Lately I’ve been meditating on the idea that today’s crop of right wing Christians are really quite the arrogant bunch. There’s nothing new in the thought; for all that humility is supposedly an important attribute of the prototypical Christian, it’s difficult to see it in the Evangelical.
Why do I say this? Well, I came to this not through direct observation, but while I was considering my own agnosticism, by which I mean that, when it comes to spirituality, or the divine, or religion, whichever term you prefer, I don’t know.
Does a Divinity, singular or plural, actually exist? I don’t know.
What’s it’s name? I don’t know.
What does it care for me? I don’t know.
What are its plans for, oh, anything? I don’t know.
It’s rather the catchphrase for me, as an agnostic. Maybe there’s a Divinity. Maybe there’s not. Maybe there is, but he doesn’t much care for me. I don’t know.
It even applies the other way. Does the Divinity want our society to be more just? I don’t know. In fact, maybe I shouldn’t ask.
And then I thought about the Evangelicals – this was during the campaign – and their painful certainty about how the world should be ordered, and that their God wants it that way. That God favors the United States (aka Manifest Destiny). That God ordained that Donald J. Trump, Father of Lies, should be President. That, in the 2004 campaign, George W. Bush had been selected by God to be President. (That didn’t end well at all for us, did it?)
One of the finest examples of this arrogance came through my email this morning, from the ever persistent Erick Erickson:
I am weary.
Truth cannot be what any campaign says it is. Truth must be true and Christians must have an obligation to the truth.
Yesterday, between the phone calls calling for me to be fired from radio and emails encouraging me to shove Omaha Steaks up my ass, die in a fire, and calling me a sissy who should die of cancer for the offense of telling people the truth, I had a Christian tell me that God’s will is for Donald Trump to win and the church to be purged of all the pretend Christians like me who did not really support him. This Christian truly believes that we are about to watch God perform a miracle and generate enough votes to shift the Electoral College to President Trump.
I ended the day with a Christian telling me there’s no way God could ever want Joe Biden as President because he’ll persecute the church so how dare I say if Biden gets elected it would be God’s will.
If you go through the various quotes of Erickson I’ve pulled over the years, it’s clear that he’s quite arrogant himself, between his views on abortion, how Trump’s Administration is part of God’s plan, and perhaps even his views on how the Democrats will destroy the economy.
But arrogance is not a uniform phenomenon. For different folks, it affects different facets of their beliefs with different magnitudes. Worse – much worse – arrogance decreases tolerance. The more certain a belief, the less tolerance there is for divergence. Stripped of context, this isn’t a bad thing or a good thing, it’s merely an observation of human behavior. For example, if the context is homeopathy, the belief that drinking water that was used to dilute a poisonous substance until it’s chemically indistinguishable from water will cure one of the same affliction, and the belief, based on extensive research, is that homeopathy is ineffective, then having little tolerance for those advocating using homeopathy to cure anything is a good arrogance, if perhaps a little grating.
But basing one’s arrogance on a Divinity for which there’s no evidence, on a Divinity whose plans, if any, are plainly marked as being mysterious?
Intuitively, it seems clear that the less plain evidence is apparent for supporting an arrogance, the stronger that arrogance must become simply to survive. It’s as if a mouse is gifted with a megaphone so that it may shout, I’m a monster! just to stop the mountain lion from eating it. And I think with Erickson, we’re seeing him caught in the grinding gears of arrogance. He has dared to be not quite so arrogant as those he has often written for. It is, in a sense, for the man who had the arrogance to write of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as he called those who loathed Trump the Liar, a comeuppance, even karma, as his fellow Evangelicals exhibit behavior that, truly, appears to be deranged to their fellow citizens.
But Erickson’s arrogance isn’t quite as strong as many of his fellows, and, in their intolerance, they’re grinding him up. He’s not exhibiting as strong an arrogance as they, and in their intolerant certainty, the upbraid him for his perceived lack of faith.
Am I arrogant? Some will yell yes! I think I’m only middlin’ arrogant, and I try to mitigate it by often asking myself about the foundations of my belief systems. I shan’t go into that topic here, though.
Now, I think Erickson is a little baffled, and it’s because he misses a bit of emotional logic here.
I’m weary of the self-imposed victimization of people who, when things don’t go their way, concoct conspiracies to avoid confronting problems. Four years ago it was Democrats who believed Russia stole the election. Today, Republicans believe voting machines did.
Joe Biden is President-Elect and too many people who rather play victim, cry, scream, and believe a whole lot of lies. We are more than a week away from the election and his lead keeps growing. Is there voter fraud? There’s always voter fraud. Is it enough to scrap the election? No. Why? Because Biden won overwhelmingly with lawful and legitimate votes.
Here’s the thing: the pastoral grifters and con-men, as well as the earnestly mistaken, who’ve been leading the Evangelicals, have spent years telling their congregations of Trump’s selection by God. Even now, with Biden the clear winner, we have Kenneth Copeland stoking the hatred and arrogance:
Erickson is missing this bit of logic: If Biden does win the Presidency, against all the prophecies of the huckster pastors who proclaimed Donald J. Trump a holy icon, then not only does it mean the pastors are wrong, but it means those congregations have been repudiated.
Repudiated by God.
And if you’re part of these congregations, that arrogance of which they’ve imbibed cannot permit such a thought. They tithed, they believed, they lived their lives by the canons promoted by their clerics, they promoted their faith, they may have even committed acts of dubious public morality, because cults sometimes require such acts in order to retain membership.
By promoting truth over their arrogance, Erickson threatens their position in society as the Chosen of God. For the arrogant, that prestige factor, even if it’s only self-perceived, is most important. For the humble, who know of their own ignorance, the selection of Biden to lead the nation, even if personally repugnant, doesn’t carry this emotional logic and weight.
Erickson should not be surprised. He has, after all, been promoting the far-right ideology for decades, and, judging from his emails, imbuing it with the fragrance of the Divine. To be puzzled now is a measure of just how far he’s bought into the mythology of a divine creature for which there is no objective evidence.
And that is arrogant.
