American Taliban

The US Religious Right's Cultural Revolution

  

                                               

Until yesterday I hadn’t heard of the American ‘Christian Youtuber, author and prophetic voice’ Troy Black.  I didn’t know that he posts videos sharing ‘prophetic messages’ about Donald Trump.   One of these videos is devoted to the ‘banana visions’ – yes you read that correctly - that the Lord supposedly passed onto him. In one of these visions Black claims to have witnessed Trump sitting in the White House eating a banana. This was followed by subsequent visions in which he saw giant bananas standing upright with the peel coming off and a banana with the peel put back on.

To most British readers who ‘don’t do God’, as Alistair Campbell once put it, it’s easy to conclude that Black is a charlatan or a zealot, and he may well be both.   But there are a lot of people in the United States who take this kind of charlatanry very seriously, and for whom visions about the Holy Spirit and bananas are entirely plausible.  

These are the voices that Flannery O’Connor once captured so powerfully and wittily in her short stories and novels: the God-crazed Southern street preachers like Hazel Motes, for whom ‘faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.’ 

Listen closely to the likes of Troy Black and you can hear echoes of the New England clergyman Cotton Mather, of the Salem Witch Trials, of Jerry Falwell and Jim and Tammy Bakker. But these aren’t the lone prophets and backwoods moonshiners who step out of Flannery O’Connor’s books.

Nowadays, they are likely to be middle-class professionals; fervent to the point of fanatical, anti-modern and anti-liberal, politically well-organised and often well-connected; comfortable with money and new technologies, and intent on bringing religion back into the public square through TikTok, Youtube, and with the improbable assistance of Donald Trump.

To non-Christians – and quite a few Christians, for that matter - who regard Trump as closer to the demon world than the heavenly spheres, it may be difficult to accept the argument made by the authors of Trumpocalypse, that Trump is in fact ‘the End-Times president’ raised up by God to be ‘a fearless leader to guide America and the free world through a series of major crises as the biblical end-time narrative unfolds’.

Perhaps you can accept the apocalypse part, but how can Christians who fulminate against adultery, ‘immorality’ and promiscuity pin their political hopes on a sleazy sexual predator whose multiple affairs include a high-profile dalliance with a porn star? 

The answer isn’t as mysterious or as irrational as you might suppose. To the evangelical broadcaster Lance Wallnau, Trump is ‘God’s chaos candidate’ and ‘the wrecking ball to political correctness’.  Walnau, along with many evangelicals, has compared Trump to the Persian ruler King Cyrus, who liberated the Jews from Babylon, and described the former president as the ‘flawed vessel’ sent by God to realise his purposes.

These purposes include the establishment of the US embassy in Jerusalem – a crucial first step towards the End Times that was witnessed by 100 evangelical Christians, including former US Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.   

In other words, these Christians make their judgments on outcomes, rather than on the character of the person who delivers them. And last week, nearly two years after he ceased to become president, Trump gave the religious right a stunning victory in its long-running war against liberal America, when the Supreme Court overturned the 1972 Roe vs Wade decision by which the US Constitution protected the right of American women to choose whether to have an abortion.

The decision to return this right to the state level was the result of many decades of campaigning by the ‘pro-life’ movement, but it was made practically possible because Trump appointed three Supreme Court conservative justices, the last of whom was rammed through in defiance of precedent, at the tail-end of his calamitous presidency.

As a result, the Supreme Court was able to strike down a constitutional right that had endured for fifty years. To the religious right, this outcome was indeed manna from heaven and the perfect vindication of Trump’s ‘flawed’ presidency.  As Billy Graham’s son Franklin told Fox News:

 I’m just so thankful to President Trump and former Vice-President Pence [note the absence of ‘former’ President Trump] for the nomination of Conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and it’s the right decision.  When you think of over 60 million lives have been terminated since World War II, this is a genocide against the unborn.

This is an extremist view, and it is also a minority view.  Polls suggest that most Americans, by a clear majority, believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.  Yet a powerful, well-financed and well-organised conservative minority has been able to overturn a decision that affects the lives of millions of American women, with the help of the ‘flawed’ president who used evangelicals for his purposes just as they used him for God’s.

A Poisonous Victory

It’s difficult not to notice the tremendous irony of this outcome, in a country that once used the rights of women as a justification for the invasion and overthrow of the Taliban regime that is now back in power nearly two decades later. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, American women and doctors can potentially be tried for murder if they have abortions in some states but not in others, and even if they cross state lines to have one and return to their own states afterwards.

As red states implement so-called ‘trigger bans’ on abortion, and blue states rush to uphold the same right, America is split legalistically to an extent not known since the Civil Rights era.  Many critics of this decision have pointed out, the mostly low-income (and Black and Hispanic) women who have abortions will now be forced to have babies they may not want or be able to afford, or else they will be obliged to cross state lines or even have medically unsafe illegal abortions in the states where they live.

All this is possible, thanks to a Supreme Court that includes an alleged sexual harasser married to a far-right extremist, and a judge accused of participating in or witnessing sexual assaults who was appointed by a president accused of rape.

This is Trump’s gift to the religious right, and it may not be the last. The Supreme Court is already poised to give them more, with the full support of a Republican Party that has abandoned even the most basic notion of social consensus, preferring to use hot-button issues like abortion to prise open and destroy the milestone rights on which American liberal society has established itself since the sixties. 

Thus, the Bush appointee Clarence Thomas now proposes to revisit Supreme Court judgements on contraception rights, on same-sex marriage, and anti-sodomy laws, on the same grounds as the overturning of Roe vs. Wade – that such rights were not contemplated in the American constitution.

These ‘originalist’ conceptions of the constitution might also extend to desegregation – a development that a number of luminaries in the religious right once opposed – and that is the whole point.  Thanks to Trump, nothing is off the table.

The Supreme Court has in effect become a reactionary battering ram in the American right’s culture wars. A highly politicised religious minority that spans the evangelical Protestants, Christian ‘Dominionists’, white supremacists and Christian nationalists is attempting to subject America to a social counter-revolution that will take the country back somewhere between the 1950s and the seventeenth century.

In taking this high-handed and divisive decision, the justices have dealt a shattering blow to women’s rights and opened a fault line that runs through states and between them.  This should never have happened, and the fact that it has happened is both a testament to the organising ability of the religious right, and the weaknesses – and even the complacency – of the liberal society that is now being unravelled. 

Obviously, this decision must be fought at state and national level, and the outrage with which it has been greeted over the last week make it clear that it will be. For the time being, the people like Troy Black, who believe that the Holy Spirit has shown them visions of bananas, have won their victory. They see Roe vs. Wade as one battle in a long struggle to re-make America into the kind of society that, in terms of its attitudes to women and sexuality, would not be entirely familiar to the Taliban.

And those who wish to fight them - and defeat them - should recognise this agenda, and never make the mistake of underestimating them again.