At the siege, the presence of white conservative Christians was unmistakable. The Proud Boys stopped to pray to Jesus on their march toward the Capitol, and the crowd held signs proclaiming Jesus Saves and God’s Word Calls Them Out. One flag read Jesus is my savior. Trump is my President. In the Capitol, an insurgent stopped to pray outside a room where Senator Mitch McConnell’s staffers hid behind barricaded doors. She asked God for “the evil of Congress to be brought to an end.”But Kerby notes, this time they weren't the only crazies in the crowd:
Not all of the January 6 insurrectionists were white Christian nationalists. Some represented themselves as pagan, while others were later identified as Orthodox Jews. Many came because they were inspired by QAnon conspiracy theories. But they were all united by the idea that the establishment should be overthrown and the nation returned to its founding principles, an idea white Christian nationalists have been promoting and normalizing for decades.People who study fringe religious enthusiasms and conspiracy theories are struggling to explain the melding of these oddball fantasies into violence on behalf of Trump's false election claim. There's a considerable stretch between your everyday Christian evangelical believer who assumes the Bible requires her to follow the leader, militia gun nuts spoiling for an heroic final battle, QAnon believers obsessed with internet "research" into establishment Satanism, and a handful of ignorant fantasists dreaming of an imagined Nordic paganism.
That long time chronicler of right wing Christianity, Sarah Posner, tries to sort out the conjunction of these quite disparate strands at the Capitol in an interview:
Q: the guy in the horns. What was that about?
Well, he’s a fairly well-known QAnon figure from Arizona who just misappropriates a bunch of different cultural symbols to dress up in this weird outfit. You see a lot of that at right-wing events—people who’ll either dress up in some Viking outfit or some other kind of medieval figure, Knights Templar, that sort of thing. They attempt to claim that Vikings or other figures from the Middle Ages represent whiteness and white supremacy and justify reviving white supremacy in 21st century America. ...
I think QAnon was a significant driver of a lot of the people who showed up there. It crosses different realms of the right. It crosses over into evangelical Christianity. It crosses over into these openly Nazi and white supremacist realms, and in a lot of ways it was the common thread. The woman who was shot and later died trying to break into the speaker’s lobby, Ashli Babbitt—she was an avid QAnon adherent, believing that there is a deep state that was out to get Trump, of Satanic pedophiles who were trying to undermine Trump’s presidency and who stole the election from him. ....
... a lot of this rhetoric is being put out there by Christian right organizations or Christian right leaders or evangelical pastors or televangelists and so forth. That the election was stolen was an article of faith—literally—for months. And because the Christian right has seen Trump and created this iconography around Trump that he is a divinely anointed president whose enemies are literally Satanic. This is why the QAnon conspiracy theory played so prominently among evangelicals, why it was so easy for them to absorb it. The idea that the enemies of their anointed leader were Satanic or pedophiles, which is something that they have long thought about Muslims and homosexuals, fit very easily into their worldview.
... Anti-Semitism has always been a key part of these white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements in the United States that we now lump together as the alt-right. Their central idea is that diversity is causing white genocide, and one of their big grievances is that Jews get so much advantage from that: “They get to say that Hitler tried to wipe them out, but what about us? We’re the ones who are being deprived of our homeland.” That morphs into Holocaust denial. ...
... A lot of evangelicals who have fallen for the QAnon conspiracy theory would not recognize that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory because they’re just not familiar with, say, the blood libel. I mean, the blood libel is the heart of the QAnon conspiracy theory: That Christians, or righteous people, righteous Americans, are being prevented from holding power by people who literally abuse and murder children. ...Diana Butler Bass is an historian of Christianity and an advocate for progressive Christianity. She has her own intriguing theories about the religious trends visible among the insurrectionists. She contends that in the late 20th century, denominational allegiances which once defined differences between Christian groups were replaced by cross-denominational right and left alliances.
... people on each side — especially conservatives — were crossing denominational lines and joining forces with like-minded folks in other religious groups, forming two super-alliances of faith and politics. Thus, conservative Catholics, Jews, and Protestants formed common cause around certain issues; likewise liberals formed the same. One of the results of this political restructuring of American religion was — and this was a new phenomenon at the time — a liberal Baptist had more in common with a liberal Catholic and a liberal Jew than she did with a conservative Baptist; and a conservative Presbyterian found comradeship with a pre-Vatican II Catholic or an Orthodox rabbi rather than a liberal Presbyterian.The insurrection revealed a new alignment:
... On January 6, we did not witness the old Religious Right at the Capitol. Instead, we saw three streams of religion, forging a new alliance.
They weren’t “conservative” per se (even if certain familiar conservative issues [-- abortion, LGBTQ inclusion, and women’s rights --] were in play). Instead, they were hyper-authoritarian, nationalist, and apocalyptic versions of white Catholicism, white evangelical Protestantism, and white pre-Christian European folk religions joined together to advance a shared vision of American identity and political power. And together they represent a kind of cleavage within the old Religious Right, one that is similar to the split in the Republican party.In a discursive but interesting video discussion with the Rev. Ed Bacon, formerly of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Butler Bass muses on the faux Nordic neo-pagan and white supremacist strain in emerging rightwing U.S. religion -- these folks see the path to hell being carved by white people betraying their race.
In Rolling Stone, reporter Kim Kelly meanwhile points out that more disciplined and perhaps authentic neo-pagans loath what the Q folks are making of their tradition.
Understandably, many actual pagans are horrified at the way white supremacists have co-opted their religious and cultural icons and twisted them into symbols of hate. Talia Lavin, who explores the concept in her recent book, Culture Warlords, says that neo-Nazis’ Viking fetish harkens back to their obsession with both traditional European conceptions of masculinity and whiteness itself. “Neopagan symbols offer the hypermasculine aesthetic sheen of the Viking,” she explains via text message. “But we can also see a desire to ground their white supremacist ideology in a purportedly timeless myth, a desire to reach back to an anachronistic, ahistorical ‘perfect’ whiteness, thus grounding their violence in an idealized past, in white nationalism as in any other form of nationalism.”
Funny how the worst of these quasi-religious byways in the United States always come back to whiteness among their white adherents.
• • •
U.S. religious landscape 2021:
Evangelical Christians: but how can they?
White Christian insurrectionists and fellow travelers
A coming out for liberal religion
1 comment:
Interesting read -- thanks! Does seem to boil down to racism any way you cut it.
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