The Great American Christian and the Fat Golden Calf
How the GOP kidnapped Jesus for votes and brainwashed the faithful
I went to Mass yesterday. I cannot tell you why. Catholic-curious again, the way one is curious about an old lover who has resurfaced looking unexpectedly well. A great deal of it is Pope Leo, an American in white, which still feels like a typo. (One forgets how much a single person can rearrange the furniture of the conscience.) And I am, as ever, helpless before an old church. The cool stone. The wax. The light through glass someone bankrupted a guild to pay for. This time it landed differently. Not because of God. Because of the men who have spent fifty years renting him out.
The crucifix did it. Christ nailed up there, all sinew and surrender, looked barbaric, violent, and sad; a torture device gilded into furniture. And my mind, the ungrateful organ, went straight past the theology to the racket, because what unsettled me in that pew was not doubt. It was the dawning clarity that the most powerful religious movement in American life was never a revival at all. It was a recruitment. And like any recruitment, it has a founding story everyone should know.
Because the religious right did not rise up, spontaneous and spirit-filled, over abortion, gay rights or medical care for those who identify as trans. That version was written later, because it polled better. The actual catalyst was money and segregation. In the 1970s the IRS moved to strip tax exemptions from whites-only Christian academies, Bob Jones University chief among them, schools built so children would not have to integrate, and that was the grievance that organized the pews. The operatives understood exactly what they had. Paul Weyrich, who helped build the con, said the quiet part for decades, that the goal was not more voters but fewer, that their leverage went up as turnout went down. Jerry Falwell was handed the Moral Majority in 1979 like a franchise. Phyllis Schlafly supplied the foot soldiers. Abortion and LGBTQ rights got bolted on afterward.
All it needed then was a candidate to make the exchange official, and Ronald Reagan obliged. In Dallas in 1980, to a hall of preachers who could not formally endorse him, he delivered the line that founded the modern arrangement, telling them he knew they could not endorse him, but that he endorsed them. The transaction was set. The pulpits would deliver the turnout. The party would deliver the policy. Faith went onto the balance sheet, and it has been a line item ever since.
Reagan struck the bargain, but it was Newt Gingrich who weaponized it. Gingrich was the one who grasped that the religious right was not a constituency to be served but a battery to be drained. Through GOPAC he circulated a now-infamous memo on language as a mechanism of control, a glossary instructing Republican candidates to describe Democrats as sick, pathetic, corrupt, traitors, and to drape themselves in family, freedom, courage, faith. Politics as catechism, with the demonology printed in the back. It worked. The 1994 takeover was his, and he governed the way he campaigned, by scorched earth, teaching a generation of Republicans that compromise was apostasy and the opponent was not wrong but evil. This is the through-line. Everything crude in the party now was prototyped by him.
And the man himself is the tell. Gingrich preached family values while conducting an affair during the very impeachment he was driving against Bill Clinton over an affair. The House reprimanded him and fined him three hundred thousand dollars. His own troops eventually pushed him out. Then, in 2009, the power long gone and the relevance fading, Newt Gingrich was received into the Roman Catholic Church. His third wife was Catholic. He had a documentary to sell about a pope. I am not the keeper of his soul, but the chronology is the chronology, and the faith arrived precisely when the politics needed a second act. A conversion is supposed to be a road to Damascus. This one looked like a repositioning, another faux Catholic, faith deployed the way he deployed everything, as an instrument.
After Gingrich the machine only hardened. Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson industrialized it through the Christian Coalition, the voter guides slipped into church bulletins, the precinct lists, the long patient campaign to capture the courts, because legislatures come and go but a federal judge is forever. The men running this understood something the faithful did not. The point was never the Kingdom. The point was the map. And a map, once drawn, only waits for the right man to walk it.
That man, inevitably, was Trump, who did not corrupt this tradition so much as complete it. He is the logical endpoint, the one who stripped the arrangement of its last decorations and showed it for what it always was. He does not pretend to piety with any conviction, and that is almost the honest part. He offered the religious right a contract in 2016, plain as a lease. You deliver the votes, I deliver the judges. They took it, eighty-one percent of white evangelicals, for a thrice-married casino developer who could not name a Bible verse, because the verses were never the point. He installed a prosperity preacher in the White House to run a faith office. He held up a Bible upside down in front of a church after the square was cleared for the picture. He picked a fight with the Pope. He has mortgaged the entire inheritance, the cathedrals and the catechism and the two thousand years, against power, and the religious right cosigned the loan and called it a revival.
This was what I was sitting inside of, in a full church, when the organist announced the hymns. I sang them. The words came up familiar under my eye and the tunes were easy, the way hymns are engineered to be easy, built so a room of strangers can move as one body. At the sign of peace the woman beside me said I had a lovely voice (I don’t) and that I must come often to know the hymns so well. I said peace. I said thank you. I did not tell her that I did not know the hymns at all. I can read words and I can read music. That is the whole trick, and I learned it in Catholic school, where music was not enrichment but catechism, filed alongside the Latin and the guilt. The institution being looted for parts is the same one that taught me to read the page I had just used to lie to its parishioner.
The readings, of all things, were about inclusion, the plain old-fashioned kind. The message was that even amid the noise about Christians being persecuted you could walk out knowing your faith was sufficient unto itself. Not the lawsuits. Not the grievance industry of the most powerful religion in the hemisphere claiming martyrdom from inside the West Wing. Just peace, as a private matter. It made me understand, from inside the building rather than outside it, why we wall church off from state. Not as a slogan, but as a load-bearing wall. The wall does not only protect the republic from the zealots. It protects the faith from the men who would strip it for copper. The politicians never mention that half.
I turned all of this over on the walk home, and the gallery assembled itself. Hegseth and the muscular new faithful, reportedly reaching for scripture and surfacing a line from a Tarantino movie instead. Rubio and the absence where moral clarity should be. Vance, recently and conveniently Catholic, lecturing the actual Pope. Mike Johnson, ready to follow them the moment it turned safe. Reckless, crude, theologically illiterate, every one, and all wearing the same rented vestments Gingrich tailored and Trump finally wore out in public.
Then I thought of the gold, the White House troweled in it like frosting on a supermarket cake, and of course my mind went to Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets still warm, finding that the people could not last forty days without melting their faith into something they could see and weigh and dance around. He was gone one season. They had already made it out of gold.
Trump is no Henry the Eighth. Henry at least wanted a dynasty and built a church on doctrine he could bend. This is smaller and stranger and more transactional. But I would not be surprised, not in any way, shape, or form, if Trump, or Eric, or Don Jr. eventually opened a church of their own. The branding is done. The flock is gathered. The doctrine can be written later, or never. After all, there is that collection plate.
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Brilliant.
"The Christ," as in all myths, is easily open to interpretation. Use it as a spiritual guide, a weapon of destruction, or a reason to hate and war. Is there any justification and motivation in this world for one to be like the Christions christ? Turn the other cheek, love thy enemy etc. I think that time is over. HATE and the religious right are the rule of the day.