Shreveport

The Last Trumpification of Christ

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

—John Dominic Crossan, New Testament scholar

Which brings to mind the current Speaker of the House, the gentleman from Louisiana, Mr. Mike Johnson, who apparently believes the Bible is the only book he needs:

“Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”

So here’s a follow-up question: Does he believe that literally or symbolically? Does he believe God created the world in seven days? That Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead? We’ll soon find out. I visited his home town of Shreveport once, in October of 2014 on one of my road trips for Time Magazine. It was an incredibly depressing experience, the first time I saw the specter of venal stupidity that became Donald Trump:

“How do you feel about the federal government buying tons of ammunition for the post office in order to raise the price of ammo for gun owners?” was the first question I got at a town meeting in Shreveport, La. Kevin and Lois Martello, a dentist and speech therapist, respectively, had put together a group of 15 friends and neighbors to talk politics, and it was pretty intense from the start. I asked Lee Foshee, who had raised the post-office question, where he’d heard that. He told me he had several sources. One of them may have been the right-wing Breitbart website, I later learned, which has been tracking ammo sales to federal agencies. Breitbart didn’t mention the price-raising strategy, but Bill Kostelka, a certified public accountant, confirmed that he’d had to stand in line to buy .22-caliber rounds recently. (For the record: the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is armed and needs ammo from time to time.)

Ahh, the drop dead evil of banality. I conducted dozens and dozens of small town meetings throughout the country over the years and they were usually reassuring, even edifying affairs. Americans are cool, unrehearsed people, at least they used to be. There was anger out there, especially at Tea Party meetings—but the Tea Partiers tended to be interested in government; sometimes they had valuable ideas, on the local level. Shreveport was different. The anger was encrusted, bitter, rutted deep. The Martellos, who hosted the meeting, told me they were surprised by the vehemence of some of their friends. One gentleman, for example, was absolutely convinced that food stamps existed so that miscreants could game the system and buy “T-bone steaks and orange soda.” Several others agreed. They had seen it. Where? When? Well, they’d heard about it…indeed, I’d often come across this middle American myth. Always T-bone steaks, too. (One wondered whether the miscreant buying all this beef was an overweight black woman driving a Cadillac; there were myths about that, too.)

The anger I’d found elsewhere in the country was understandable, if often misplaced. It was easily disarmed; people wanted to talk, and be listened to. They felt their views weren’t being heard by those in positions. of authority. There was a lot of talk about the Chinese. There was a lot of talk about the Mexicans. I later asked President Obama why he didn’t address those prevailing worries: “They don’t know what your position is on China,” I asked, “Why don’t you give a speech?” He prevaricated a bit, then moved on.

But something was happening, something was bubbling up from the bayous. In places like Shreveport, people were becoming dislodged from the facts. They were latching on to conspiracy theories. Worse, they actually seemed to be enjoying the act of hatred, the feeding of their prejudices. Something bad was surely coming. In 2016, it came.

And now we have a mild-mannered manifestation of their ignorance: the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Who believes America is “a Christian nation,” even if our Founders were very specific that it wasn’t: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams weren’t even Christians; they were deists. Jefferson, in an act that John Dominic Crossan—the eminent scholar of early Christianity quoted above—would have loved, wrote a version of the Gospels that excised all the miracles Jesus supposedly performed. There was plenty left to write about, if you just dealt with the stuff Jesus said. The Sermon on the Mount was pretty terrific; you could build a church on that alone. Matthew 25 was my favorite verse in all the Bible, Old or New:

Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35 for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in;

36 I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink?

38 When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You?

39 Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’

40 And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’

Jesus, a Jew who may have been born in Bethlehem, a territory now considered Palestinian, is my favorite Jewish prophet. His words glow; one can easily see why many regard him holy. And it’s wonderful to watch him teaching grace to his oft-hapless disciples. But, in my experience, you don’t hear much of Matthew 25 in evangelical precincts (although the late Mike Gerson introduced me to a saintly few). Evangelicals tend to get lost in the fire and brimstone hallucinations of Revelations—which, to my mind, is the least explicable book of the Bible.

Mike Johnson may turn out to be a Matthew 25 Christian. Apparently, he and his wife raised a poor black orphan as their own. He is said to be a very nice guy. But he’s also a believer in miracles—like, somehow Donald Trump, the least Christian of Presidents, produced enough loaves and fishes to win an election in 2020. If Johnson truly believes that, he is dangerously delusional. And now our fate is in his hands.

His first act as Speaker was to play games with the aid package for Israel, Ukraine and border security. And for the most unChristian of reasons: he wants to take funds from the Internal Revenue Service to pay for the aid, funds that would be used to capture rich people in their endless attempts to fit, like a camel, through the eye of of a needle. I remember Newt Gingrich once asked: What would Jesus take? As in taxes. Lawrence O’Donnell answered the question with one word: Everything. Sanity dictates that the writers of the New Testament were probably being metaphoric here, not literal—Jesus dealt in parables. But the ability of so-called Christians to invert the teachings of their prophet—to ignore the most important messages of Jesus—remains one of the great, depressing mysteries of modern life.

Tuberville Trollery

You get the sense that the clock is ticking on Alabama’s Senator Tommy Tuberville and his one-man crusade to block all major military promotions because he doesn’t like the Pentagon’s policy of funding abortions. His fellow Republicans, especially those with military backgrounds, are sick of it.

Which raises a question: Given the dysfunction on both sides of the Capitol—given the misuse of arcane rules that were established in gentler times—is it possible that we’re drifting toward a significant 21st century overhaul of not just the Senate’s obeisance to individual privilege, but other vestigial impediments to majority rule, like the filibuster? I’m a traditionalist, but you really can’t have a system where a single doofus can paralyze our ability to defend ourselves militarily.

Here’s another proposed rule I’d like to see implemented on the House side. It was proposed a decade ago by my pals, the Brookings scholars William Galston and Elaine Kamarck: What if you needed 60% to elect a Speaker? In other words, what if you needed votes from both Republicans and Democrats to run the show? It would empower moderation, bipartisanship, comity. The system we have now empowers extremism. I doubt that’s what the Founders had in mind.

Black Lives Matter Doesn’t Matter Anymore

The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley, who keeps track of these things, writes that the latest effusions of anti-Semitism by local chapters of Black Lives Matter were entirely predictable, indeed they have marked the group’s DNA from the start:

In 2016, four years before [George]. Floyd was killed by police, BLM released an official platform that referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” and declared that America is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”

What’s shocking isn’t the rhetoric of BLM leaders in the aftermath of Oct. 7 but that so many people who ought to have known better got played. In 2020, an open letter that endorsed the BLM movement appeared as a full-page ad in the New York Times. It was signed by more than 600 Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to fight anti-Semitism. If accusing Israel of genocide isn’t defamation of Jewish people, I don’t know what is.

A couple of points here:

—I’m getting tired of the left playing fast and loose with the word “genocide,” which is usually defined as: The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians have been, at times, reprehensible—the current acts of violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians on the West Bank are disgusting—but they don’t come close to “attempted extermination.” As Tom Friedman, who has been truly inspired in his columniating recently, pointed out: a majority of doctors graduating from medical school in Israel these days are Palestinian or Druse. There is a significant Palestinian professional class in Israel. That doesn’t sound like genocide to me. Nor does the bombing of terrorist military positions in Gaza. Netanyahu’s position on Palestinian statehood has been despicable, but not genocidal.

—Blacks Lives Matter was a dubious operation when it confined itself to police violence. As a matter of leftist ideological myopia, BLM ignored the overwhelming majority of black lives lost to the mad tide of gangsterism in the black community. As I’ve written before, it has suckered far too many white liberals—who, if they’re really concerned with black lives, have a variety of worthy charities they can support, many of them faith-based (Matthew 25 again). If you think Black Lives Matter, as you should, contribute to one of the many after-school programs and food banks run by churches in the black community. Those folks are walking the Jesus walk.