It’s no mystery that extreme political polarization has coincided with the rise of the Christian Right and its Christian Nationalist agenda.
The Bible offers a polarized worldview: God’s side is good and true; the other side is evil and wrong. Biblical worldview was formulated thousands of years ago in the desert sands by a warlike and ambitious nomadic tribe and is grounded in their tribal God’s like and dislikes — who’s great in God’s kingdom and who’s not, what it takes to be commendable and what gets you in serious trouble, and on it goes, an exhaustive rule book of celestial surveillance and human compliance.
Christianity furthers Biblical polarization.
Us and Them.
Sheep and goats.
Wheat and weeds.
With us or against us.
Children of God and children of the Devil.
Sons of God and the Sons of Perdition.
Saved and unsaved.
Born again and born in sin.
Spirit and “the flesh.”.
Redeemed and enslaved.
Righteous and unrighteous.
Taken and left behind.
And on it goes for a couple thousand Biblical pages.
Worldview creates culture — culture is worldview embedded in the minutiae of daily life – all the tangible and intangible institutions, norms, expectations, assumptions we rely on to define “reality” and keep things “normal.”
For the past five decades the Christian Right has been meticulously advancing, imposing, and enforcing their Biblical worldview on USA law, economics, and social life. The Christian Right movement began largely in response to Roe v. Wade, as prominent evangelical luminaries such as Jerry Falwell and Francis Shaefer led a counter-revolution against what they perceived to be a decline in social morality. The initiative encouraged evangelical Christians to become politically active and offered popular support and funding. The initial goal was to make Biblical worldview normative. The end game was Christian Nationalism – a cultural return to the USA’s beginnings as a “Christian nation.”
The end game is now within reach. Trump holding the Bible in front of St. John’s Church was the perfect iconic moment for the Christian Nationalist agenda. Pundits miss the point when they snicker about whether Trump knows what’s in the Bible. He doesn’t need to know – all he has to do is brandish the Bible, and the gesture says everything that needs to be said: “Bible – that’s who we are. We are here to divide and conquer. We are here to create winners and losers, us and them, sheep and goats, wheat and weeds. We do as the Bible does – we separate and polarize, we advance our worldview and agenda at the expense of yours, and we are not afraid to act like the Bible’s people of God and use force if we need to. We have God on our side, but just in case we also have guns.”
Lately, Texas and Florida have aggressively pushed the Christian Nationalist social agenda in open defiance of Constitutional rights such as voting, abortion, and gender equality. Texas has further introduced the Biblical enforcement technique of deputizing citizen vigilante enforcers. (For the Biblical version, check out the chilling story of Phineas in the list of Bible verses at the end of this article.)
The ripening of the Christian Right into Christian Nationalism and its normalization in federal and state culture has become so normal that we don’t see its polarizing assumptions. I didn’t see them when I was a Christian — I just accepted them as the truth about how life is. Christianity is based on belief, and its Biblical worldview assumptions come with the belief package. If you’re a believer, it doesn’t occur to you to step aside and think about them. You don’t ask, “Is life really this way?” “Does life really need to be this way?” You don’t question if we’re better off for being divided up into Biblical categories of who’s in and who’s out.
Biblical worldview and its package of polarizing assumptions have been operating in western culture for millennia – little wonder, then, that history keeps replaying the same old same old. More division. More us and them. More I got the truth and you don’t. More draw a line in the sand and dare you to cross it. More enemies. More war.
You’d think we’d be sick of it and ready for something new, but no — Biblical worldview evokes nostalgia and stokes rage – sad and mad that things aren’t good like they used to be. Belief in that worldview keeps us small and stupid — makes sure we never grow up, that the cultures of our societies and enterprises never get past the psychological maturity and emotional intelligence of middle school.
There’s a popular misconception that Jesus was somehow not part of the ancient Biblical worldview — with its murderous God and blood-thirsty religion — that he was born into. I used to think that way when I was a Christian. All of us did – Christians still do – there’s this perception that the Christian God had been reformed somehow, that he was kinder and gentler. But now that I’m not a Christian, I don’t see through the lens of belief anymore, and instead see Jesus not as the negation of that worldview, religion, and God, but the epitome of them.
Gentle Jesus meek and mild? No way. Jesus was a rabbi in a religion that loved to quibble endlessly about every “jot and tittle” of religious practice, reducing devotion to its minutiae. Jesus went around provoking the religious establishment, picking fights. He was defiant, feisty. He was a master of the verbal smackdown. He prodded the crowds to choose sides. He lambasted the minutiae lovers, scolded his followers, berated his own mother, flipped off his own family. The angels descending in a heavenly chorus were wrong – this guy wasn’t about peace on earth, goodwill toward man – he came with a sword – he said so himself.
He came to divide.
He came to agitate civil war and family division.
He came to taunt the Roman Empire.
He came to win in the name of God.
And the religion that others founded in his name has carried on what he started.
No I’m not a utopian. No I don’t believe in world peace. No I don’t think there’s any chance at all I’ll ever see anything but dismal divisive Biblical worldview during my lifetime. I’m not trying to promote something better – I don’t think there is such a thing. It’s just that sometimes I get in a mood where I can’t help but wonder….
What would life be like if our outlook wasn’t so unthinkingly invested in polarization?
What if conflict and competition weren’t the dominant energies running the world?
What if we were willing to do the hard work of dealing with complexity and contradictions instead of storming and rampaging?
Would life really be all that boring, would the economy really tank, would all of us suddenly lose our good character if we didn’t have to always know who’s side you’re on, who’s got more money and bombs, who owns that land and those resources that the rest of us have to pay for?
And on and on… so many obvious questions we never ask.
We don’t because it would take species-wide brain surgery to get us to the point where we think to ask them and do the hard work of finding meaningful answers. Not going to happen. Not ever. We’ll go extinct first. A liberal arts education would help, but it won’t be enough, and besides who can afford it anyway?
I used to wonder how the Christian Right could be so supportive of a President who so obviously wasn’t Christian – at least not what I used to believe was a Christian. But then I understood how the Christian Right that began when I was a Christian has now devolved into the Christian Nationalism we thought was such a good idea back then. Now that the goal of “restoring” the USA to its intended status as a Christian nation is within reach, the drive to the prize is irresistible, so that political leaders and their news media start to act just like God acted in the Bible as he carried out his nationalist agenda. Authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, brutality, war, law and order, genocide… it’s all there in the Bible.
And once you get to that point, you’re “free” to create whatever Christian Nationalist “truth” you need to attain your final goal of imposing your political will on national culture. So now we’ve got truth the Biblical way – truth you believe into existence, assumed truth, unthinking truth, it’s-okay-to-believe-whatever-you-want truth. The Big Lie truth. QAnon truth. Fox News truth, Texas and Florida truth. “Freedom” truth.
It makes me sick truth.
Polarization is the rule of the day. It became normative thanks to the Christian Right and the Christian Nationalists. They didn’t make it up, they just made the Bible the new American political rulebook.
Sucks for the rest of us.
Just a few of thousands of examples:
Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Matthew 12:30 ESV
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Matthew 10:34-36 ESV
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Matthew 25:31-33 ESV
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-24 ESV
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left… Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his anger… And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Matthew 25:31-46 ESV
He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds[a] among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants[b] of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” Matthew 13:24-30 ESV
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44 ESV
Then an Israelite man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand 8 and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. … The Lord said to Moses, Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal. Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.” Numbers 25: 6-13 ESV
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