Christian Gang Members

Duncan:

[A] piece of religion in this country for a lot of people is a basic kind of ethnic tribalism. Most people aren't genuinely very religious and most of those who profess to be don't have any kind of sophisticated understanding of what their religion is supposed to be. They do know what team they play for, and that's important.

Right. See this local example from a few years ago:

Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read "Jesus Saves," she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: "I feel bad when kids in my class call me 'Jew boy.' I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever."

Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, "If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus."

Humans are social animals, but belonging to a tribe - otherwise known as being in a gang - is a basic unit of "society". It requires a higher level of abstract reasoning to consider yourself a member of a group that primarily includes people you don't know and who may look and behave in ways very different from you. 

Nationalism is a common way of conjuring this higher level of belonginess. In America, nationalism was made possible by the exclusion of blacks from the definition of "American."  Once that notion was undermined, whites started either turning away from nationalism or re-defined "the nation" using their own idiosyncratic measures. The rise of the Christian gang as a political force in America is the result of both of these reactions.  On one hand, white conservatives have to some extent become Christians first and Americans second. On the other, Christians have conflated Americanism and Christianity, and thereby imported the requirements of the bigoted form of the first - xenophobia, militarism, exceptionalism - into the second. To conservatives, they are the nation, and anyone who is "other" must be silent or be driven out.

Comments

[zenpundit]

"Nationalism is a common way of conjuring this higher level of belonginess. In America, nationalism was made possible by the exclusion of blacks from the definition of "American." Once that notion was undermined, whites started either turning away from nationalism or re-defined "the nation" using their own idiosyncratic measures"

Or perhaps the concerted ideological effort from the 70's to the 90's to scrub public education and higher education of any and all possible positive interpretation of American history helped put a serious dent in the cultivation of a higher abstract loyalty to the nation, once quaintly known as "patriotism".

People generally do not learn non-obvious abstractions they are not taught but easily gravitate to concretes they see in their immediate environment without being taught. Children, in particular, react to signals of disapproval even if they do not understand the nature of what is being discussed - particularly when the adults themselves are generally ignorant of history and the mechanics of constitutional government and cannot give them any kind of context.

I think we could draw a much straighter line from that than from any indirect negative reaction among whites to the civil rights era causing them to slowly reject America the nation-state.

[Mithras]

Hey zen-
"Or perhaps the concerted ideological effort from the 70's to the 90's to scrub public education and higher education of any and all possible positive interpretation of American history helped put a serious dent in the cultivation of a higher abstract loyalty to the nation, once quaintly known as 'patriotism'."

The notion that there was such an "ideological effort" is one of the arguments by the Right that some Americans were unpatriotic and thus not "real Americans" - a formulation we have with us to this day. I'm a child of the 70s, and I didn't see any evidence that such a program existed in my East Coast city, where you'd expect to find it. What I did see was parents sending their kids off to fight in Vietnam, American flag decals on a lot of people's cars, and guys in my all-white neighborhood attacking any black man who stepped foot in it.

"People generally do not learn non-obvious abstractions they are not taught but easily gravitate to concretes they see in their immediate environment without being taught."

I agree with that. But kids get most of their beliefs outside of school. One of my first jobs out of college in the 80s was with a large accounting firm. Three partners took me along to lunch one day and in the course of conversation the subject of how the hippies lost the Vietnam war came up. They were unanimous that they had. Where did these guys get such ideas? The "concretes in their immediate environment" when they were younger didn't communicate that America was unworthy of patriotism, but that they were part of the "silent majority" and the long-hairs were foolish at best and traitors at worst. Their beliefs were the result of the actual "ideological effort" of the Right.

Take another, more recent example. I went to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky last year. There was a voluble range safety officer who also acted as a kind of M.C. with a microphone. The way the shoot works is that people gather around to watch the exhibitors line up on the firing line and shoot for a fixed period of time, and then take a break, so the range officer is constantly talking to the crowd and the shooters. Same guy gave the morning prayer and lead the singing of the National Anthem before breakfast over the P.A., too. Many thousands of people attend this event over the course of three days. Mostly adults in the audience, but a lot of kids, too, of course. Almost 100% white. Some of the targets in the field were voting booths from the 2008 election. The range officer gave little speeches before each shooting period, and in several the message was that some people were trying to take away all of our rights, starting with our guns, and that the very act of shooting was one of political defiance to tyranny. Pelosi and Obama were prominently mentioned. He ended one sermon memorably by shouting, "Think of the people who want to take away your rights and FIRE!"

Now that is what I'd call "concretes they see in their immediate environment" for the people in attendance. And there is just nothing equivalent on the Left, and never has been.

[zenpundit]

"The notion that there was such an "ideological effort" is one of the arguments by the Right that some Americans were unpatriotic and thus not "real Americans" - a formulation we have with us to this day. I'm a child of the 70s, and I didn't see any evidence that such a program existed in my East Coast city, where you'd expect to find it. What I did see was parents sending their kids off to fight in Vietnam, American flag decals on a lot of people's cars, and guys in my all-white neighborhood attacking any black man who stepped foot in it. "

The two are not mutually exclusive, Mithras.

You can have working class racist whites attacking black men in Boston or Cicero in the same country where, say at Roberto Clemente High School in Chicago, FALN activists replaced the US flag with Puerto Rican flags and imposed a wacky curriculum and embezzled school funds. Or Yale eliminated Western civ requirements after a crowd led by Jesse Jackson chants "Hey, hey ho, ho Western civ has got to go"

The NEA Today, the trade mag of the NEA, recently featured a story of a Latina activist running a Hispanic Studies program in a High School that the state of AZ basically is trying to legislate out of existence. The teacher denied her program is anti-white or anti-American but the glossy pic shows her standing in a classroom decorated with Marxist propaganda, which leads one to question how closely she is adhering to her legal and ethical responsibilities of teaching controversial material to a captive audience of minors with some semblance of balance. She's not of course, she's indoctrinating and illegally using the school as a recruiting ground for her political causes.

BTW I've been a national delegate to the NEA twice and spent a considerable amount of time handling difficult union business. There's a definite need for the organization but some of the members are, in my view, political activists first and foremost, especially those from California's locals for whom 1968 never stopped.