The lunatic fringe

If there's one thing I still don't understand about the past eight years of politics, it's the ongoing support of right-wing Christians for Donald Trump.

It's baffling.  The people who have been screeching "family values" for forty years support a guy who is a thrice-married serial adulterer who paid hush money to a stripper and porn star.  The same folks who want the Ten Commandments posted in every public school classroom back someone whose main claim to fame is breaking all ten on a daily basis.  The MAGA crowd considers Trump a "good Christian man" despite the fact that in a public speech he said his favorite book of the Bible was "Two Corinthians" and couldn't quote a single biblical verse from memory.  And the central tenets of the faith -- humility and repentance -- prompted him to state in an interview, "Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes?"

What has added a whole new layer of bizarre pretzel logic to the situation is that at long last, it's registering with evangelicals that their support of Trump contradicts the actual words of Jesus Christ.  You know, Jesus Christ?  The guy the Christians believe is the Son of God?  The one the religion is named after?

So when Jesus's words fly in the face of what Trump says, it's gotta be one or the other, right?

Well, when confronted with this conflict, a majority of the evangelicals...

...side with Trump.

This has finally begun to alarm at least a few evangelical leaders, like Russell Moore, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention.  Moore said in an interview a couple of days ago:

It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?"  And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize."  The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore.  That's weak."  And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.

I'd say so.

In an odd synchronicity, this is a theme that comes up in my novel The Chains of Orion (scheduled for release in November).  In it, a violent reactionary cult called the Zealots revere the memory of an early spiritual leader, Blessed Julia Lowell.  But when a new manuscript is discovered containing the actual words of Blessed Julia, written in her own hand -- and those words command doing exactly the opposite of what the Zealots are actually doing -- they reject the document out of hand rather than change their ways, and ultimately assassinate the religious leader who brought it to light.

As Susan B. Anthony so trenchantly put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Add to all this the fact that some of the most outspoken evangelical leaders have, in the last few years, seemed to lose the plot completely.  The latest examples include self-proclaimed prophet Hank Kunneman, who "guaranteed" Trump would win re-election in 2020 because God himself said so.  He hasn't been much inclined to address the question since then, but just two weeks ago said that Jesus told him personally "not to apologize" for the error.  

Then we have Lance Wallnau.  Wallnau, you may remember, is the guy who in April went on record as saying that Satan was responsible for Tucker Carlson being fired by Fox News.  Well, he's still hard at it.  (Wallnau, not Satan.)  Just a couple of days ago he said he'd heard a voice while he was praying telling him, "Donald Trump will be elected for one more term," but when he turned around, no one was there.

But instead of seeing this as a sign of an incipient psychotic break, most of the evangelicals consider this business as usual.

Then there's Pastor Greg Locke, who is in another league entirely.  Locke's insane ravings have appeared here at Skeptophilia before, but he took a further leap into Cloud Cuckoo Land this week by preaching a sermon railing against The Barbie Movie, culminating with bringing out a Barbie Dream Home he'd purchased and demolishing it using a baseball bat to which he'd tied Bibles.

I swear I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the video.

In a sane world, behavior like this would lead to the audience erupting in gales of laughter and Pastor Locke being hustled off the stage, given horse tranquilizers, and never allowed near a public event again.  Instead, the reaction of the crowd who had gathered to listen to him can be summed up as "Hallelujah!"

A friend of mine explained the response of evangelicals to Donald Trump as, "Of course they support him.  He hates the same people they do."  Free thinkers, the non-religious, immigrants, brown-skinned people, women in non-traditional roles, LGBTQ+ people.  As long as he demands an America free of any of those, the members of the Religious Right will vote for him enthusiastically.

To which I respond: well, okay.  But, you know, the Gospels?  The purported actual words of Jesus?  That contradict ninety percent of what Trump and his cronies are saying and doing?

I'm sorry, I still don't get it.

Given the fact that I just wrote a novel about this phenomenon, you'd think I wouldn't be as gobsmacked as I am.  Somehow having the lunatic fringe I wrote about in a fictional setting leap off the page into the real world is a little alarming.  At least some of the Christian leaders (like Moore) are recognizing the problem, and I have hope that a lot of moderate and progressive Christians are as appalled as I am.

Until they are in the ascendancy, however, I'm afraid that we're going to be stuck with living in a world where, as Oscar Wilde put it, "Life imitates art more than art imitates life."

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The perils of indoctrination

Can I clarify something here?

Learning about something is not the same as learning to believe in it.

As an example, in an introductory political science class, I would undoubtedly study communism.  I might even read Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.  This does not mean that I now have no choice but to become a raving communist, ready to leave behind capitalism and go to North Korea to join in the worship of Dear Leader.  In fact, it could well have the opposite effect; my reading of those books might leave me thinking, "This is all bullshit."

Or I might decide that it sounds right.  It could go either way.  The point is, having been exposed to the communist school of thought means I have the choice of making up my own mind -- provided I have been given enough tools of rational evaluation to decide what makes the best sense.

This is a point that has evidently escaped Fox News commentator Todd Starnes and evangelical pastor Greg Locke, both of whom have gone public in the last couple of days with statements that any inclusion of material about Islam in public school curricula amounts to "indoctrination."  Locke went even further, saying that Christian parents need to see to it that their children completely refuse to participate.

"You need to tell your kids, ‘Take an F for the class,’ Locke said.  "Because I’d rather fail in man’s class and get an A+ in God’s class.  And we need to have some kids that have some character, that stand up.  Because we do not serve the god of the nation is Islam [sic].  We do not serve Allah."

Starnes said parents are up in arms, too. 

"'I am not pleased that my 12-year-old was taught the Islamic conversion prayer,' parent Brandee Porterfield told me," Starnes wrote in an op-ed piece.  "Joy Ellis was a bit fired up, too.  She discovered the Islamic lessons after examining her daughter’s class work.  'I was very angry that my child, my Christian child, was made to profess that Allah was the only God,' she told me."

"Could you imagine the outcry from liberal activists if the students had been forced to write 'Jesus is Lord'?" Starnes went on to say.

Starnes gives the impression that the state standards include Islam only, and ignore Christianity completely, a claim that is outright false -- the curriculum guidelines in Tennessee (the state in question) list nearly equal numbers of concepts from Christianity and Islam, and in fact, the sixth grade standards include zero references to Islam, but the following about Christianity:

[Students will be able to ] describe the origins and central features of Christianity... 

• monotheism 

• the belief in Jesus as the Messiah and God’s Son 

• the concept of resurrection 

• the concept of salvation 

• belief in the Old and New Testaments 

• the lives, teachings and contributions of Jesus and Paul 

• the relationship of early Christians to officials of the Roman Empire 

I wonder what credence these people would give to an Islamic family who complained about the sixth-grade curriculum and claimed it was "Christian indoctrination?"

Locke then followed Starnes into the Unintentional Irony Zone with the following statement:

[Teaching about Islam] is nothing more than absolute brainwashing of religion.  And so, I’m telling our folks, don’t take the test.  Keep your kids home from school...  [T]hey have to learn about Islam and Mohammed and how it all came about and about the Holy Koran and the Five Pillars of Islam and how they pray and when they pray and where they pray and why they pray and about pilgrimages and all of this!  That’s a bunch of bunk, we do not serve the same God.

So not only are Starnes and Locke lying about the facts, what they're saying is untrue on a deeper level.  Learning what the Islamic conversion prayer says is not the same as declaring that it represents the truth.  In a good social studies curriculum, children are taught about a great many political, social, and religious systems, and they grow to see how those institutions have shaped human history.  The point isn't conversion, the point is broadening of the mind.

And really, how likely is it that one unit of a forty minute social studies class in elementary school is going to profoundly alter a child's religious beliefs?  Consider how many students have been exposed to Greek mythology -- Zeus, Hera, Athena, and the rest of the lot -- during their school careers.

How many of these students then went on to spend the rest of their lives sacrificing goats to Apollo in their back yards?

Once again, you have to wonder what they're so afraid of.  Are their children so weak in their beliefs that even learning about Islam is sufficient to make the whole house of cards come crashing down in ruin?  Or do they fear that Islam is, at its heart, more attractive than Christianity?  Or that any opening of the mind provides a gap through which Satan might leap?

Whichever it is, their demands that schoolchildren not be exposed to other cultures and other belief systems comes at a cost.  Deprived of any knowledge of beliefs outside of their own will result in another generation of narrow-minded, paranoid bigots, living in a little circle of their own fearful certainty, not even wanting to admit that any ideas different from their own might be worth knowing.

And that, honestly, might be what Starnes and Locke are really trying to accomplish.