Now go straight to hell
The Bible-toting white men in jackets, white shirts and ties along Wade Hampton Boulevard in Greenville, South Carolina were students from Bob Jones University. In the 1960s and early 1970s, they were not the only ones doing street evangelism.
Before Hyatt built its hotel at the corner of North Main and College St., the tag-team preachers stood on Saturdays screaming at passersby to repent or burn. When one shouted himself out, he’d sit down and the other would take over like performers at the auditorium during Monday night wrestling. The delivery was performance, if sincere.
Their world was a threatening place. Devil-occupied territory. They were patriots for Jesus fighting to retake territory. By now, readers recognize the paranoid style.
It is not surprising then that as Republicans coopted the religious right in the 1970s that the paranoid politics honed in the McCarthy era dovetailed so easily with the religious right’s natural suspicion and inate sense of persecution.
The Jones boys would approach and ask if you were a Christian. Saying yes was never enough. Wonderful, they’d say, exchanging sidelong glances. And where do you go to church? Now, it’s a game of 20 Questions: sniff out the sinner. Anyone from a church not on their approved list is against them. Alien. Enemy. Other.
When state Rep. Susan DeLemus began screaming at abortion rights protesters outside the New Hampshire State House on Thursday, the Republican lawmaker was not performing hysterical.
She did, however, borrow Oprah’s riff, pointing to individual protesters and screaming, “you’re a murderer, you’re a murderer, you’re a murderer,” etc.
The tag-team preachers are long gone. But an entire U.S. political party has adopted their style. The rest of us — any American not of their church — is an enemy. Alien. Enemy. Other.
The not-so-coded message is we all will be assimilated or be destroyed.
This tweet from a Republican attorney I spotted this morning carries that message forward.
Alien. Enemy. Other. Pedophiles. Terrorists. “Groomers.”
Where once the right assigned Other to communists and hippies and non-whites, now they’ve branded 70 percent of the country as Other. Now go straight to hell. How soon before some hysterical Real American steps forward to usher you in?
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