hollow president, trojan horse: why Trump is not our greatest threat
Two years ago, I sparred publicly with Jerry Falwell Jr. for a week or two, igniting a heated debate on campus at Liberty University that spilled over into national media. I had gone to see my friends Johnnyswim (Abner and Amanda Ramirez) in concert at Liberty University, when I was escorted out of their green room by armed campus police, threatened with arrest, and banned from campus for life. It was a preemptive move to prevent me from holding a prayer meeting with a small group of students and faculty the following morning who shared concerns about the way Liberty’s Christian witness was being compromised by Falwell’s political statements. There were statements back and forth between both Liberty/Falwell personally and myself, a classic case of he said/she said, or rather, “he said/he demonstratively removed a peaceful concert-goer by men with guns.”
Falwell Jr.’s overreaction was successful in doing what a tiny prayer gathering with a C list Christian leader never could have: provoking a broad public conversation about the nature of Christian political witness in a place that had become increasingly hostile to any sort of open counter witness. Students who felt differently seemed to feel empowered to carry the conversation further, and people like my friend Shane Claiborne seized the opening to push for dialogue with Falwell Jr and the university. When I saw Dr. William Barber taking up the issue publicly, I took a deep breath, because unlike myself, he’s a real movement leader with the credentials to carry the conversation into the. broader spaces it needed to go. Both feeling like any further personal direct provocation from me at Liberty would be unduly polarizing, and altogether uninterested in any sort of ego duel with Falwell Jr., I was happy to back off the accelerator and recede, while the people most qualified and equipped to do the work on the ground carried it forward.
When Jerry Falwell Jr. met his own unceremonious demise at Liberty recently, a lot of people asked me what I thought of it. I have been a bit ambivalent about commenting in public, not only because I am no fan of piling on, but because I truthfully never felt any ill will at all towards him, personally. Between the Muppet Babies (my pet name for Jerry and Franklin, sons of famous fathers who inherited religious empires), while both share the same lack of depth, breadth, and reading, he always struck me as less mean-spirited than Franklin. Now it is no small thing to attempt to turn one of the world’s largest Christian institutions of higher learning into a satellite church for Breitbart, run it like a third-world dictator, nor run off the lion’s share of black students and faculty, yet none of these things led to his demise. The fact that it took the photo in question to stir the Liberty board to act (I am aware the story has got much deeper sense) is perfectly illustrative of the religious spirit that underwrites those who support people like Falwell Jr., perhaps even more than Falwell himself: an overarching concern with how things appear, even more so than how things actually are. Actual questions of good and evil are too ambiguous, too demanding, to be engaged critically. The appearance of evil, on the other hand, is to be avoided at all costs.
But Jerry Falwell Jr. was never an ideologue. For those who were paying attention, he never tried all that hard to play the game. He didn’t quote Bible verses and rarely talked about Jesus. He was quick to say he was a businessman and not a preacher, and fairly clear that he saw no reason why people should let the Lord of the Church inform their politics. You always got the sense that Jerry was in it for a good time, but never really believed that he believed the kind of nonsense he spouted off on tv. He landed a gig he hadn’t really prepared for, had some giggles — and embraced some dangerous ideas, but was ever really about the ideas. Yet like the President he so tirelessly stumped for, he had dangerous ideologues in his ear.
This is critical: the reason I challenged Falwell Jr. to begin with, despite all his shilling for President Trump, was actually not about the President, per se. Trump, like Falwell Jr., is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. He’s never been an ideological purist about anything. After four years of praying for the President, I don’t bear any more personal animosity towards him than I do towards Jerry. On the contrary, I see in him an unhinged vision of my own unrestrained ego, trapped in the eternal hell of the mind where every slight is played over and over, where no amount of adulation could ever soothe the torment. Like all pathological narcissists, there’s not some compelling evil, no interesting plot twists, really nothing to study. There’s no mystery to get to the bottom of. It’s more like an onion skin, where when you peel back layers of vanity and insecurity, all you get is more onion, the endless void of a soul that never feels seen and known. He lacks typical human traits of empathy and compassion precisely because that’s what a life lived in such a condition does — dehumanizes, turns you into a ghost. The man himself has always been a blank canvas, and is in state that honestly stirs fear and pity in me more than hate.
Yet in the torrent of news coverage, I was repeatedly labeled an “anti-Trump pastor” or “anti-Trump Christian author.” I never self-identified as “anti-Trump,” but am deeply antithetical to the ideas this hollow man has served as a trojan horse for. Even the “Never Trump” moniker is not one I would necessarily use, because never implies endless constant theoretical comparison. So while for example I would prefer any human being with a pulse who does not display overt traits of pathological narcissism over the President, and almost certainly my dog Stella, I am less sure of my decision if I had to choose between him and say, a wild ferret, or an actual bowl of french onion soup. Thus the phrase “never” seems unhelpful.
What had actually set me in motion was a Breitbart exclusive interview Jerry Falwell Jr. gave, in which he called on evangelical Christians to “partner with Steve Bannon to oust the fake Republicans” during that year’s mid-terms elections. Bannon had recently left the White House, and was attempting to shape the broad landscape of Republican electoral politics the way he had shaped the Trump administration. Steve Bannon’s white supremacist positions, and their influence on Breitbart news during his tenure there, are a matter of public record and not in serious dispute. Former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh has been open and repentant about the shape of her own white nationalist views and how they formed Breitbart during her own time there, as well as how Bannon’s colleague Stephen Miller (still a key philosophical influence in the White House policy) had indoctrinated her in those views.
To link Breitbart with explicit, front door white supremacy, and even to say that Breitbart furthers a narrative that is overtly racist, is not the sort of radical claim made by fringe activists, or the kind of thing you are only likely to hear from a professor at Berkeley. In their consistent framing of a world in which European (their preferred word for white) civilization — both historically and currently — keeps unclean hordes of barbarians away, there is no other way to read it. For all their carping about identity politics, the only coherent through line between the more devious figures who have masterminded the Trump phenomenon is a constant stoking of white resentment, barely even troubling to code the language anymore — beyond lazily inserting “European” and “suburban” for white.
The tentacles not only of Breitbart, but of QAnon (which I will return to), just keep becoming more deeper entangled with mainstream white evangelicalism. It is tempting to make a jab about these organizations cobbling together the digital KKK of our time, but that feels unfair — not to the organizations in question, but to the KKK, who at least I’d imagine would be marginally more honest about what they actually believe. All of these “thought leaders” have a private language for these ideas, and a public language for them. If some of the figureheads they influence are too stupid to know what they are doing, as there it does seem a number of them have never met a book they haven’t read (or suffer from what I call Eric Metaxas syndrome — that is to say, they’ve never read a book they’ve understood), I can assure you the people slithering in their ears are quite aware of the realities they are shaping.
why the propaganda is more dangerous than the President
Several weeks ago, the video from the self-proclaimed “America’s frontline doctors” became both a viral sensation, and the ultimate cultural Rorschach test: either the a symbol of right-wing quackery, or the mascot of left-wing censorship of the truth they are trying to keep from us, depending on how you look at it. Much has been called into question about the “science,” as well as much conversation around the credibility of the doctors, ranging from one called into question for becoming a bitcoin salesman, to another called into question for more unconventional beliefs. I was less bothered by some of those, because the doctor in question’s alleged statements about the government being run in part by (checks notes) reptilians has not precisely been disproven and even makes a certain kind of sense to me, and because I actually thought that everyone knew that endometriosis, fibroids, cysts, etc. are actually evil deposits from the spirit husband!? (Plus in full disclosure, let he who has not accidentally had a little late night romp with a witch, warlock or demon in the dreamworld cast the first stone, amIright?!)
All of that stuff was salacious to talk about, but I never got past this one most basic detail: how on earth do that many Americans still feel that comfortable sharing content brazenly branded by Breitbart News? How is that still okay? Whatever suspicions or concerns that you might have about the science behind COVID-19 or the way government is or or is not combating it, can we not get a consensus about spreading material from the alt-right’s most reliable arm of propaganda? I am a spiritual person, so I am in fact concerned about people visiting a dreamworld — an alternate reality — in which demons are trying to screw us. I just happen to believe those places are named “Breitbart” and “QAnon.”
Trump will not be here forever, whether he is gone in months or four more years. Having a dysfunctional father at the head of the table does change the temperature in the entire house, and the spirit in the air will linger long after he’s gone. Elections and policies absolutely do have tremendous consequences for real bodies, and they do matter. But the truly cataclysmic long-term fight ahead will be with the propaganda platforms he has been a trojan horse for.
While white evangelical support of Trump is heavily documented, and there is no shortage of real enthusiasts out there, my experience on the ground is that many white evangelicals who support the President actually do have some ambiguity about him. In some cases, it is surely not unlike the David Duke phenomenon among Republicans in Louisiana years before, where people agreed with much of what the former Klansmen said, but had the “good manners” to know they weren’t supposed to agree with him out loud — a kind of performative dissonance. But my sense is that many white evangelicals actually do feel troubled about the President’s rhetoric and often even behavior, and are at least somewhat aware of the conflict with their ostensible values.
But this is where social media consumption is so critical: while they cannot deny certain inconsistencies, they are inhaling a nuclear cloud of alt-right news, all day, every day. Trump, in their view, may be an impolite narcissist, but at least he isn’t living in a dungeon molesting children and shredding babies with the Democratic party elites — which is more or less the accepted consensus on the platforms programming their thinking. They see Trump as an imperfect vessel, but they see the Democrats as the root of every nefarious thing happening in the world. Inexplicably, they maintain both that all expressions of federal government are grossly incompetent and yet, somehow simultaneously coordinated enough to hold together an elaborate deep state conspiracy.
I have a legion of frustrations with the Democratic party, but find it truly remarkable that almost none of the legitimate grievances are the ones that stick. It is absolutely extraordinary that a group as often boring could so often merit the word “radical,” either as criticism or praise. The dialectic of the right-left continuum in America largely lacks a left at all, because corporate interests run too deep to produce people capable of meaningful economic critique. During the pandemic, Republicans offered brazen corporate bailouts, while Democrats offered us slightly less corporate bailouts.
The party’s stated ideals of diversity and inclusion aren’t wrong, but still too often translate to tokenizing, fetishizing practices that keep real prophets at bay. While the last thing the world needs right now is another white man pontificating about abortion, and I will not be that guy — I will say that the inability to make space for nuanced language here is unnecessarily polarizing, in a time in which there should be a consensus that poverty is the true enemy of our entire human family (meanwhile, abortion numbers have unsurprisingly risen under an administration with decidedly anti-family policies, while per usual, firing up the base with aggressive “pro-life” rhetoric). It is even true in general that neoliberalism lacks a spiritual center and has failed to make good on it’s overreaching promises — just not in the vapid, trivial ways that culture warriors have named it.
And yet, for all of these needed critiques, there is no greater peril to democracy and basic human flourishing than the all-out assault on truth that is the defining characteristic of the Trump era. The development of our species moves forward only to the extent that our moral consciousness evolves, and that evolution is contingent on truth. This is no small reason why I am still a Christian: for me, Christianity at its best still offers a way of seeing the world from the underside, which is the only truthful way it can be seen. For all the times and ways that it has been coopted by colonizing, dominating, imperial forces, most people in the world believe it is wrong to kill their neighbor, under most circumstances; and more and more people in the world believe in the kind of liberation and freedom we see in the story of the God of the Exodus, who is always working to set free the oppressed. I believe that all of this is due, broadly speaking, to the influence of the Christian story.
Yes, the Roman Emperor Constantine claimed to see a cross in the sky and claimed to hear a voice say, “By this sign you will conquer.” But ultimately, having a brown-skinned man crucified by state-sponsored execution at the center of a religion always proves to be subversive, and forces us to reckon with the hard truth of the world from the underside. White evangelicalism does not define the Christian movement in either it’s historic nor current global forms, and to suggest otherwise is actually to concede the oppressors’ attempt to hijack the religion of the oppressed. Those on the underside are the only ones who can be trusted to faithfully tell us the truth of our history and of our present — and we took their Jesus, not the other way round.
For all the failings of neoliberalism, this is why the alt-right propaganda that fans the Trump phenomenon is so toxic, and so much more of an immediate existential threat to everything that is good: it wars against the truth, particularly this truth from the underside. Past a certain point, it’s not just a matter of telling lies anymore, it’s a matter of consciously choosing to believe them yourself. And as M. Scott Peck demonstrated in his book People of the Lie 40 years ago, consciously choosing lies is where true evil begins.
It is good and right and fair that we critique people, parties and platforms for not living up to their stated ideals — I certainly need this in my own life. But there is something to be said for having stated ideals, that are not entirely based in falsehood. The petty rage, self-pity, and unveiled white resentment fueling the alt-right platforms that dominate the landscape right now are based on unequivocal lies — lies about history, lies about humanity, lies about God. And that is why, despite my own fairly apocalyptic expectations for America in the coming years, and despite my deep misgivings about the Democratic party, I cannot risk any sort of moral equivalence here: there is nothing currently in the world is as dangerous as the lies of the alt-right, and the people that peddle them. They are not just politicians, they are false prophets, and what they offer is an alternative religion. As the Hebrew word translated Satan means “the accuser,” they traffic entirely in the demonic energy of accusation, and it is powerful, blinding, spiritual force.
the deadly tropes behind our conspiracy theories
Because this spiritual energy is powerful, it accounts for the very bizarre ways in which people “see.” 93% of protests of police brutality have been peaceful, and yet a large segment of the public believes there is violent anarchy in the streets. The things I hear white evangelicals say about Black Lives Matter are slanderous and absurd — “they are coming for your houses! They are coming for your church!” The wide circulation of a viral video of a confrontation at Grace Baptist Church in Troy, NY with protestors perfectly illustrates this. When a self-proclaimed bigot pastor who defends the use of the n-word and preaches that black people are cursed by God, has his church give away AR-15’s, the meaning of the act is not unclear. They clearly provoked their community, not the other way around, and what was at stake in the tussle had absolutely nothing to do with “worship”. Yet far right “news” giddily claimed this church as a story of religious liberty under threat, and claimed this pastor as a noble patriot who just wanted to preach the gospel in peace. And by the way, speaking of Black Lives Matter— while I am hardly a Marxist, I cannot bear hearing the word one more time from people who would not know the difference between a line from Richard Marx, and Karl Marx.
Right up there with the Loch Ness monster and George Soros’ secret dungeon where the Democrats chain up children, is the overstated threat of Antifa. Every time a white American talks about their fear of an Antifa surge, I ask them if they have ever met anyone from Antifa. Almost 100% of the time, the answer is no, because most people haven’t — whatever you make of them, the group’s scope and reach is exaggerated (and has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, in any case). But because white supremacy is not mythological, virtually every person in America knows someone radicalized who is currently stockpiling guns and ammunition in their basement in case the government were to (fill in the blank). Throw a rock in the air, and you’ll hit such a person. You don’t have to go out in the country, they are in every suburb. Oh I know, “they don’t plan to do anything, they are prepared just in case”…while also being prepared every day to not accept the results of an election if it doesn’t go their way.
What could possibly go wrong here? The Trump administration, in a largely unheralded early move that told us everything we needed to know about their intentions, stop classifying white supremacist hate groups as terrorists, even though they are by far the biggest threat of domestic terror in the US, thus defunding their study and the fight against them. So despite atrocities like the Oklahoma City bombing that happened where I live, and despite the fact that virtually every mass shooting in America has been perpetrated by white men (usually with legally purchased weapons), we are in a digital moment where the plague of white supremacy has all access to main arteries of popular culture, and are entirely unprepared for it. Self-styled armed militias continue to sprout up, who are making their own unilateral decisions about how their own streets should be policed and who, unlike BLM, actually do threaten to terrorize us. Especially when more and more mainstream politicians not only dog whistle to them, but now just call out to them publicly on Facebook.
The increasing normalization of QAnon conspiracy theories among conservatives is especially bone chilling. Human trafficking/child trafficking is a deadly serious problem in America and around the world, and the fight against it should matter to us all. But what is especially depraved about this phenomenon — increasingly spread by memes and cut and paste posts where people are oblivious to their source — is that by flinging wild accusations of pedophilia against political opponents, it trivializes and undercuts the actual global fight against trafficking. This doesn’t end with people knocking down the doors of child brothels. This ends with people acting out with a gun based on some tip they got from patriot1776 over in the forum.
No one is supposed to say this, but the cold hard reality is that these conspiracy theories play openly on two tropes: the hysteria around black protestors flagrantly plays to “black men are coming for your wives.” The baseless accusations of pedophilia being thrown at Democrats is an unsubtle play on “values,” suggesting that the folks most likely to support LGBTQ rights actually have no sexual ethics at all, not even when it comes to children. So the trope there is, “gays are coming for your children.” This is not idle speculation. These are the levers that are openly being pulled to provoke fear and hysteria. It is not only wrong, it is evil. It is bearing false witness against our neighbors. People of faith should lead the fight against these lies.
I am an optimist by nature, and hopeful by choice, because I believe in a God who resurrects the dead. And I hear bright, clear prophetic voices from the margins refusing to let the center ignore them, sons and daughters speaking truth, elders who tell stories of faithful resistance…and people who are waking up for the first time. Because I am not trying to hold on to the world that was or even the world that is, I have moments when I can glimpse something of what could and must yet come, and it is beautiful. And yes, I do believe in being the change you want to see in the world, getting involved in your community, focusing on the small things you can change, all the things I am not only supposed to say, but really do believe.
But the truth in my bones is, I believe that what lies ahead is bleak. White supremacy is a powerful spiritual force, and you can’t just use it to warm you by it’s fire in elections, and then walk away. It is a wildfire, and what has been already been flamed is out of control.
The imaginations of so many people have been corrupted, and I am not convinced that God will keep us from having the world we have dreamed up. If this were a Rorschach test, too many white evangelicals have looked at the story of the God of liberation who raised Israel up out of Egypt and Jesus of Nazareth, the nonviolent messiah, up out of the grave…but what they saw was apocalyptic revenge porn. They have looked at a history of violence, and seen the oppressed as the oppressors, and the oppressors as the oppressed. They have looked at mere commentators, and seen prophets. They have looked at tenderness in their LGBTQ friends and seen wickedness, but looked at their own cruelty and seen kindness. They have looked at Pharaoh, and called him Moses.
To be clear, I do believe Donald J. Trump needs to be voted out at all costs this November. I just also happen to believe that what we need even more than an election, is an exorcism. At this point, the entanglement is deep, and by the time people are ready to walk back from the ledge, I fear it will be far too late. While none of the realities we are contending with are new, we are in a time in which we have the resources to know better, but have chosen not to. Courting these devils in broad daylight has consequences that will not easily be undone.
This feels bleak, but on some intuitive level, I think people increasingly recognize that anyone who tells them things aren’t going to get worse before they get better simply are not telling the truth. At the very core of my faith is a belief that God is endlessly creative at bringing new life out of death. But make no mistake about it — the wheels of the empire are coming off, and there’s a whole lot more collapsing yet to come.