In the current climate of ICE raids on American citizens on American soil, there’s an ineffable split of opinion among the common man. One sort of refrain that rises up from a certain group is “if you don’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear from the law.” Objectively, observably, this is not the case, and this same group will fall back on the “one bad apple” argument.
Where does this come from, though? If you try to source this particular mindset, you’re almost overwhelmingly going to find white conservative Christians of various sorts at the bottom of it. Not exclusively, of course, but a significant trend.
And that trend tells us what we need to know.
There are a few, coohabitating and compounding elements, outlined by real-world experiences and religious ideologies:
- Things happen for a supernatural reason, and you have very little direct control over the world around you.
- If you “behave,” you’ll be rewarded by the Ultimate Authority.
- If you’ve never had any real, tangible conflict with authority in an existential way, you never question the above two points and apply them to real life.
I’m going to tell you a story about my mom. A few years ago, she and my sister as the combined financial unit they are were going through a string of bad luck. The kind of unfortunate spate that emerges, most sharply, from not having the money to make your problems go away. A branch fell on my sister’s car while she was driving on a back road near their house. It cracked the windshield, creating a costly repair. On the phone, my mom said to me something along the lines of:
“I don’t know what we did wrong to be punished like this.”
And this is a hugely prevalent understanding of the world in conservative Christian social teachings. If you listen to evangelical influencers for any length of time, you will hear them them talk about their experience with “the enemy.” How when they face any kind of very normal hardship, they’re “under attack” by evil spirits. Addiction isn’t just a biochemical and/or behavioral problem that needs compassion and professional medical intervention, it’s a “demon of addiction.”
There is a contingent of conservative Christians that are genuinely terrified of literal demons. So much so they ascribe it to everything. The virality of labubus isn’t the result of capitalism, FOMO, and shopping-induced floods of feel-good chemicals. It’s the influence of the demon pazuzu. Which they only know about because of the movie The Exorcist, not any deep theological study.
Everything they don’t like, confuses them, or conflicts even slightly with the teachings of a religious authority figure is demonic to some degree of abstraction. Even “Earthly evils” are frequently managed by a Satanic force intended to pull you away from the presence of the Lord.
And whether they’re envisioning an actual, physical entity with it’s own sapience probably varies from person to person. And some people are going to have dug a deeper well around this idea than others. The language is the important part, though.
Bad things at their core, are the result of a supernatural force that you can only combat through spiritual warfare. But, suffice to say, they don’t necessarily apply that evenly.
Another memory from my childhood in the Southern Baptist Convention, one that was an early seed in my personal deconstruction.
The choir director, a worship leader in his own right, was standing in for the preacher that day. He told a story about the power of prayer as a direct communication tool with God. He and his family were going on an international mission trip. On the way out the door, they couldn’t find their passports. Desperate to not miss their flight, they stopped and stood in prayer, asking God for help. That’s when, according to his story, he received a vision of their passports falling behind the dresser. God had come through in their time of need.
That’s the other side of this coin.
If Evil is supernatural, then so is Good. Good fortune is a blessing from a higher power. I was taught to do good not necessarily for the sake of goodness itself, but rather to be an emissary of Jesus and to let his light shine through me. Morality could be reduced to a rubber bracelet emblazoned with “WWJD?”
So the active corollary is that if you check the boxes of goodness, you will be rewarded. It’s the central tenet of the prosperity gospel.
Now if this is just for you, and how you organize the world, that’s fine. If it helps you deal with the bad things in your life by anthropomorphizing them, go for it. Conceptually, if a person praying away a “demon of sickness” for their family members gives them a feeling of control and doesn’t otherwise hinder actual medical care, then its ultimately harmless. But too often it doesn’t stop there. It bleeds out into everyone and everything around them.
So we put all these things together, and this is what the logic looks like:
When bad things happen to me, it’s not because of my own choices or the randomness of the universe, it’s the result of external forces acting upon me. When bad things happen to you, it’s, charitably, a test of faith, but most likely you did something to deserve it by letting yourself be susceptible to evil forces.
It’s a way to create distance from any real culpability or accountability for their own actions while still maintaining a sense of purpose to the universe.
Most importantly, nothing in their day to day life has actively contradicted this perception of the world. They’ve never experienced othering to a degree that leads them to question this essential structure of the universe. They are almost always in agreement with and on the side of the figures of the authority in their day to day life. They’ve never really been victims of Authority in an existential sense.
That is the mindset they are bringing to real world problems and the lens through which they view earthly authority.
To this group, Authority they helped put in power is on “their side.” They’re a team with this Authority. The Authority is acting in their best interest, so, therefore, anything the Authority does is “good” or, at most, an “unfortunate error.” It has to be good, because if Authority does something “bad” then they must also be “bad.”
It never occurs to them that Authority doesn’t actually give a shit about them because that’s not how they’ve been taught Authority works at a divine level. They fail to realize that Authority is just people, and that people are capable of terrible things when given power.
And in the face of the actual evil of real-life terrible people willing to gun down someone in the street, none of us are ever really safe.
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