When religion turns to the dark side

The extreme-right gang members who pray for Fox News

My cousin Cheryl sent a letter saying that she was in the hospital and might die – if the Lord permitted it. Yes, she would like to see me. Her parents had moved to Rockford, Illinois so that’s where she was. Chicago was probably the most convenient airport.

The sky was blue and there were high snow-bright clouds over emerald fields. The Midwest could be beautiful, I thought, until I passed a town or shopping center. Then I had to consider the unredeemed ugliness of American infrastructure.

At the hospital, I learned that Cheryl hadn’t realized something was wrong till very late, too late unless the Lord intervened and took the cancer away. Living high in the mountains in Peru, stomach bugs were common and that’s what she thought the pain of late-stage ovarian cancer was. Now they were operating, and operating again, while the family sat nearby and prayed.

Cheryl and I had been friends when we were teenagers, after I trekked off alone on a bus to visit her in Mexico where she’d been doing missionary language training. I’d then spent time with her family in Virginia and become a born-again Christian, briefly. But that was a long, long time ago. I now had teenagers, and she had five children, five missionary kids who looked to me like they would fit in fine at an Illinois mall.

She and I had some quiet time after everyone else left and before the night-time drugs kicked in. I could see why I’d liked her – she was curious and wry. The next day, they took her away for what we all knew was the last possible surgery. I stood next to my Uncle Dean, his arm around me, tears pouring down his face. No prayers then, no talk of how she would be going to Jesus. Just a father who was watching his daughter die.

I’d been fond of Dean, my mother’s older brother, a stocky blond preacher who couldn’t carry a tune, with a fierce interest in intricate theology and a warm heart. Over the years, I had found it rather touching to hear that he and my aunt had moved again, started yet another church, taken up yet another pyramid scheme business. When my husband and I had visited once, Dean proudly showed us his book-lined study, wanting us to know that he too was a scholar, not just a former Navy man with a pulpit.

While I am not a believer, I’ve retained a sense of respect for people of faith. I don’t think there’s a God, but faith binds people in ways that can be good for them and good for communities. I’ve published a good deal about religion, and became friends, through Bill McNeill, with Martin Marty of the University of Chicago, one of our great scholars of religion and a man of faith himself. He and his wife Harriet made me feel at home in Chicago, and our correspondence has brightened my life. Ray Oldenburg urged me to read The Company of Strangers by Parker Palmer, one of the best books about the importance of a public life and civil society. It’s written by a Christian for Christians, but it’s a book with lessons for anyone who cares about community.

I explain this because I want to convey how appalled I am today by the views espoused by Uncle Dean and his fellow believers. They are believers in something, but I can’t call them people of faith and they certainly are not Christians.

Dean’s little fundamentalist church was not only warmly embracing to a lonely teenager but had a reasonable number of Black congregants – not so common in ‘70s Virginia. Now he – at over 90! – is part of the extreme, vicious white nationalist movement that worships the former US president Donald Trump and considers the TV star Tucker Carlson a prophet.

This is the dark side.

How does it happen? How have ordinary Christians - fervent but otherwise just suburban consumers - become a mob? And what can we do about it?

Pride, or loss of face, has a lot to do with it. It was mostly humble people who joined churches like my uncle’s. They learned that by taking up a superior, more rigorous theology they could actually look down on mainstream Christians.

Confusion about sexuality is also important. I have never known people so obsessed with sex than Uncle Dean and his wife and congregants. He disconcerted me once by saying, in the middle of an intense conversation about theology, that the men at the other end of the diner probably thought he was a dirty old man, sitting there alone with a young girl.

Most important, people need community. I did, as a teenager, and that’s what was most attractive about that little church. The anomie of modern life makes people ill at ease, unhappy, depressed, and vulnerable. Without the ties we had in the past in villages and neighborhoods, people look for something else.

It's thought that people become traitors to their country because they feel slighted, passed over, unappreciated, and powerless. If some substantial percentage of the extreme right – those hefty people in red hats – are needy people who want to feel good about themselves and part of something bigger than they are, berating them will only make them stick together more closely.

I don’t think this is an intractable problem, if we recognize the emotions and human needs that lead people in that direction. Of course there are also the leaders, those who get their excitement, and make money, by controlling the rabble they’ve gathered. We generally focus on the leaders, instead of looking for ways to get the followers on another path. The conclusion of the article on “Gangs” in the Encyclopedia of Community links this phenomena to the dismantling of the welfare state:

Most urban political economists see the polarization of rich and poor to be a master trend of the global era. This polarization increases racial divisions both within the United States and between the United States and the nations of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. As this trend continues, issues of security become paramount, particularly when countries follow neo-liberal policies of dismantling their welfare states. The war on terror is one manifestation of the world's richest nations' obsessive concern for security; its domestic manifestations are gated communities and community policing. In this atmosphere, few observers believe the gang problem is likely to go away soon. Download the article in PDF.

A large percentage of so-called Evangelical Christians in the United States have become gang members, not unlike the gang Mark Twain described in Huckleberry Finn (1884):

“Now we'll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood.” Everybody was willing. So Tom gave out a sheet of paper that he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn't sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign of the band. And nobody that didn't belong to the band could use that mark, and if he did he must be sued, and if he done it again he must be killed. And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off the list with blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot, forever.

Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he got it out of his own head. He said, some of it, but the rest was out of pirate-books, and robber-books, and every gang that was high-toned had it.

It’s no surprise that this phenomenon arose from religious groupings. Bill McNeill wrote at the end of The Human Web:

Either the gap between cities and villages will somehow be bridged by renegotiating the terms of symbiosis, and/or differently constructed primary communities will arise to counteract the tangled anonymity of urban life. Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role. But communities of belief must somehow insulate themselves from unbelievers, and that introduces frictions, or active hostilities, into the cosmopolitan web. How then sustain the web and also make room for life-sustaining primary communities?

Educated, cosmopolitan people are often insensitive, ignorant of what most people’s lives are like and ignorant of how ignorant they (or we) are. This week I was chagrined, because I hadn’t thought of it myself, to read a piece about why many Americans read and watch media filled with conspiracy theories and lies. That kind of media is free. These folks can’t afford subscriptions to the New York Times or Foreign Affairs. They read and watch what’s readily available, and geared to their vocabulary and familiar points of reference. This made me grateful for the Guardian, which remains free online, but it too is designed for a more sophisticated reader than the average American. (What do I mean by sophisticated? I was talking to someone yesterday about cycling and before long we were referring to what we’d seen in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. I’m not the most widely traveled person around, but I have been to both those cities. That’s not a conversation I’d have over a beer in a small town in Missouri.)

Keep an eye on Redding, a city in northern California, which has become a hotbed of far-right and militia activities. It’s no surprise that it is the home of the Bethel megachurch. My youngest brother and his family live in Redding and Uncle Dean makes regular trips there.

The Shasta County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to allocate millions of taxpayer dollars to pay for seven new employees who will assist in the county’s switch to manual ballot tallying. But the man behind the switch is paying a large price, too. Conservative Supervisor Kevin Crye, who has perpetuated the claim that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election in favor of President Joe Biden, was served recall papers at the board meeting. In March, Shasta became the first county in California to pivot to a manual tally. The county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems ended in January, and after right-wing news outlets and commentators spread the falsehood that the machines were rigged, board members decided not to renew it; instead of replacing it with different machines, they opted for the controversial decision to count ballots by hand at great expense. Read more.

I became interested in the concept of community when I was a young environmental author. My editor handed me a copy of Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place. All these years later, I’m at work on a new version of that classic, influential book on third places. I’m now convinced that community – and especially third places – are the key to a sustainable future and to an improved political climate. Now I need to figure out if there’s a way to sit down for a conversation with Uncle Dean. Maybe we can find a diner.