Born of a virgin
It’s still true:
The Reformation may have decentralized the faith and brought it closer to the people, but it also meant by the late 20th century that any American huckster with a flashy suit, an expensive coif, a sonorous voice, and a black, Morocco-bound, gilt-edged, King James red-letter edition could define Christianity pretty much any damned way he pleased. And did. Who was to say he was wrong?
Certainly not Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Dana Milbank considers Johnson’s role in turning the House GOP caucus into a circus in an excerpt from “Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists and Dunces who Burned Down the House.” Johnson’s improbable rise was foretold by God, you know. God speaks to Johnson personally:
“I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.”
God, said Johnson, told him that “we’re coming to a Red Sea moment” and that Johnson needed to be prepared — to be Moses! Throughout the speakership battle, “the Lord kept telling me to wait,” Johnson recounted. “And it came to the end, and the Lord said, ‘Now, step forward.’” Johnson told them that “only God saw the path through the roiling sea.”
In Sleeper (1973), Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) is asked 200 years in the future to identify photos of people from his time. One could replace Billy Graham with Mike Johnson:
This is Billy Graham. He was very big in the religion business, you know. He knew God personally. Got him his complete wardrobe to go out on double dates together. It was a very big thing. They were romantically linked for awhile.
Johnson’s tenure is just as absurd and covers a period both tumultuous and damnably unproductive. What will future histotians will make of it?
Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.
You get the picture.
Donald Trump’s crank politics became a thing to emulate to get ahead in his Republican Party. David French at the Times suggests that Republicans’ and evangelicals’ taste for transgressiveness matching his has led to men like Mark “I’m a Black Nazi” Robinson being chosen by GOP primary voters as their candidate for governor in North Carolina by a 45-point margin over his nearest compretitor. It’s how you get a Marjorie Taylor Greene, or a Lauren Boebert, or a Matt Gaetz, French explains. Leaders change insitutions. “They make them into images of themselves.” And hoo-boy, did he ever.
“Republican voters knew [Robinson] was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man,” French writes.
Yes, that’s what they like about him. In their nihilism (or is it apocalypticism?), the MAGA cult is prepared to burn down the republic and install a dictator in a Bizarro version of Jesus overturning the money changers’ tables. It’s what Donald would do. (WWDD?)
French is concerned what it means for the trajectory of the Republican Party:
The yearslong elevation of figures like Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.
In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.
But it’s the linkage between Christianity and transgressive politics that French glosses over that should be disturbing to the vast majority of American Christians who’ve escaped the Trump contagion. Any day soon, MAGA could declare Trump born of a virgin and, as I beagn above, who is to call it blasphemy. Christianity seems no more able to police itself than the Republican Party.