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there should be a muppet fighting game theyve got a big roster of characters to pull from. fraggle rock and dark crystal fighters expansion this shit writes itself
So many of the takes about lil nas x versus the Christian right betray how little people know or understand the christian right, it's approach to any cultural or intellectual creation of any kind, or its hatred of gay people and it would be incredibly embarrassing if it wasn't deeply fucking maddening and upsetting to see
#You're right I *don't* understand the Christian right#Especially the USian Christian right#But I'd genuinely appreciate if someone could explain how they think to me
great, @intpdreamer I assume you’re in earnest so I’m going to try and boil this down as simply as possible under the cut!
1) The Christian right’s hatred of gay people is very impersonal, but also highly politicized especially in the USA
If you’re looking at enemies to tilt at in the name of preserving family values, in turn in the name of forming a political coalition to actually lobby for changes to preserve the status quo of racial segregation, you have to invent them. Abortion was a good one, women’s rights & equality were also good (see: Phyllis Schlafly & her campaign, plus the Moral Majority). The latter campaign for the equal rights act was specifically linked to encouraging gayness in Schlafly’s incendiary campaign, and as this was at a time that the gay community was also politically organizing and growing louder, i.e. getting visible, it became inevitable that homosexuality became one of the two big pillars of the Christian right’s campaign for political influence and relevance.
They don’t hate gay people personally. They may even be nice to the gay people whom they know personally, for the most part (a good chunk of the Christian right is made up of people who genuinely, have not been exposed to other views or even to people outside their small little conservative bubble), if in a pitying, patronizing way that still insists on celibacy or conversion. It’s not personal: they genuinely don’t think of romantic love as something that all people are deserving of. You’re gay, you deserve love but not that kind of love. Community love is totally a substitute! Or maybe they did hate gay people, but then someone they knew came out and they realized actually gay people are kind of human too, not some abstract weird monster. So they’ll make an exception for this one nice gay person, especially if this gay person hates themselves enough and practices their arbitrary standards of celibacy and self-denial and they’ll take this person in. They may even be nice to the nice “practicing” gays too, but as long as they don’t want to join the church (therefore implicitly recognizing that they’re super sinful). Among these, you also get the die-hard true believers who actually legitimately do hate gay people, no exceptions. Its tough to say on which side of the divide people will fall and there are a lot of surprises in this angle.
The visible and politicized Christian right, which also includes the vast swathe of pastors because pastors are supposed to set the tone and standard for their churches i.e. also in a way teach them how to think about & interpret the world, don’t hate gay people personally either. Some of them may even do business with them on the sly if it benefits them! However, their job is to maintain the political coherence of their movement, keep their flocks in line and make sure authority is obeyed. If the gays can be sent up as a sacrifice to maintain group coherence, so be it. Like the other group, there are true believers too - many true believers. But its easier to use the gay community as a whipping boy: this happens even in countries where the gay community is a nonentity within the church and poses approximately zero percent of a problem e.g. India, where I’m from, where the favourite bogeymen of Christian conservatives in the english-speaking church is abortion and gay people, despite other more serious issues such as rising hindu nationalism or incredible amounts of casteism and discrimination within the church.
2) 90% of what the Christian right does is about maintaining group cohesiveness; its not actually about hate or any genuine belief in sin; its pure naked fucking self-interest
Look, I’ve been “disciplined” by the Church and while its personal, its also weirdly impersonal. Its not about me, or concern for my soul. Its about the threat I present to group cohesiveness by doing wrongthink (in my case: smoking weed, reading Aldous Huxley & Oscar Wilde, enjoying Wachowski sister films and thinking Lady Gaga was kind of cool) or by doing wrong things. If I personally, get away with it, the authority of the Church and the pastor is undermined. If the authority of the Church and the pastor are undermined, people are open to question them, hold them accountable and even disagree and challenge their authority -- which means anyone can teach, anyone can preach and the church as a coherent entity falls apart because anyone can deliver & interpret the message of the gospels.
You remember the Reformation & the factors leading up to it? Imagine that today, but you can read your Bible in English, you’re even encouraged to read it but you cannot interpret it in any way that threatens church or pastoral authority, that steps out of official doctrinal line. You might think I have a reasonable litany of sins to get disciplined for. But try this on for size: my fucking parents have been isolated in the church, my mother accused of being under demonic influence, because they raised a couple of disagreements with the theology that was being preached, arguing that there needed to be more focus on the doctrine of grace, and personal transformation thru the power of the holy spirit not works - textually represented in multiple passages throughout the New Testament, over and over and over again in Paul’s epistles. But remember: read your bible, ask questions and learn! Until you start asking questions of the church and the pastor.
Same thing with gay folks: its not about the sin, or disciplining the sin. Its about group cohesiveness because gay folks are directly, absolutely, outside the church and because the Bible unfortunately directly delivers a mandate saying that men cannot lie with other men (and women with women, in a few places, i think). Everytime you see hate directed at gay people, remember its about fostering an atmosphere of fear and paranoia - that Christianity is under attack, under siege from a conspiracy of gay people - so that people feel pressured to a) hold their criticisms and dissent in because we’re under attack and b) continue pushing the line because the church is under attack!
If you’re thinking “wow this sounds like a cult” good news! It has a lot of similarities to cult-like behaviour and thinking!
3) The Christian approach to media is twofold: a) all media contains lessons which you can analyze or which seep unconsciously into the mind, b) any media which makes you feel uncomfortable is Satanic actually
Does Lil Nas X grinding on the devil make people feel uncomfortable? You betcha! Hell, it seems to have even made neo-puritan lib-kids on tumblr dot com uncomfortable, judging by the number of them who think “but omg he shouldn’t be creating sexual content because kids could see it!!!” is a REMOTELY useful addition to the current conversation right now.
Look, for context: you have to understand the Satanic panic of the 80s, which influenced basically all Christian attempts at media analysis today. You can read the article for a lowdown on what the Satanic panic is; I’m more interested in discussing how it influenced Christian media analysis.
Because so much of the “analysis” that Christians are used to being the kind of rudimentary textual analysis of the Bible that didactically seeks a) a message (moral or simply God speaking to oneself) and b) a practical lesson for application in daily life, media analysis in the Christian right focuses heavily on deducing messages in texts - overt or covert - and What They Mean For Your Life. i.e. are these good messages or bad messages. And there is always a message in these texts. The level at which you interpret it depends on the person doing it. So you do get some truly batshit but earnest takes on texts (just google “[media name] satanic” and enjoy your fill!), sometimes you get more literalistic approaches (the PluggedIn Online media approach) and for the rare Christian parent who may have some kind of background in literary analysis, you might actually discuss the question of metaphors, symbolism, style - but it always links back to A Message and this message is either Good or Bad. Very simply the entire rubric to which all media is held up to is Philippians 4:8 -- “ Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.” Good influences produces good thoughts and a good heart and therefore, good action and a good life.
With its linkages to the heavy metal scene, plus the rise of films and media that were either horror films with religious(ish) themes, or films that tackled the Jesus story in less than flattering ways (e.g. panics over JCS, Martin Scorsese’s film on Jesus), any kind of media was basically turned into a potential gateway drug for Satan getting a foothold in a young person’s life. Combine this with the Christian approach to any piece of media being The Inherent Message Of The Text: Is It Good Or Bad, the leap of logic was simple: any piece of media with a message that was BAD was satanic/demonic.
But how do you quantify if something is good or bad? Sometimes this was reduced to the mechanics of “this band sings about romantic relationships outside of marriage, divorce, breaking up, cheating, drinking alcholy therefore they are advocating adultery, lust and drug use!” (a legitimate analysis of ABBA’s ouevre from a Christian book on various music bands and whether or not they were good that my family once owned a photocopy of). A simple tally of “sins”. Sometimes its about the nebulous question of discomfort - is this piece of media making me feel uncomfortable? Now, in some families, this isn’t a bad thing. My family were okay with me reading books like 1984 and Brave New World because they could recognize that the dark elements in those books served a specific literary purpose, that sometimes discomfort was needed for reflection. But for the most part, the Christian approach to media is not unlike a dictatorship’s approach to any media that isn’t feel good, happy, triumphalist and where the noble hero has a happy ending: anything less is verboten and what’s more, filthy lies. The dictator calls it the work of a troublemaker; the Christian calls it the work of Satan. That’s it. That’s the only difference.
4) The Christian Right loves a good redemption story, but only if you suffer miserably before repenting first & fuck you if you walk away and don’t come back
But what about the creators of these works? The usual argument is that they’re under Satan’s influence, they’re living sinful lifestyles, so they can’t possibly be happy, they’re miserable because they’re living in sin and don’t know the miraculous love of Jesus or they’d change their ways; or if they are happy, they’re suffering and they don’t know it. You want freedom? Independence? You’re a rebellious kid, you’re a prodigal son in the making. If you leave, you must suffer and they’ll make a big big show of accepting you with open arms if you come back crawling.
I think possibly the most emblematic story of all of this is that one of the favourite stories of the Christian right is that of the daughter of Jim Cymbala (an evangelical pastor), who ran away to LA and eventually only came back when she’d hit absolute rock bottom and wanted to kill herself - a triumph story because she was saved by the miracle of he & his church praying desperately for her coincidentally exactly at the time when she wanted to kill herself. (I don’t have hard numbers, but hilariously another mutual confirms they heard a similar story told in their church and we live continents apart). Its all the correct, Christian tropes, that reify the biblical story of the prodigal son.
But you do not hear the story of Danny Lavery (I didn’t even connect Danny Lavery [Ortberg] with THE John Ortberg till my parents discussed his case in a different context), nor do you hear at all about Abraham Piper i.e. son of THE John Piper, within the church -- the failure stories, i.e. the kids who walked away and were happy doing so. It undermines the whole narrative. Those stories? They undermine the universality of the prodigal son narrative and in doing so, undermine the universality of God’s moving power in people’s lives and in doing so undermines the basis for their fragile, brittle faiths, that cannot even begin to factor in the question of human agency and free will that is the entire foundation of the creation of Man apart from other creatures and other heavenly beings.
5) Lil Nas X is hitting them where it hurts most (and he knows it)
Lil Nas X’s video falls at the unique intersection of all these negatives at once: it provokes, it makes people uncomfortable with its unabashed gayness and unabashed sexual energy, it subverts biblical imagery to a gay cause (his Sistine chapel promotional art, the garden of Eden at the start, even the trial with the accuser and being cast down to hell), it is unabashedly sexual, it even has Satan in it. Analyze the video linearly and the message is to defy the Bible, sin openly and unabashedly, refuse to repent when given the chance and defiantly sink into hell, fuck Satan, become Satan yourself -- all in the name of being gay.
It is literally every single horrible lie that they’ve spoken about gay people being thrown back at them, only instead of feeling shame or being chastened, the gay person, an unabashedly loudly gay person who USED to be part of this same church of theirs, is like “yeah and so what?”
Lil Nas X walked away from the church, is in public, happy, successful and doing well, and is telling the church: “yeah ur right and so what?” about every single evil piece of nonsense they’ve made up about gay people.
It attacks their group identity, it undermines their authority, it is a direct fuck you to them from start to finish (and Lil Nas X knows it!). The reaction is not because of the specific imagery, but what it means for someone to have walked away from the Church and not end up miserable, unhappy and penitent, but to be happy, thriving, successful by every single metric they use for themselves (vis a vis the prosperity gospel) and be very visible and public while doing so. That is why its blowing up. Not (just) because of their personal hatred of gay or black folks but because it is a direct and highly public, highly visible, completely unapologetic in any way, middle finger in their faces.
walked in on my friend watching one of the avengers films during a funeral scene and he got really mad at me because i laughed upon seeing a fucking raccoon at a funeral. like how is that not the height of comedy
this is a thing! danah boyd is a researcher who has been studying social media for over a decade and in her 2014 book it’s complicated she argues that teenage social media “addiction” (which she also contends is like…..not actually a thing) is a result of the fact that “today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation” because “parents argue that these restrictions are necessary in an increasingly dangerous society, even though the data suggest that contemporary youth face fewer dangers than they did twenty years ago.”
as a result, teenagers are reclaiming these lost social spaces (which their parents and grandparents had in the form of mall hangouts, drive-in theaters, after school parking lots, etc) by using social media, where they can continue to “engage in crucial aspects of maturation: self-presentation, managing social relationships, and developing an understanding of the world around them,” aka stuff that teens are Supposed to be doing
Watching a movie in the middle of the day or god forbid in the MORNING is one of the weirdest feelings in the world. Things that aren’t illegal but feel like they should be
No but moralizing about how you don’t deserve the vaccine yet is greatly reducing vaccination numbers it’s not your job to worry about if you’re “stealing” a vaccine from someone else there is a National supply and when it’s your turn it’s your turn. Refusing to get vaccinated is not going to magically vaccinate a bed bound rural person. It’s just going to get vaccine doses thrown in the garbage. God.
Every vaccine dose ups our herd immunity. Every vaccine dose potentially frees up treatment for other people who might need it. Get the vaccine! There’s no “selfish” reason to protect yourself and everyone else from a deadly virus.
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