Gantry (noun): "...an overhead bridge-like structure supporting equipment such as a crane, signals, or cameras." - Wikipedia.
Gantry (as in Elmer Gantry): the surname of the protagonist in Elmer Gantry, a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis concerning a Methodist minister of the American Midwest during the 1920's.
The threat of American white supremacist theocracy was pushed to the forefront of the consciousness of many people after the overturning of Roe V. Wade in June of this year. But the roots of the threat have existed for a rather long time, as seen in the teachings and activities of
Rousas Rushdoony,
Abraham Kuyper,
Gary North,
Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye,
George Grant (one of whose buddies is a certain contemporary religious musician named Michael Card), and others of like character. When seen from a historical perspective, 2022 is then simply the culmination of a long process. I find it natural to want to consider, or even to make, predictions regarding its ultimate success or failure. My personal prediction is that the white evangelical/Protestant supremacist experiment will eventually fail - not only in the United States, but elsewhere, in such places as Brazil under Bolsonaro for instance. (Here I find myself at odds with the predictions contained in books like
The Handmaid's Tale.) Why do I say this? Because according to the Good Book, white supremacist theocracy is evil in the sight of God, even the God Whom the white supremacists claim to worship. Therefore, the outworkings of damnation are already propagating through white evangelical America and through those elements of white evangelicalism that are aligned with the Global Far Right. The ultimate end state of white supremacist theocracy is therefore failure, regardless of the path taken to that ultimate end state - rather like the
result of a line integral taken over a conservative vector field. But let's see if we can explore and trace some possible paths for this failure, for these outworkings of damnation - not as wanna-be prophets, but as empiricists making educated guesses. As always, take these guesses with a grain of salt.
First, the theological perspective. As I have mentioned in previous posts (
here,
here, and
here, for instance), the American Religious Right has declared that the United States is in great need of a spiritual change, and that the proof of this need is America's tolerance of certain sins which the preachers from the Right hold up as being worse than all other sins. Therefore the American Religious Right has told all the rest of us that in order to save America from moral ruin, we must vote for "godly" politicians who will preserve America as a "Christian" nation by passing and enforcing "Christian" laws. My previous writings on this subject have stated my belief that the political strategy of the American Religious Right is the wrong approach to trying to create spiritual change in society, and that the New Testament proves this approach to be wrong. (Read the Epistle to the Galatians, for instance.) I have also mentioned that spiritual change is not the actual goal of the American Religious Right, but rather, economic, military, and political supremacy for one group of people at the expense of all the other people on earth.
So then it is natural to ask what actual spiritual change looks like according to the New Testament. Let's look first at what this change looks like on a personal level, as illustrated in Luke 19:1-10. This passage concerns Zacchaeus the Jewish tax-collector. A bit of backstory: by the time of this incident, the nation of Israel had long since been conquered by the Roman Empire. The custom of the Romans toward the subjects of their conquered territories was to delegate certain functions of the state to private contractors. Thus the collection of taxes in the Roman provinces was contracted to wealthy private citizens who bid for the right to serve as official tax collectors. These private individuals frequently cheated the people from whom taxes were collected, and got filthy rich in the process. Thus when we first encounter Zacchaeus, the Scripture notes that he was rich. The Scripture also says that he was a sinner. But by the end of Zacchaeus' encounter with Christ, the Lord said of him, "Today salvation has come to this house, becaus he, too, is a son of Abraham..." In other words, Zacchaeus had been converted from being a cheat and a rascal. How do we know that he had truly repented and believed? Because he gave back all the money he had taken by cheating. The spiritual change in Zacchaeus was seen in what he did as a result of his encounter with Christ. Spiritual change brings a change in the things people do and in the things they stop doing. And this change covers much more than just repenting of sexual sin. According to the Scriptures, God wants to deliver people from cheating, from greed, and from committing murder as well.
How then do societies experience this change? It happens as that change is propagated from one person to another. It starts with people who have experienced that change as a result of an encounter with Christ, and it is propagated as these people encounter others who can see the incarnation of Christ in the behavior of the people who have experienced spiritual change. In other words, the change is propagated through believers in Christ - servants of the New Testament - who practice what they preach. As that change spreads, it changes the society. But it does so by changing the people of the society. That spiritual change results in a change in what societies do and what they don't do. For an example of large groups of people choosing to stop doing things, we can look at Acts 19, where entire communities gave up practicing magic and praying to idols (thus provoking a bit of civil unrest from people who made money from making idol statues!). But for an example of large groups of people choosing to do things they had never done before, we can look at Acts 2 and Acts 4, in which rich people who became believers in Christ began to sell all their possessions and share them with the poor and with anyone who might have need. As Acts 4:32-36 says, "And the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and not one was saying that anything belonging to him was his own; but all things were common property to them...For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the prices of the things being sold and lay them at the apostles' feet; and they would be distributed to each, as any had need." However, these societal changes are but the result of an inward spiritual change. The spiritual change must come first.
When we look at the radical nature of this spiritual change, at its radical end point of producing communities of people who truly and practically and radically love their fellow human beings as they love themselves, we can easily see that the American Religious Right (and its evangelical offshoots in places like Brazil) have no interest in this kind of change. Indeed, if such change were to occur nowadays, the Right would accuse the instigators of such change of being "ssssocialistsssss!"
and would bitterly fight against them. Trying to produce spiritual change by political action and passing laws is completely backward from God's methods. The white American evangelical/Protestant church should know this, yet they continue to try to seize political power under the pretext of promoting godly laws. But the evidence of their own moral failure shows that they really don't care about morality or spirituality, but simply seek to use dirty tricks - including corrupting the Word of God - to obtain political, economic, and military supremacy. Because the real aim and goal of the American Religious Right is to turn religion into a tool of earthly secular empire, the New Testament declares that they are under a curse (Galatians 1:8-9). They are thus destined to fail.
Why this failure? Or, to put it another way, what are the ways in which this failure may propagate? To answer that question. let's zoom out from the spiritual to consider historical and literary perspectives. On its most basic big-picture level (even before we get to theology), those who want to use religion in any way as a tool of earthly empire are trying to get the rest of us to swallow a certain kind of belief. The tenets of this belief could be described as a "sales value proposition" served up to us by the missionaries of such a religion. What is the "
sales value proposition" which the white church has historically offered to the rest of the world? It can be summed up as follows:
- That we should believe in a god who has decreed that one group of people should rule and dominate the world, subjugating and/or dispossessing all other nations on earth because the favored nation is supposedly pure while all the rest of us are defective.
- That we should believe that when this supposedly favored nation proves by its deeds that it is no more righteous, no more pure, no better than any of the rest of us, it should receive all of the forgiving grace of its supposed "jesus" who dispenses that grace in the form of "Mulligans" for bad behavior (see this also) which serve much the same function as the indulgences which the Catholic Church used to dispense to wealthy penitents.
- That we should believe that the god whom the missionaries of the supposedly favored nation preach has decreed that all the rest of us should be punished forever for our imperfections, whether those perfections are real or only imagined by the members of the favored nation, and that this punishment should consist of enslavement and extermination of us by the members of the favored nation. No grace, no "mulligans" for us! Rather, zero-tolerance, three-strikes, let's-build-a-wall, etc.
- That it is supposedly the "Christian" duty of us who are not of the favored people to submit to such a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose god and his missionaries, and that we should not complain about or attempt to resist our lot in life.
Given the cultural invasion which we the nonwhite and non-Anglo peoples have experienced, and given the fact that this Kool-Aid was forced down the throats of many of us from childhood, it is understandable that many of us started out believing it. But now many, many of us are awakening from our enforced intoxication. How do the missionaries of the supposedly favored people think such a "sales value proposition" is viewed by us in this present day? You may as well offer to put a full toilet bowl (or chamber pot, for those who want to be more portable and old-fashioned) on each of our doorsteps! Who in his right mind would accept such a proposition?
In other words, sooner or later, people who have been victimized by religion used as a weapon of subjugation will reject that religion, or at least that presentation of religion. Consider a purely fictional example of this rejection, as seen in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. In the first book of the series, we see the use of a fictional religion to advance the political power of the Galactic Foundation - and we see how in this story, over a period of a hundred years, religion as a tool of empire ceases to be effective because the intended victims of the empire begin to see how religion is being used in the attempt to politically and economically subjugate them. This is a purely fictitious example, although Asimov himself admitted that he wrote the Foundation books "with a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon" who was a historian. Yet it has been repeatedly played out in real life, as seen in the loss of the political power of the Church during the Renaissance and the Reformation.
It is also seen in the novel
Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal. This novel describes how the Catholic Church in the Philippines began to lose its legitimacy due to its own corruption and oppression of the Philippine populace. This loss of legitimacy was a key factor in the Philippine war of independence that shattered imperial Spanish control of that country. Consider also the loss of legitimacy of the Catholic Church in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries, as Catholic clerics far too frequently sided with European oppressors against the Latin American poor. Some of this loss of legitimacy shows up in the writings of
Latin American novelists who used the literary device of "magic realism" in order to provide disturbing commentary on the role of the Church in the daily lives of poor people in Central and South America. Consider lastly the documented experiences of missionaries like Pearl S. Buck, whose exposure to the arrogant nationalism of many white missionaries in early 20th century China turned her off to American evangelicalism and led to her writing essays that were sharply critical of American and European missionary efforts in China. (As a result, she became so controversial that she earned the distinction of
having J. Edgar Hoover's FBI create a file on her!)
Let's zoom in a little more closely on China and India. Both nations were subjugated and ruthlessly exploited by Anglo-European power. Thus a "missionary door" was forcibly kicked open to both nations. Through that door many white missionaries streamed. What were their motives? It is sometimes impossible to say directly, yet there is much evidence that many of these missionaries were moved by a narcissistic desire to establish themselves as mini-popes, big shots over the only people on whom they had any power to force themselves. Thus they became shovers of things down other peoples' throats. Consider the example of Mr. Beaver in
Have We No Rights? by Mabel Williamson, as well as the literary example of
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. But even more, consider what George Orwell says in
The Road to Wigan Pier about the reasons why many poor British young men of the "lower upper class" enlisted in the British Foreign Service in the early 20th century. I suggest that perhaps some of these reasons carried over to those who volunteered for the mission field in those days. Given such "ministers of the Gospel", it is no wonder that the struggle for liberation from Anglo-European rule in both China and India was led by men who disavowed Christianity. It is also no surprise that now, in the 21st century, we see that those white missionary agencies which spent so much in labor and money in the previous centuries to establish missions in these countries have almost nothing to show for it. For these missionary endeavors were but the expression of the neurosis of the dominators in response to the alarms of their conscience concerning the treatment of the dominated.
China and India are but two examples of the way in which peoples who have been oppressed liberate themselves by building their own internal power - both culturally, educationally, and technologically - as they learn to successfully navigate the world of "
peer-polity interaction." Their example is being imitated by nations, communities, and forward-thinking individuals throughout the African continent and other historically nonwhite locales. These individuals are in the process of crafting their narrative according to their own calling and not the wishes of their would-be oppressors. Thus in their examination of the Scriptures, they have accurately seen a call to a
theology of liberation. One consequence of this will be the emergence of a world in which peoples and nations will have to be polite toward each other in order to live decently. In such a world, those who truly want to advance the Gospel will have to obey the dictum of James 3:13 - "Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom." But those who want to twist the Bible into a political tool of empire will find themselves increasingly thwarted, because the rest of the world will refuse to swallow any of that nonsense. And those who want to dominate their fellow human beings will find that they can do so only at unbearable cost to themselves.
