All American Jesus

Dear God! Indeed

What is happening with the GOP? Trump’s GOP is wackier than ever when it comes to religion. Can America survive it?

In February, in the great grim keep of the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense (WAR) convened one of his monthly prayer services and handed the lectern to Doug Wilson: a courtly, silver-bearded pastor from Moscow, Idaho, who would like, given a couple of centuries to work with, to repeal a woman’s right to vote, recriminalize homosexuality, and gently reopen the closed case of slavery. Pete Hegseth, the former weekend cable host who now commands the largest military on earth, listened from the congregation. He worships at Wilson’s new Washington church. He is, in the argot of the movement, a sheep of the fold.

There was a time, and it was not long ago, when a scene like this would have detonated a career by lunchtime. That time has closed. This is the new social fact of American power: the fringe has been fitted for a decent suit and seated at the best table, and everyone at the table is pretending they always dressed this way.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who charted this country in “Jesus and John Wayne,” will tell you that a decade ago Wilson’s program lived in quarantine at the far edge of the evangelical world, the stuff of blogs and bunkers. Nothing about the program has softened since. What has changed is the seating chart. Proximity, in Trump’s Washington, is the game, and Wilson has it. He is at pains to say he stays in his lane, ventures no opinion on the Strait of Hormuz, holds no clearance, merely keeps a blog the Defense Secretary may happen to read and trades the occasional cordial text. It is the serene humility of a man who no longer has to ask for anything, because the building has already come to him.

Out in the provinces, the cause has produced its own flamboyant leading man, and he is a genuine original. Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, is a former Marine, a martial-arts black belt, and the survivor of a childhood so operatic it makes Dickens read like a claims adjuster. At three, he says, a stepfather marched him through a voodoo rite involving a decapitated cat. At seven, he shot a man dead in Mississippi, a killing that has left no fingerprint in any police file. As an adult he founded a ministry, liberated (he says) forty-five thousand souls from captivity, phoned in an airstrike that vaporized seventy ISIS fighters, and casts out demons, some by telephone, presumably on a very good plan. He brought his Dutch shepherd to the one debate he deigned to attend. Invited to deliver a closing statement, he prayed instead.

Doug Wilson | Google Images

Colorado, mercifully, will not have him; the state has not sent a Republican to the governor’s mansion since 2007, and Phil Weiser, the Democratic attorney general, is already measuring the drapes. But Marx is not the point, and neither, quite, is his coming defeat. He is the advance man. The gaudy, unmissable, telephone-exorcist trailer for a feature the serious people are quietly financing somewhere the cameras are not.

Because somewhere else is where the movement does its real, unglamorous labor, in the fluorescent municipal rooms where a country is actually rewired. In Louisiana, the legislature ordered the Ten Commandments hung in every public classroom, kindergarten through college. A lower court gagged on it; a three-judge panel pronounced it plainly unconstitutional. Then, in February, the full Fifth Circuit, that reliably devout bench, voted twelve to six to let the tablets go up anyway, reasoning with an admirably straight face that it was simply too soon to know whether a compulsory religious poster in a compulsory classroom might, conceivably, establish a religion. Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee with a taste for the grand gesture, wrote separately to anoint the law an affirmation of the nation’s highest and noblest traditions.

Texas, never a state to be out-sanctified, went bigger. In June its Board of Education adopted a required reading list that installs the Bible in front of all 5.5 million of the state’s public schoolchildren, portioned out by age like a prix fixe: Adam and Eve for the seniors, the Sermon on the Mount for the middle years, David and Goliath for the little ones. It sits atop Bluebonnet, the state’s scripture-scented curriculum, which Texas markets to districts at sixty dollars a head and which has already cost more than eight million to repair after someone noticed the sacred answer keys were pocked with over four thousand errors. (The Lord moves in mysterious ways. The Texas Education Agency merely moves in wrong ones.) Oklahoma’s schools chief, refusing to be upstaged, simply commanded a Bible into every classroom in the state.

Victor Marx | Reuters

This is the tell, and it deserves saying without the usual anesthetic of the on-the-other-hand. A party that spent a decade schooling its voters to despise expertise, distrust institutions, and mistake competence for a con has arrived, with a certain grim inevitability, at the terminus of the lesson. It now prizes the vivid over the credentialed and the anointed over the elected. It nominates the man who says he killed someone and it platforms the man who wants its daughters mute at the ballot box. The old Republican Party kept a velvet rope and a bouncer at the door. The rope is on the floor now. The room is full, and the room is loud.

Wilson, asked by NPR to describe the country after his side has won, produced the neatest summary anyone has managed. Church bells, yes. Minarets, no. The public space, he said, would belong to Christ.

The astonishing thing is not that he said it. It is that he said it from inside the house, and no one asked him to leave.

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Originally published at https://www.thepowellhousepress.com.