At some point in the past week or so, the health care debate stopped being about health care. Sure, how to reform the health care system – if at all – is what everyone notionally keeps talking about. But you don’t have to listen long to get the distinct feeling that deductibles and co-pays, cost containment and preventative care, government mandates and end-of-life decisions have started to function as a collective cipher through which at least one part of America – a largely white, largely Christian, very angry part – is really talking (and often shouting) about something else entirely.
In Hillsboro, Mo., not too far from where I grew up in the evangelical heart of the Ozark foothills, a furious crowd packed Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s town-hall forum on health care earlier this week in order to shout her down practically before she even started speaking. When she asked what the crowd wanted from her if they didn’t want to hear her out on health care, people yelled: “go home.” At a health care town hall in Pennsylvania, one particularly angry man concluded a red-faced harangue of that state’s Republican-turned-Democratic Senator, Arlen Specter, by declaring that Specter would have to stand before God and be judged for his involvement in health care reform. The crowd cheered.
This is not a public discussion, certainly not civil discourse. Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as an uprising among a post-modern Bible Belt whose buckle has come undone. But an uprising against what, exactly?
As Matthew Avery Sutton’s recent post about apocalypticism and the president shows, there are plenty of reasons to think health care reform for many fundamentalist and conservative evangelicals may well be just the latest, most visible evidence that Obama is antichrist. For others, as Frank Schaeffer suggested in another recent piece, opposing health care reform participates in a generations-long effort among evangelicals to aggrandize political power to themselves by obstructing democracy.
More broadly, these examples of religious extremism exist on a continuum of disturbing responses among many evangelicals and others on the far right to Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, and of large progressive majorities in Congress.
Just this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that militia and other paramilitary group formation is on the rise, eerily echoing the kind of activity that preceded the run-up to the Oklahoma City bombing. It’s a chilling report, one suggesting that – without a step away from the brink – we may well look back at incidents such as the murder of George Tiller and the shootings at the Holocaust museum and see the beginnings of a resurgent vigilantism among religious extremists during the age of Obama.
What’s this got to do with the health care debate?
For starters, there’s the guy in New Hampshire who brought a gun (and a sign about watering the tree of democracy with blood from time to time) to a protest outside a recent presidential forum on health care. Interviewing the guy later on Hardball, Chris Matthews was baffled by this, but it makes a certain, scary sense to me.
Having spent a lifetime immersed in the fundamentalist evangelical culture of rural America (first as a Southern Baptist, later as a scholar of religious culture), I’m convinced that all the sound and fury generated by the health care debate is not about health care at all, but about a segment of white, Christian America finding in the health care controversy a sufficiently capacious political occasion to give expression to an intense but incoherent feeling of being displaced from the seat of cultural dominance.
It’s the same feeling of helpless rage animating the revival of the militia movement, the same desperate-times-and-desperate-measures ethos motivating protesters to bring side-arms to public policy debates (a conflation of the first and second amendments that led the blogger Josh Marshall to wonder sardonically about a “transitive property of amendments”).
America right now is full of potential energy supplies for all this rage. Take, for instance, this week’s image of a bi-racial American president of Kenyan descendant giving a hearty White House welcome to a wise – and unmarried -- Latina recently confirmed to one of the most powerful positions in the country. For many conservative and fundamentalist Christians, these types of images quite literally betoken a forsaking of the nation’s Anglo-centric, patriarchal heritage, and in this view we will – we must – as that Pennsylvania protester put it, be judged.
Another way to put it (borrowing Raymond Williams’s formulation): an emergent culture – the multiethnic, politically progressive, increasingly urban, pluralistic and humanist generation of leaders embodied in Barack Obama – is overtaking the once dominant position so long occupied by Americans of Anglo-European descent and committed to a conservative Christian worldview. This point of view is fast becoming what Williams called a “residual” culture, and history provides scant evidence of anyone quietly surrendering to that particular fate.
In this context, there are few issues as capable as health care of accommodating so many of the conspiracy theories, myths, and figments of the imagination galloping like a virus through the newly disempowered right wing of America. And thus does that once imposing, silent majority become ever more radicalized within a gestalt of grievance, alienation, and increasingly, its own self-induced political irrelevance.
America is becoming a more mature culture. There is no more Wild West to tame. Industry is transforming. How do we respond? We resist the urge to vilify the people who are carrying the pain of the transformation, we resist our own knee-jerk responses, and we let the psyco-drama play out, intervening only when necessary.
But all I can picture in my head is the scenes in Southpark where the rednecks gather in the streets and shout, "they took 'er jobs!"
Doug, excellent piece. But what's the middle ground between letting the psycho-drama play out (as KAS suggests), which sounds passive to me, and waging a counter-war? Speech and facts. Talking calmly to friends and neighbors about issues, resisting the temptation to get sucked into the emotional jihad. It doesn't help that most mainstream media coverage on health reform is about an emotion -- the anger, and whether it's "real" or Astroturf, and not about the substantive issues themselves. Maybe attacking what lies behind the anger -- fear -- is a place to start. sorry for so many dashes
Very thought-provoking article. I had never considered the evangelical right as being angry with the changes of society, but it is all very clear now. As usual, the Republicans and the right play on this, not knowing what disaster might happen. I guess it's OK as long as you're right. Very right.
As someone who also shares background in rural evangelical territory I appreciate this piece. You said what I had been thinking lately, only you said it better. I especially appreciate that final paragraph.
First of all a Latin women being a supreme justice is not a problem for as you would put it White, Evangelical Christians. The problems is in the depth and scope of her beliefs and convictions. Now about healhcare. I am proud of the people I see standing up for their rights. If those White, Evangelical Christians had never stood up to England, we would not be the great country that we are today. We help, protect, feed more people than Bono could ever think about. The problem lies with this healthcare proposal is in the way it seems to devalue life and give no one another alternative. Obama and his cronies want us to depend on the federal government for everything. He is a man on a mission and that mission is "change". Do we really want or need the "change" he is proposing is what these we really deserve to know. But we are lied to from the media, from our politicians, from our bankers, from pretty much everybody and people are sick of it. I stand behind those AARP members who raised concerns when someone that is supposed to be working for them is working against them. I could go on but I am sure you get the gist of what I am saying.
Condascending drivel and paranoid blather...but well written.
Having spent some time in journalism, I think that two weeks of prime time exposure of angry protests following the same script could lose their luster, especially if another big news story comes along. Meanwhile, the slower momentum of people who support reform visiting their senators, writing letters, talking to neighbors will have an effect if people who are moderate and progressive in their religious expression will just take the time to do it. This week I started; a letter I wrote to our daily will be published on Saturday; I'm planning a visit to Claire McCaskill's office as well. And by the way, Sen. McCaskill did not go home. Electronic outlets (TV, Radio, Blogs) did not elaborate on how she used her powers of persuasion to calm the crowd, answer every question and keep the forum going for 2-1/2 hours. She was quoted in a newspaper story saying that dissent didn't faze her and she welcomed the dialogue. That's what the late Paul Harvey, noted for his conservative commentary, used to call "The Rest of the Story." Let's get to work. Yes We Can.
I don’t see a new generation of leaders “embodied in Barack Obama” - I see the same old political hacks playing the same old games, trying to wrap it up in the new “Obama” wrapper.
Am I supposed to apologize for being committed to a conservative Christian worldview? How about spreading a little "tolerance" my way? It’s not a religious issue, it’s not an anti-intellectual issue, it’s not a racist issue - change for the sake of change is just as stupid as clinging to the status quo. There is a solution out there - and it will be painful for all involved, but this is not it.
Creating more bureaucracy will not help reduce costs, and THAT is what the American people are enraged about. If this program being ramrodded through doesn’t scare or anger you, then you are not paying attention or you are drinking the kool-aid.
I agree generally with the sentiment that the health care debate gets stupid very quickly.
In Canada, anytime anyone wants to make major changes to the health-care system they had best beware lest some opportunistic lefty start blathering about going towards demonic "American-style" health care system, as if this was an either-or question.
The Canadian government-funded system is neither as saintly or as demonic as the proponents or opponents might suggest. One good way of putting it is that the day-to-day service rather sucketh but at the high-end or in the case of a life and death emergency it is second to none.
Frankly, it makes the most sense to provide some subsidized service for those who can't pay for it, and allow those who can pay to access better service if they want it. Of course it's not entirely fair, but frankly, neither is making people who are willing and able to pay wait just so they can suffer with everyone else. It's 2-tiered and unequal and evil but it makes sense.
LOL
Interesting you chose not to acknowledge the majority of well-reasoned, thoughtful and insightful objections being expressed at these meetings by engaged constituents to their elected representatives, who are in fact, under their employ. You simply put them in white robes, hoods and capes in an effort to summarily dismiss them.
People of faith are trying to stop America’s slide into the same post-Christian culture that permeates Europe. I would ask what in European society is worth emulating?
I have a bachelor's degree in Political Science. I have a master's degree. I have worked in government, education, and business.
My view of this type of health care reform is simple. The bigger government becomes, the less responsive it is to individual needs. The federal government cannot financially or logistically handle the job of health care.
I gladly defend your right to free speech, and I welcome logical discourse. And I defend the right of every American to protest the governments actions - past, present, or future.
I'm guessing you would defend the rights of Iraq War protesters during the last administration.
I would, too.
However, I doubt you would be interested in using the same type of expose on that group of protesters. Could you have found a religious or racial element in their actions as well? Would they have warranted such generalizations? Stereotypes? Would they have been subject to derision for their ignorance -- a given based on their position on the subject?
Your article does not contribute to a higher level of political or religious discourse. The broad generalizations, the factual errors, and your propagation of stereotypes are all disappointing, especially coming from someone whose scholarship should be more rigorous.
Why should I pay for yours? If I choose to do so because I care and want to help - that is FREEDOM. Because the government forces me to do it - that is TYRRANY! Jesus fed the five thousand because of his compassion and not because Rome was enforcing crowd regulations.
Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs stated that there has been no increase in threats to the President based on town hall activity.
Article in www.thehill.com
http://tinyurl.com/qf46xg
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