The Christian Right Hankers for Medieval Times
Was it just a simple oversight that the Texas Republican Convention platform failed to mention stocks, pillories, and branding?
American historian Heather Cox Richardson has written indefatigably about so-called movement conservatives who decried the New Deal and vowed to return the country to the 1920s before our minimalistic social safety net became a thing and businesses were somewhat regulated.
More recently, Richardson has written that the anti-federalism of our Supreme Court is an attempt to take us back to the first part of the 19th century when the southern slaveholding states were busy championing their right to “nullify” federal laws.
But today’s far-right Christian conservatives, emboldened by their radical Catholic-packed Supreme Court, clearly want to send us further back — way back — to a fuzzy era before the Enlightenment.
What would a King Donald and his lickspittle enablers and cult subjects say of the Age of Reason? Fake news. What is this strange thirst for authoritarianism but a nearly insatiable desire to drink deep from a dark goblet of vindictiveness and, well, feudalism?
Imagine a Supreme Court justice in, say, the Year 2022 A.D. justifying taking away a woman’s right to choose whether or not to end her pregnancy by repeatedly citing a 17th-century English jurist who downplayed rape and eagerly tried women for being in league with supernatural forces.
Now, those were the Good Olde Days of Real Witch Hunts.
Think of a global pestilence, of incomprehensible conspiracy theories, of books being banned. (That English translation of the New Testament you’ve prepared? We will hunt you down, Mr. Tyndale.) Consider Christians who have been accused of acting like fascists embracing the term and openly calling themselves Christian fascists.
What is this strange thirst for authoritarianism but a nearly insatiable desire to drink deep from a dark goblet of vindictiveness and, well, feudalism?
Was it just a simple oversight that the recently articulated — or, more likely, grunted — Texas Republican Convention platform failed to mention stocks, pillories, and branding? Think this Supreme Court won’t, along with the executive branch’s power to regulate anything, take away rights to contraception and same-sex relationships, not to mention same-sex marriage?
Do you say that feudalism was a system based on ownership of the land? American, Saudi and Russian oligarchs — our new feudal masters — are buying up all the housing stock in our major cities and much of the virtual territories of technology where the rest of us spend our days in toil. And American women have lost their bodily autonomy.
As law professor Michele Goodwin notes in a recent opinion piece, a willful misreading of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution by the Alito gang declares that their bodies are owned, but not by them.
It’s like we’re living in some alt-version of the Middle Ages, one with those proud Christian fascists, social media, an abundance of AR-15s, and a Russian feudal king showing the way to other autocrats dreaming of empire by reducing his neighbor’s cities to rubble.
The service of the lords, barons, and some knights of our cultist feudal king, from the Queens’ House of Grift, are rewarded with money pulled from small-donation serfs and peasants for a nonexistent “Official Election Defense Fund” and other such marketing schemes. The barons and lords in our current feudal state have many rights conferred on them by our highest court; the serfs and peasants, not so much.
In medieval times, one knew one’s place in society. There was little to no chance for social mobility — a baron raised a brood of barons, a knight raised other men of warfare, a serf raised other workers bound to the land, and peasants raised more peasants.
Pray, tell me, what again is the given name of King Donald’s youngest prince?
The United States saw an increase in income mobility from 1950 until 1980 when the Era of King Ronald and his Court of the Trickle-Down commenced. Early in his reign, Ronald proclaimed that the annual budget deficit was caused by serving men and maids not declaring their tips, so right away you could see where things were heading. Since the times of “Chuckling” Ron, the country has become sharply more and more feudal.
Not only did King Donald benefit politically by appealing to his fellow grifters, racists, and bigots (a sad, unending panoply of them, as it turned out), but he also promised the pious among the Christian Right that they would be able to have a tremendous — nay, a “bigly” — voice in making America great (small type: for grifters and religious zealots) again.
But how could truly religious people — believers in the words of Jesus — push their morality on others, how could they harbor resentment over other people just trying to live their best lives?
I was just being facetious there.
Johan Huizinga, in his classic “Autumn of the Middle Ages,” writes of the pious personality:
We should not see hypocrisy or conceited bigotry in all this, but rather a state of tension between two spiritual poles that is no longer possible for the modern mind. For them, it is possible because of the perfect dualism between the sinful world and the Kingdom of God. In the medieval mind, all the higher, purer feelings were absorbed by religion so that the natural and sensuous drives were bound to be consciously rejected and allowed to sink to the level of sinful worldliness. Two views of life took shape side by side in the medieval mind: the piously ascetic view that pulled all ethical conceptions into itself and the worldly mentality, completely left to the devil, that took revenge with ever greater abandon.
Because it has been willingly handed over to a greater power, the cult mind is essentially medieval. And membership in a cult allows cultists to think well of themselves even when they are letting it all hang out against their Most Dread Enemies — say, jabbing a Capitol policeman with a Trump flag on a pole or pepper-spraying a policewoman after knocking her unconscious or helping their savior seek vengeance against, say, his vice president. Or threatening the lives of election officials and volunteers. Or, say, hunting moderate Republicans.
Some of the Capitol and Metropolitan police officers who defended the Capitol likened the hand-to-hand fighting by rioters specifically to a medieval battlefield. As noted by Paul Goodman, author of the website “15 Facts About Feudalism,” you were expected to fight for the king when he called upon you:
At times of war, when the king needed an army, there would be a “call to arms” and troops were raised by the Feudal Levy.
After the last election, the call to arms was at least partly raised by the wife of a member of the highest court of the land, who also had the ear of the closest advisor to the self-proclaimed forever king. The king’s “troops” apparently were vociferously cheered on, if not funded, by the Feudal Ginni.
It’s as if the acronym sported on all the red caps handed out by King Donald has always really stood for Make America Gothic Again. And the Christian Right is primed to take its vengeance on all manner of personal choices that insult their feeling of “religious liberty.”
It’s not about their freedom to worship as they choose. No, they have a new definition of religious liberty, which is a very, very old one: you are now at liberty to live your life in the manner their religious belief dictates you should live.
That pain in your chest, because you always felt that progressive, humanistic thought would inevitably prevail among reasoned people and lead our country, and the world, to some better place?
They want you to spread a hot mustard poultice on that.
But, better and more appropriate to our actual times, we can all get involved using whatever energy and talent we have in protecting fundamental democratic principles — including the rule of law and majority rule — and basic human rights here at home.
Be a zealot for democracy.
