One Utah

Via Dispatches From the Culture Wars, I saw this great article by Elizabeth A. Castelli about the persecution complex among America’s conservative Christians.  These whiny ass titty baby Christians start crying persecution and “War on Christians” whenever things don’t go their way.  They create arguments in which a pharmacist refuses to fill prescriptions for contraception is defending his (and have you ever noticed how it always seems to be a some guy?) freedom of religion.  A few key passages:

The Justice Sunday project consistently frames the issues involved in terms of religious freedom, arguing that Christians are the victims of bigotry, second-class status, and court-sanctioned injury. Speakers at Justice Sunday II sought to place their cause in a lineage that includes the civil rights movement and, in the case of one speaker (Zell Miller), the women’s suffrage movement. They repeatedly invoked martyrological themes, aligning their own cause with that of two quintessential American martyrs: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. The invocation of Lincoln (framed as the great emancipator) and especially Martin Luther Ring, Jr. (singled out as the iconic leader of the civil rights movement) and their rendering as analogies and precursors for the Justice Sunday project are hardly accidental.

Tom DeLay spoke — for the last time before he resigned his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives because of his federal indictment for violations of campaign finance laws — the conference’s convener, Rick Scarborough, dismissed the legitimacy of the indictment, claiming that it simply reflects the fact that DeLay is “the target of all who despise the cause of Christ.” . . . . One sees in such moments how the rhetoric of “the war on Christians” operates outside of the empirical field, creating a self-referential and self-generating logic that begins from the premise that Christians are by definition perennially locked in battle with “the enemy” in a cosmic war without end.

The effects of the discursive production of the “war on Christians” are multiple: on one level, they become self-generating, caught in a repetitive circuit that amplifies and legitimates the claims of religious persecution through each successive level of iteration, regardless of any counterinterpretation or presentation of empirically grounded counter-evidence. Working at the level of sloganeering, the language of the “war on Christians” creates an interpretive frame through which any number of political and cultural moments come to be viewed. But the “war on Christians” discourse is also a productive discourse, with the capacity to contribute to the transformation of social policy at the highest levels.  . . . we see some effects of the “war on Christians” movement’s pragmatic and strategic efforts to lay claim to the historical legacy of the civil rights movement: the legitimation and routinization of a new, Christian identity politics based on the historical model of struggle against racial discrimination by African Americans but displacing African Americans and their ongoing claims for political and economic justice in the process.

The rhetorical structure of the “war on christians” is so absurd, so overblown, so laughable, and yet, taken seriously.  Castelli’s article is long on academic analysis of the events and provides some of the history of the movement.  Since the mid 20th century, conservative Christians have grown increasingly immersed in their own subculture, in their own self-imposed sense of alienation.  As the rhetoric and actions of the Religious Right have alienated more and more Americans, a large segment of the American public has sunk into the belief that they are being persecuted.  The idea that their actions and beliefs are simply distasteful to people is never discussed.  It becomes a twisted belief that Christians are under attack, that Christianity itself is under attack.

This dyanmic reminds me of a passage in Leaving the Saints.  Martha Beck describes her father’s response to criticism of the Mormon church.  If you belief it, it’s because you know the church is “true” if you disbelieve, it’s because you are being misled by the devil who wants to undermine the church and if you actually critique the church, it’s inspired by the devil because’s the church is “true” and the devil wants to undermine it and is using you to do so.  Other options are neatly excluded from consideration.  It’s a rather tidy, and dishonest, rhetorical flourish.  But it works because it is so bizarre - a weird lateral move that can truly leave the critic dumbfounded. 

This entry was posted Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Conservative Sell-Outs, Conservatives, Religious Fundamentalism, Republicans, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.