Over four days in July (15 to 18), watching on television, I saw witnessing, confessing, and sharing inside a dystopian bubble called the Republican National Convention (RNC). In fact, I wondered whether I was watching a political convention or a Bible camp I attended as a teenager. The media surprisingly did not pick up on the contrived atmosphere as something drawn from the circles of fundamentalist Christianity. After all, fundamentalist Christians are the planners and leaders of the MAGA movement. Let me draw out some parallels.
As a teenager I attended a Bible camp because I was interested in religion and because I was naïve. I discovered immediately that in camp it is important, before you accept the savior, to confess your sins. Just like Bible camp, at the RNC the sins of America had to be recounted hundreds of times first before the savior could speak. In Bible camp, though, you have to make up sins because, usually, you do not actually have that many, but the drama of the occasion calls for effective exaggeration.
In the MAGA Republican universe, the sins of America are inflation, gas prices, crime, and immigration (mind you, there are no solutions offered), but as in Bible camp, the sins recounted at the RNC do not actually exist. In the US, inflation is down and for the last twelve months wages have increased at a higher rate than inflation. The average price of gas is now the same as it was in June 2011 ($3.73). The crime rate has fallen every year since Trump left office, and while immigration is indeed a hot topic of debate, the MAGA Republicans have gone out of their way to prevent action. MAGA senators hypocritically ensured that the issue of immigration could not be addressed in any effective or humane way until their savior arrives on the scene to conduct an especially inhumane mass deportation.
The MAGA crowd has not learned that when you say untrue things, two things happen. One is that you publicly lie, but the other is that you lie to yourself, which is a form of self-hatred. There is a Jesus saying about this that goes, “the measure you give is the measure you get.” The RNC indicated to me that the fundamentalist Christian agenda of self-hatred now defines the Republican Party.
At the RNC, as at Bible camp, sins are confessed to ensure that the savior is the necessary and only source of hope. Fundamentalism manipulates reality in this way: the aim is to paint ourselves into a dark corner (the darker the better) so that there is only one source of light. In the case of the RNC, the savior is not Jesus but the deputy who Jesus appointed. Unfortunately, when salvation is based on lies, then the savior can only be false. The Republican Party fundamentalists do not understand that the real trick of the Christian gospel is to tell the truth first, then you can see the savior in poverty, homelessness, and tragedy. If the savior is invoked on a set of lies, then most assuredly the false savior is seen in privilege, money, and tax cuts.
At Bible camp, the good news is that Jesus saves your soul, but being saved does not involve truth telling or changing your social habits. At the RNC, the savior finally arrived to give the good news, which at first blush was about unity. As in fundamentalism, unity was a code word for “you have to accept our version of the truth, then you can be in unity with us, but if you don’t accept our version of the truth, then you are our enemy.” And this is exactly what the savior announced. The savior had one or two throwaway lines about unity, then he smiled and began to demonize his opponents. He quickly resorted to name-calling in a desperate attempt to control the perception of reality. When I was in Bible camp many years ago, my need for the savior was also explained to me with images of my evil enemies, their hopeless causes, their devious names, and their distorted views. Somehow, I was smart enough then, and I think I am smart enough now, to know that the pot is calling the kettle black. After all, if I need enemies to believe in my cause, then maybe I need to look at my heart for a second time and reevaluate my cause.
At the RNC it was clear that the tellers of truth had to be masculine like John Wayne. I easily saw the Jesus and John Wayne theme playing out.[1] Then, to confirm my suspicions, Hulk Hogan took the stage. How is this politics, was my question? Suddenly I realized that it was not politics but Jesus camp. The truth comes out by yelling at the audience, by scaring the children into accepting simple answers, and by avoiding any adult level conversations that might include ambiguity. Neither in Bible camp nor at the RNC can you have difficult questions discussed with informed perspective because such discussions might cause a loss of faith.
In Bible camp, the experience is that since we have the truth, our job is to save the lost, but oddly we must first demonize them before we seek to save them. After all, if they are not lost to demons, then they do not need to be saved. They only need saving because they are under the control of demons.
Participants at the RNC talked about unity, but the unity was conceived with Bible camp terms. Since the RNC participants are veterans of Bible camps, they knew the formula by heart. First, you tell them how bad things are, then you tell them how deceiving the enemy is, and finally you offer them salvation, but who is them? When I was in Bible camp, I learned that them turned out to be my non-fundamentalist mom and dad, whom I loved. When I got home from Bible camp, the leader of the camp phoned me immediately to make sure my parents had not converted me back to the side of the enemy. It occurred to me that while Jesus might have said, “hate your parents,” it might not mean that your parents are evil since presumably the saying would apply to my parents hating their parents, too. How far down the trail can you go? What about my grandparents and great-grandparents? Should we all start hating each other or did Jesus mean something else? In this strange way, Bible camp taught me to think things out and not just believe. In my opinion, the delegates who attended the RNC should pause to consider the same thing.
The theme of the power and glory of the United States was on full display at the RNC, and this language is the imperial (Roman) language that fundamentalist churches use for God and Jesus. The trouble is that someone’s power is usually exercised at the expense of someone else’s tragedy, and someone’s glory is usually proclaimed at the expense of someone else’s right to exist. Among the many problems with empire, one is surely that it must justify itself with power and glory at the expense of countless others. I’m sure that if we asked Jesus whether the expense of power and glory is too high, he would say that it most certainly is.
Power and glory are absent from the parables and aphorisms of the historical Jesus. In fact, power and glory are lampooned in parables and aphorisms. This should cause us to hesitate and perhaps help us to conclude that when the good news is mixed in with imperial power and glory, the wrong gospel is proclaimed.
Jesus was not a billionaire but someone who spoke from poverty. The empire he spoke of was the empire of God, and that empire was for the poor. Jesus did not talk about getting even with people, and, so far as we can tell, knew the experience of stigmatized outcasts often portrayed as criminals. I believe Jesus knew the answer to crime was not more prisons, and I know that as a parabler, Jesus did not provide sure answers to any question.
Here is another Bible camp parallel. In camp, Jesus needs to be “our” Jesus, a Jesus we own, and not a Jesus who might disagree with us. When you own Jesus, you trap Jesus, and when you trap Jesus, you can no longer hear him. Jesus can only be our spitting image; he cannot be who he was. When Jesus is not who he was, his voice from poverty goes unnoticed; his cry of desolation is silenced, his weak status is altered; and his vision is mocked. At Bible camp, we thanked Jesus for saving us, but at the same time we forgot who he was.
At Bible camp, once you are born again, you have no further need of being a human being. You are free to consider common human decency as a weak trait because your new concern is to tell people how they are sinners in need of salvation. At Bible camp, I remember thinking that the world is a pretty big place. Surely not everyone except us is out to lunch!
What happens in the camp experience is that the world collapses to the size of a few acres, and inside that tiny world, everyone believes the same thing. It becomes permissible to deride the imaginary world of sinners out there, and it is practically admirable to cut the tie to your own humanity. Common human decency is forgotten, and narrow mindedness defines the limits of the world. You cannot really leave Bible camp because it’s a mentality, not a place. You cannot leave Bible camp; you have to escape it.
The eerie presence of Bible camp at the RNC was nowhere more evident when guests, attendees, and finally the savior himself showed an utter lack of common decency. The insults, the casual lies, the mocking of opponents, and the dismissal of reason limited the world to the convention walls. The connection of common citizenship was not just severed but lost.
When in a group it is easy to adopt the thinking of other members, but a truly spiritual group never loses touch with its common tie to all life. Common decency should prevent the loss of spirituality, but common decency, I learned as a teen, is lacking in Bible camps and apparently now also in the new Republican version of a political party.
[1] Kristin Kobes Du Mez was a Westar Wednesday guest in 2023. She gave a great presentation, and her book is Jesus and John Wayne (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020).
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