Just as with the two separate entities of the military-industrial complex, we have emerging in America a hard multi-sided faction of a religious-racial complex, with this rise of White Christian nationalism. We can’t understand the one without the other, as they join to form a new entity with strength synergized by the two wings of its dovetail.
I previously wrote about how lower-middle and lower class (White) persons in our culture are particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories and other pseudo-profound declarations, because of their superposition in society: they are part of the majority due to de facto White supremacy, but they are also subject to being made the butt of the class structure, called white trash and other epithets. This superposition creates a simultaneous superior and inferiority complex, which renders them more open to ideas that would assuage that inherent anxiety.
An analogous dynamic exists within Christianity, especially those strands that espouse a Manichaean view of a showdown between ultimate good and ultimate evil. By accepting a theological worldview where God is omnipotent but also equally beset by a similarly powerful opponent, Christians are able to adopt a cultural viewpoint where they can be dominant in society yet still fight against those they see as infringing or encroaching upon their territory. Their black/white compartmentalized bifurcation allows them to at once occupy all-powerful positioning while also holding others back to the point of vanquishment.
This explains how the right wing is able to attract people who are drawn to conspiracy theories, as well as the lower-middle and lower class of White Americans—these people see themselves as superior/powerful but at the same time susceptible to outside or underground forces seeking to usurp their position or innate rank. And in that sense it is utterly unnatural and goes against all sense of order. It is a perversion of Nature to them. But strikingly it is a perfect overlay of their otherwise inherent belief structure(s). It parallels and superimposes, because the sense is one of superposition. This vantage frees the person adopting it to persecute their perceived enemies without any moral qualms.
[R]eligion seems to be unique [in how] it provides people with ultimate meaning in life …, centered on what the individual perceives to be sacred[,] especially in a way that is nonveridical such that its truth claims or the person’s idiosyncratic meanings derived from them can carry the weight of absolute reality without being bound by the rules of evidence.1
This quote illustrates the danger of religion mixing with politics, as we have seen with the Maga movement and the bleeding over from QAnon (and now also “Dark Maga”). The religious dimensions make it so that the movement’s adherents take certain ideas as having the strength and validity of a religious claim, ideas that in the political realm are bound by the rules of evidence but in the religious domain are seen as being in a special category that is not tested against reality. These ideas, being classed as religious, are not subject to update, even in the face of disconfirming evidence.
The merging of the two disciplines corrupts one (religion) and corrodes both. Civil discourse cannot take place because certain ideas have attained to the status of religious belief. QAnon is particularly dangerous because it deliberately mixes the two domains into each other. Political concepts become ultra-stubborn, almost impossible to correct.
The problem with the admixture of church and state is that the church is too efficient/efficacious in instilling emotion-laden values. If the values instilled are that of disgust for outsiders, that really can’t be countered by other mechanisms in the community, especially if the church and the state are operating in tandem. There’s no other (equivalently efficient) mechanism to serve as a bulwark or check.
In fact, it seems that the two, due to their synergy, create a behemoth that threatens to steamroll society and leave cultural debris in its wake. It’s a wrecking ball in terms of emotional force. Religion is too personal—it’s too easy to stimulate.
The extremists know that, as long as the movement is under the auspices of the church, it becomes that much harder to discuss, that much harder to touch, because it is so easy to take criticism about the form or function of the church personally. Individual conversations would stop at the level of hurt or offense, and no meaningful discussion would be had. All the while, this viperous ideology continues marching on, deforming the Message, spoiling it but letting a residue of holiness attach to that misshapen ideal. If White is pure, all else must be cleansed—cleansed in the Blood. Blood and soil. Ashes to ashes, baby. Let’s roll. It all gets mixed together and it forms a new shape.
1 Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park, “Integrative Themes in the Current Science of the Psychology of Religion,” Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (2005), p. 8.