One of the things about writing a blog, as is the case with any regularly scheduled program of writing: some days you can't wait to sit down and start typing, and other days, you sit in front of your screen and think, "OK, now what?" And then, there are the weeks, like the past few, where a political writer has all sorts of options. Fox News. The Georgia grand jury. Jimmy Carter, speaking about Georgia. East Palestine. Ukraine. The SOTU address, speaking about Biden. MTG's plan for red and blue states to divorce, speaking of Congress.
I'd like to write about all of that. I will, in fact, write about at lease some of it next month. But I've been moved by two events to return to a subject I've written about a number of times, and yet it never gets old for me. Even though I may not have much in the way of new information to share about it.
I'm talking about evangelical Christianity, with which I had a long, difficult, and ultimately traumatic relationship in my young adulthood. For me, part of the trauma was the feeling that being "born again" had been actually a kind of "failure to launch" into an adulthood, one that I carried within my family as a kind of source of shame, even though there was a profound benefit to that failure: my marriage, my new family, and career choices that I could only have dreamed about when I was younger. It's why I don't regret at all the trajectory of my life. On the other hand, having had my development "sidetracked" the way it was made me feel like I was unique, and not in a particularly good way.
And then, I read this.
I have always been an admirer of Kirsten Powers' work. I believe that, among political commentators, that she is truly and consistently fair and balanced. I think that she comes as close as it is possible to being a "centrist" in a world where centrism has been hard to find and therefore harder than ever to define. Which is why I appreciated her humility and candor in sharing by way of Substack her experience with born-again Christianity, and her difficult separation from it.
For me, it was especially bracing to read her description of her struggle to regain her sense of personal agency after she left the evangelical world. As I told her in my comment on her post, this was the breaking point for me with that world, twelve years into it. I finally realized, during what was for me one very bleak December, when I was in danger of becoming unemployed, with no immediate career prospects, very little in the bank, and two very frustrated parents who were wondering when I was going to put life together, what the problem was.
And that was the point when I figured out what the problem was.
Evangelical Christianity, boiled down to its functional essence, has something in common with the political world to which, in the U.S., it is now joined at the hip. Unlike the Gospel it supposedly preaches, it is not a world in which the greatest virtue is humility and the worst sin is pride. Indeed, on a brass-tacks basis, it is 180 degrees away from that Gospel. Evangelical Christianity is about power. Not in any democratic sense. Not even in the sense of power for all evangelicals. It is about power for a few wealthy, well-connected members of the clergy, over their congregants, their congregations, and the Constitution they pretend to defend.
And to get there, they play mind-control games with their followers, by teaching them to doubt their simplest impulses and inclinations, and to see any form of failure in their personal lives as a reflection of some sort of secret "sin" that must be flushed out. And, of course, that flushing out must be done under the supervision of some supposedly more mature, more "enlightened" person or program, in return for your providing a hefty portion of your disposable income to the "enlightened."
Ultimately, this leads the poor suckers who fall under the spell of the "enlightened" to question all of life's decisions. Even the most basic ones, like taking a specific job, moving to a certain city, dating a certain person. And I was absolutely there, with a sense of self-esteem so low I would have to reach a thousand miles down to touch the top of it.
I had, in short, completely lost my sense of self-agency. And that December, I finally realized it. What G-d has really given each of us, in the form of a soul, and a body with various abilities, is a kind of ship. We are, in some sense, limited by the ship's limitations. But it's otherwise up to us to be the captain of it.
That's what Kirsten Powers had to re-learn, and that is also what I had to re-learn as well.
But here's the larger point: I stated a moment ago that evangelical Christianity and politics are joined at the hip. I should have been more specific. Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, with which it shares an obsession with control, are joined at the hip. That has been true for decades. But it has never been more dangerous than now, when political conservatism has shifted from being a philosophy to being a fifth column.
At the same time, conservatives of both the secular and spiritual variety are recognizing that, having won victories with the Greatest Generation and Boomers, they are losing the battle with the generations that follow. Take, for example, the "He Gets Us" Super Bowl ads that provided the jumping-off point for Ms. Powers' post. As you can read about here, these ads, which are framed to make Jesus sound like some sort of latter-day hippie (gee, haven't we tried this before, too?), are in fact bought and paid for by some of the most powerful conservatives infecting our politics.
I say "infected," because these people, far from doing G-d's will, work actively to subvert that will in a variety of ways, whether it involved crippling the IRS to ensure it won't look too closely into the finances of megachurches, or preventing those who have suffered from abuse by priests (which probably included at least one member of my family) from coming forward to seek justice. As the latter point indicates, the problem is by no means limited to Christianity of the evangelical variety.
But the "He Gets Us" campaign exists for a reason: it is addressing the uprising by young people against the authoritarian theocracy that all of us have allowed to spring up in our midst. You need look no further than this to see what I'm talking about.*
If we all heed the words of Jinger Duggar, and many others like her, we may all yet find ourselves freed from the power and the glory of evangelical conservatism by the young and the restless who have learned to see through its false promises and its greater lust for a secular kingdom rather than a spiritual one. Democracy can only survive if each citizen reclaims the helm of his, her, or their personal ship. Ms. Powers and I have reclaimed ours. I hope and pray that you reclaim yours.
*Full disclosure: the Times article to which I have linked here references both Bill Gothard and Brian McLaren. I went to one of Mr. Gothard's seminars, an experience that contributed mightily to my loss of self-agency. As for Mr. McLaren, I had the good fortune to meet him later on, an experience that helped me to regain it.
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