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Think Piece: Notes on the Democratic Defeat: Conservative Christian Atavism or "Christians from Hell"
According to the Washington Post columnist David Broder's analysis of exit polls in the 2004 Presidential Elections, "about 22 percent of voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians, three-quarters of whom went for Bush." This kind of White conservative Christian voting for the Republican party's presidential candidate translated into 30% of Bush's total national vote. As the editors of The Black Commentator observed in their November 4, 2004 issue, this electorally crucial White conservative 30% of Bush's national vote is a kind of electoral "militia for Karl Rove and other Bush [political] commandants [who scare] the hell out of many of the 44 percent of white folks who didn't vote for Bush." Put more bluntly, the editors of The Black Commentator culturally characterize the Republican party's core White voters as "Christians from Hell."
While this cultural characterization of the Republican Party's core White conservative Christian voters is more graphic than my own cultural understanding of such voters, viewing them as "Christians from Hell" is analytically apt from an ethnographic vantage point. However, in my preferred ethnographic characterization of Bush voters, they operate out of what I call an "Americanistic-atavism ethos". What is basic to this Americanistic-atavism ethos is that it reaches back-in-time to a crude traditionalism-defensive version of our culture's Christian religious roots, thereby seeking protection against the cultural/societal complexity and trauma that define so much of the post-industrial and post-Cold War world we live in today.
We owe our general understanding of the atavism-ethos to anthropologists who have studied pre-literate kinship societies. To ethnographic analysts like Anthony Wallace, Godfrey Wilson, Monica Wilson, A.L. Epstein, Max Gluckman, and others whose research among Oceania and African peoples (see, e.g., Anthony Wallace's The Trumpets Shall Sound, Monica Wilson's Reaction to Conquest, Bengt Sundkler's Bantu Prophets) demonstrated how resort to retrieving ancient or traditionalist norms and values enabled crisis-riddled and trauma-riddled kinship societies to revitalize themselves. Which is to say, to regain a sense of cultural and thus personal efficacy. Of course, the duration or stability of such atavistic-ethos revitalization is quite another matter, for the "new order" was not often particularly viable, resulting , as Max Gluckman's studies of southeast African tribes demonstrated, in another atavist-inspired revitalization thrust, and then another, and another, ad infinitum.
Other analysts facilitate our more modern understanding of the atavism-ethos in Western nation-state societies from the 17th century onward. For this, we turn to historians like the Harvard economic historian Joseph Schumpeter, the British social historians Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone, among others. Studies of the atavism-ethos in Western nation-state societies suggest that the societal revitalization role can be either regressive (militarist, dictatorial, fascist) or progressive (culture-experimental, theocratic-reformist, political-reformist).
Uses Of Modern Christian Atavism Ethos: Liberal Examples
That small group of White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant religious denominations among Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Universalists who launched the great anti-slavery Abolitionist Movement in the early 1800s functioned along the lines of an atavism-ethos within Christianity, a reaching-back-to-traditionalist-Christian roots in face of a monstrous normative crisis. It was an atavism-ethos in behalf of a culture-innovative or liberal revitalizing societal process in American society (England, too) of that era. The Abolitionist Movement was defined not by a culture-regressive retrieval of traditional Christian religious creed, norms, and values, but rather by a culture-experimenting and humanitarian use, a crucial outcome of which is brilliantly analyzed by Horace Mann Bond, former president of Lincoln University, in his great history of that anti-slavery inspired institution – Education For Freedom: A History of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Without the momentous Abolitionist Movement instance of the Christian atavism-ethos used as a culture-innovative revitalizing societal process in 19th century American society (along with, of course, the Civil War which Lincoln's Union Army won), Negro slaves wouldn't have been emancipated in 1865, and only God knows when that earth-shaking event would have taken place. Happily, from the early 1950s through the 1960s, our own era's great Civil Rights Movement also involved a culture-innovative and humanitarian reaching-back-to-traditionalist-Christian inspiration. Thanks especially to Martin Luther King's leadership and that of other 1950s Christian-inspired Southern Black clergy activists like the South Carolinian African Methodist Episcopal clergyman Reverend Joseph Armstrong DeLaine, whose courageous opposition to Southern racist practices was recently probed by the Vanderbilt University historian Dennis Dickerson. (See Dennis Dickerson, "'Reverend J.A. DeLaine, Civil Rights, and African Methodism," The A.M.E. Church Review, July-September, 2003, pp. 47-62.) Within King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the culture-innovative reaching-back-to-traditionalist-Christian inspiration was calibrated through creative Christian-activist skills of inner-circle persons such as James Lawson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, L.D. Reddick, Bayard Rustin, Jesse Jackson, and others, calibrated in a way that gained Black Americans a small but genuine degree of White Americans' support for our anti-racist, desegregation goals.
Rightist Theocratic Atavism In 2004 Presidential Election
Against the background of the skillful application of a culture-innovative Christian atavism-ethos under Martin Luther King's leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, the rightwing use of the atavism ethos by Christian fundamentalists through Republican party modalities in the 2004 presidential election was a depressing development. It was no doubt a valid revitalization in the eyes of rank-and-file White Protestant and Catholic Christian fundamentalists, as measured by the fact that White Protestants gave Bush some 70% and White Catholics around 53% of their votes. But the American society-wide consequences will be something very different indeed. The consequences will be mainly anti-feminist, homophobic, anti-egalitarian in wealth and social mobility patterns, and anti-Black.
As Princeton University philosophy scholar Cornel West informs us in his new book Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (Penguin Press, 2004), the crude traditionalism-defensive version of Christian atavism among White fundamentalist Christian circles today has stymied the culture-innovative and humanitarian version of Christian revitalization, amounting to what he calls a "Constantinian-type Christianity" that allies with the imperialist-minded, oligarchic, greed-riddled corporatist elites in American society. What Cornel West is telling us is that today's rightist mode of the Christian atavism-ethos – of reaching-back-to-traditionalist-Christian roots – by Christian fundamentalist organizations and leaders (Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, etc.) is thoroughly reactionary in its systemic impact.
It has assisted the strengthening of oligarchic and greed-ridden plutocratic patterns to a degree comparable to what prevailed in American society back in the Robber Baron or Gilded Age era from the 1870s through the 1920s. Happily for most White Americans, the crisis of the Great Depression combined with the lucky events of Roosevelt's election in 1932 and three-time reelection turned our democracy toward something approximating a genuinely liberal organization of America's socio-economic and political patterns, though regrettably and cynically cruel and rigid racist realities continued to oppress and torment the vast majority of African-American lives. World War II advanced America's liberal patterns, and the post-war years from the Truman/Eisenhower administrations through the Kennedy/Johnson administrations did, too. But starting with Nixon's Republican White House and especially Reagan and Bush I's reign, a political oligarchic restoration of American corporatist power began to cast a deadening conservative shadow over the country, the seemingly benign feature of which – thanks to Reaganite ideological charm – aided a Republican electoral consolidation.
Nothing I've read since the Democratic presidential candidate's defeat in November relates the electoral effectiveness of today's baffling pattern of an admixture of Christian fundamentalist atavism and oligarchic American corporatist power better than a news report carried in the Boston Globe the week after the election. Titled "For Evangelical Family, Bush's Victory Due to Values, Prayer," (Boston Globe, November 7, 2004), the article features a long interview with a middle-class White Protestant family in a suburban-type northern Ohio town named Sheffield Lake, whose male head earned $55,000 as an insurance salesman as of September 2001 when his company cut back jobs – including his. Today he earns $35,000 annually, an income derived from two jobs, one of which involves "delivering pizzas Friday and Saturday nights." Cary Leslie's family has three children (the oldest looks like 7 or 8 years of age), so Mrs. Leslie stays home.
Now, according to my old-fashioned leftist view of how politics in a 21st century democratic capitalist country operates in overall terms, I'd expect 29 year-old Cary Leslie to at best be some kind of Democratic Party voter and at worst some kind of moderate-to-liberal Republican. I can report that my old-fashioned progressive predilections regarding Cary Leslie's politics were dead wrong! Here's what he told the reporter, who did the article originally for the Washington Post:
"I don't blame President Bush for anything that's happened with my income," Cary Leslie said. Rather he looks at Bush as someone who believes in "personal responsibility," which Cary Leslie believes in as well. "It's been rough, very rough. I mean scraping by," Tara Leslie [the wife] said. But "to us, the biggest things were moral." Because of this, Tuesday came with what they both say was "a sense of urgency." They voted for Bush and a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. "To know that he prays," Tara Leslie said of Bush, "and I really believe he does, that's a huge thing."
This interview with the hard-scrabble middle-class Leslie family strikes me, in terms of their political consciousness and the rational-thinking side of their middle-class mindset, as just plain bizarre. As bizarre as the reporter for The Nation, Thomas Frank, found the Leslie-family type political consciousness prevailing on a state-wide basis in his native Kansas, brilliantly related in his book What's The Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004). Now, in regard to the grimness characterizing Cary Leslie's current job and income situation, here's what the Boston Globe reporter tells us:
Forty hours a week at the car-rental counter, 12 hours a week running pizzas, the pinch of gasoline at $2 a gallon, savings drained, the realization that he and his wife are "kind of the working poor" – and still it was moral concerns, rather than economic ones, that guided both of them on Election Day. As tired as he might be Saturday nights as he drives the streets of northern Ohio, he can use that time to listen to worship tapes, to think, to pray .
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"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling