Re: <nettime> In God We Tryst

Oh yeah, of course I agree that not all Christianity is synonymous with the instrumentalization of Evangelical Christianity by the right! (Thank you, Ryan.)

The eternal question is, how has the Right succeeded in getting people to vote, not only against some of their own interests as the materialist reading goes, but above all, in favor of a horrifyingly oppressive version of their central interest: religious community.

Being an Evangelical Christian does not make you the same as the people who stormed the Capitol. But in a large percentage of cases, it does make you their passive enabler. Something specific is going on here, which involves media but is not reducible to it - just as it involves religion but is not reducible to it.

Brian

On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 1:40 PM Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com> wrote:

On Jan 25, 2021, at 12:38 PM, nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org wrote:

Perhaps, in terms of fascism, fundamentalist religion is what is being
substituted for the state.

Contradiction doesn't bother these people. They are anti-state
nationalists. Traditional fascism gets folded in as part of nationalism.
For them, being against the state means getting rid of those aspects of
government that don't fit their world picture. Ideally, a Christian state
would solve all their problems, but in the meantime, the White nation is
good enough. If you try to find coherency here, there is none.

I’m not sure that it’s worth getting into this, but maybe it is, I don’t know. The idea that the Right has a monopoly on Christianity, much less, organized religion and spirituality, is not really grounded in history or reality.

Of course it would be ridiculous to ignore the rhetorical use of Christian morality by dominant sectors of the US Right… I mean Pompeo’s press conferences alone reveal the extremes of such rhetoric being at the heart of their vision of foreign policy. But I think it’s spurious to claim that the US Right depends on religious fundamentalism to make its claims of white nationalism (as Brian notes), misogyny, and minoritarian rule. I don’t think the “White nation” is simply "good enough” for the US Right, it is the goal that (their use of religious fundamentalism) serves, IMO. Lots of rightwing conspiracies are as grounded in secular apocalyptic fantasies as they are Biblical gnosticism.

But, maybe more important, giving the US Right sole claims to organized religion does extreme disservice to the ongoing history of liberatory spirituality, from Catholics protesting early colonial violence to abolitionists, to the spread of Liberation Theology across the Americas. Yes, there are all kinds of problems with the missionary tendencies in some of these examples, but there is also the rise of the AME Church to the SCLC to the contemporary Moral Monday movement and reimagined Poor People’s Campaign.

I guess I’m just suggesting that to ignore the role of “the church” and organized religion in liberatory and leftist politics in the US Left would be a huge mistake. As is suggesting that the left-right divide in the US is synonymous with one that is rational vs religious. This recent radio segment (from the United States of Anxiety) features a couple of Black theological scholars/leaders who make this case better than I can.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anxiety/episodes/how-martin-luther-king-jr-changed-american-christianity

Anyway, possibly also of interest, this recent podcast on the rise of post-1970s white supremacy in the US features some discussion of the early adoption of online message boards to form a broad, decentralized culture, and a lot of the talking points then mirror the underlying fantasies of QAnon adherents today.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/940825490

I hope everyone is doing well,
Ryan
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