February 23, 2019

This is a continuation of the blog series Today’s White Niggers.
To start reading from the beginning, go to Part 1.

Religion makes people feel better because it grabs hold of the trials and tribulations they feel and then shapes how they sort through their anxieties, their terror, their dread and despair so that they feel better.

As a 2010/2011 Gallup poll discovered, “Americans who are the most religious have the highest levels of wellbeing.” Religion in principle “provides mechanisms for coping with setbacks and life’s problems, which in turn may reduce stress, worry, and anger.”  If churches do not provide attention and support to these emotional needs, they tank, and the religion “consumers” go elsewhere.

The most revered leaders in a religious community, accordingly, are not those who know the most about their religion, but rather those who live their lives most consistently in an exalted state. Everything these leaders do in their lives thus seems guided by compassion, or love, or whatever feeling is sanctioned as the most exalted emotional state of the religious community. The feeling inspired by a revered leader might be unquestioned assurance linked to a continued demonstration that protection of the flock is the highest priority.

So religion is not just about beliefs, doctrines and ideas. It’s also about the way in which horrific feelings are handled, calmed, and healed through worship services, prayer, song, rituals, and rites of passage.

The religious power of The Tea Party movement is its attention to the aggrieved feelings of white niggers.  It pays political attention to broken, angry, enraged, and despairing white hearts as a religious practice.

These folks should be called “Teavangelicals,” says David Brody, the chief political correspondent for CBN news. They are “Bible-believing Christians [who want] a strict interpretation of the Constitution [and] focus on a crucial additional layer: all of these founding documents are rooted in a belief in Almighty God.”

As Frances Fitzgerald demonstrates in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, the Christian Right didn’t actually die. It metastasized inside the body of the Tea Party. Writes Fitzgerald: “The Pew Research Center analysis showed that Tea Party supporters were disproportionately white evangelical Protestants and that most people who agreed with the Tea Party agreed with the `Christian conservative movement,’ though the two movements were not coextensive…. According to another study, fully three-quarters of those who identified with the Tea Party described themselves as `Christian conservatives.’”

“[T]he Christian Right didn’t actually die. It metastasized inside the body of the Tea Party.”

Religion, race, and God are tightly bound together in Tea Party political tactics. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, summarizes what this bond entails: Christian worship, action in the world guided by “Judeo-Christian capitalist values” that create wealth, and a creedal Christian affirmation of the U.S. Constitution as a document sanctioned by God. Worship is of critical importance here because traditional Christian services are designed to produce emotional uplift in their flock. Music, singing, scriptural readings, and other ritual acts attend to how persons think about and transform the way they feel.

Religion, race, and God are tightly bound together in Tea Party political tactics.

So when Bannon calls for a “global tea party movement,” he is calling on church-based worship service experiences that give rise to what Tea Party members do as white Christian crusaders: they act like God’s chosen Christian people.

Moreover, Bannon now wants to build a “Gladiator School.” His goal is to train right-wing Catholics—hostile to Pope Francis’s liberation theology agendas—using a more traditional theological perspective, give them media-training, and use this work as a beachhead to not only elect populist politicians across Europe, but also to launch an attack against Pope Frances and his progressive social agendas.[1] Bannon hopes to launch a prototype course for his gladiator school in the spring of 2019.

Bannon’s choice of the name “gladiator” for his new school is his affirmation of men who are trained to fight to their death. Roman gladiators, after all, were not only war captives and slaves—persons without recourse—but also men who chose the blood sport for fame and glory. The Roman poet Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), who celebrated the transition of Rome from a Republic to the war machine of Empire, described such deadly “service” as a virile ideal:

Youth must harden its limbs in war,
Bear harsh poverty like a friend…
Live life under the sky among
Urgent perils.

This warrior-stance hailed by Horace idealized men who befriend their feelings of terror in order to wreak terror on others. This pagan gladiator blood-sport was celebrated as a redemptive sacrifice. The institution itself was so pervasive throughout the Roman Empire that it has been tallied as one of the two most quantitatively destructive institutions of human brutality. The other one is Nazism.[2]

The gladiators Bannon wants to train will be Christians equipped with the emotional dispositions of pagan Roman gladiators. He will train them to endure and mete out terror as a redemptive act.

Tea Party members, from Bannon’s perspective, are dead set on destroying non-Christian resistance to the Christian West’s master narratives of corporate empire, military might, authoritarian state power, and the status of America and Christians as the people God chose to police the rest of the world.

Tea Party members are dead set on destroying non-Christian resistance to the Christian West’s master narratives.

The Tea Party, from this perspective, consists of a network of communities that attend to the aggrieved feelings of white niggers religiously. They do not have competition from liberal and progressive mainline churches because these congregations tend to focus on ideas, as if ideas are enough to alter the way terrified persons feel and behave.

Niggers of all colors unite.

Continue to Part 8  >

[1] Jason Horowitz, The New York Times, December 8, 2018. The ‘It’ ’80s Party Girl Is Now a Defender of the Catholic Faith – The …
[2] Gladiators – Michael Grant – Google Books

Today’s White Niggers | Part 6: Poor Whites as Cannon Fodder for the Slave Powers
Today’s White Niggers | Part 8: Why White Niggers Are Abandoning Conservative and Mainline Churches

Comment(1)

  1. Reply
    comment Maya says

    This article (series of articles) is terrifying and one of the most important things I have read in some time. We must all wake up to what is actually going on and consider what ACTION is to be taken. Ideas disconnected from action in these times are not our friends. Thank you, Thandeka, for ongoingly being a radical voice of truth and possibility.

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