Donald Trump: the Church of America's Pope

No one's been saying much about Donald Trump lately so I thought I'd try and get a conversation going.

The business of political punditry has never been better or busier thanks to Trump and the drunken clown fight that is the GOP nomination process. One aspect of Trump's rise that's produced mass head scratching has been his success with evangelical Republicans. Ted Cruz, the most bothersome of the GOP's divine host of God-botherers, was supposed to be the darling of those who think Jesus came over on the Mayflower, drove the dinosaurs out of America, and then invented baseball. Evangelicals, so the theory goes, should be shocked and dismayed by Trump's worldliness, his vulgar displays of wealth, his sexual boasting, his multiple marriages and infidelities, and his unrepentant New York, N.Y.-ness.

What people don't appreciate is that this makes Trump the pope of the Church of America. You see, evangelicals aren't really Christians. Yes, they assemble in churches, say prayers, quote bits and pieces from the Bible, but it's more correct to call them members of the Church of America. I'd argue that what's known as the religious right is actually a new, hybrid religion that's composed of equal parts capitalist boosterism, white ancestor worship, rabid nationalism, militarism, with just a patina of Christianity. Followers of the Church of America, unlike Christ, have an active dislike for the weak, the meek and the poor, and they're definitely not peacemakers. The religious right has taken bits and pieces from the Old and New Testament to craft a religious outlook that ennobles capitalism, praises warriors, exalts masculinity, and denigrates scientific thought. The best evidence for this hybridization is the so-called "prosperity gospel," which basically turns God into the Uncle Money Bags character from the game of Monopoly. Play the faith game the right way, says the prosperity gospel, and you'll be rewarded with riches.

Trump is the ideal leader of the C of A. His wealth, particularly his flaunting of it, is a siren call to those who believe that wads of money are proof of God's favour. This in turn ties in with the widespread belief on the religious right that American was specifically and particularly blessed with natural riches by the Almighty. To this way of thinking, Trump is surely one of God's chosen ones since he's been blessed more than most. The other factor that Trump relies on to attract evangelicals (probably without his realizing it) is his history as a horndog. This would seem to be illogical given the religious right's habit of getting its plain white J.C. Penny knickers in a twist whenever sex becomes an issue. Trump's sexual history is a declaration of male privilege, appetites, and vanity, and as such it dovetails nicely with the evangelical view of the sexes: men are providers and defenders of the family, bold and brave in their dealings with the world outside the family, and if they cross a line or two, or stray, they must be forgiven by their womenfolk because the challenges they face are so taxing. Women, on the other hand, should concentrate solely, as the German saying goes, on kinder, kuche, kirche. Trump is vividly and ostentatiously masculine, and that goes down a treat with those evangelicals who believe that men should be at the centre of the family and the nation. And Trump is certainly far more butch than the rest of the GOP field, all of whom come across as various flavours of nerd.

I can't say I'm surprised at Trump's success; I actually kind of predicted (*pats self on back*) that someone like him would come along in this piece I wrote four years ago on the Republican primaries. Until the GOP finally splinters into two new parties, the Delusional Republicans and the Deranged Republicans, we'll be seeing more of the same madness from the GOP every four years. It's a sickening thought, but at least it'll probably keep Twitter from going bankrupt.

Related posts:

Finally, Proof That Jesus Would Vote Republican
What Makes a Conservative Conservative?

Book Review: Attack of the Theocrats! (2012) by Sean Faircloth

You don't have to look very hard to find juicy targets if you set out to savage the excesses and idiocies of the religious right in America, and Sean Faircloth certainly takes some hefty swings at some low-hanging fruit. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Egregious religious hucksters like Joel Osteen need to be bashed every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Fortunately this book isn't just a roll call of crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated by God botherers, as the English like to call them. Faircloth, a former member of the Maine legislature, also wants to make his book a call to arms against the very real constitutional and legal crimes committed in the name of religiosity, as well setting out some policy ideas on how secular Americans who value the constitutional requirement for the separation of Church and State can take back their country from the likes of Pat Robertson and his (overwhelmingly) GOP allies.

One very important point that Faircloth brings up is that religion in America, at least the kind that inhabits megachurches and shouts from TV screens, is a business. Thanks to a wide variety of tax breaks and subsidies that are intrinsically unconstitutional, people who once upon a time would have been selling lightning rods or baldness cures on street corners are now in the religion business. Religion can be very, very profitable in America. And like any other industry it strives to stay profitable by putting pressure on politicians to grant them favours. In this regard fundamentalist preachers and organizations are no different from pressure groups like the NRA. In relation to this, Faircloth points out that the majority of Americans (according to various polls) would prefer a more secular country and a reining in of the influence held by the religious right. Like the NRA, fundamentalists are the tail wagging the Washington dog thanks to their money, willpower and organizational ability.

This is a slim book, and there isn't a lot of new information here for readers who've paid even minimal attention to this issue over the last couple of decades. It is, however, valuable for two reasons. The first is that Faircloth provides a tidy and trenchant guide to the secular ambitions of America's founding fathers. If you know someone who likes to declare that the founding fathers were devout Christians and wished to create a Christian country, just have them read chapter two of this book and they should shut up pretty quick. The second valuable lesson that comes from this book is that it shows how hard it is for Americans to escape from the tar pit of their own myth-making. And surprisingly, it's Faircloth who's stuck in the tar pit.

Here are two Faircloth quotes from the book:

"American is still the greatest nation on earth because of its commitment to equal treatment under the law, its protection of minority rights, and its separation of Church and State under the Constitution."

And...

"America is the greatest nation on earth--because of our constitutional ideals and founding principles."

The problem here is that Faircloth is using the same language, expressing the same vision, as every oily preacher and teary-eyed Tea Party congressman. They may disagree on what constitutes greatness, but they all agree that America is number one with a bullet. This is lazy, jingoistic thinking. Faircloth's definition of greatness is based on a set of laws and legal principles, which is fine except that a large number of other democracies can easily claim that they have similar or identical laws. And the actual enforcement of those laws should be the barometer of "greatness" not the fact that they're on the books. Declaring on any and all occasions that America is the greatest nation on earth sometimes seems to be the right and duty of every politician, pundit and Joe Citizen of the U.S. of A. no matter what their political stripe. It's a dangerous thing when people, especially politicians, say that they're inhabiting the greatest nation. It's normally the case that countries that are overly fond of declaring global supremacy are either delusional (North Korea) or employ armies of flinty-eyed men in trenchcoats who make sure the citizenry is nodding vigorously in agreement (the former U.S.S.R.). And the word "greatest" implies that a kind of perfection has been achieved. Why change anything or tolerate dissent when you're the greatest? No nation is the greatest. Well, Norway probably is according to all those U.N. health and happiness surveys that come out every year, but I don't think I could put up with those long winter nights and tacky troll dolls everywhere. The point is that throwing around the "greatest" tag when referring to nations is usually a sign of the worst kind of nationalism.

The "greatest nation" trope in American culture and politics is also what might be the chief prayer in what I'm going to call the Church of America. I'd argue that what's known as the religious right is actually a new, hybrid religion that's composed of equal parts capitalist boosterism, white ancestor worship, rabid nationalism, militarism, and a patina of Christianity. As Faircloth accurately points out, the religious right rarely behaves in a Christian fashion. They, unlike Christ, have an actual dislike for the weak, the meek and the poor, and they're definitely not peacemakers. As Faircloth says, the religious right has taken bits and pieces from the Old and New Testament to craft a religious outlook that ennobles capitalism, praises warriors and denigrates scientific thought. The best evidence for this hybridization is the so-called "Prosperity Gospel" which basically turns God into the Uncle Money Bags character from the game of Monopoly. Play the faith game the right way, says the Prosperity Gospel, and you'll be rewarded with riches.

Faircloth thinks he's simply fighting theocrats, but the Church of America is a more complex beast. Arguing the fine points of scripture with C of A worshipers is only part of the battle. The C of A worships America as an abstract concept. Their America is a holy place created by and for white people in which a love of both capitalism and anti-intellectualism are as important as the love of Christ. This blend of religion and nationalism has happened before in places like Russia and Spain, but in those cases organized religion played a central role. In the US, the C of A is a big tent under which groups like the NRA, fundamentalists, libertarians, birthers, white supremacists, and creationists take shelter. All these groups see America as a quasi-religious entity, and so any criticism of America, from whatever angle or with whatever intent, is perceived by them as an act of blasphemy. So when Faircloth advocates pushing back against the theocrats, I don't think he quite realizes the size and character of the hydra he's up against. Any attack on a single branch of the C of A is seen as an attack on all.

Visual proof of the existence of the Church of America is everywhere in the US. If you've never visited America one of the strangest things to be seen is the omnipresence of the country's flag. It's truly everywhere, from clothing to advertisements to the front porches of houses big and small, and in pin form it's worn on the lapels of rich and poor alike. This fetishization of a flag was and is the norm in totalitarian states, but the US is the only country in which it's been done by popular choice--the land of the free and the brave, and star-spangled, theocratic Don Drapers.

What Makes a Conservative Conservative?

Republican or Democrat?

Have you ever wondered why someone chooses to vote Republican or Conservative? Or who agrees with the stuff that comes out of the mouths of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? Is it simply the case that some people weigh the available economic and sociological evidence and, after due consideration, decide that the right wing is the right way to go? Or is there a psychological component to being conservative, especially at the angriest, spittle-flecked end of the right-wing spectrum? It turns out there is a compelling explanation for why people work for and support right-wing political parties and causes. The answer comes in a book titled On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976) by Norman F. Dixon.

Dr. Dixon served ten years in the British Army from 1940-50 and, among other honours, became a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His book is an attempt to explain why military organizations often encourage and promote people who are intellectually incompetent or psychologically unfit for the tasks they're charged with. Here's how Dixon frames his thesis:

"How, if they are so lacking in intelligence, do people become senior military commanders? And what is it about military organizations that they should attract, promote and ultimately tolerate those whose performance at the highest levels may bring opprobrium upon the organizations which they represent?"

One of the main reasons for this situation, as Dixon explains, is that the military tends to attract people with low self-esteem, weak egos, and/or severe anxieties about disorder. A military environment gives strength and value to those who see themselves as weak or outsiders, and order and structure to those who fear freedom and disorder. Here's how Dixon explains it:

"...displayed behaviour symptomatic of extremely weak egos. In this light, their behaviour typifies the neurotic paradox in which the individual's need to be loved breeds, on the one hand, an insatiable desire for admiration with avoidance of criticism, and, on the other, an equally devouring urge for power and positions of dominance. The paradox is that those needs inevitably result in behaviour so unrealistic as to earn for the victim the very criticism which he has been striving so hard to avoid."


And:


"Incompetent commanders, it has been suggested, are often those who were attracted to the military because it promised gratification of certain neurotic needs. These include a reduction of anxiety regarding real or imagined lack of virility/potency/masculinity; defences against anal tendencies; boosts for sagging self-esteem; the discovering of loving mother-figures and strong father-figures; power, dominance and public acclaim; the finding of relatively powerless out-groups on to whom the individual can project those aspects of himself  which he finds distasteful; and legitimate outlets for, and adequate control of, his own aggression."

It's at this point that I want to extrapolate from Dixon's book the idea that what he says about the military mind and character applies equally to the right-wing mind. The two are not far apart. In fact, it would be hard to find a party or person of the right that doesn't offer vociferous support for the military or marital virtues. The most extreme form of this is fascism, in which politics becomes blended with militarism. Right-wing parties, whether it's the Republicans in the U.S. or the Conservatives in Canada and the U.K. are uniformly pro-military. These parties are quick, even eager, to undertake or urge military action, and military spending almost inevitably increases when they're in power. Dixon goes on to show that, unsurprisingly, the military also attracts authoritarian personalities:

"In the place of free-ranging, creative and inventive thought, an authoritarian's thinking is confined to rigid formulae and inflexible attitudes. He is intolerant of unusual ideas and unable to cope with contradictions...the authoritarian personality is intolerant of  ambivalence and ambiguity. Just as he cannot harbour negative and positive feeling for the same person but must dichotomize reality into loved people versus hated people, white versus black and Jew versus Gentile, so also he cannot tolerate ambiguous situations or conflicting issues. To put it bluntly, he constructs of the world an image as simplistic as it is at variance with reality."

If the above passage was creatively rephrased it could stand as an oath of allegiance for Tea Party members. The desire to reduce politics and the world to the most simplistic terms has been a hallmark of rightist politicians from the local to the international level. George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" was one example, of many, of his attempts to turn the world into an Us versus Them situation. And the current crop of GOP presidential candidates go out of their way to boil all issues down to whether something is American (capitalist, Christian, pro-family, patriotic) or un-American (socialist, godless, liberal, elitist). Sarah Palin's success amongst the rightist demographic is based largely on her simple-mindedness; they can rest assured that she has no complex or contradictory thoughts, and her opinions proceed from a simplistic and unalterable set of values.

It would also seem that politicians who are, to put it scientifically, dumber than a bag of hammers, are invariably working for the right. It's a perfect environment for them; they have self-esteem issues from knowing that they're dunces, and right-wing parties keep things simple for them with policies and slogans a sixth grader can understand. Examples of dim bulb rightists are almost too numerous to mention. But I will: the previously mentioned Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, Ronald Reagan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and George W. All of these people have been the butt of late-night TV humour precisely because they are stupid. Finding an equal number of high-profile left-wing politicians this dumb is almost impossible. There are leftists who promote policies or causes that could be described as flawed, futile, inefficient or wrong-headed, but it's difficult to find a lefty who's transparently a slack-jawed yokel in the way that Dubya was. This isn't to say that the left can't attract wingnuts, which it can and does, but those wingnuts usually did very well in school.

I'm not arguing that all rightists are dimwits or psychological misfits. Some could be categorized as members of the patrician class, who feel that it's the right and duty of the upper-classes to control the levers of power. George H. Bush and Nelson Rockefeller would be examples of patricians, and British political history is stuffed with this type of politician. An even larger category of rightists consists of careerists. These rightists have chosen their political path because it seems to be a quick and easy route to the top of the political ladder. Even though Barack Obama isn't a rightist (at least by American definitions), his political life story provides a fine example of a careerist at work, constantly moving onward and upward without taking a strong stand on anything in particular on the way up.

I'd love to toss out more quotes from Dixon's book but then this post would run on forever. The conclusion that can certainly be drawn from it is that one's political preference is often determined by psychological traits. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is not as dry a read as I may have made it sound. Dixon is a witty writer, and his stories of military ineptitude through the ages are fascinating and often jaw-dropping. I don't think it's still in print, but Amazon has it in Kindle format, and a good-sized library system probably has a copy or two.

Finally, Proof That Jesus Would Vote Republican

As the rough beast of American presidential politics begins its long slouch towards decision day in November, the civilized world is left wondering, as it does every four years, WTF is up with America's obsession with religion. In just last the few days President Obama has had to come up with a compromise on the birth control portion of his health care package in order to placate the Catholic Church, and this is against the backdrop of the Republican primaries, which consist entirely of white multimillionaires trying to proclaim that not only are they more god-fearing than the next guy, but they'll actually make America more god-fearing if given the chance in November. Once the actual presidential campaign begins the two candidates will invoke or quote Jesus and his dad in virtually every speech, and on Sundays we'll see them drop in on the nearest suburban megachurch where their piety will be on full display. But that won't stop both candidates from inferring, or even declaring, that their opponent is in some way heretical or godless.

The auto-da-fé of the American presidential election is a wonderment to Canadians and Europeans because it's a reminder that Yanks are more religious, by far, than anyone else on the block. But why is this? A few months ago I was researching this issue for an article and I kept looking for cultural and political causes of America's religiosity. Nothing seemed to explain the situation until I thought of the other major difference between Europe and the US: social  welfare spending. Europe believes in it, America (its ruling class, at least) loathes it. So I Googled social welfare spending and religion and came up with this academic paper written by Anthony Gill (his website's here)and Erik Lundsgaarde, professors at the University of Washington. Eureka! Solid evidence to explain the religiosity divide between America and most everyone else. Before I go further here are some quotes from the paper:

"...state welfare spending has a detrimental, albeit unintended, effect on long-term religious participation and overall religiosity."

"People living in countries with high social welfare spending per capita even have less of a tendency to take comfort in religion, perhaps knowing that the state is there to help them in times of crisis."

The professors back up these conclusions with all the necessary facts and figures (graph alert!), and their paper makes for very interesting reading, but be warned that it is an academic paper so it's a tad on the dry side. The profs argue that as church-sponsored social welfare programs (education, relief for the poor, etc.) are replaced by state programs, people see less value in religion itself. Religiosity (it's defined as weekly church attendance in the paper) does not, however, decline immediately upon an increase in social welfare spending. Decreases in religiosity are generational.

The paper emphasizes the role of churches in providing social welfare support as one of the key causes of religiosity. That's where I disagree with them. I don't think American churches have any significant tradition of providing material support for their followers. I think a more likely explanation, which is hinted at in several places in the paper, is that fear is what drives some people to church, and since WW II the US has been one of the most fear-filled countries on the planet. First there was the Cold War and its fear of nuclear war, then the Vietnam War, fear of street crime in the 1970s, and then a reboot of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. Add in the wars in the Middle East and 9/11 and you have society that's filled with dread. It's small wonder that Americans look for supernatural protection and comfort when so much that surrounds them seems so dangerous and unpredictable. And this is all on top of a society that provides the most meagre of social safety nets.

It doesn't come as much of a surprise that the Scandinavian countries, with their broad and comprehensive social welfare programs and non-involvement in military conflicts, sit at the bottom of the league in terms of religiosity. It's a clear message that people who have some confidence in their future well-being, who don't live in fear of death and disaster lurking around the next corner, have no need of imaginary beings to protect them. Needless to say there are probably a dozen other factors that can help account for US religiosity, but it would seem that free, universal health care goes a long way towards creating and maintaining a secular society. Gill and Lundsgaarde's paper provides some more proof of this with the example of the ex-Soviet Union. Once religion was made legal in Russia after the fall of the USSR, spirituality made a big comeback. It was no coincidence that the end of the USSR also marked the end of cradle-to-grave welfare programs for Russians, not to mention the end of a guaranteed job for all.

The role of religion in American politics became a big deal in the 1970s as President Jimmy Carter let it be known that he was a "born again" Christian. That seemed to be the starting bell for the evangelical movement, and it's become a key factor in every presidential election since. The rise of the Christian right has gone in lockstep with the erosion of social welfare programs that began with the election of Reagan in 1980. The US is now at a point where the Tea Party and the various Republican presidential hopefuls spend enormous effort in thinking of ways the US government can do less for its people, except, of course, when it comes to waging wars. All this looks like more evidence of religiosity being largely dependent on social welfare spending.

So, from the point of view of a ruthless, evangelical Republican politician there could be no shrewder political strategy than to cut any and all social welfare programs; its appears to be a guaranteed way to fill the pews and stuff the ballot boxes with votes for the GOP. And, really, it's probably what Jesus would do. He wouldn't want a nation of happy, healthy unbelievers. Of course, there was that time he fed the multitudes with free bread and fish...that does sound a bit welfare-ish, a bit food stamp-y, but it was probably a deliberate mistranslation by some liberal, elitist professor of ancient languages.