This Faith Holds Only One Doctrine: Chosenness and Conservatism
“A few banal fantasies float across white evangelicalism. It seldom tires of arguing over hell, substitutionary atonement, or biblical inerrancy, and it never misses an opportunity to judge women or non-heteronormative sexuality. But if my claim is that white evangelicalism (as a political project) is quite recent, then I’m also claiming these older ideas are utterly irrelevant to the vacuous believer wishing to argue now. This faith holds only one doctrine: an already forgiven and shameless choseness. They saw a story of Abraham’s blessing and coveted that story; in their hands the story mutated into a Christianized simulacrum cobbled together from election, gratuitous pretentiousness, and white settler colonialism. Every other doctrine is improvised and disposable.
Chosenness is its ultimate fantasy. Chosenness captures so many more specific doctrines—atonement, afterlife, perspicuity, predestination, the inability to lose one’s salvation, and so on. Chosenness means the believer has direct access to a divine knowledge that the unbeliever does not. Taking chosenness for its own use was a double-theft committed by its supersessionism and its racism. Theological chosenness bleeds into racial or national chosenness like a manifest destiny. The chosen believer rests assured she’s a member not only of the true faith but the correct lifestyle, the blessed nation, and so on. Every other doctrine can and will be shown disposable, and as white evangelicals drop the theological jargon and identify more directly with white nationalism or the alt-right, the true doctrinal core remains. Chosenness means never second-guessing your narcissism or cruelty.”
The above quote comes from an article that Tad Delay wrote a couple of years ago for The Bias Magazine which does a good job of summarizing his book, Against: What Does The White Evangelical Want? (Which has a pretty great cover btw!).
Tad’s observation here with regard to this notion of shame avoidance and chosenness (which really does appear to underlie much of the behavior we see in white evangelicalism) has come back to my mind recently due to the ever popular topic of free speech as well as the sad reality of the Supreme Court currently being poised to roll back women’s rights. If Tad is correct (and I think he is) that “theological chosenness bleeds into racial or national chosenness like a manifest destiny” then what we have here is a very clear and perfect connection between white conservative evangelical Christianity, conservative catholic theology, and Euro-American conservative political philosophy in the sense that all of these groups, with their analogous schools of thought, desire to return to what essentially amounts to monarchical, patriarchal, Christian theocracy.
I mean it’s not hard to imagine, especially when one considers the work and insights of political philosopher, Corey Robin, who traces the origins of conservative political thought to the 17th century and argues that it is based on the principal “that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.” In other words, conservative political philosophy is, despite what they might have you believe, NOT about liberty, limited government, resistance to change, or public virtue, it is a “mode of counterrevolutionary practice” to preserve hierarchy and power.
Additionally, another article I recently read in Religion Dispatches written by, Andrew L. Seidel, confirms my suspicions. Seidel writes:
“The Christian nationalists who put Trump into power and packed the high court won’t be satisfied until abortion and contraception are outlawed across the United States. Alito’s lip service in his draft opinion about returning these issues to the states and to the people is disingenuous. The court could have decided a case like this at virtually any time, but waited until after it had completely gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County (2013) and Brnovich (2020) and after it had upheld partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019). Those decisions protect the power of the conservative white Christian who would otherwise be subsumed in a demographic tide that would keep them out of office for good.
The measures empower the shrinking demographic that’s raging against the dying of its privilege—that wants to resurrect long dead bans on contraception (Griswold) and gay marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges). That wants to criminalize being gay (Lawrence v. Texas). Alito’s opinion reads like a hit list, with BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ people as the target. They will not stop until conservative white Christian men are a special, privileged class and everyone else sits in the second class cars. In short, they want a Christian nation.
And that’s why they’ve also targeted the separation of church and state.
That separation prevents religious extremists from realizing their Christian nationalist dream and has been a major roadblock for opponents of reproductive rights because it forces them to talk about abortion in unfamiliar and secular terms. Yet Alito’s draft opinion begins and ends with religion. Some will disagree because Alito phrases it as “morality,” but that’s the point: he’s forced to adopt euphemisms for imposing his conservative Christianity on us all.”
I honestly don’t think Seidel is off base here, his observation that the Supreme Court is weaponizing religious freedom as a means to concertize Christian supremacy is actually quite convincing to me. And at this point at least one question came to my mind and it’s one that philosopher, Adam Kotsko, has asked before with regard to racism/Nazism and free speech:
“[Nazism] is not just one opinion or view among others — it is an ideology whose *only* goal is violence and genocide….When confronted with someone who literally thinks blacks are subhuman and should be killed off en masse, what is the appropriate response?”
With regard to our discussion here we might rephrase the question a bit in this way: when confronted with someone who holds to a philosophy that, at root, suggests some people are inherently superior to others and, therefore, are also more deserving to rule economically and/or politically, what is the appropriate response? Isn’t this type of philosophy (again, one that postulates that some are chosen and some are not) also inherently violent? I think it certainly is. Kotsko’s point about those who might proudly voice their bigoted and archaic views in public not being susceptible to public shaming, but view it as a brave and noble act, is most likely correct. In fact Tad Delay’s psychoanalytic perspective seems to coincide with this:
“Those without eyes to see nor ears to hear must avoid reckoning with their sins. The subject is doing all she can to avoid shame, and that is why she enjoys the (comparably easier) state of anxiety and turmoil. It’s true of all human subjects, but white evangelicalism seems particularly adept at propping up shamelessness. Fantasy justifies shamelessness and moves them back toward the true goal, which is to be completely free of and indifferent to the trauma of the world.”
I have very little patience for any type of conservative political philosophy or theology that accepts hierarchy, inherited wealth, power, and supremacy leading to the destruction of one’s enemies to be axiomatic. If I happen find myself in a conversation with a conservative, political or religious, I will indeed waste little time cutting to the root of their philosophy/theology, exposing it for the violent, archaic ideology that it is, and condemning it. If conservatives want put their philosophical theology up for contention, well, may the best and most beautiful theological imagination win! It’s actually not much of a competition, though, because Conservative Christian imaginations are so thoroughly shaped by a patriarchal God-king in the sky that they, like Pilate in the Gospel of John, are baffled by Jesus’ ambivalence about being called a king. Conservatives cannot conceive that Jesus’ use of the phrase ‘Kingdom of God‘ was used to evoke an alternative order of things over and against the political content of the Roman Empire and its Caesar, the actual kingdom and king at the time. I propose that if Christians are “chosen” in ANY way it is that we are chosen to usher in the KIN-DOM of God (not the Kingdom of God) by continuously being in solidarity with the poor and oppressed. Theologian, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, says it this way in her book Mujerista Theology: “From a Christian perspective the goal of solidarity is to participate in the ongoing process of liberation through which we Christians become a significantly positive force in the unfolding of the kin-dom of God.”
Look, it honestly doesn’t take much imagination to imagine a kingdom with a king. We’ve been there and we’ve done that. We know quite well how all of that works. Let us instead take up the late David Graeber’s challenge to cultivate imagination, playfulness, and master the art of not being governed. THAT is what Christians are chosen to do.
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