Sunday Scaries

The Religious Right: Method and Madness

And angels have been dispatched from Africa right now, Africa right now, from Africa right now, they’re coming here they’re coming here from Africa, angelic forces are coming from South America.  Inga, Hatta Anga Atta ..  I hear the sound of victory I hear the sound of victory … .

The American Political Freakshow tent is usually open only on Saturdays but once in a while, when the spirit moves us, we have a Sunday morning special.

Hallelujah!

To share the spirit, please enjoy this half-minute of Creole-Russian-Swahili-Italian glossolalia from MAGA spiritual guide Paula White, Prosperity Gospel Minister and former Trump White House staff.

Feel the POWER!

Now, catch your breath. Grab the smelling salts if you need them.

When you hear the word “evangelical” you probably think of wax museum figure Mike Pence and “Mother” shuttling to New York City from Indiana to seal the religious right’s deal with the libertine conman they would soon anoint as the reincarnation of the Biblical King Cyrus or the second coming of Jesus, Trump-ant.

But many freakier grifters from the long and fruitful Republican alliance with “God” inhabit our freak show tent. If you didn’t watch televangelist TV, you might never have heard of Paula White until TFG put her on the White House staff in charge of a “Faith and Opportunity” office. Other than letting a pack of modern-day Elmer Gantries wipe their shoes on the White House doormat, it’s not clear what the office accomplished.

White, a blond Florida preacher first hooked up with Trump sometime in his early Palm Beach days. White is way more simpatico with Donald than Pence ever was. She does speak in tongues, but so, one could argue, does TFG. Thrice married, she came with the added luster of connection to minor celebrity, so key to respect in Trumplandia. (She is now married to Jonathan Cain, frontman for the band Journey - “Don’t Stop Believin’!”).

Besides her identical matrimonial history, White also shared with MAGA Jesus a pretty casual attitude toward financial laws. No surprise, since she preaches a super-capitalist version of evangelicalism in which believers (having dispensed with that business in the Bible about getting a camel through the eye of a needle and rich people and heaven), hold that God rewards the righteous with money.

In 2007,  a Republican-led Senate committee investigated her for possibly fraudulent tex exemptions before losing interest. Richard W. Painter, chief ethics lawyer in President George W. Bush's White House, accused White of committing "fraud" and running a "Ponzi scheme.”as she continued as a televangelist to hawk religious items with claims they would provide spiritual and material benefits to buyers.

Earlier this year, a member of the band Journey accused her of fraudulently dipping into the band’s bank account. A letter from band member Neil Schon’s lawyer dated December 12, 2022, denied that White-Cain was “an authorized signatory” on Journey’s bank accounts. Schon called her a “National-Level Con Artist.” According to Schon’s spokesperson, the Cains were “obscuring information, even to the point of blocking Schon’s legitimate access to those accounts.” (White has reportedly complied with the request.)

Trump anointed White his personal spiritual advisor when he was persuaded - as all Republicans since the 1970s have been - that to get elected, he needed to harness the organizing power of the hard-right churches.  Not his crowd — but at least hanging with a svelte blonde was not as bad as the layings-on of hands, experiences the germaphobe endured for photo ops.

About her White House appointment, she preached: “Wherever I go, God rules. When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds. To say no to President Trump would be to say no to God.”

She vexed anti-abortionists in the Trump camp when during one particularly enthusiastic sermon, she brayed, in front of congregants and video cameras: “We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now. We declare that anything that’s been conceived in satanic wombs, that it will miscarry, it will not be able to carry forth any plan of destruction, any plan of harm.” 

The clip went viral, viewed more than 2.5 million times in the first days after it was posted.

President God’s support never wavered.

When Trump lost the election in 2020, White called on “angels from Africa … angels coming from South America!”  to overturn the will of the American people, occasionally lapsing into gibberish.

White’s glossolalia might in another time have suggested a certain unfitness for a White House position. Glossolalia is a symptom of schizophrenia. But a comprehensive study of the condition, published in Frontiers of Psychology in 2010, looked into whether religious speakers in tongues exhibited any connection to mental illness. “Heightened mentalizing activity may be a cornerstone of religious and spiritual cognition, which may be enhanced in individuals practicing glossolalia who experience direct access into the mental states of imaginary beings,” the researchers concluded. … “[But ]while the psychopathological model of glossolalia is a feature of schizophrenia, … culturally embedded glossolalia in religious settings can be present in the absence of profound psychopathology.”

If this not madness, then what is it? Well, watching Paula White, one gets a strong sense that it’s performative, calculated.

The Kimberly Guilfoyle vibe is impossible to miss.

For so many women in the echelons of Trumplandia, the path to power begins with a shriek in front of  a cheesy music and light show. Think of Lauren Boebert, shimmying in a skintight frock on the red white and blue CPAC set, channeling Eva Peron. (A weird New York Times compendium of recent TV expressions of  “female rage” suggests another explanation, I suppose.)

Christian MAGAs of both sexes do share what seems to be a mass psychopathological condition, though. Paranoia. White American Christians are demonstrably the most well-defended human beings on the planet right now. But the persecution fantasy of being early Christians tortured into sainthood by pagan Rome prevails.

Paula White complains about being under attack by demons. When Trump lost, she preached: “We are in a spiritual war right now. Every demonic force has aligned itself in a network against the purpose .. let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus!”

Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, has as her pinned Tweet:  “I’m going on record now: If they try to cancel Christianity, if they try to force me to apologize or recant my Faith, I will not bend, I will not waver, I will not break. On Christ the solid Rock I stand. And I’m proud to be an American.”

Huh? Who has ever asked her to recant her faith?

(Ellis, by the way, as a Trump attorney, pushed the stolen election lie hard, as the fresh face beside cadaverous Rudy Giuliani. She has since admitted in a Colorado disciplinary proceeding that she misrepresented evidence about the election at least 10 times. )

We mock these people, but there is something seriously terrifying about them and their movement.

Man-made climate change has heated the oceans at such a rapid rate that by 2050 we will have lost the jet stream and weather normalcy. Animals and plants are going extinct while we pig out on them and fossil fuels.

This has been known for decades.

And yet, the evangelical churches, organizing particles of right wing politics, continue to spew out zombie voters who eschew all responsibility. For them, whatever happens is up to spirit Father (not Mother, no way!) in the sky.

Pass our challenges over to God. Not our job.

Texas Republican Keith Self appeared on CNN after the latest gun massacre in his district. Asked whether gun control would be more effective than prayers for the victims and their families than prayers, he got belligerent. “Well, those are people that don't believe in an almighty god who has, who is absolutely in control of our lives.”

The religious right always uses “let God sort it out” to avoid doing the hard work of thinking about earthly problems, and how to negotiate solutions or even how to carry out that most basic responsibility in the Chrisian creed, loving thy neighbor.

Prominent MAGA Christian Mike Huckabee left his position as pastor of the nearly half a million-strong Arkansas Southern Baptists to run for governor.  Early in his time in office he refused to sign off on disaster relief legislation that would have prevented insurance companies from denying claims — because catastrophic weather events are referred to as "acts of God." Huckabee objected that the contracts "issue some kind of comment for the few who died and blame [God] for that and let that be the only time at which we offer His name in some kind of public setting."

What?

The politically active religious right is not nuts at all, though. It is the product of a deliberate and brilliant strategy. The unholy alliance between capitalists and churchgoers was born in the era of the racist south’s “segregation academies,” nominally religious tax exempt schools set up for white kids in the wake of Brown v Board of Education.

By the early 1970s, the IRS and the federal judiciary had caught up with this ruse. The IRS removed Bob Jones University’s tax exemption because the school didn’t admit blacks, and the game was up for everyone.

Republican strategists saw an opportunity to break the Denicratic Party’;s traditional hold on the South. A cabal of loafered DC schemers ventured down from Washington, met with Jerry Falwell Sr. and formed the Moral Majority. Using morality as a cover, they focused on feminism and abortion, but the racism at the heart of the alliance was manifest when Ronald Reagan in 1982 tried to intervene in support of Bob Jones’ racial policies. Outrage forced him to back down and the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 against Bob Jones. A few years later, Reagan appointed the lone dissenter in that case, William Rehnquist, to be chief justice.

The Moral Majority became one of the great fund-raising and political organizing operations of its time. As a movement, it spawned countless powerful, occult and sinister networks in Washington and American politics generality, all dedicated to obliterating the line between church/state, shoving Americans back to the cultural - and for women specifically, the medical - Stone Age. Modern iterations include Leonard Leo’s vast operations, The Family, the Center for National Policy.

But none of them could exist without the churches.

Across America this morning, political actors waving Bibles like Paula White will manipulate gullible, spiritually lonely people who find community on Sundays. Through these organizing cells, the religious right has created an army of political zombies who can be dispatched to the polls to vote against climate change mitigation, gun control and women’s health care.

Half a century has passed since the unholy political alliance that created the Moral Majority. A whole generation has endured their fragging of our society and politics. Now they’re banning books. Why? Because at some level, they know what Tom Paine wrote more than 200 years ago: One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

Despite their success, religion in American society is in decline. The nonreligious nones are the fastest growing group in surveys on religion. Seizing the Supreme Court via their strongman political “Jesus” was the bloody arm rising out of the ground at the end of the movie Carrie, the last horrifying grasp from something dead.

Here are some links to organizations and podcasts on the other side, where secular humanists can organize and resist. Tom Paine Society

Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Tom Paine Society

Unreasonable podcast

American Humanist Association

Article References

Paula White’s glossolalia spectacle was posted to Youtube and translated by “America’s Best Christian” Mrs Betty Bowers, alter ego of Canadian comedian Deven Green.

Frontiers in Psychology study on glossolalia

Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis censured

Weird Times roundup of TV female rage.

Racist roots of the religious right

Trump secretly mocks his relies supporters

Paula White calling on angels in Africa.