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.   

Vengeance--the one thing Christians, Muslims, and Jews seem to agree on

Asking people what religion they belong to is usually about the worst way to figure out what they truly believe. The best way to figure out what they truly believe is to hit them in the face and watch what they do next. Judging by this, it’s clear that nearly all adherents to the world’s great monotheistic religions really do believe the same thing after all.  Whether they profess Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, a million natural experiments going on as we speak in Gaza, Mosul, and Washington D.C. reveal that pretty much everyone agrees: retaliation is where it’s at.

Maybe the CliffsNotes informed drone of classic liberalism had it right all along; maybe the world’s major religions really are all the same. The irony, of course, is that this mantra, still earnestly chanted by progressive secularists, that the religions are really all the same, is intended to promote functional unity even if many theological differences still remain. The reality is that, in fact, we already have achieved functional unity—Christians, Muslims, and Jews all agree on hitting back when they’ve been hit.

Their chosen methods of retaliation might differ slightly. But whether a suicide bombing or a drone strike, everyone seems pretty well agreed that this is basically how the world works. In the name of peace, I’m inclined to shout, “Can’t we all just argue?” Just once, couldn’t one of the great monotheistic religions finally disagree that an eye for an eye is the only way forward? Maybe with some digging around one of those great religions could even find some obscure mandate from their leader to turn the other cheek when slugged? That would stir things up. When RPGs and M-16s have simply become the ambient noise of our lives, a single instant of silent refusal would be absolutely deafening.

Fear not, secularists. Judging by their actions, your dream of functional unity is still in tact. The faithful of the world’s major monotheistic religions really do believe the same thing: if someone hits you, hit them back.  

That’s the ethic across the board. If we dig a little deeper, they all seem to share a core metaphysic as well (their official teachings not withstanding). When I was a kid, this way of seeing the world was proudly stated to me by a trusted Christian elder as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “The world is made up of two kinds of people,” he said, “those who litter and those who clean it up.”

The theological term for this kind of worldview is “dualism”—the idea that there are two forces, good or light vs. evil or darkness, and they are forever facing off. Dualism is officially a heresy in all great monotheistic faiths. But no one cares. Christians, Muslims, and Jews have all bought into it hook, line, and sinker. It’s just too darned convenient as an explanation for everything. Bad things happen because that other part of humanity over there is bad.

Of course, this kind of dualism all sounds very absurd to the more thoughtful among us. But even the thoughtful become fast dualists when they’re afraid. My intellectual mockery of simple-minded dualism is no match for the fear that wells up in my gut as I scroll the week’s news feed. In my unconscious mind, the fear that I associate with the alien clothing styles and harsh vocal rhythms of some terrorist leader’s video ever so subtly becomes an overlay for a whole anonymous swathe of the world’s population. I’ll of course justify myself and speak in calm disinterested tones. I might even have you convinced that my inner violence is of a completely different kind than theirs, perhaps even an admirable kind. “Well, that monster is a cold blooded killer. I’m only interested in the justice of God and protecting the victims.” Nonetheless, at this point, a sort of irony has taken place. The world has become exactly as dualistic as I’d suspected it was. The darkness has been born in my very own soul. 

…

One day, many millennia ago, person A struck down person B. Maybe he was jealous of the plot of land that person B had, or disagreed with person B over the sacredness of a given tree, or grew paranoid that person B was looking at him the wrong way. It doesn’t really matter why. What matters is that striking him down was an offense that family B could not abide. If this was the sort of thing that could be expected of family A, then like any pack of rabid dogs, they needed to be put down. Of course, tribe A would not take this lying down. So they fought back. Tribe B expected nothing less of those tree worshippers. So back and forth they went.

When Jesus was being arrested in the garden, Peter took out a sword and tried the “stand your ground” method. Jesus scolded him.

In some sense, it’s easy to defend yourself if you can make yourself hate your attacker. Peter made that mental shift, no problem, in the very second that he saw Judas’ two-timing face. But not Jesus. What do you do when you are being attacked and yet you will that not a hair on the head of your attacker should perish?

You die.

In the moment that Jesus refused to fight back, he opened up a new possibility in human history, a new choice which God validated three days after his death. We’ll call this the way of the cross.

Of course, our societies reflexively feel threatened by “the way of the cross.” Predictably, someone will stand up at this point and say, “Here in the real world,” apparently, not the one in which Jesus lived, “having no means of punishing or retaliating will only allow free reign for the violent to do as they please. Just forgiving and turning the other cheek willy-nilly will cause the world to spin out of control into a violent chaos.”

After several millennia of this, the irony is still lost on this person that the world already has spun out of control and not because people keep turning the other cheek.

So we continue to expect a take no prisoners messiah who will come down hard on that bad half of humanity, the litterers.

What we have now is one who chose to die instead. And that has always been an unpopular sort of messiah.