Jesus and John Wayne critique

I'm reading Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.  The subtitle, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, is an indication where it's headed.  What it says is less surprising than everything it assumes:

• American patriotism is little more than chauvinism and racism.   
• The Cold War was irrational fear mongering by American politicians.
• Soviet Communists were not attempting to destroy our capitalist economy and system of government.
• The Vietnam war was American power mongering and not an obligation of membership in Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.
• The sexual revolution has been all progress and liberation.   
• Male assertiveness is evil.
• Jesus is, in reality, the painting by Warner Sallman and not a sun-burned Jewish carpenter who confronted and challenged the authorities of his culture.  
• Evangelical publishing and media power significantly counterbalance the left-wing bias of main-stream media.

If all this is true, then patriotism and advocacy for American democracy by Evangelicals might be dismissed as religious fear mongering.  Any awareness of how socialist ideology has fared over the past hundred years, makes it difficult to take seriously the redundant slander of anticommunism and defense of American polity.  

After about ninety pages, the book does seem worth reading.  I'm finding answers to questions I've had about Bill Gothard, Marabelle Morgan, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, Tim and Beverly LeHaye, Oliver North, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson et al.  I've met people over the years who have read these icons of the Religious Right or attended their seminars.  Kristin Kobes Du Mez has caught them in quotes she assumes are beyond the pale.  The impressions I had of Bill Gothard and James Dobson, notorious for their ideas about authority and hierarchy, were from conversations with people who tried to put their ideologies into practice.  What I knew about Marabelle Morgan was mostly from a Saturday-Night-Live parody. 

Gothard and Dobson argue or imply that God has ordained hierarchical organization in the family, in business management, government, and the church.  Gothard contends that resistance to authority is the root of most of our problems and that submission to the chain of command is the remedy.  It's difficult to accept the idea that submission to the authority vested in fathers, bosses, government officials, or pastors should be the general rule when bosses, officials, and church leaders are so frequently grotesque in their character flaws, and fathers are, often as not, completely missing from the families for which they are one way or another responsible.  Patriarchy is now an epithet.  Business managers who rule by intimidation are considered obsolete.  

Submission isn’t fashionable, especially for women.  “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the dirt." Says Mordred, the bastard son of King Arthur in Camelot.  Our current culture has abandoned traditional ideals.  As a general rule, there are no rules.  This, of course, has more than a century of philosophical precedent, or more explicitly, anti-philosophy by existentialists who argue that even if there is metaphysical formal order, we don't have access to it.  We're at the stage where people aren't willing to submit even to the biology of their bodies.

But in this context, it might be reasonable to also question the authority of revolutionaries whose nihilism has gone onto the fringe of credibility.  When might submission be reasonable or even beneficial?  Start with the cynical perspective: most of us have worked under the hierarchy of business organizations.  We notice that getting a good review depends on being useful to people with power.  Some people call that kissing ass; others call it ambition.  If you find out what the power players want and help them achieve their goals, you'll keep your job and maybe get promoted.  If this isn't submission, it is the equivalent.  By putting your own ideas and opinions on hold, you work according to somebody else's agenda.  I know a guy who changed his political perspective entirely to accommodate management when he took a job at Google.  He's doing very well in his career and compensation.

There are always limits to one's options at work or earlier in life.  Kids who learn to obey their parents generally do better in school.  A generation before James Dobson, Dr. Spock's Freudian ideas made parents fear giving their child a complex of some sort if they disciplined or inhibited him or her in any way.  The Boomer generation reared on the Freud/Spock ideology encountered reality when they came of age in the Vietnam era.  It can be argued that their revolt was morally justified.  Not so much their excesses of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  Dobson's ideas about setting limits and punishment for strong-willed defiance were not unreasonable in the 1960s and 70s.

But this thing about chains of command, starting with the father in the family and continuing at various stages of life, clangs against every modern shibboleth.  It is unreasonable to submit to all hierarchical authority.  I've had managers who told me to do irrational things just to assert their authority.  A lot of business processes and procedures are counterproductive.  Even when it wasn't good for my career, I have, often enough, worked outside the parameters defined by management.  Sometimes this has been productive, more productive than following the protocol.  Sometimes it has led to my termination, usually on good terms.  Managers could sometimes understand what I intended, even if somebody else was more useful to them.

Back in the 1970s, I dated a woman who had read Gothard and Dobson.  She was a veteran of the sexual revolution who had married then divorced another rebel.  They had a child, a boy, who was about six years old by the time I got interested.  She had found Jesus a refreshing alternative to the life she had been living.  She had a good job at the phone company, then a career in which women could advance.  She was also concerned, to say the least, about her son, partly because his father, it came to light, was bisexual.  After he left her, he was, as she indelicately put it, hustling dudes on the street.  Going to church was for her a different kind of liberation.  

She could sing and play the guitar.  She was a hit in many ways at the megachurch she attended.  We did some singing together even though my classical training alienated some of her friends, who suggested she might be compromising her native gift.  Her church was enforcing the chain-of-command ideology.  One of my friends called her minister The Great White Chief.  Everybody was compelled to participate in a home group where a delegate of the Chief or his minions supervised their lives.  All were expected to share their most intimate thoughts and submit to life coaching, actually to obey their spiritual director.  This didn't sit well with me, but I apparently passed review by her spiritual director, and she was pretty sexy.  I also liked her son, whom she had given a biblical name, Reuben. We got him a child's size violin and enrolled him in the Suzuki School.  Interestingly enough, I never had the feeling that she would be a submissive wife if things had gone that way.  After she met my parents, I remember my father's quip, "If you marry her, you'll likely have a tiger by the tail".

After a few starts and stops, our relationship fizzled.  She married another guy in her church.  Last time I saw her, she was pregnant and very happy.  Given her background of riotous living, she and her son didn't seem to have suffered any harm from the control freaks at her church. That kind of discipline and submission may have been an antidote to the ideology of the 1960s from which she was in retreat. 

Though mainline denominations of the church don't ascribe to any of Gothard's or Dobson's ideology, hierarchical management is the way things run.  A priest in the Episcopal Church told me his boss-Bishop required all priests and deacons in the diocese to answer email or text messages within thirty minutes.  Anybody who wanted to continue to work in this domain had to endorse the party line.  They knew what they must do and what they must leave undone.  At diocesan conventions this included adding their preferred pronouns to their name tags.  I used to write prayers of the people at the invitation of a woman who had ambitions beyond her status as a deacon.  She carefully edited my submissions and revised anything that wasn't politically correct.

Through a couple more chapters Kobes Du Mez rattles on about Phyllis Schlafly, Tim and Beverly LeHaye, Oliver North, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.  Southern Baptists participated in politics.  Isn't this a violation of the separation of church and state!  They used militaristic metaphors and patriarchal language about women in combat.  Phyllis Schlafly opposed feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment.  Despite her accomplishments as an attorney and her prominence on the speakers' circuit, she said her husband allowed her to fly to many events around the country.  They said Jimmy Carter, a brother Southern Baptist, caved to the Communists and flubbed the Iran hostage crisis.  When Southerners abandoned the Democrats in large numbers, they helped elect Reagan.  They hyped the Strategic Defense Initiative, which despite being missile defensive technology confirms their fascination with Reagan's cowboy-gunfighter mystique.  Add patriarchy to jingoism and racism, and you have Kobes Du Mez's profile of the Religious Right.  Despite the title of the book and a lot about patriarchy, we haven't yet read anything about John Wayne. We do get a litany of sexual escapades by televangelists.

Family values as advocated by the Religious Right are often maligned as a cover for patriarchy and homophobia.  Kobes Du Mez details collaborations by James Dobson, Presidents, and military brass, about family values, with a presumption that it will be questionable among right thinking people.  Currently more than 20 million children live in homes without the physical presence of a father.  It's easily verified that children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.  

For the past fifty years, Johnson era programs--the War on Poverty, the Great Society, Aid to Families with Dependent Children--have allocated trillions of dollars, in effect subsidizing dysfunctional behavior.  36 million people were living in poverty in 1964, and about 46.5 million live in poverty today. The poverty rate was 19 percent in 1964 and is about 15 percent now.  The War on Poverty has been as big a failure as the War on Drugs, and the later debacle is not unrelated to the former.  During this interval of history, the Religious Right has been advocating for family values.  Draw your own conclusions.

I quit reading this rant before any appearance of John Wayne.  Readers who persist evidently accept it’s contention that religion and politics are separate or independent cultural species.  I got interested in a book that documents the absurdity of this claim: Dominion; How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland.