Monday, April 25, 2005
(8:29 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Going Public
Last night, my household briefly watched the special American Top 40, hosted by the most boring and nondescript man working in entertainment today, Ryan Seacrest. After just a couple performances, Anthony and I had decided that every song performed could have been a Christian song -- not lyrically, but stylistically (a certain blandness that started to show up in mainstream rock as early as Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars"). Christian music is the unacknowledged root of the contemporary music scene. When I consulted with Robb about it afterward, he agreed wholeheartedly.After Hayley turned off the TV in disgust, I turned to reading the latest issue of Harper's. Turns out it's not just the music! No, no -- all of us who were raised as evangelical Christians will be either pleased or horrified to learn that literally every aspect of that righteous subculture is "going mainstream." The stupid, hackneyed arguments about shit no one cares about? Going mainstream! The ignorant speculation about international politics based on half-remembered second-hand information about the Book of Revalation? Going mainstream! Perhaps best of all, the paranoid persecution fantasies[1] are now publicized in detail by the very same mainstream media that is most often cited as a persecutor. Generic "church growth"-style evangelical Republicanism is the new sexy. The mainstream fashion whores who are catching this wave probably don't understand the movement, but that's okay, because there's not much to understand -- that's the whole point.
[1] The persecution fantasies are doubtless a product of guilt at the lack of persecution -- after all, the New Testament, largely written to those facing intense persecution, often takes the risk of declaring persecution a litmus test for proper faith. But with their accessible music style, their seamless integration into the capitalist order, their utter lack of insight into what's actually going on in the world, it is hard to take these Christians seriously as a threat, at least to the state, which they worship in much more elaborate ways than they worship the risen Christ. And doubtless, these Christians know it to some degree, know that they are so radically separated from real persecution and real death that they could not stand up to the real thing.
I've heard evangelical young people say they would die for their faith, and I always supressed a laugh. You don't have a faith to die for, you poor pathetic person. You don't have a religion worthy of the name. Your practices and beliefs are fully integrated into the mechanisms of power -- you are immediately recognizable as a completely normal, mediocre American, and you only get recognized as a Christian by advertising it in some superficial way. You don't take any position that is intrinsically unpopular -- after all, who doesn't want to pick on the downtrodden, the weirdos, the homeless guys who deserve it, the queers onto whom you project every sick sexual fantasy you've ever had, the vulnerable pregnant women whom you want to force to bear a child as punishment for their sin? That's what makes the persecution fantasies so much more disgusting, the fact that the best strategies of the downtrodden have been stolen from them, precisely by the powerful.
Generic "church growth"-style evangelical Republicanism, if it signifies anything at all, signifies a radical foreclosure of hope -- and when the feeding tube of hope is pulled, no one will be out in the streets protesting. No one is threatening Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or James Dobson with the death, because at bottom, everyone knows that all three of them want to die and that all their followers want them to die, brutally, randomly, gunned down by some gay black man who got a woman pregnant and abandoned her.
