Monday, December 11, 2006
Christians are stupid, this time about Christmas cards
At my new job at the New York Civil Liberties Union, we receive Christmas cards in the mail from earnest believers in the rump heartland (possibly those in the 31% of the electorate who have totally cut and run from reality). Because we're pro-separation of church and state and therefore godless heathens--shit, I wish it were so, but one of my co-workers goes to Bible study--we need to be reminded of the inherently religious nature of December.
So we get letters. Some of these people don't even have the courage to sign their names or include a return address. They must be afraid of our vast powers of surveillance and the waterboarding we've threatened our enemies with. One woman, Connie Bixler of Branson West, MO, did identify herself and wrote an elaborate Hallmark treatise about how He sent His only Son to live a life like ours and what a miracle that is. Unfortunately the card in which these pithy maxims arrived had snowmen and frolicking children on it, just the sort of inoffensively nonsectarian imagery a well-meaning but ultimately damned blue-stater might mail out to friends and loved ones.
I wish I had the card here, because my real point is the tortuous syntax one apparently must wade into when one is speaking about profundities with a Christian inflection. It's appalling. No, it's sad. Because the American educational system shits out these ill-read people whose awareness of rhetoric, cadence and poetry is so polluted by the thundering contentlessness of their pastor that they really think they're emulating the way God...actually...talks.
What a miracle--that God would send his son, who is also himself, to live and die. Really, that's a big wow. And we are complicit in his death! (Much less than our complicity in, say, exporting computer monitors to Nigeria where the mercury leaks out and pollutes all the groundwater). What a miracle is the Lord! Our God is an awesome God! Things that are not only patently not true but which should be self-evident to those who have believed them for decades and who ought to be totally past them by now and into a more intermediate stage--these are perpetually held up and glorified as amazing fonts of continual revelatory power, when really they're just sentences that appear verbatim in a lot of hymns and sermons. Christians think that God's strangely elaborate form of self-immolation a) proves his love for us, b) is sufficiently interesting to exhilerate them for all time and c) commands trump status as an all-purpose rebuttal against reason, logic, Islam, empiricism and, frankly, imagination itself.
This has dual components, in written language and the spoken word. Listen to any televangelist and you hear these reliably tidal intonations. Nietzsche broke with Wagner because he felt Wagner's music was pure ornament, an elaborate hoax to disguise the lack of substance in these marathon operas. That's what it reminds me of. Preachers have to cloak the naked reality that they're recycling poorly-executed literature which, in order to inculcate in its gullible adherents the unquestioning and childlike faith which Jesus himself encouraged, must remain unalterably fixed in 18th century crypto-English. Christian discourse never gets around to saying anything because if you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and you question the need for priests or any learned group of spiritual intermediaries, Scripture must be totally accessible to all as well as totally closed and in no need of supplementary chatter. Since not even the primmest of scolds wants to be lectured on moral rectitude ALL the time, and we know the Christian Coalition considers helping the poor to be outside its purview, all we're left with is the circular contentlessness, with enough signifiers sprinkled in to keep up appearances. Only the signifiers aren't actually shibboleths in the sense of 'code words strung together to let believers know that a fellow believer is talking to them, so they should listen.' It's more that the pastors adopt a highly artificial tone of voice that, irrespective of the life lessons or admissions of having sex with dudes while on crystal, constructs the expectations of the faithful at the same time as it satisfies them.
Back to the Christmas cards. It's the same deal. These people aren't writing to evangelize, in the sense of genuinely hoping to strike a chord within the ACLU's wretched little heart, so that we recant and join the warmongers. They just want to perform a little exercise in striking back at one of the more visible and concrete manifestations of the vague, all-encompassing anti-Christian culture they perceive to be axing their way of life out from under them. Yeah, it's passive-aggressive. Given that most people only care what the neighbors think and imagine God to be the ultimate neighbor, one endowed with unlimited spying-from-behind-the-drapes, they're not only accruing a small spiritual chit, they're adopting the posture of the asshole neighbors who are always out there judging them. It's more fun to get to look down on someone for once, and if that someone happens to be a fleet of left-wing New York attorneys, so much the better.
So the vocabulary they help themselves to is this garbled nonsense. It's way too easy just to think that there's a lumpen mass of illiterate morons out there, and some of them have more time on their hands than you or me. But I bet a lot of them are in the upper middle class, college-educated people who read. They just feel obliged to express their irritation with "Happy Holidays" by underlining the holier terms pre-printed in the cards, and affixing a highly specific variety of claptrap that makes perfect sense to them because it replicates how speaking about God-related matters "ought to be." It's the necessary conduit of evangelical discourse, religiose without being the least bit pedagogical. And it's weirdly opaque. If there's one single thing to hate about the South, it's the attitude of "I'm going to offer you some sweet tea because you're a guest in my home and I believe in being a gracious host, but I'm going to give you every indication through tone of voice, body language and eye contact that I hate you and I'm quite confident you're going to hell." Except instead of offering us Mock Apple Pie with Cool Whip (p.s. the secret ingredient is apples), we get Christmas cards.
So we get letters. Some of these people don't even have the courage to sign their names or include a return address. They must be afraid of our vast powers of surveillance and the waterboarding we've threatened our enemies with. One woman, Connie Bixler of Branson West, MO, did identify herself and wrote an elaborate Hallmark treatise about how He sent His only Son to live a life like ours and what a miracle that is. Unfortunately the card in which these pithy maxims arrived had snowmen and frolicking children on it, just the sort of inoffensively nonsectarian imagery a well-meaning but ultimately damned blue-stater might mail out to friends and loved ones.
I wish I had the card here, because my real point is the tortuous syntax one apparently must wade into when one is speaking about profundities with a Christian inflection. It's appalling. No, it's sad. Because the American educational system shits out these ill-read people whose awareness of rhetoric, cadence and poetry is so polluted by the thundering contentlessness of their pastor that they really think they're emulating the way God...actually...talks.
What a miracle--that God would send his son, who is also himself, to live and die. Really, that's a big wow. And we are complicit in his death! (Much less than our complicity in, say, exporting computer monitors to Nigeria where the mercury leaks out and pollutes all the groundwater). What a miracle is the Lord! Our God is an awesome God! Things that are not only patently not true but which should be self-evident to those who have believed them for decades and who ought to be totally past them by now and into a more intermediate stage--these are perpetually held up and glorified as amazing fonts of continual revelatory power, when really they're just sentences that appear verbatim in a lot of hymns and sermons. Christians think that God's strangely elaborate form of self-immolation a) proves his love for us, b) is sufficiently interesting to exhilerate them for all time and c) commands trump status as an all-purpose rebuttal against reason, logic, Islam, empiricism and, frankly, imagination itself.
This has dual components, in written language and the spoken word. Listen to any televangelist and you hear these reliably tidal intonations. Nietzsche broke with Wagner because he felt Wagner's music was pure ornament, an elaborate hoax to disguise the lack of substance in these marathon operas. That's what it reminds me of. Preachers have to cloak the naked reality that they're recycling poorly-executed literature which, in order to inculcate in its gullible adherents the unquestioning and childlike faith which Jesus himself encouraged, must remain unalterably fixed in 18th century crypto-English. Christian discourse never gets around to saying anything because if you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and you question the need for priests or any learned group of spiritual intermediaries, Scripture must be totally accessible to all as well as totally closed and in no need of supplementary chatter. Since not even the primmest of scolds wants to be lectured on moral rectitude ALL the time, and we know the Christian Coalition considers helping the poor to be outside its purview, all we're left with is the circular contentlessness, with enough signifiers sprinkled in to keep up appearances. Only the signifiers aren't actually shibboleths in the sense of 'code words strung together to let believers know that a fellow believer is talking to them, so they should listen.' It's more that the pastors adopt a highly artificial tone of voice that, irrespective of the life lessons or admissions of having sex with dudes while on crystal, constructs the expectations of the faithful at the same time as it satisfies them.
Back to the Christmas cards. It's the same deal. These people aren't writing to evangelize, in the sense of genuinely hoping to strike a chord within the ACLU's wretched little heart, so that we recant and join the warmongers. They just want to perform a little exercise in striking back at one of the more visible and concrete manifestations of the vague, all-encompassing anti-Christian culture they perceive to be axing their way of life out from under them. Yeah, it's passive-aggressive. Given that most people only care what the neighbors think and imagine God to be the ultimate neighbor, one endowed with unlimited spying-from-behind-the-drapes, they're not only accruing a small spiritual chit, they're adopting the posture of the asshole neighbors who are always out there judging them. It's more fun to get to look down on someone for once, and if that someone happens to be a fleet of left-wing New York attorneys, so much the better.
So the vocabulary they help themselves to is this garbled nonsense. It's way too easy just to think that there's a lumpen mass of illiterate morons out there, and some of them have more time on their hands than you or me. But I bet a lot of them are in the upper middle class, college-educated people who read. They just feel obliged to express their irritation with "Happy Holidays" by underlining the holier terms pre-printed in the cards, and affixing a highly specific variety of claptrap that makes perfect sense to them because it replicates how speaking about God-related matters "ought to be." It's the necessary conduit of evangelical discourse, religiose without being the least bit pedagogical. And it's weirdly opaque. If there's one single thing to hate about the South, it's the attitude of "I'm going to offer you some sweet tea because you're a guest in my home and I believe in being a gracious host, but I'm going to give you every indication through tone of voice, body language and eye contact that I hate you and I'm quite confident you're going to hell." Except instead of offering us Mock Apple Pie with Cool Whip (p.s. the secret ingredient is apples), we get Christmas cards.
