American revivalism
"God dropped a giant sandbag" on Glenn Beck's head, he announced prior to his rally last weekend. It was a stunning alarm clock. Beck, who had previously planned the Aug. 28 "Restoring Honor" event as a political outcry, decided to change his tone.
"For too long, this country has wandered in darkness, and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning," Beck said at the event. "God is the answer."
Compared with more secular Tea Party rallies in the past, the event exposed the rich soil fertilizing right-wing dissent: not necessarily racism, not necessarily xenophobia, and certainly not academic, intellectual political arguments.
It's religion, stupid.
Or, more specifically, the furor over America going off track, the calls to "take America back," and even the continued insistence that President Obama is a Muslim are all about the same religious revivalism I've studied in my time as a religious-studies major.
You see, America, as the "Restoring Honor" crowd would have it, has lost its way. The appeals to the Founding Fathers, the men dressed as Ben Franklin or American revolutionaries, all point toward one thing: We used to be so righteous.
This is not a new concept. The GOP has long trafficked in 1950s glossies repackaged for a nostalgic present. But now there's a steely sense of the sacred behind all that retrograde dreaming.
Last summer, some Unitarian Universalist friends and I had a most unusual experience, attending the Spirit and Truth Apostolic Fellowship evening service in Marion. We sat respectfully as Senior Pastor Dennis Krog called for an end to the corruption of the sexual revolution and a new Great Revival.
While the Pentecostal church does not represent the majority of religious Americans, I now suspect that the Spirit and Truth Fellowship was simply more honest in its call for a revolution than many other denominations.
In a Gallup poll released earlier this week, 65 percent of Americans said religion plays an important part in their daily life. Of that 65 percent, the majority identifies with some form of Protestant Christianity, and many self-identify as evangelical Christians. But being a Christian means more than simply believing that Christ died for the sins of humanity; it means understanding life through a series of narratives and ideological precepts.
First among these is the story of the Garden of Eden and the concept of original sin. Humankind, the Book of Genesis explains, used to live in an idealized world. But because of our disobedience and our straying from God's will, we fell from grace. Since then we can only aspire to grow as close to God as we once were and recreate parts of Eden that we have lost.
This narrative of a golden age lost bears striking similarities to Tea Partiers' cries to restore the Constitution. Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project calls for a reinstatement of God, as though America has somehow forgotten what God might mean to its religious citizens along the way. This postlapsarian ideology — that we live after the fall of humankind, or after the fall of America, and we need to return to the good times — is necessarily conservative, because it looks ever backwards.
Of course, when Americans idealize the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers, or even the postwar decade, we calmly erase the downsides of those times: slavery, racism, rape, patriarchy, and religious persecution. But it is a soothing narrative in times of economic downturn, loss of faith in secular institutions, and mass uncertainty over everything that seemed so simple.
People who are secular, or who come from traditions that do not inspire conservative ideals, are wrong to discount religion's influence on politics as sheer indoctrination. Karl Marx's description of religion rings true: "It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality."
To understand Beck, Palin, and the "Restoring Honor" crowd, progressives have to speak their language — and their language is the language of the Pentecostals I met in Marion. It is the language of the sacred.
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