Note: My previous piece about Mark Pope and Kentucky Basketball was my most viewed post since I started writing here. I’ll attribute that to sharing it on the digital wasteland known as Facebook (credit where credit is due). Anyway, thanks for reading! Here is something not about sports at all, but two topics I have found fascinating for twenty years or so, especially with the way they’ve intersected with each other in the culture and in my own life. These topics aren’t controversial in the least, and everyone is in agreement about them. I apologize in advance.
There was a time, it feels like not so long ago, when religion didn’t seem so unfailingly intertwined with our nation’s politics. Perhaps the two have always been intertwined to some degree, but certainly not to the degree that they are today. Maybe religion and politics have a longer history of being allied than I realized and I just wasn’t paying enough attention. Or, maybe it was because the darkest public corner of the internet, social media, had yet to crowd its way into all of our lives, pulling back the curtain to give wide exposure to such alliances while at the same time wreaking progressive havoc on the way we obtain and consume information with each passing year. That is all entirely possible.
Many of the people who mention politics and religion in the same breath these days do so with casual vehemence, mixed with an assured conviction that they are essentially two sides of the same ideological coin. The brand of religion on the one side typically runs the spectrum from everyday conservative Christianity to a fanatical version of fundamentalist evangelicalism. The brand of politics on the other typically runs the spectrum from common conservative Republicanism to now-not-so-fringe rightwing extremism. (When the extremes on both sides marry, it’s called Christian Nationalism, which is an apt descriptor, but I won’t get lost in those weeds right now. You’re welcome.)1
When I was growing up, my faith and my politics did not intermingle—namely because I didn’t know what my politics even were. I have a hunch that was true for most of my adolescent contemporaries. I was politically ignorant, at least when it came to political affiliation as an identity, as an ideology, goes. I’d heard the sayings, “Don’t bring up politics or religion at the dinner table” and “Don’t talk about politics or religion with your friends,” but I never conflated the two beyond that. It was clear that these were potentially divisive subjects that it wouldn’t be wise to bring up unless you wanted to ruin a delicious meal or a torch a longstanding friendship.
I never got the sense that my parents’ politics and faith informed each other, either. They never talked about them as if they were two sides of the same coin. There was never a sense of, “We believe this about God so we have to vote for that political party.” I remembered small chunks of information from school, but mostly what I knew about politics was that both of my parents were Democrats, so I naturally assumed that I was too, or at least that’s what I was going to be when I turned 18. These were the halcyon days when being a Democrat did not automatically equate to being a “heathen” or a “leftist” or a “pedophile sympathizer.” The nineties were incredible.
My mid to late teens is when I first remember hearing people talk explicitly about identifying as a “conservative.” This would have been around the time of the 2000 election, coverage of which I watched on a staticky, rabbit-eared box TV I’d newly plunked, against my mother’s wishes, on top of my bedroom dresser. I’m not sure whether it was on the news, at school, or at church that I first became aware of this ideology called conservatism, but it was clear its adherents took to it with urgency. After Bush won, and throughout his first term, I remember “compassionate conservatism” being the buzz phrase (at this point I’d welcome anything with the word “compassion” in it to find its way back into our politics), and much was made about the evangelical support he had garnered, which was considerable.
An anecdote to give you a glimpse into my state of mind around this time: I’d come across an article which re-capped some comments Bush made about how Christians and Muslims worship the same God. In the aftermath of 9/11, I was vehemently being taught at church that this was not the case, and so I made a post on a fairly prominent Christian messageboard asking people what they thought about the president’s comments. I do not remember the overall tenor of the responses, but by bravely making an anonymous post on the internet, I was hoping to call into question whether Bush actually deserved so much evangelical Christian support if his understanding of the one true God was not only misguided but heretical. Leave it to me to call out “our guy” for not being enough of a theologically astute Christian (supposedly) to be “our guy.” That I am not the same person I was 20 years ago is a delightful development in my life, and a great blessing to those around me.
All of this was transpiring within the same period of years that I began attending youth group at a Southern Baptist church, and I remember hearing adult congregants casually allude to their right-of-center leanings. I have to say that I don’t remember anything specifically standing out to me as a red flag at this church. Most of the folks I knew were good people, and massive disagreements aside, I would probably still say the same today. But I also never thought much about it at the time because I had other things on my mind: girls, and playing drums in the youth praise band to impress girls. Which didn’t work.
But somewhere along the line during my early spiritual journey, my Christian faith did somehow bind itself to conservative politics. I couldn’t tell you exactly how it happened, but the combination of hearing about the “Christian values” of George W. Bush at church as well as other religious outlets, along with the general tenor of radio and TV media during the Bush years reverberating with evangelical discourse probably had something to do with it. I was nothing if not a follower of the crowd.
Eventually, though I don’t recall it being at the forefront of my conscious mind, the belief started taking root that to be a good Christian meant I had to be a Republican, because they were the ones who truly believed in Jesus, who obviously would have been a Republican if he still walked among us. This wasn’t something I went around espousing; I mean, I couldn’t even vote yet. My knowledge of the Republican party pretty much came from my high school civics class that I took copious notes in but remembered little from. To this day, the thing that stands out the most is that one of my classmates shared with the class that she thought George W. Bush was “handsome.”
Because my Christian faith was something I was serious about, especially between the ages of around 17 to 20, I was actively looking for more ways not only to be—but be seen as—a serious and authentic Christian, whatever I thought that meant at the time. I needed the external validation, and adopting a staunchly conservative mindset seemed an easy enough way to do that. Political and religious passions had been fomenting all around me, and eventually the two converged into a singular, raging cyclone—and the dust from the storm had started getting all over me.
Because my Christian faith was something I was serious about, especially between the ages of around 17 to 20, I was actively looking for more ways not only to be—but be seen as—a serious and authentic Christian, whatever I thought that meant at the time.
I was a pretty avid reader of Christian books because, by this point, when I was around 18 or 19, I was seriously considering going into the ministry. I read some of the colossal Christian classics of the time such as I Kissed Dating Goodbye (which author Josh Harris has now disavowed) and Wild At Heart (which I’m pretty sure, with the subtitle Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, I thought was terrible even back then). I went to the kind of church that warned against The Prayer of Jabez despite its widespread popularity, so I didn’t read that one. The first political book I ever bought was also around this time, and I bought it because of its apparent connection to Christianity: Sean Hannity’s Let Freedom Ring. That’s right, baby: there were no warnings against the Hannitizer.
I laugh now—and cringe—thinking of a spry and youthful me walking into Barnes and Noble and, without irony, buying a book written by such an outrage-peddling reactionary. I was unfortunately starting to obsessively watch cable news around this time, mostly Fox News and Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC (strange bedfellows, I know), so that’s most likely how I heard about the book. I was probably channel-surfing one night and landed on the classic Fox production Hannity and Colmes, drawn in by the rhetorical fisticuffs. Alan Colmes, the liberal, was probably talking about how he wanted to destroy the country with his big, bad, demonic, lefty ideas, and Hannity probably took the opportunity to then promote his book, for it championed the cause of freedom, and God and Jesus, of course, were the ones ringing the bell. I wasted precious hours of my life watching this stuff. And the dust only got thicker.
Flash forward to the 2004 presidential campaign: a vivid memory I have is of driving around and listening to my car radio a lot. I was a pensive and lonely and lost twenty-year-old. And I was attending Bible college in New Orleans, twelve hours away from home. Often, when I wasn’t in class, I’d get in my car and just drive around the city. Sometimes I just needed to get away, not only because I was still a somewhat uncomfortable and awkward person around people I didn’t know, but because there is a certain stifling air that hovers in the atmosphere of a seminary, especially if it’s an environment you’re not used to, if it’s a place you’re not entirely sure you belong. It wasn’t exactly the most conducive environment for maintaining one’s mental health or making new friends. And so I resorted to motorized escape. I’d take off and flip the radio to the local modern rock station that’d be playing either “Float On” by Modest Mouse,2 “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand, or Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Personal Jesus.” It was a pretty great station, back when pretty great radio stations weren’t a dime a dozen (“Personal Jesus” cover aside).
There is a certain stifling air that hovers in the atmosphere of a seminary, especially if it’s an environment you’re not used to, if it’s a place you’re not entirely sure you belong.
And sometimes I’d stumble upon the nationally syndicated radio broadcast of the man, the myth, the monger of fear, Sean Hannity. Wait, this guy’s on the radio too? I don’t know if I found his unabashed confidence comforting (I cannot fathom that) or if I just liked that he mentioned God and Jesus and freedom every so often, but I got hooked, impressionable seminarian that I was. I thought I was going to take the country back for the Lord, and I’d come around to the idea that the most impactful way to do that was to be politically engaged.
I listened to Hannity partly to try and understand why this guy seemed to have so much clout, clout that I was daily (somehow) becoming persuaded he deserved. I listened partly to try and earnestly learn about the presidential election, the first one I could vote in. It’s very possible—nay, highly probable—that I listened because I was transfixed by his preternatural talent for charismatically, hilariously, and unreservedly eviscerating the policies and character of John Kerry. What can I say except that the immaturity was appealing. Let’s call it the Rush Limbaugh effect, which has not so hilariously resulted in tragic consequences for our political discourse in the years since. As well as PTSD for my wife whenever she hears the theme song.
Or maybe, just maybe, I listened to The Sean Hannity Show and watched Hannity And Colmes in an awkward, morose attempt at brainwashing myself—to fit in, to feel like a part of the gang. To feel like I could be a part of a visible group that was confidently standing for something. In a fit of self-delusion, I wanted to belong in this world where all truth and morality was black and white, where the bad actors were clearly differentiated from the righteous and upstanding. Where it was so clear who the heroes were that I couldn’t help but want to be one.
In the long run, I did not fit in, however, and at some point during the semester, I became mildly notorious for not disclosing who I was going to vote for in the 2004 presidential election. An anti-hero of sorts, if you will. At Bible college, this information was deemed obvious to be shared because it was expected that there would be—could only be—one correct answer. And the act of everyone sharing this same expected answer with everyone else satiated our young egos, initiated groupthink, and made us all feel apart of something important. Which, if I’m being honest, I don’t really blame anyone for; we were college kids beginning the long and arduous quest of finding our way in the world.
Yet still, it all rang a little false to me, the seeming ubiquity of unanimous agreement. It left me slightly unsettled in the far corners of my mind. Combined with the growing questions about my faith that had begun to develop and unsettle me in those very same corners, and the fact that I legitimately had no idea yet who I was voting for, I decided I was going to be a troll about the whole endeavor. And troll I did, because the withholding of this—some would say very personal—information frustrated many people, or at the very least baffled them, and that made me double down. You know, like Jesus would have done.
My great trespass during this humorous ruse was to be young and naïve enough not to believe that my Christian faith compelled me to only vote for one candidate—one party, really—as if I had no choice in the matter. But being unwilling to disclose who I supported for president of course meant, in the eyes of my pious peers, that I would be voting for the God-dishonoring, America-hating Democrat, John Kerry, instead of God’s chosen one, George W. Bush. The great irony of it all is that I never even voted. I never mailed in my Kentucky absentee ballot. I’m not sure I even knew how to obtain the form. My brave refusal—my eventual brave refusal, to be clear—to be brainwashed by Sean Hannity or persuaded by my schoolmates was matched only by my own political laziness.
During the fall of 2004, I would also drive two hours south of New Orleans to a small island town on the Gulf of Mexico, where I had spent the two previous summers as a student missionary. And when the pastor of the First Baptist Church where I’d been stationed heard I was attending Bible College in New Orleans, he asked if I wanted to drive down on weekends and be a sort of de facto youth minister. And he was going to pay me. He was going to pay me $250 per weekend. Of course I said yes.
It was either during one of those fall weekends or one of the previous missionary summers, but at some point during my sporadic island residencies I purchased another behemoth political tome, Bill O’Reilly’s Who’s Looking Out For You? I remember sitting in the the little “camp” (a small house on stilts that sits near the coast) I stayed in when I was down there, and flying through it. This was sometime before the election kerfuffle, when I was still looking for more popular and accepted conduits of Christianity, which I felt would help me better express and share my faith. I was still hoping to find connection, some common bond in the conservative media landscape and its millions of confident acolytes who were impressed by its pious opinionators' ability to namecheck Jesus every hour on the hour.
I was still hoping to find connection, some common bond in the conservative media landscape and its millions of confident acolytes who were impressed by its pious opinionators' ability to namecheck Jesus every hour on the hour.
Skimming back through the book, I was shocked to find that some lines actually sound downright level-headed. Released in 2003, O’Reilly writes that he respects non-believers, condemns fundamentalism of all stripes, including Christian, and that there’s no way a Hindu who is a good person is going to burn in eternal hellfire. And here is this shockingly balanced nugget of wisdom:
So here’s the question we are here to discuss: Does organized religion look out for you? And the answer is not definitive. Sometimes religion can be good and sometimes it can be bad. It is how you incorporate religion into your life that provides the best answer to the question. Use theology to help others and comfort yourself, it becomes a good thing. But use it to belittle and mock others, or to punish yourself, then it is pernicious. (112)
I hope it doesn’t shake my credibility too much, but allow me to voice a hearty Amen to that, Bill O’Reilly. If he hadn’t been fired by Fox News already, this wishy-washiness about the value of religion would be enough to get him canned via boycott in the present day.
I don’t mean to suggest that O’Reilly didn’t project extremism and faux-outrage on his show, or that he didn’t get more extreme and ingrained within the wackier wing of conservatism as time went on; this book came out 21 years ago after all. And I’m not saying that there isn’t some surely contemptible stuff in the rest of the book (sorry, I’m not reading it again). All I’m saying is that it’s interesting, in the context of our current tense political climate and 24-hour news media, to read these words from a man who is considered to be one of the trailblazers of the conservative talking head establishment. Perhaps we can go back and find something Tucker Carlson has said or written that portends something like this moderate, reasonable mindset in the hopes that some form of sanity and decency resides within him. Nah, I’m just kidding. And anyway, I never have and I never will buy a book written by Tucker Carlson. I’ve hate-watched enough of his clips on YouTube to have forever mutilated my algorithm.
In 2008, when he came out of nowhere to be a leading candidate for president, I did buy a book by then up-and-coming senator, Barack Obama, and I did so gladly: The Audacity of Hope. From Hannity to O’Reilly to Obama. Naturally. I wasn’t (yet) an Obama fanboy or anything, I just wanted to understand what the near salvific rhetoric on one side and the antichrist rhetoric on the other was all about. I didn’t quite lean into the Obama-as-savior mentality—which was, to be sure, over-stoked by the right as a fear tactic—but it was hard to deny the intelligence, elocution, and charisma of the man. I liked him very much, as did several of my college-aged peers, which is why I was puzzled that so many people around me thought I had gone into full devil-worshiping commie mode when they found out I was reading the book. The audacity I had to publicly carry around Obama’s Audacity—it must have seemed like gloating.
I truly just wanted to learn more about the man. What made him so magnetic? What was his story, and where did it begin? What did he believe, and what were his ideas? What were his ideals? Much of what I learned I liked because I proudly voted for him in 2008. And, as we all know, he won. And, as we all know, but perhaps forgot, Christians of a certain stripe lost their damn minds. I wasn’t involved in church at this point in my life, but the general feeling among my Christian friends and religious acquaintances on social media—as well as many in the Christian blogosphere (here’s where I date myself)—was that voters had handed the keys of the United States over to Lucifer himself. What confused me—again, naively; are you noticing a pattern?—is that this man, Barack Obama, who some people thought was the literal villain of the book of Revelation, and therefore the ultimate antagonist of the world entire, professed to be a Christian himself, and, from where I was sitting, seemed to back it up in word and deed. It baffled me so much that I sent a Christian friend a Facebook message asking why people hated him so much. To quote myself verbatim (cringe): “...every time i even leave open the possibility that i might vote for him when i have political conversations, people literally freak out; they look at me like some unpatriotic bastard, or say shit like, ‘how can you vote for him?’”
This kept up throughout Obama’s presidency. Some things that were said about him, and, quite frankly, still are said about him by people who claim to be Christian, defies my understanding of the basic moral and social tenets of the faith. I began to realize that any time a Republican didn’t win the presidential office, the reaction was inevitably going to play out like this. A large swath of conservative Christians were going to make a big fuss about it, like a toddler missing recess, declaring the country godless and unchristian, led by the devil’s minions, and soon to reap what it had sown by not electing God’s chosen one. I know there is some precedent for this in our nation’s political history, but I had never seen it so blatant, so magnified, so clearly playing out in front of my eyes as it was during Obama’s presidency. I mean, seriously: the antichrist? There must have been something about him that inspired people to take the vitriol up a notch.
And here is where I must say something about the obvious, though often subtly expressed, racial animosity regarding the hatred Obama received. You’d think that calling him the antichrist was as vitriolic a thing as someone could say, but you would be wrong. I heard people talk about how he was going to give people “like him” a bunch of free stuff, and that’s when the jeer socialist began getting lobbed in his direction. I didn’t know what socialism even was, but it didn’t matter. The level of disgust with which the term was incessantly hurled at him made it clear what his haters really meant—at least a good number of them. They meant it as more than a taunt; they meant it as a slur.
I rarely, if ever, hear of anyone calling Biden a socialist, and when Bernie Sanders talked about being a “democratic socialist” in the 2015 presidential primary, it was mere fodder for a goodly chuckle. By no means was this veiled racism disseminated only by Christians, but the fact that any professing Christians at all felt like it was an act of fealty before God to not only harbor such feelings, but make them known publicly and proudly—while ironically embracing the cowardice of coded language—seemed to me a sickening indictment of the American church.
Around 2011 or 2012, in the third or fourth year of Obama’s first term, I tried to start attending church again, and at this point you might be asking, Why? And my answer would be, That’s a really good question. I went for a few months, trying to find my place, trying to, I thought at the time, sincerely find a place where I felt I could fit in and make a difference. I recall hearing subtle political references in my Sunday School class and from the pulpit, but nothing overly concerning. But one Sunday morning, any semblance of vagueness or subtlety fell away. Any hint of doubt I had about an alliance between evangelical Christianity and Republican politics was eradicated with a sledgehammer. The only thing I remember from the sermon that morning was the pastor saying, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” to thunderous applause from the congregation. This was a time when American culture was in the thick of the debate over gay marriage, as it always seemed to be before it was federally legalized in 2015.
Look, I wasn’t surprised the pastor of a Southern Baptist Church said something against homosexuality. A sermon about the sanctity of one-man-one-woman marriage, and only one-man-one-woman marriage, was not unexpected. But to use such a cliched, dim-witted phrase, and for the congregation to go apeshit with gleeful agreement—I sat stunned and befuddled. The preacher had said it in such a ridiculous manner, as if he was the first person to utter that particular pattern of words, as if he was a toddler discovering the neat and awesome power of rhyme. I rolled my eyes. I laughed disgustedly. But I was too forgiving, too willing to dole out the benefit of the doubt, and I stuck it out for a few more weeks.
The preacher had said it in such a ridiculous manner, as if he was the first person to utter that particular pattern of words, as if he was a toddler discovering the neat and awesome power of rhyme. I rolled my eyes. I laughed disgustedly.
Or perhaps I was just too weak of mind and backbone to take any principled action. Maybe I was just that comfortable, and just that lonely. And I’ve now come to realize, I think I can tell you why I started going to church again: I missed the sense of community. I needed it. Or at least I thought I did.
One Sunday, I saw the light, clear as a blue-sky morning: I woke up and decided that enough was enough. I was done going to church. I was too tired of faking it, which was indeed what I’d come to feel like I was doing, because there was a voice in my head each morning I walked through those double doors that said, “This isn’t you. You don’t belong here. So much of this you just don’t believe.” I thought eventually the voice would go away, but it never did. I thought my desire for the unique type of community that a church can foster would win out, but it didn’t. I thought I could overlook the haughty cultural and political jabs, but I couldn’t. There was so much I was willing to ignore to find a balm that could heal what was broken in me. But willful ignorance was no longer a valid excuse.
I’m sure that if I would have shared what that voice was saying with certain people from the church, I would have been told that the devil was whispering lies in my ear: lies about gay marriage, lies about not fitting in, lies about unbelief, lies about truth. Well, the truth is, I followed the devil’s lies—my conscience—to the bar that Sunday to watch a Packers game, free from the mental burden of pretending to be someone that I was, and am, not.
The religious and political worlds would continue to brazenly conspire in more frequent and frightening ways over the coming years,3 but my eyes and my head would now be clear. Or at least they would be a little less foggy. I would be better equipped to discern the basically reasonable from the wildly absurd. The truth had set me free, indeed.
But no amount of mental liberation could prepare me for the absurdity that was about to transpire in the theater of American reality. I don’t think any of us were ready.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s incredible, thorough, and eye-opening book Jesus and John Wayne discusses some of the origins of evangelical Christianity’s alliance with right-wing politics.
Modest Mouse just announced a tour celebrating the 20 year anniversary of Good News For People Who Love Bad News, the album that gave us “Float On.” Oh my God.
I will delve into my own personal experience of these years in part two.