By Hans Fiene
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
If you’re not familiar with the “Peanuts” football gag,
well, shame on you, you culturally illiterate buffoon. But, as a gesture of
goodwill, let me describe it for you: Lucy van Pelt grabs a football and urges
Charlie Brown to kick it. Charlie Brown desperately wants to kick the football,
so despite his reservations over Lucy’s intentions, he sprints towards the ball
and swings his leg in the air.
But, just as she’s done every time, Lucy yanks the ball
away at the last second and Charlie Brown falls flat on his back. Just as he
suspected, she didn’t actually want him to kick the football. She just wanted
to use the football as a ruse to humiliate him.
I’m certain Charles M. Schulz didn’t intend this, but the
classic “Peanuts” football gag is a perfect analogy for understanding why it’s
often hard for people in religious squabbles to condemn things they believe to
be sinful. Why, for example, does Charlie Evangelical hesitate to condemn
Westboro Baptist Church when Lucy von Episcopalian urges him to? Because he’s
afraid that, as soon as he condemns Westboro’s hatred and cruelty, she’s going
to shout, “Well, you still oppose same-sex marriage, so I guess you don’t
really reject them after all.”
Come Here,
Heretic, Kick this Football
This is how things often work in debates between
religious groups who see each other as perverters of the faith. Group A says
“You’re a heretic if you don’t condemn this sin I’ve got here.” Group B
hesitates to publicly condemn something they agree is sinful because they’re
afraid Group A will yank the sin out of the way at the last second and say,
“You missed, heretic.”
“Man is a religious animal,” Mark Twain once said, and
while some claim that America is becoming a more secular nation, we never become
less religious. We just trade formal religions for informal ones, politics
being chief among the faiths in the latter category.
When we view our presidents as either messiahs or
anti-Christs, and when we believe that election results will yield either
utopia or Armageddon, politics has become our religion, our preferred parties
have become our creed, and those of differing persuasions have become the
heretics whose blasphemy must not be tolerated. So it shouldn’t come as a
surprise when political sectarians sidestep actual discourse and pull the
“Peanuts” football trick to score some cheap points against their rival
zealots. It also shouldn’t come as a surprise when those who are invited to
partake in the supposed interfaith dialogue refuse to play a game they know is
rigged against them.
As violence and death erupted in the streets of
Charlottesville this past weekend, many devout practitioners of leftism
demanded that conservatives speak out and denounce white supremacy.
Conservatives such as senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were quick to do just
that. But the moment they did, leftist zealots followed Schulz’s script and
quickly yanked the neo-Nazi football out of their way.
New York Times
reporter Eric Lipton had this to say:
Sorry to be cynical, but most of
all Rubio and Ted Cruz to me seem mostly to be doing a tremendous job of
posturing for 2020.
Likewise, CNN contributor Dan Pfeiffer offered this
analogy:
“I condemn White Supremacy, but
vote for Trump’s agenda” is the new “I send thoughts and prayers to the victim,
but vote against gun safety.”
In other words, “Those who belong to the True Church of
Political Orthodoxy condemn white supremacy, but Republicans don’t belong to
the True Church of Political Orthodoxy. Therefore, despite their words,
Republicans don’t really condemn white supremacy.”
Translated: “Come, Republicans! Come prove that you’re
not heretics by condemning white supremacy.” Then, as soon as Republicans did
precisely that, they stroked their beards, clucked their tongues, and lamented,
“Oh, do you still hold to those blasphemous Republican beliefs? Then I guess
you didn’t disavow white supremacy after all.”
President Trump
Fell for It, Too
Likewise, on Monday, President Trump spoke quite
specifically against white supremacy. “Racism is evil,” he said. “And those who
cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including KKK, neo-Nazis,
white supremacists, and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold
dear as Americans.”
One might think this would have mollified all those who
condemned him for initially offering a rather vague condemnation of violence on
the day of the terror in Charlottesville. But the response from some was rather
predictable:
In other words, “Those who belong to the True Church of
Political Orthodoxy condemn white supremacy, but President Trump doesn’t belong
to the True Church of Political Orthodoxy. Therefore, despite his words,
President Trump did not really condemn white supremacy.”
Given the Breitbart baggage surrounding his
administration, it’s not hard to understand why people have a hard time taking
the president at his word on this issue. Likewise, it’s hard to argue that
their skepticism was unwarranted when President Trump vaporized whatever goodwill
he’d built up on Monday by doubling down on the “both sides” talking point on
Tuesday.
With Friends Like
These
But just as some Catholics perceive fair criticism of
popes through the lens of the unfair treatment they’ve received, conservatives
who’ve made a religion of politics often do the same when liberals fairly
criticize President Trump. Critics say to President Trump, “When the main
outburst of violence in Charlottesville came when a Hitler-loving white
supremacist allegedly killed a woman with his car, why can’t you just focus on,
you know, Hitler-loving white supremacists?” But what many conservatives hear
is Lucy van Liberal saying to them, “I get to ignore Antifa, Charlie Brown, but
you have to own white supremacy. You’re a bigot until you renounce them. And,
no matter what you say, I’ll never let you renounce them.”
When leftist zealots are convinced that conservatives are
tied at the hip with Satan while they dwell on the side of the angels, is any
wonder that conservatives refuse their invitation to kick the football? When
the rules leftists have set up require conservatives to accept the premise that
neo-Nazism is the logical end of conservatism, why should conservatives allow a
game they’re destined to lose to damage the cause the hold dear? It seems
conservatives’ choices are either to remain a heretic to their opponents or to
become one in their own eyes. Much like War Games, it seems the only winning
move is not to play.
You Don’t Have to
Play the Game Or Stay Silent
You avoid playing the game not by refraining from
speaking out, but by refraining from caring when leftist zealots condemn you
for a supposedly insufficient repudiation. No matter how hard those who call
you an enemy may try to twist your words, if your neighbor still needs to hear
the truth, you still have an obligation to speak up. And our neighbor does need
to hear the truth, over-hyped as the white supremacist “movement” is.
Our white sons need to hear that the way they can find
self-worth amidst a PC culture that degrades them is not by embracing
hedonistic, racist trolls, but by embracing conservative principles like “stop
living for yourself, get a job, find a wife, and have some children.” Likewise,
our church members need to hear that our response to anti-white identity
politics is not to embrace white identity politics but to find our identity in
Christ rather than our race.
The world hardly needs more tweets or Facebook posts, so
I don’t begrudge private citizens who stay silent on social media. As long as
conservatives are telling their children, friends, and neighbors that they
oppose hatred and violence in all their forms, they’re doing exactly what they
need to do.
Public figures, on the other hand, do have a greater
obligation to speak publicly, which gives Republican politicians two options in
response to the white supremacy in Charlottesville. Either they can sidestep
the football game by ignoring the leftist zealots who will condemn them either
way, or they can speak in a manner that essentially takes the ball out of their
opponents’ hands and lets them frame the discussion in a less combative
fashion.
Here’s What That
Might Have Looked Like
President Trump is perhaps incapable of choosing the
former option. If he wants to clean up the mess he’s made, however, he could
choose the latter option, schedule one more press conference on the matter, and
say something along these lines:
“White supremacy is not an ideology that falls on the
extreme right end of the American political spectrum. Just like violence in the
name of leftism, white supremacy is nothing other than hatred and idiocy
masquerading as ideology and conviction. Those who espouse these views have not
taken the principles of one political party and corrupted them. They have
simply embraced the doctrine of demons—the belief that man can build utopia by
aiming violence and hatred at his neighbor.
“Therefore there is no need for whataboutism today. I
don’t need the media or Democrats to rebuke the terror of self-identified
leftists before I can speak against the violence of those who claim to be
members of the Right. White supremacists already stand condemned according to
the law of God, and that’s all I need to condemn them as well.
“In conclusion, I’d like to say something to those who
approve of the hatred that we saw in Charlottesville last weekend. And I will
speak loudly and clearly, so that they can hear me above the rumbling of the
washing machine in their mothers’ basements: I am not your friend, and I oppose
your agenda. If you want to air your diseased doctrines before the world in a
peaceful manner, you have that right and I trust that the marketplace of ideas
will leave you irrelevant.
“If, however, you want to pair those hateful thoughts
with hateful deeds, you should trust that my administration will leave you in
prison as we continue to Make America Great Again for all her citizens.”
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