wealthiest conservative families have lavished the religious right with money.

That has certainly not been free money — they expect a return on their investment in terms of supporting “limited government.” (Naturally “limited government” need not be limited in terms of regulating social and moral issues, as many conservative donors also want the state to be proactive in enforcing “traditional American values.”) What Wilson calls the Koch brothers’ “Kochtopus” has extended its arms into PACs and congregations small and large. According to “tax records, in 2008, the family gave to thirty-four political and policy organizations, most of which they founded or direct.” Between 1998 and 2007, the “family gave over $262 million for lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and support for PACs.”

Much of this money went into groups like the Heritage Foundation, EvangChr4 Trust, and Focus on the Family. Not to be outdone, the DeVos family has blessed the Heritage Foundation, Focus on the Family, and other socially conservative groups with millions. Conservative politicians have returned the favor, as when Betsy DeVos was appointed Donald Trump’s first secretary of education despite never having attended a public school.

The portrait of the religious right painted by Wilson belies a certain condescending image of American fundamentalists, to be found in some liberal discourse, as unsophisticated bumpkins. However objectionable their aims, they have been tactically and strategically well organized to prosecute the culture war declared by Pat Buchanan in the 1990s. At this point a well-oiled machine, the evangelical right takes defeats like the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015 or Trump’s election loss in 2020 in stride before moving onto the next battle.

Part of this is due to the fundamentally agonistic quality of the religious right’s worldview, predicated on a belief that their innate moral superiority conjures decadent and demonic liberal and leftist forces to confront them. Drawing on social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, Wilson claims that feelings of “moral superiority lead to [a] differentiation of us/them that can manifest as a minor avoidance of the other to more active legitimation of domination or ethnic cleansing.”

Hate Thy Neighbor?

I’d like to say a word about hatred. While our world proclaims easy virtues, it also condemns easy vices. Even the most limp-wristed and cowardly of pastors, the kind who will not denounce sin in any form, will still have no problem wagging his finger over the alleged evils of hatred. But hatred in and of itself is not evil. Hatred can in fact be a good thing, even a beautiful thing.

— Matt Walsh, Church of Cowards

While Wilson’s empirical analysis is careful and impartial, her psycho-social and normative evaluation of the religious right is unsparing. In its most virulent form, Wilson argues, the Christian right is motivated by hate, which she claims “has undermined democracy. And it has led to a darkening of America’s political soul.”

This is an ambitious claim, but it is backed up by social-psychological research throughout the book (not to mention that the virtue of hate is endorsed by influential self-described “theocratic fascist” Matt Walsh himself). Wilson appeals to Brewer’s research to argue that “in group love” can establish a “predisposition to hate the ‘other.’ In group exceptionalism relies on beliefs of specialness or . . . moral superiority.”

Wilson also draws on social scientist Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic to explain the recent turn to strongmen like Trump, who “reward uniformity while rejecting and punishing difference.” Wilson points to Stenner’s research describing how, when “white Americans perceive their social cohesion as threatened or their culture as fragmenting, an authoritarian dynamic occurs with an increased in-group affiliation, obedience to a higher authority, conformity to norms, and an intolerance toward difference.”

Stenner, and Wilson, are on to something here. Yet surely an important part of the story of the threat to social cohesion — experienced by white Christians as well as many other groups — is the dislocating, atomizing effects of capitalism, especially pronounced in the neoliberal era. The failure of liberals and the Left to offer a compelling, universalistic response to growing inequality and precarity, then, has given the religious right’s narratives of civilizational danger the chance to spread. Unfortunately, beyond her useful charting of the ultrarich’s contributions to the Christian right, Wilson does not delve into the deeper political-economic roots of the phenomenon.

At any rate, the end result, Wilson’s analysis suggests, is that the religious right in fact falls into a familiar and very banal kind of vice. A sense of tribalistic in-group superiority generates hostility to otherness, invariably painting the “different” as immoral, unnatural, and in violation of the laws of God that Christians have a privileged understanding of. Whether about LGBTQ people, economic left-wingers, or feminists, the struggle is invariably framed the same way: righteous truth-holders confronting a near–irredeemably fallen world filled with sinners and drag shows.

Despite its neglect of political economy, Wilson’s analysis is generally apt. It could be sharpened further, however, by digging deeper into the epistemological and psychological dynamics at work on the religious right.

An epistemological tendency that deserves more attention concerns the Right’s perennial wariness of excess intellectualism, especially pronounced on its religious wing. There are many reasons for this, not least a perception that intellectuals have a long-standing tendency of riling up otherwise contentedly “unthinking people” with their revolutionary ideas, as conservative philosopher Roger Scruton put it in The Meaning of Conservatism.

Another motivation lies in the Right’s tendency to indulge the desire for certainty over a Socratic quest for truth. Many of the fundamentalists Wilson describes are deeply wary that much good can come from questioning established authorities. She describes instance after instance of discussion and debate being discouraged during sermons and rallies in favor of edifying affirmation of the self-evident “truth” of the religious right’s worldview. Any serious questioning of that worldview is at best a route to unnecessary and unpleasant self-doubt — and at worst dangerous heresy.

Whose Christianity?

I think there is more to say, too, when it comes to the psychological basis of the religious right’s particular brand of militancy. For me, reading Wilson’s book evoked unhappy memories of watching the God’s Not Dead film franchise. For the most part, the protagonist of each movie is a humble conservative Christian who confronts hostility and persecution from an increasingly secular, and even socialist, world. But each time, they nonetheless persevere in their faith, and with a little help from the big man (and sometimes from the noble Republican Party) their beliefs are reaffirmed — and our plucky saints triumph.

Just beneath the surface, though, there are clearly darker emotions at play besides appeal to neighborly love and Samaritanism. Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that Christian moralism was not in fact motivated by love but a desire for revenge. Envying and resenting the powerful, healthy, and aristocratic ruling class, Nietzsche argued in The Genealogy of Morals, Jewish and then Christian religionists asserted superiority over their enemies through the development of a moral ideology that venerated weakness and humility and castigated strength and pride as sinful.

One need not buy Nietzsche’s views that Christianity is inherently “life-denying,” or that all moral and religious claims are merely masking bids for power, to recognize an important grain of truth in Nietzsche’s analysis applied to contemporary Christian conservatism, as represented by the God’s Not Dead movies. With the partial exception of the third film in the series, the characters are not required to grow, learn, or encounter non-Evangelical points of view. Any questions they have can and must be answered by directly communicating with God or other members of the church, who are presented as having privileged access to moral and metaphysical truths. This is in direct contrast to the profane “wisdom” of sneering college professors and smug liberal journalists who, like clockwork, are eventually shown up and come around to the right way of seeing things. It is far too easy to read the franchise, in a Nietzschean vein, as a moralistic revenge fallacy against the faithful’s secular and liberal antagonists.

In keeping with Wilson’s characterization of the religious right’s thought leaders as firmly and anxiously insistent on its own moral superiority, the films are also pervaded by a persecution complex. The sense of anxious victimization comes across as an intense feeling that the whole morally inferior world of liberal enemies is fixated on trying to displace you of what is rightfully yours: your (Christian) country, governed by your people and your values.

I myself grew up a devout Roman Catholic, but I left the Church behind young. This was at least partially out of disappointment with middle-class, conservative Catholics who insisted that the Biblical injunctions to challenge domination, or for rich men to give up their wealth to the poor, were meant to be interpreted as loose suggestions, but hatred of sexual minorities was natural law. Christianity deserves better than to be exploited as a vehicle for right-wing nationalism and social Darwinism.

On this point, The Politics of Hate put me in mind of a different kind of critic of Christianity. In his Attack on Christendom, Søren Kierkegaard (himself no leftist) argued that while institutional Christianity had spread to every corner of the world, there were in fact very few true Christians. This is because authentic Christianity was resolutely opposed to what he called “Christendom”: Christendom constituted a banalized version of the faith that evaded its extraordinary demands that we love one another and give up everything for God by appearing to reconcile Christianity with bourgeois nationalism, psychological comfort, and the pursuit of self-interest six out of seven days of the week.

Kierkegaard intimated that the spread of Christendom was far more threatening to Christianity than mere atheism, which paid Christianity the respect of taking it seriously enough not to believe. Proponents of Christendom wanted belief, but only insofar as it justified their selfishness and moral complacency. It is tempting to imagine Kierkegaard having similarly harsh words for the contemporary Christian right. Far from being “the heart of a heartless world,” the religious right’s “reverence” of the divine looks more like reverence of itself.