This is not a plea for understanding. I’ve seen too many of these since the last election. I am not interested in understanding in the sense that understanding connotes an empathy towards someone.
No, it’s a plea for comprehension. This nation is deeply divided, and I have the perception that many of you might not understand why and how badly it is divided because you only superficially comprehend those masses on the right with whom you disagree. You pay much attention to their self-proclaimed leaders, but you don’t know and rarely speak with anyone in the rank and file, and if you do, it’s rarely a resident of Jesusland.
Chances are, you, dear reader, are a leftist or leftish person who has absorbed from your mostly urban, secular culture the values and ideals of the Enlightenment. The United States was after all founded in that time, and is a reflection of those ideals, hopes, and dreams.
Chances are that you have a belief that all men are created equal. It says so, right there in our founding documents. That regardless of skin color and religious affiliation all are entitled to an equal opportunity for the “pursuit of happiness.”
For the last six months or so, I have lived in what I term Jesusland due to personal circumstances. You should know I was born and grew up here, a baptist. For the early part of my life I accepted what they believe here as gospel, and I choose the word carefully. I can feel it in my bones, vibrating darkly there over the many years since I last left this place because of its proud ignorance and patriotic provincialism and rabid anti-intellectualism.
I am here to tell you about the majority of people here and what they believe and why they support the current President fervently regardless of what he says and mostly regardless of what he does.
I’m not doing this to reassure you — because this will not do that. It should chill you to the bone.
Jesusland. I choose that term carefully too. Because unless you live here or spend a great deal of time here, you don’t understand the essential role a certain specific version of the Christian religion plays in this culture.
The little houses and farms all around where I live were often decorated with worn little Confederate flags, until the election of November 2016. As soon as it was clear that Trump had won, sometimes the day after, almost all of those flags were replaced, by a spontaneous impulse, with bright new American flags. In many of those yards a pre-printed sign was put up: “Thank You Jesus.”
The sense of relief and joy was quiet but overwhelming. It was as if a great cloud had been lifted from the spirits of the people here. Nearly all of them. Dissenters, and there are some, knew enough to keep very quiet. They had taken back their culture, and struck a mighty blow for their God, and did it against all predictions as underdogs in their desperate flight for the survival of their embattled culture.
I need to say that the Christianity of Jesusland pays lots and lots of attention to the words of Scripture. You read scripture everywhere. It is used to justify or comment on nearly everything. Pastors speak every Sunday (and often on other days of the week in revivals and the like) of the saying of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the New Testament.
I have read that testament cover to cover several times. And I can say to you that in almost every case the words quoted by the cultural leaders of Jesusland are very selective. They support a certain vision of culture. That vision is both bolstered by and a product of their particular version of Christianity.
That version is this: that not all races are created equal. And the genders and not equal. And cultures are not equal. God created all these different groups in a hierarchy. If he didn’t want a hierarchy he would have made everyone the same, right? And that clearly the white race is the superior one. This was the choice of their God, who also chose to make them, each individual resident of Jesusland, a member of that superior race. And that the male was created to be dominant over the female, and that any culture that truly follows the One True God is absolutely superior to any culture that does not.
That sounds racist and every other ist because it is. But except in very rare cases, every single resident here will insist that he or she is not, for example, a racist. No way, no how. How can they believe that? Because they believe this is God’s design, not theirs, and that they follow the words of scripture and believe in kindness and tolerance towards others and do not consider that any cruelty towards any other member of any other race, religion, or nationality is following the word of God as expressed in the New Testament.
But that is only part of the Bible, and not the largest part either.
Because, unstated except at Klan rallies and privately among friends is the important corollary, less visible but just as important as any amendment Squealer splotched in white paint on the wall of the barn: the words of scripture only apply so long as the occupants of the lower rungs of the God-given hierarchy know their place and stay in it.
They consider themselves not racist or sexist or anything else because they believe it’s all fine and good for black person, or a legal Mexican, or a woman, or even a Muslim to succeed in America; to make good money, to live in their own home, and to speak freely and enjoy religious freedom — so long as they know their place and stay in it.
So long as the status quo is not threatened, the leaders and followers here in Jesusland are tolerant and will pretend to believe and follow the ideals of the Enlightenment.
But like a friendly dog who will bare his teeth if you try to take the food bowl away while they are still hungry, they will fight you every step of the way if you threaten their concept of a God-designed hierarchy that places them at the top of it.
Chances are, dear leftist or leftish reader, that you don’t believe human races and cultures and even genders are arranged in a hierarchy, and that if they are, it’s certainly not a part of the structure of the universe made by a divine being but a situation created by man due to greed and fear.
Do you know that the Enlightenment concepts that shaped your view and that in which you place much of your hopes for the future of humanity is considered here in Jesusland (by those few that even know what the enlightenment is) to have been a disaster. It was the start of the great turning away from God and Jesus, a product of the Adversary (what they tend to call Satan now in some places.) It led to the most evil concept of all: Darwinian evolution. The poison that has infected America and the world and which they fight against every day. Because it is not Godly, it is not scriptural.
If you, my reader, happen to get off the Interstate and drive along the back roads of Jesusland you will notice the trailers, double wides, small houses in need of paint; sometimes with a withered confederate or American flag tied to a flagpole in the front yard. And you will think: it’s really economics that drives white Trump support in rural America. These people are economically distressed and if you solve that you will win them to your side.
Are they in need? Mostly, yes. But if you think for a moment that is more important to them than the pride they feel in their Jesus-based culture of whiteness and maleness, you are utterly wrong.
It’s important to realize that if you happen to speak with any residents here in the rural white country they call “flyover land”, they are not likely to share these attitudes with you, an outsider. And many of them can’t: they feel it in their bones but they are not articulate enough to say it if they were inclined to.
But the leaders here, the pastors and politicians, can read demographics and the people can feel it. The once unquestioned rule of the white male is declining. And even more terrifying, the once unquestioned rule of their particular brand of Christianity is declining visibly and precipitously. The legalization of abortion was the first huge blow to the Church by an increasingly secular America. And now marriage equality? Intolerable!
Here, the culture and the Church are not separate. They are one and the same. If one falls, they both fall.
The urban culture of this nation has mostly simply left religion in the dust except as a personal belief system not as a guide for the entire culture, and in this we are behind but in league with the rest of the developed world. However in Jesusland this is not tolerable either.
The white male dominance that founded America is fading. For many of you it can’t fade fast enough. Because deep down you feel that a society based on equality for everyone is a great shining goal. In other words, the elimination of all hierarchy in place of a level playing field.
You know who can’t stand that concept? Two groups. One is those that are currently at the top of the existing structure and who are determined to stay there; the wealthy status quo. But the other, much less visible, are the ones who belong to culturally favored groups but who are clinging to the bottom of the ladder desperately. Why would they not support the end of the structure that keeps them there you ask?
Because while you believe in the possibility of equality for all, they do not. To them — to the residents of Jesusland who live all around me, and who largely elected Trump and desperately support him — your ideal is a guaranteed disaster and ruin. Because God created these hierarchies and the choice is not to dismantle them — that's impossible — the only choice a culture, a religion, a race, a nationality, even a gender can make is whether they are on top or not.
You live in a world you see as backward, being dragged kicking and screaming towards the light. They live in the same world, but they see it as being wrecked and destroyed by the likes of you, dragged towards the darkness by idealistic Godless secular humanist concepts.
If there is a way to reconcile these two views, I can’t see it.
Until you realize that the hard core base of Trump voters cling to him desperately as the only hope they have seen in a long time to save their culture which is on the ropes, and without which they cannot conceive life as being worth living, you don’t really comprehend why this battle is much more difficult than you imagined it was.
Trump gets this. He deeply understands it. I don’t believe he cares about these people except as a power base. His concern is for the top of the status quo, not the bottom of it. But they don’t see it that way. They see him as their warrior king in the battle for God. If you laugh at that phrase, pause for a moment. Whether he is or not doesn’t matter. What matters is they believe it — because they are desperate. And their desperation has been fed and amped up for decades by the Republican ring-wing propaganda machine for votes and money.
Did you wonder why Trump’s denunciation of “political correctness” always got the second biggest cheers at this rallies (the top was “build that wall”)?
It’s because they see this whole attitude of equality as their enemy — they are in a war, and the former tolerance they showed is out the window now. People who insist they show respect for the cultures and races and countries and “feminazis” who threaten their God and their way of life are, to them, the same as traitors.
Safe in a bubble of liberal, urban culture; working diligently towards truth justice and freedom at last, it’s all too easy to try and understand this mortal struggle between two worlds as just an economic imbalance soluble by economic policies.
I was born here, left, and now I’m back. It’s much worse that it was before, and it was bad then. There are millions of these people, and they are rarely open to any new information that upsets their world view.
Do with this information what you may, I only offer it as a sincere vision of the truth on the ground as I see it in front of my eyes.
I have no “solution” except too press forward and brace for the inevitable violent resistance to come if they fail at the ballot box. The Muslim world got there a century before us with their secular modernization. You see where that has led.
I fear that when backed into a corner, a minority of the residents of Jesusland will be no more “enlightened” and accept the changes any better than Islamic fundamentalists have.