Atomic Nerds

It’s the early part of the Republican field sorting itself out, which means time to pander to the heartland, which means time for the almost entirely coastal and urban-dwelling members of the media to treat this activity and the heartland itself as an excursion to an alien planet, populated by dangerously exotic natives.

Religion becomes a particular sore point, because it is both a slice of the country a candidate- even a Democratic candidate- must at least not overtly horrify, and something that media seems to find extremely puzzling. (I find THIS extremely puzzling- most Americans grow up either religious or around the religious, yet journalists often act as though overt religiosity were not just embarrassing or wrong but actually foreign.)

Now, I’m not one that thinks the religion or lack thereof of candidates is a private thing that it’s simply gauche for the media to question or interrogate; religious and philosophical beliefs often form the bedrock on which a person’s ethical structure is founded, not to mention a fair amount of worldview and what one thinks of the basic structure of the world. It can be tribalistic or inclusive, and it absolutely affects what kinds of actions a candidate may or may not take. (Though not nearly as predictive as their past actions are.) I just wish the media were up to doing it with some degree of literacy or understanding both of the religion they’re talking about, the subcultures within it, and the various interactions between them. There’s rarely an insider’s understanding of the various power dynamics and actual degrees of influence; a very good litmus test is whether someone refers to Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist as an example of Southern Baptists, when Westboro is affiliated with no Baptist convention (Phelps was kicked out decades ago for advising a parishioner to beat his wife) and is in fact something much more like a one-family charismatic cult than it is any kind of Christian sect.

Michelle Bachmann seems to be drawing a great deal of this mix of fear and loathing. I don’t like her at all, I like her husband even less, and her religious outlook is at least mixed up in some of the reasons I find her problematic- but I also find her a fairly garden-variety* sort of Christian according to what I know of American Christians. I see constant darkly muttered references to how the Bachmanns are from some sort of terrifying theocratic sect- and see the word “Dominionist” tossed around a lot- but so far as I can tell she’s not particularly distinctive among serious Lutherans, which aren’t exactly a radical fringe group.

Yes, you can point to people who are or were involved with scary substrains of Christian thought, including Dominionists, as “influences”, but if you combed my bookshelf of everything I’ve ever read that I thought was important and influenced me in some way you could probably come up with a lot of fairly scary things- and this is true for anyone who has ever given any sort of serious thought to anything in their entire lives, especially when dealing with large cultural and philosophical issues. This, by the by, goes for politicians on the left, too- I don’t think Barack Obama is a scheming Alinskyite neo-Weatherman due to his past reading and associations, I think he’s an intellectually fairly shallow man who ran in the right circles and read the right things who is mainly scary because it strikes me the only thing he ever really gained deep understanding of, and competence with, is campaigning.

The fact of the matter is, to be literate within your culture or subculture, there are things you are more or less obligated to read or at least be influenced by just by exposure to those ideas. If you’re not part of that culture, it’s much more difficult to distinguish which references and exposures are part of bedrock, directed belief and which are more like part of the wallpaper. (If you want a good example, the tendency of fundamentalist Christians to be shocked and alarmed by the magic-and-demons aspects of fantasy literature and gaming geek culture is an excellent one.)

Cue Bachmann campaign actually having to explain to the media that a remark about “God getting our attention” about fiscal policy by sending natural disasters was a joke and not a serious attempt to suggest that God is striking us with plagues because he doesn’t like Ben Bernanke. This is what I mean by the tone-deafness of the media in reacting to religious people and religiosity- in a culture in which references to God and what God’s doing or wants are common, it’s very obviously a joke and the audience in the video reacts to it like one. Absent that familiarity, it’s apparently possible to react with unfeigned horror that Bachmann would suggest God is striking us down for our financial hubris.

This is, by the by, one of the reasons I’m very skeptical of the concept of “dog whistles”- which are supposedly code terms politicians and other speakers use to tell their base/shared culture something without alarming the media or unaffiliated people. There’s a difference between secret code language designed to subvert America and the concepts, metaphors, and worldview a speaker shares and may assume; while it may indeed be a shorthand reference for a belief or a point a naive audience would find horrifying, it’s not always, and I think it’s far more often done because that is the vocabulary and outlook the speaker has than because he or she is trying to put one over on the audience and signal his “real” audience what he or she will really do once in power.

The dissection of Bachmann’s “head and tail” comment regarding Obama’s military adventures in Libya as a metaphor for America’s role in warfare is a good example; it’s a quote from Deuteronomy, “The Lord will make you the head and not the tail”. People seem to be freaking out that this is a dogwhistle to Dominionists, because they use the phrase as a theological justification for why Christians have a God-given obligation to rule. Well yes, they do. However, it’s also really common for people in religious circles to use Biblical metaphors, period; I’ve seen serious theological debate, sometimes radical debate, over passages and lines I’ve also seen used as metaphors much as we use any common cultural metaphor to describe a situation. I don’t think it’s any more innately sinister than describing someone entering a difficult situation as “walking into Mordor”.

The interesting thing about dogwhistles is they almost always seem to be identified as such by anyone who is outside the culture/movement supposedly being dogwhistled. Just about every time I’ve seen the reverse- someone thinking a politician is speaking to them/their group in code- it almost always turns out to have been a case of wishful thinking. Most groups really aren’t satisfied with being supposedly represented by a leader who is completely unwilling to speak of their beliefs straightforwardly in public, even if they understand they are an unpopular minority.

If we want to know what Michele Bachmann, or any other politician, believes and how that would affect their governing, our best bet outside looking at their past actions is to ask them- and we’re not going to get anywhere particularly productive or particularly far if the people asking are so illiterate in their own line of questioning that they simply don’t know what they’re talking about. If they are unwilling to answer a straightforward question that isn’t starting off wrongheaded (the theological equivalent of asking an evolutionary biologist why, if humans evolved from primates, monkeys are still around), then that tells us something as well. Otherwise, the most that will be accomplished is further convincing Americans that don’t find Christian culture innately alarming that they are being talked to, and ruled by, a completely clueless self-deemed elite- which are already Bachmann campaign themes.

Don’t want to see her in office? Don’t show her to be right.

*Yes, I’m entirely aware of her views on gay people and evolution. Sadly they are not all *that* exceptional.

Posted current events, small gods |