“Evangelicals” and Their Gatekeepers
A case study in exploitation
When I was about 14, I read a book called Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. Of my own free will, even. I was living Pennsylvania, kinda missing my Faith Evangelical Free Church peeps and this book was lying around the house while I was having my mind re-arranged by dc Talk’s Nirvana-infused “Jesus Freak.”
I’m telling you this because my experience with “evangelical” culture is personal and lived. I am not an academic expert or an anthropologist. I don’t have a lot of secondary literature to draw on. The academic in me is frustated by that. I am also frustrated that I don’t have a pre-existing theoretical vocabulary to organize these observations of a culture that I used to enthusiastically participate in. Which is to say, mea culpa, caveat emptor and all that.
Before we go hard at this, a note on the term “evangelical.” It’s theologically wrong for the cohort we are talking about, which includes all manner of denominations (including “none of the above”) which are not necessarily outreach oriented (this poll has a good breakdown based on reported beliefs, rather than self-reported identity). “Evangelical” has become a (lazy) catchall term for religiously active conservative voters. It is handy to use a single word, though and it’s broadly used so I’m kinda stuck with it. I’m gonna use those quotation marks, though, damn it.
The first thing you need to know about conservative Christians is that the Bible is both a primary authority and a messy flipping document. “Evangelicals” prefer certain traditions of interpretation over others. For example, there is a loooooong Jewish tradition of viewing the creation account as an allegory. Conservative Christians insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis and God creating the world in 6 days and stuff (“gah”). Within that literal tradition, there are three key things that “evangelicals” believe: they are not of the world; friendship with the world is antagonistic to God; they are not to conform to the pattern of the world.
“The world” is an imprecise phrase and the “evangelical” way to interpret it is as the collective actions/beliefs of the secular community, especially as manifested in popular and political culture. The universe of things that Christians do amongst themselves is not “the world.” This universe is “redeemed” and “holy.” The universe of things that secular people do is “the world” and that universe is tainted with sin and corruption. It’s Us (the community of believers) vs. Them (the community of unbelievers and everything that they say and do) and it is imperative WE keep ourselves from being compromised or tainted by THEM. This US vs THEM situation means quite a lot of the “evangelical” community does not process secular material themselves for fear of encountering THEM or their dangerous ideas. That community outsources that task to . . . whoever will take it up.
Gatekeeper
I’ve been thinking seriously about this since September when I heard MTV News’ (keep your snobbery, they do good work) Jane Coaston interview Adam Holz, a film reviewer for Focus on the Family, among other outfits (transcript of the full interview). Adam Holz reviews movies and processes them through the lens of “evangelicals,” then shares an evaluation of a film with them with their interests and concerns in mind. He stands between that community and the outside world. Think of it as a sort function to handle an overchoice problem. “Evangelicals” don’t make many movies. They are bad at it, like real bad, for so many reasons that it deserves it’s own post (or book or library). That means they have to deal with the universe of movies that the secular world is making and most of them are presumed to be objectionable on some level or another. It is so much easier to take the word of a conscientious reviewer associated with a trusted organization, like Focus on the Family, than it is to engage with and evaluate whatever movies hapen to come across the write. Essentially, if you do a sort of “Evaluated by a trusted organization” you have saved yourself the effort and the danger of prolonged contact with dangerous cultural products. Focus on the Family provides a screening function, like St. Peter at the gates of heaven.
Meet Keymaster
If you grew up “evangelical,” and you are of a certain age, you will remember this chart or something like it:
At Faith E Free, this kind of chart was used for two things. First, for Christian youth, this was a helpful guide to showing the believer (me, in this case) that Christians could produce those sounds too and fill the songs with better (i.e. “godly”) content. Second, for new believers, who probably thought that Christians were squares, the chart is meant to be reassuring. Christians can be hip, too! We make all the same musical moves that you secular folk do. This is another sort solution to the overchoice problem: don’t worry, you don’t have to do the critical work to process these artists making these sounds, we did that for you.
I mean False Keymaster
When I first started to buy Christian music, I had to go to a corner of the Bible store to buy my Amy Grant cassettes (I had really terrible taste as a child). By the time I graduated from high school, I could get 12 CDs for a penny from the Christian version of Columbia House. Record executives had not found Jesus, but they had found a way to wring a buck from a demographic that was desperate to here someone sing Jesus’ name. Pop acts had song after song that were remarkably like love songs, but the significant other had been replaced with the one word guaranteed to produce some revenue out of otherwise small time acts: Jesus.
The obsession with “redeeming” genres with Christian content lead to a big time lapse in evaluating the quality of that content. “Evangelicals” didn’t question the music industry’s model for producing songs, they only looked at the product. What happened is insidious: “evangelicals” uncritically trusted a group of corporations to make them ideologically acceptable products they were happy to consume. To be sure, some Christians were skeptical of the profit motive and the trickeration of a company churning out boy band acts and female singers who sang about Jesus the way they would sing about that boy they crushed on (i.e. not in a sexual way). But in my corner of the world, consumerism ran rampant, it just had Jesus on the label. The gated community was learning how to build higher walls and hire a contractor to guard the front gate, but they weren’t asking that contractor particularly hard questions, but the were clear on onething: make my place look like theirs.
In the early 90’s, the music industry could not be bothered to distinguish between Amy Grant/Sandi Patty, BeBe Winans, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — it’s all gospel to the Billboard charts and there wasn’t enough airtime or dollars coming out of Christians to bother to make many distinctions. As I was growing up, this dynamic shifted dramatically. The music industry experienced the bleeding edge of the consequences of the fragmentation of the mass market; hence the gospel version of Columbia House convincing me to buy albums at insane prices for the sake of being acknowledged as a legitimate consumer. When niche went from afterthought to reliable revenue stream, the music companies were happy to follow the money, though “evangelicals” failed to notice, because capitalism is like totally Christian, right? Many pastors, and this guy Larry Norman, noted the bald faced way in which Christians were pandered to without any kind of theological thought, but many “evangelicals” were so happy to be pandered to. At Creation Fest in Pa in 1999, Larry Norman, a Christian music icon, saw the mindless way a crowd of folk at a Christian music festival sang along with the hits and were satisfied by pale, pale imitations of secular cultural. It angered him so much that he walked off stage (he eventually came back, but he had my attention). This is what pissed Larry off: “Christians” were re-arranging secular symbols but they were not doing anything radical or new. They were not redeeming culture; they were repeating the same secular structures that oppressed them with churchy words. By and large, the “evangelicals” in the audience didn’t notice.
And now the Global War on Terror
It was also at a Creation Fest, four years later, that I noticed a weird politicization of American Christianity. Michael W. Smith broke into “God Bless America” and everyone around us in Hersheypark Stadium sang it with the fervor of a worship song. I was taken aback by it. “God Bless America” is not a hymn. Worshipping America is not the same thing as worshipping God. I seemed to be the only one in Hersheypark Stadium to think that.
Record executives had figured out how to extract money from the Christian sub-culture by creating acts that participated in the right rhetorical rituals. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch firgued out how to get those “evangelicals,” to tune in to their cable channel. No one should ever think those two men shared the moral concerns of the “evangelical” community, but that community fell hard for what those shucksters had to sell. Fox News relied (and stil relies) heavily on the rhetorical strategies of isolation and the “evangelical” community had been engaging in that shit for decades. Let’s count the ways: the outside world is suspect, that world speaks down to us, that worlds’ neglect means that we need to create parallel structures, and we understand a deeper truth that has been unfairly rejected by the world. The parallel gated community that the “evangelicals” had created got a dome put over it that was hermetically sealed against the outside world as soon as Ailes and co possible could, well before “evangelicals” realized what was happening (or could have realized, because lots of them still don’t see it).
Trump and Post-Trump
“Evangelicals” are not unique in lacking critical thinking skills (that describes most folk pretty well) or being strung along by organizations that tell them what they want to hear and drops them in a different pace than they thought they were headed while makig a buck and a political point or two along the way. However, “evangelicals” were extremely well situated to be funnelled into an echo chamber because they were already pretty busy building their own echo chamber when Fox News came along and offered some shelter. “Evangelicals” naively thought that anyone who spoke their language shared their spiritual concerns. They were wrong.
The echo chamber “evangelicals” deposited themselves in doesn’t just isolate: it radicalizes. “You’re right, marriage is between a man and a woman, so you should definitely not bake that cake for that gay couple who are such obvious sinners.” “Evangelicals” don’t recognize this as discrimination. They’ve been assured that this is just a legitimate exercise of their First Amendment rights. Discrimination against the LGBTQ community is a religious practice for “evangelicals,” though not in the sense that this directive came from the Bible. It comes from much more nefarious sources and “evangelicals” have no resources for dealing that fifth column. Their talking points don’t come from the pulpit, but they don’t notice. “Evangelicals” delegated contact with the secular world to a set of gatekeepers and then delegated the choosing of gatekeepers to . . . whoever would do it. They do not have the tools to understand the tragedy that has resulted from their failure to make actual choices.
There is Still Hope
I was scared of exposure to dangerous ideas thanks to Hal Lindsey. I thought that I would never dare to read Kant or Marx or Hegel or Freud or Kierkegaard. But I’d been learning the German language since I was in 6th grade and that meant Germanic Studies was always going to be a second major (it wasn’t supposed to turn into the only degree, but here we are). Turns out that my academic achievement, which mattered A LOT to me, required that I overcome the hesitation that Hal Lindsey built into me as a teenager. I had to defuse more than one thought bomb all on my own. I had to read Kant AND Marx AND Freud (especially Freud) and to add insult to injury Kierkegaard’s work, The Concept of Irony, became a central text in my thesis on the Romantic conception of irony and its influence on post-structuralists. What is happening?!
I was so impressed by Kierkegaard, his wicked sense of humor and his keen mind (that never failed to mock Hegel), that I read Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death (both Biblical quotes if you’re keeping track of the ways that Lindsey is wrong). That’s when I realized that Hal Lindsey either never read Kierkegaard or just deliberately misunderstood him. Søren’s main message was that the established church was full of people whose eyes passed over Scripture but who didn’t actually process what they were reading, exactly the charge against the “casual Christian” phenomenon levelled by “evangelicals.” Fear and Trembling is not a dour book: it’s a reminder of the insane things that God asks of us, like sacrificing a first born son on faith, and it’s a meditation on whether or not Kierkegaard was capable of such faith as well as a reminder that most people who call themselves Christians don’t even bother to do that much.
So here we are. “Evangelicals” set up a gated community but were all too willing for that community to be appropriated by people who didn’t really have evangelical concerns at heart and boy howdy did “evangelicals” throw themselves into that community anyway. “Evangelicals” essentially brainwashed themselves. I have no idea how to deprogram them. Maybe I will have more insight after the Christmas holidays and my mom drops by (the one who thought I had abandoned all the values I learned as a child because I was more than willing to vote for Hillary Clinton). In the mean time, the best I can do is show that I was one of them, once upon a time, and that it is possible for “evangelicals” to change. No that I know how to move that process along, I just know that it was possible with me. And that’s the best I can do at the moment.
