The philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote: “the body becomes a useful force only if it is a productive body and a subjected body.”1 Foucault was describing society in economic and political terms, but he might as well been describing my Baptist upbringing.
While the transforming power of grace aimed to make us productive members of the Kingdom, its real efficacy was what it enabled us not to do; now we could be happily subjected. Because we believed in Original Sin, the theological idea that the fall of Adam and Eve2 in the garden meant everyone was born morally corrupt, we had no ability to behave ourselves. And that made us miserable.
At least that was the official party line. Nine year-old me felt much more motivated to avoid the torments of hell; a sense of existential meaninglessness wasn’t yet in my repertoire. Adults, though, apparently spent endless hours wringing their hands wondering why they could find no happiness like the joyfest taking place down the street at the Shangri-La that was First Baptist Church. We embraced this version of reality with utter seriousness.
Our lives would serve as shining examples (We were the light and salt of the world, after all. Jesus said so). People would be drawn to our happy and subjected selves and ask, nay demand, what our secret was. We are powerless to change ourselves, you are powerless to change yourself, we would reply. Only Jesus and faith can give you what you desire.
But Jesus never really seemed to hold up His end of the bargain. No one pounded on the door clamoring for salvation. Our subjected lives seemed to invite more ridicule than admiration. Even though we were admonished to never listen to AC/DC, America appeared gleefully satisfied on the Highway to Hell. Which was exactly what Jesus said would happen; we always seemed to gloss over that part.
Absent from politics since the disasters of Prohibition, Evangelicals decided in the 80s to give Jesus a hand. In looking for an issue to test their political clout, they rallied around restricting abortion access and overturning Roe v Wade. Abortion elicited powerful emotions; the issue as defined by Evangelicals played for the highest stakes, life and death for the unborn; it offered the highest level of righteous satisfaction with the lowest level of commitment. Once the child was born, the baby became the Mother’s problem.3 Eliciting Barney Frank’s famous quote, “Conservatives believe life begins at conception and ends at birth.”
Plenty of critics have described the rise of Evangelical political power around the issue of abortion. I grew up near Wichita, Kansas which quickly became the epicenter of Evangelical protests around abortion clinics. Watching from the inside, the rapidity at which protests moved from trying to persuade women to have their babies to harassment and condemnation and finally to violent rhetoric was as startling as it was dismaying. Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, became a demonic force in the Evangelical imagination He would eventually be assassinated in 2009, inside the church where he served as an usher. The news was met with something akin to solemn glee by anti-abortion coalitions.4
Abortion and other issues like gay marriage, the public funding of private, Christian education, and undocumented immigrants5 became the litmus tests of true faith. The call to love your neighbor as yourself was erased; no one was your neighbor; danger lurked around every corner. Evangelicals demolished in one frenzied generation everything I had been taught about Christianity and being subjected to the bonds of love, mercy, compassion, and justice. People I grew up respecting now consider me naive, weak, woke, and potentially dangerous to their supposed Christian nation-building.
The idea that we live in some unique historical moment is laughable. For centuries religions have grown frustrated when the tenets of their faith fail to bring about the ideal society they envision. When they finally decide that only by embracing the power of the state, by becoming the subjugators of those that disagree or dissent, they unwittingly initiate their own destruction. The only question becomes how much misery will be inflicted before their final demise. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, power abhors all freedom except the freedom to assert its control over others. At least in the church I grew up in, we all understood we were lost.
- Discipline and Punish
- But let’s be honest, Eve really ruined the party. We had that point driven home to us in a myriad of ways, but that discussion can happen another day
- Oddly not the Father’s, however. I will engage in any conversation about abortion that begins with agreeing a Father should be held legally responsible for the care of his child until age 18. Any takers, brothers and sisters? I didn’t think so.
- The surprise of some political analysts that Evangelicals would support Donald Trump, a person so antithetical to their professed beliefs, ignores the endless shoulder shrugging at every abhorrent act and policy by Evangelicals bent on their narrow agenda for the last forty years.
- The oddest move of all. If the Bible makes anything clear, any cruelty to strangers, foreigners, and outcasts will be met with the harshest judgement. Jesus never demanded the deportation of Samaritans or lepers.
