Biblical Proportions

 

Lately I have been listening to lunatic preachers. To be exact though, lunatic is the wrong word. The preachers I have been listening to, like the lady who ululates like a desert war-lord, may well be mad but that is irrelevant to their preaching or to our reaction to it. This is because their behavior is culturally coded. Flair and theatricality are part and parcel of American religion. This has zero to do with sincerity or insincerity either. They may, for all I know, be insincere to the core but the supposed distinction between sincerity and faking it is a false one as Oscar Wilde pointed out long ago. Their sincerest thoughts may well be braided with grandiosity and gaudy display as a style. In this sense I judge You Tube preachers no differently than I do a Cardi B video. Thus, I must apologize to people like David Pakman who think children should not be exposed to fundamentalist preaching on the grounds that the spectacle of mental illness would distress them. I have a literary education not a scientific one and for that reason I can see things that STEM oriented people cannot. One of these things is the value of performativity and theater for anyone who would reveal what’s truly in their hearts. Wilde is my master here not literal minded Sam Harris types. 

What, however, is the play? What are the pro Trump preachers and prophets who writhe and moan for God to overthrow Biden and cast the Democrats into the pit of Gehenna actually selling? I think they are selling something specific. Indeed, they are selling something that on its face is quite attractive: they are selling total immersion in the divine and a radical doctrine of immanence. This is the same doctrine of immanence that Swiss theologian Karl Barth thought utterly inimical to the Gospel and destructive of any attempt to proclaim the word. Now I am usually the LAST person to agree with Dr. Barth on anything but on this matter I have to admit he had a point. The Christians who melded the Word of God with the demands of German imperialism and militarism betrayed the Gospel. The You Tube Trump preachers commit the EXACT same error and betray the Gospel in the EXACT same way. They make this mistake for the same reason too. They have learned to think of God only in world immanent categories. As such they expect, even demand, an intervention in mundane politics in the form of a monstrous and utterly pagan ‘kraken’. They are expecting a peripeteia of ‘Biblical proportions’ which will reverse the result of an election that has already been certified in the crucial states.

Why they do this this will take a bit of spelling out for the error is more sophisticated and more insidious than is sometimes assumed. Jewish hope and Christian hope are often cast in the mode of radical futurity but if this is so the prophets of Trump have not gotten the word. In spite of their end time orientation they live radically in the past. This is why there is a marked emphasis, sometimes an exclusive emphasis, on the Old Testament in their preaching. This past is NOT, as lazy critics might assume, 1950’s America. It is the past of the archetypes and symbols, the patterns of events and behavior encoded in the salvation story of the Jewish people. This is presented as a time of divine presence when God dwelt powerfully and uniquely with humanity. The Trump prophets long for a time when God spoke directly to man and intervened directly and powerfully in mundane affairs. They wish to dwell permanently in the light of miracle and the refulgent glow of divine presence. They wish to know and affirm that as Cyrus was then so Trump is now; that as Deborah was then so Paula White is now. Indeed, we hear that as Moredcai was to Haman so is General Flynn to Biden. Christians are not just the dull empirical individuals they are but also Esthers and Joshuas and Daniels.The Christian dwells in Bible times by dwelling in the archetype. He or she experience the parousia by stepping out of mundane time into sacred time though this sacred time is the Hebraic pre-Christian past. This was a time when there was a sacred nation, a spirit filled polity for the ultimate identification sought here is "as Israel was then America (and modern Israel!) is now". 

Of course, the archetype is by itself a shell, an empty vessel. The archetype must be filled with content from without. Here we find the nemesis of any religious standpoint founded on nostalgia for the golden age. The Biblical archetype can only be filled with content from the news and from the pettiest concerns of daily life. Some leader of today MUST be Joshua or Cyrus. Some villain MUST act the part of Haman. AOC or BLM MUST be the Jezebel of today for there must BE a Jezebel. The types do not change! And who fills these roles in our times? My political and cultural enemies and all my critics of course.This has the effect of suffusing the smallest grievance, the pettiest resentment with the significance of eternity. My political opponents are not simply disagreeing with me; they are manifesting the spirit of Jezebel. Every showdown is one between God and the Devil. There are no finite, mundane matters for this stance. No balancing of relative goods and evils in political judgment. Nor is there any historical perspective or reflective distance from the immediacy of events. Eternity is now. God is now. In a culture that lives in a never ending news cycle this can have only one result: the divine drama is played out directly in the news of the day as figures on Fox and CNN instantiate the heroes and villains of the Bible. The mention of quivers in a Nancy Pelosi speech sends the prophet to her King James concordance to look up every mention of arrows. News about the White house staff brings up the staff of Moses and the plagues of Egypt. Balaam's ass is, inevitably of course, the Democratic party. The prophet puns, riffs and free associates in a manner that can be strikingly poetic but is, from a theological standpoint, undisciplined and arbitrary. The Word is not converted from symbol to thought and understanding but dissolved back into the most immediate and imagistic of associations.                             

As scholars like Jung and Eliade demonstrated some time ago this desire to merge in the archetype suffuses the religious consciousness of the human race and I am not an enemy of anything that is human. If the 'prophetic word' could only be disciplined by charity I would hold my peace about it. Barth, however, showed why God and history cannot simply be identified in this way at least where Christianity is concerned. The God of history, immanent world history, is a God of war and a God of power as Simone Weil and William Blake both found ways of saying. The humility of the Gospels is alien to him and, it seems, to the prophets and preachers. This is because the sacred history of the Bible is mediated through a second sacred story: that of America. I have heard the prophets and enthusiasts read from the Bible AND from the Declaration of Independence without drawing the faintest distinction between them. This puts the God of love, the God of charity out of reach exactly as Barth warned. The ‘and also’ to Christian revelation becomes not the secondary but the dominant term in the binary. This ‘also’ is the worldly God of pride and might not the God who humbled himself on the cross. If we are to speak of ‘Daniels’ this is the idol the King of Babylon ordered the children of the Hebrews to worship. This is the Kaiser and this is Hitler. This is the reality of the German nation to which all reasonable Christians had to accommodate: a God of race and a God of War who belongs to the most primitive strata of revelation and who Jesus AND the Hebrew prophets both transcended. I have been and remain a ferocious critic of what I take to be certain polemical distortions in Barth’s theology but that is an argument between me and him. On this point I have to say he is a true prophet and a crucial theologian for our age.