they told you not to read this blog about carrie underwood, your response silenced every unbeliever

You might have seen this article, qpolitical.com, making its rounds through the interwebs. The article witnesses (creates?) the controversy in no uncertain terms with a headline that reads like a flashing alarm signal to insecure Christians, “They Told Carrie Underwood Not To Praise Jesus In Public…”

Outrage. Scandal. Irony and ignominy. Our officially “inclusive” secular culture coming full circle. “Inclusive as long as you’re not a Christian,” let it be said. Make haste good Christian brothers and sisters! Let us already be mounting our counterattack!…

…Except that, EXCEPT THAT, you click on the article to see who it is, this loathsome anti-Christ who would launch such an assault on such a sweet, innocent (and not coincidentally attractive) poster child for old fashioned values, and it’s as if the foe evaporates from beneath your finger tips. No particular adversary is named, not even a record company or entertainment entity. The article contains no hint of who might’ve told Carrie such a thing, just some purposely vague and unverifiable statements that “her new single, ‘Something In The Water’ has caused quite a bit of controversy” and that she “has come under heavy scrutiny by not only the pop industry but also the country music industry at times” (note the Freudian revelation buried in the panicky syntax here: that the scrutiny comes “not only” from the godless “pop industry,” which should apparently be no surprise, “but also” that great beachhead of Christian values, the “country music industry!”).

I have little patience for researching media contrived controversy. Fortunately, it’s been done already by this article, Carrie Underwood: Not a Single Atheist Cares What You Sing, which lists more articles on the subject with titles like:

Atheists Viciously Attack Carrie Underwood’s New Song, Want it Banned

Carrie Underwood’s Brand New Song Making Atheists Mad as Hell

This Famous Music Star has a New Song Out, Atheists are Going to Hate it. Listen Here

Same thing across the board. All self-identified conservative sources. All quote Carrie Underwood’s response to her opponents. None quote or even identify the opponents, themselves.

These Don Quixotes seem to be having an argument with the wind.  

Now there are few things more embarrassing than trying to pick a fight when no one cares, but I don’t write this because I very much care what they told or didn’t tell Carrie Underwood. I have a bigger point in mind.

The effect of such ambiguity should be obvious. It creates a perpetual opponent. An opposition who was never born and so can never be defeated. A godless specter who goes by imprecise names like “secularism,” who always floats transcendently above the level of concrete things and so haunts and imposes its will on all of them. In short, a bogeyman.

The whole thing interests me insofar as it is a microcosm for the function that the other plays in our popular discourse.  The “they”—whoever it is that is so fiercely antagonizing Carrie Underwood—could very easily be replaced by “Muslims,” “gays,” “Obama,” “Mexicans,” “Welfare Queens,” or whatever intimidating other we find conveniently close at hand (it’s not just accidental that these otherwise unrelated examples are so frequently named within the same breath).

Hazy bogeyman with no concrete existence in reality are especially useful for their dexterity and their interchangeability. For instance, Slavoj Zizek, in Interrogating the Real, has pointed out how American misogyny can cloak itself under both the narrative of the lazy, uneducated (and therefore birth control-less) “Welfare Queen” who keeps having children that then need to be fed and clothed by the tax payer and the narrative of the college educated, professional woman who uses birth control, delays family, and therefore, spurns traditional values. And I wouldn’t be the first to wonder how “Mexicans,” according to the racist dogmas of our time can be simultaneously “lazy” and “stealing our jobs.” It’s perfectly common place for these narratives to be held together with no sense of contradiction or paradox.

Bogeymen (or bogeywomen, as the case may be) are apparently damned if they do and damned if they don’t.         

It’s no original insight for me to say that there is no quicker way to rally a crowd to your own ideology or agenda than to consolidate enemies with them. And the energy that you galvanize by using this common trick will be perpetually loyal to your cause so long as the others in question never have to show their faces. To show their faces would be to reveal themselves as vulnerable—human, even. And all the loyalty that is gathered in opposition to them will be lost. The more anonymous the bogeyman, the more invulnerable. The more invulnerable, the more eagerly and enduringly your following will want to oppose them. There is no more convenient enemy for a demagogue to have than an immortal enemy. And there is no enemy more immortal than one who never lived in the first place.

This creates a preliminary step if we’re to take the commands of real Jesus (as distinct from his ideological phantom) seriously in our bogeyman-making context. Before we can love our enemies, we need to first pluck them out of the spectral plane and place them on the level of the actual. Then there will actually be someone there to love.