Bedazzling an Execution

Diamond-encrusted cross necklaces, Katie Britt, and the Christian Nationalist GOP

Katie Britt’s State of the Union response was crafted especially for viewers like me.

And like Americans across the country, when I watched Sen. Britt (R-Ala.), speak on national TV in early March, I felt both stunned and horrified. While the words she used were meant to scare and mislead the public, it was the imagery and Instagram-esque tradwife aesthetics - directed at white Christian moms like me - that spoke even louder in their use of Christian Nationalist propaganda and betrayal of biblical truth.

As an ordained Lutheran pastor, a native Midwesterner, a researcher on Trumpism and American Christianity, and a 39-year-old who grew up in the height of purity culture - I know a thing or two about Christian Nationalist imagery and why it’s being used to appeal to white suburban Christian moms, whose votes the GOP desperately needs in 2024. I also think it’s crucial to understand why that same imagery, used by Britt in her speech, desecrates the Easter story of Jesus, whose resurrection western Christians will commemorate just five days from now.

The most glaring example of Christian symbol turned white nationalist and cultural propaganda?

Britt’s sparkly diamond-encrusted cross necklace. Let’s start there.

Katie Britt is about three years older than me. She graduated from the University of Alabama just a few years before I graduated from the University of Missouri, a not entirely dissimilar college experience. While at Mizzou, I hosted Bible studies at my apartment, and participated in events with Campus Crusade for Christ (dwell for a moment on the choice to call a group for Christian college students in the early aughts a “crusade” and what that might mean for non-European-American Christians) and with Christian Campus House. In high school, I attended a purity retreat with a local church and went to church camp for at least four years straight every single summer. As a sportswriter in Florida after college, I continued to spend a lot of time around Evangelical circles, attending young adult nights at local Southern Baptist churches, and bonding with football coaches and athletes over our shared faith.

I knew what Britt was conjuring, then, when she wore a prominent, diamond-encrusted cross necklace to address the nation in the State of the Union response, filmed in her expensive-looking kitchen.

I know, because I had once tried to conjure the same thing.

I owned a plain cross necklace as a teenager, though I didn’t always wear it. In high school I was always caught between the traditional, somewhat milquetoast faith of my parents’ Lutheran congregation, and the more exciting, band-led, fire and brimstone theology of the Baptist bible camp and Evangelical youth group I’d attend on the side. In my Missouri college days, when I was the only Bible study participant who’d been baptized as a baby, I swung more towards conservative Evangelicalism, though I remained suspicious of its obvious misogyny and lack of female empowerment.

In Florida, as a single female sportswriter in my early 20s, blazing a trail into the hockey locker room as the team’s first female beat reporter, I found myself balancing competing identities, as a feminist journalist who abhorred the fake, aw-shucks piety of then-vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and as a woman who was hoping to date conservative, athletic, Christian men.

This was when I bought my first “diamond” cross earrings.

One Sunday morning after attending church, I drove up the low-slung coastal highway to a little shop in Bonita Springs called “Best of Everything.” Basically, it was a store filled with low-priced dupes of higher-priced items. So they had fake Chanel earrings with the interlocking C’s, and fake Vera Bradley bags and accessories. It was one of those stores that’s just overflowing with *stuff,* full of young and elderly women alike, picking through items to find the perfect deal. You never see white men in these stores for two reasons: (1) men’s items are rarely as overpriced as women’s, so “dupes” aren’t as necessary, and (2) white men are not as socialized to be price conscious when it comes to buying items for themselves, nor to have expensive external adornments as proof of their internal intrinsic value.

I came to the store looking for Vera Bradley purse dupes, and a couple of pairs of gaudy “Chanel” earrings. But I also bought a pair of cross earrings encrusted with cubic zirconia “diamonds.”

I bought the cross “diamond” earrings for a specific reason, because I wanted to communicate that I was a specific type of girl (girl, not woman). I wanted them to say what “diamond” cross earrings and necklaces meant to me at the time, that I was a “good” girl but also fashionable and “not poor.” That I cared about my appearance and wanted to be able to appear aesthetically pleasing to the men in my life. That I was kind and sweet and giving and caring and utterly accepting and unproblematic. That I would never yell too loud or make men too uncomfortable. That I was, to use an old term, “marriageable.”

This is the same aesthetic message that Katie Britt and the GOP wanted to send America in the State of the Union response. Her diamond-encrusted cross sent a message of unchallenging, acquiescent, white femininity, a veneer of beauty over a base of ugliness and meanness, which would treat women’s wombs as unfeeling ovens, and women’s bodies as a means toward men’s power and pleasure. This was a message that I’d been taught, not necessarily from my family or from my home church pastors, but definitely from the conservative men in power who I encountered in my life.

I was trained by white American Christianity to lay my female body down in order to protect the hegemony of White Christian male American power, and to cover it up with nonthreatening feminine beauty and privilege.

I remember the day I bought my first diamond-encrusted cross jewelry, and I remember the day I knew I’d never wear it again.

After a few years as a sportswriter in Florida, I succumbed to God’s higher calling in my life and entered seminary in order to become ordained as a Lutheran pastor. I entered first as a conservative, suspicious of the liberal drift of the white Midwestern Lutheranism I’d grown up with, that was my family heritage. But as I spent four years immersed in the scriptures and theological texts, I found myself praying again and again for God to reveal Godself to me more completely, and for my wonderings about the limits of God’s love to be challenged in my experiences in the church, where I met people who showed me that God was much bigger, more expansive, than I’d ever imagined God to be.

That same expansiveness of God allowed me to accept my own expansiveness, too. I no longer had to fit myself into a tiny white Christian-shaped acceptable woman box. My most valuable asset was no longer my well-contained and managed beauty or my tightly-controlled and managed purity. I no longer felt responsible for pleasing, attracting, and also chastening every single man who I encountered.

In my second year of seminary, I spent a fascinating semester learning at the feet of an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian professor. In our class on early Christian history prior to the Reformation, she told us the stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, of the martyrs of the faith who were still dying for professing their Christianity today. She told us about unfathomable courage, and in doing so she showed me that Christianity had always rested not on the witness of the powerful but the desperate prophecy of the persecuted. This was, I learned in my theology courses, the very heart of the theology of the cross, which remembers that Jesus’ power came to its height at the very moment when the world had condemned and killed him, and thus Jesus’ followers must expect not prosperity but persecution as we follow the Way of the Cross.

My professor told us of an Orthodox Christian tradition that continues today, especially among Middle-Eastern and Egyptian Christians. In countries where Christians are often under threat from fundamentalist Muslim governments and extremist groups, Christians still choose to brand themselves with the mark of the Cross, often getting large tattoos of black inked crosses on the insides of their wrists.

Two years after graduating seminary, serving as Pastor of a small Lutheran church in the Chicago suburbs, I was still so inspired by the story of those modern Middle Eastern Christians, so far from my privileged experience of middle-class white American Christianity, that for my 30th birthday I went to a tattoo parlor and got my first two tattoos, two small black crosses on the inside of both of my wrists.

The ink has slightly faded now, nearly 10 years later. But the crosses remain, and I will never take them off.

I still own those “diamond” cross earrings I bought in Florida almost 20 years ago, at the height of my personal experiment as an Evangelical American young woman. But I’ll never wear them again. As I compared their gaudy glory to the stories my professor told us of men and women tortured for their cross tattoos, I felt the shallowness of the message those diamond cross earrings conveyed to the world about who I was, and about what it meant to be an American Christian.

I’ve spent much of the past 8 years researching and writing about the vast majority of white American Christians who have traded their catechisms for Trumpism. I’ve found that they’ve been easily seduced to the promise of power and glory for white Christians offered by Trump, because for a long time white American Christianity has rested its own promise and witness in the promise of white middle-class American glory. White Christian women wearing diamond-encrusted cross necklaces like Katie Britt have been that kind of Christianity’s most powerful prophets.

When you put diamonds all over a Cross, you strip it of its power and of its indignity.

The Cross is a method of execution.

It’s like putting diamonds on an electric chair and wearing it around your neck.

It’s like bedazzling a gun … or wait, we do that, too in America.

More than 2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth, a brown-skinned Jewish carpenter’s son living in the Middle East, was sentenced to death by deadly collusion between a religious hierarchy in pursuit of political power, and a Roman Empire thirsty for dominance over the restive ethnic and religious minorities of this Jerusalem, its far-flung conquered land.

He was nailed to the cross flanked by common criminals. He was:

despised and rejected by others;

a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;

and as one from whom others hide their faces

he was despised, and we held him of no account,” (Isaiah 53:3).

The American Christian Nationalism championed by Trump, Britt and today’s GOP has taken the critical cross of Christ and covered it with blood diamonds. They have taken a symbol of death and turned it into a cheap consumer good. Without recognizing that which the Cross brought death unto, there is no resurrection to celebrate or uplift. There is only life as an endless pursuit of others to fear and to hate, and a desperate squirreling away of goods, money, influence, and power, in order to quiet the fear and emptiness that gnaws away inside.

If you look up from Katie Britt’s shiny, sparkling cross of diamonds, and you look into her eyes, you can see the deadness behind them. These are the eyes of a Christianity that has no need for a Savior, because it is a Christianity that has made power, money, and wealthy white men into gods of its own. This Christianity has no need of the Cross, because it does not recognize its own sins, or the need of their forgiveness.

So this Christianity takes the invaluable Cross and covers it in diamonds, because only then is it valuable in the only currency this empty white American Christian Nationalism can understand.

For more reading on the elements of Christian Nationalism made manifest in Katie Britt’s speech and the aesthetics surrounding it, I recommend:

This, from

Tia Levings

Fundie Baby Voice Isn't What We Called It

This, from

Sarah Stankorb

Senator Katie Britt and XOXOXO for the Patriarchy

This, from

Heather Cox Richardson

March 8, 2024

This, from

lyz

Dingus of the week: Sen. Katie Britt

And this, from

Jared Yates Sexton

The Deep Weird: Consequences of the Rabbit Hole

Thanks for reading,

Angela

P.S. …

A Few Notes:

First, a huge THANK YOU to all subscribers. I get a little email notification every time someone signs up, and every time I get one, I feel joyful and honored that you want to spend part of your day with this community. I mean it when I say: “I’m listening,” to you as well, and please don’t hesitate to share with me your thoughts + ideas for what you’d like to read in this space.

To PAID SUBSCRIBERS: I am humbled and honored that you’ve chosen to spend part of your limited budget on this newsletter. To borrow words from another newsletter I love, you are directly funding freelance journalism with your subscription, and I have to thank you more than ever for your continued support. Our world’s media and journalism is in a state of crisis, with fewer and fewer billionaires in control of global news outlets, and journalists being either laid off or threatened with violence for their work every single day; with fewer and fewer newsroom positions paying a living wage. I pledge to you to steward your paid subscription faithfully + use it to support honest, hard-working, and LOCAL journalism. One of my goals in this first year is to open this newsletter to other journalists, and pay them a fair wage for their work.

THANK YOU for your support. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.

On free vs. paid-subscriber posts only: My plan right now is that the Friday + Sunday posts, focusing on news + spirituality, in that order, are available for subscribers only (I am going to continue sharing a sample, with a line where the paywall cuts off for our paid subscriber community). My plan is that the Tuesday blog-style posts will always be free, to enable as much access as possible, while creating a smaller and more intimate experience for paid subscribers, who are also able to comment and share in community in fuller ways.

Free Trial: Substack always offers a free week-long trial subscription to this newsletter, so you can get a taste of the Friday + Sunday posts and see if you’d like to subscribe!

If a paid subscription is a hardship for you, but you’d like access to the Friday + Sunday posts: PLEASE do not hesitate to reach out. I will be happy to provide a complimentary subscription for you.