The title is a quote from this slacktivist post, dealing with the fear some evangelicals have that there must not, ever, be other ways to interpret the Bible than the one their church follows, because those other ways are Sinful and lead to Damnation. And make it harder to justify racism, misogyny, hostility to immigrants or whatever else their church may have embraced.
Case in point, the right wing’s calls for more Christians in government only apply to their kind of Christianity: preach a liberal message and they demand you shut up (as Vaclav Havel could have told us).
That put me in mind of Robert Altemeyer’s insight in The Authoritarians: people who crave an authoritarian leader (something that occurs across the political spectrum but is currently very high on the right) typically want their leader to lay down the moral law: black is black, white is white, the boundary is clear and there is no gray. Anyone who questions where the boundary is drawn or whether there are not in fact some gray areas must be smacked down hard. All of which stems partly from the belief that society is a fragile house of cards: move one card and the whole thing will collapse.
That fear leads to malice in the form of intolerance. For immigrants; right-wingers routinely describe immigrants in their community as a change they never asked for. Also intolerance for gay marriage. For women working outside the home. For the end of Jim Crow. Dammit, the system works, why are people trying to change it? And from the point of view of the people who benefit, it does work; that it doesn’t work for everyone and may work very badly — well it’s still better! It’s the nostalgic gloss that imagines the 1950s as a sitcom with mom at home and blissfully happy to be so.
Not that it’s all fear. Joel Webbon being horrified there are non-Christians in his neighborhood is just a racist shit, but he validates the fears of people who are merely uncomfortable. When the late Charlie Kirk claimed he was scared to get on a plane with a black pilot, I doubt he was scared at all. Again, it feeds fear in others.
Then we have the fear of some men that they’re not manly enough to be a real man. That’s a fear one can be sympathetic too, except so many men try to prove it by drawing sharp lines between them and all things feminine. Women can’t have a man’s job, can’t sleep around like men, have to stay clearly below men in status and rights (but don’t worry, the guys will treat them well if they behave … yeah, right). Ditto blacks and other people of color — one old-time complaint among white workers was that if the boss let black men work the same jobs, suddenly they were doing “n-word work” which was unacceptable.
And once you accept the hierarchy is right — whether it’s right based on God, aristocracy, race or biology — then any tampering with it is inherently bad: “He wants each of us to know our place. And to stay in it. Otherwise, there would be disorder. And God doesn’t want disorder.”
As I’ve written before, Isaiah Berlin captured this fear well years ago: “Men may be divided into those who are in favour of life and those who are against it. Among those who are against it there are sensitive and wise and penetrating people who are too offended and discouraged by the shapelessness of spontaneity, by the lack of order among human beings who wish to live their own lives, not in obedience to any common pattern.”
I agree it’s discomfiting when the world changes but it’s been changing longer than any of us have been alive. Bad change should be fought but when the arc of the universe is trending towards justice, we should be on justice’ side, even if it’s uncomfortable (and it often is). As Yoda told Luke, acting from fear does not end well. And it can indeed lead to the malice of the dark side.
