News with Nuance: Nov. 8, 2024

Post-Election Edition: Christian Nationalism reigns, Democrats obey in advance

Hi Readers,

I’m going to be honest here, because it’s the only way I know how to be - and that’s been my commitment to all of you here.

Remember way back in June, when the President of the United States, Joe Biden, appeared incoherent and utterly unfit for duty in a Presidential Debate with President-Elect Donald Trump?

Remember the days and weeks after, before Biden stepped down, when the prevailing line from Democratic leadership and prominent Democratic influencers was sort of this vacuous denial of the truth, a gaslighting of America that claimed everything is fine?

I hate to admit this, but our good Minnesota buddy, Gov. Tim Walz, was right there with them. I remember a press conference he held after a meeting at the White House with the Democratic Governors Association, where he told us Biden seemed great and everything was fine.

In case you’re new to this newsletter, and new to my work about the rising trend of fascism and authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism in America, everything is not fine.

Art by KC Green

At the time, with Biden literally making a Trumpian turn into narcissism, saying “I alone can fix it,” and voters’ voices being ignored … the same voters: majority women, majority young, majority nonwhite - who had given the Democrats electoral victories in three elections in a row (2018, 2020, 2022) with only rising costs, inflation, and gaslighting about those realities to show for it … I felt worse about America’s future than maybe any other point in time. Not that Jan. 6 wasn’t worse, or George Floyd’s murder wasn’t worse, or COVID, or any of the other awfulness we’ve endured in just the past five years. But it seemed worse in 2024 because all of those things had happened, and still Democratic leaders were unable to grapple with reality, to listen to anyone outside their elitist insider circles and yes-men and women whom they plied again and again for massive campaign donations. They were void of compassion for anyone, not to mention kids in Gaza, not to mention poor people in America (unless they had certain characteristics that allowed Democrats to paint them as unequivocal victims, until they rose their voices and complained).

I told myself at that time that if Biden remained on the ticket, and Democrats kept lying about his condition, that I wouldn’t vote for President. I wouldn’t vote for Christian Nationalism and the authoritarian turn of Trump. But I couldn’t vote for the lies and gaslighting of Democrats, either.

At the time, many of you disagreed with my criticism of Biden, and you let me know. I was and am always open to the conversation and hearing other points of view. I have long believed Biden to be a decent man, and yet utterly unequipped for the task that faced him.

Post-debate Biden and his sycophants exposed on top of that ineptitude a layer of selfishness, self-deception, and insular rot that we always knew was at the heart of the Democratic Party. That’s why after 2016 I couldn’t disagree with those who embraced Trump’s promise to Drain the Swamp. Many of the complaints he has raised up from his voters have been legitimate ones. It is his prescriptions that have veered darkly into racial prejudice, sexist hatred, blaming of those who are most vulnerable and marginalized.

Anyway, we all know what happened since then. At the time, it felt like a miraculous shift of fortune, even in the wake of the heroic picture of Trump painted by many, including prominent national media outlets, as he faced multiple assassination attempts.

Joe Biden stepped down. He acknowledged his own fallibility, something few politicians ever do. And then he anointed his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the would-be candidate.

It was about three months before the election. While Dean Phillips was likely proven right about the Democrats’ need for a contested primary contest prior to the 2024 election, by July, that seemed unlikely. It also felt wrong to jump over Harris. As Biden’s Vice President, she was sworn to step in if he proved incapable of completing his duties, which he had.

They really got me. The siren song of the first female president awakened inside of me a latent hope that had long been snuffed out inside of me, a woman who has spent my careers in journalism and ministry surrounded by men who thought I didn’t deserve to be there (and lots of good men who have supported me, too). Then, Harris ignored those urging caution and instead went with what was seen as an outsider pick, Minnesota’s Walz, as her VP.

How could I not start to suspend my worry and disbelief? Walz grew up not far from the small Nebraska town where my grandpa pastored a Lutheran church. Walz and his family attended a local Lutheran church in the Twin Cities where I had preached and done presentations on Christian Nationalism. His wife, Gwen, hailed from the small town just 15 minutes east of the town where I pastored for three years in rural Minnesota, a place full of beloved memories and hope and camaraderie.

I spent September to Election Day on a torrid pace, presenting often multiple times a week throughout the Midwest and appearing as a guest on podcasts, sounding the alarm about the Republican Party’s naked embrace of Christian Nationalism and rising idolatrous worship not just of the nation but of Trump himself. He was crowding out any mention of Jesus in churches across America. There was no longer any limit to the ways he’d degrade his fellow Americans, and J.D. Vance was even worse. It was like all the people on Twitter who’d send me threats and tell me I was channeling the Devil by claiming to be a woman pastor had morphed into a person who was now a major party candidate for Vice President. Making it worse was the fact that his rise ran right through the same traditional secular publishing industry that had largely rejected my book proposal earlier that year.

I watched in the VP Debate as a well-practiced Vance cozied up to Tim Walz. I knew the move well.

“Hey buddy, I know you’re working with that woman, and I really feel for you, man,” Vance seemed to say. “I want to work with you. Let’s work together. Screw her.”

Walz seemed befuddled and ill-at-ease. At the end, he asked Vance to verify the election results from 2020. Vance declined. It was arguably Walz’s only rhetorical win of the whole night, but most American voters wouldn’t see it and didn’t care.

All this scorching Fall, as Trumpism became more and more openly grasping at authoritarianism and tropes against immigrants that rang eerily of the Nazis’ blood and soil, it seemed like business as usual on the Democratic side of the aisle. Rather than leaning into the Democratic base’s enthusiasm after Biden stepped down, Harris downplayed her race and her gender (I don’t necessarily blame her for this), and Walz was seemingly yanked off the airwaves, where he’d generated excitement for his plainspoken denunciation of the “weirdness” of J.D. Vance and the rising tech bro Christian Nationalist authoritarians and right-wing manosphere podcast devotees, who wanted to repeal women’s right to vote, not just our right to lifesaving reproductive healthcare.

Instead, we got warmonger Liz Cheney at Harris’ side, and a parade of other has-been Republicans who Trump had trounced and whose Party had rejected them. Leading national newspapers owned by billionaires deferent to Trump declined to make endorsements of the Presidential race, instead running OpEds from Republican pundits like CNN’s Scott Jennings about why they were voting for Trump.

We careened into Election Day like a country in a car being driven by a drunken fool.

Harris and Walz smiled broadly while bomb threats shut down polling places in predominately Black neighborhoods in swing states. Pastors told their congregations that Christians couldn’t vote for anyone but Trump. Teenaged girls watched in horror as they saw Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” video on the bus with Billy Bush for the first time. They couldn’t believe no one cared in 2016. Little did they know how little anyone cared in 2024, with a man found culpable in court for rape on the ballot, and female influencers racking up millions of brand deals for promoting the “tradwife” lifestyle, rejecting work outside the home and pants and public school, alike.

Twenty-four hours later, masculinity influencers would be reworking TikTok videos from young female abortion activists, scrawling in large font over young women’s plaintive cries:

YOUR BODY, MY CHOICE

And still, in addresses to the nation, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden the days after the election did their best When they go low, we go high impressions. Democrats did the same old expensive and freewheeling celebrity-driven campaign that turned off voters in 2016.

Not that it matters, really, but there were so many signs.

If you watch Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York City, maybe you saw this clip? (If you don’t watch, don’t do it. Truly awful drivel).

One of the Housewives, a woman of South Asian descent named Jessel, is talking with her husband, a man of South Asian descent, named Pavit. I believe they’re both in their mid-40s, on the young end of the Gen X generational cohort that was the only one to decisively break for Trump in 2024.

They were discussing what to do about their frozen embryos, part of the process of in-vitro fertilization undergone by many wealthy couples. Allegedly, according to Jessel, she and Pavit were paying more than $1,000 a month in “rent” for their embryos, in Beverly Hills.

Pavit doesn’t want to have another child; Jessel does.

“But Pavit,” she says, plaintively (my own remembering of the conversation). “What if one of those frozen embryos is a future Beyonce? Or a future Elon Musk?”

Pavit sneers.

“I’ll let Beyonce go,” he says. “But I’ll take Elon Musk.”

It was such a casual sexism, such an easy dehumanization and statement of both privilege and prejudice. And it stated clearly what so many Democrats were utterly unwilling to see and refusing to confront.

Remember: this is Manhattan, a deep blue place in America, where Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. Pavit and Jessel come from immigrant families. Neither of them is white. They’re both college-educated.

One of the biggest sins of recent American political life has been the assumption that you can look at a person, classify them according to race, ethnicity, and class - and predict and judge their politics and/or morality. The ugly creep of authoritarianism and casual disregard for human life does not spread neatly according to demographic and political lines. Everyone has to make their own choices.

Are you shivering as you read this? I am.

We are going back. This is no time for weak platitudes or remedies to “talk across the aisle,” and lament the rise of “polarization.”

It is a time for telling the truth, or submitting to live within a lie covering up a terrible, hungry violence, nihilism and death that will eventually come for us all.

***

No news stories this week, other than the big one. And I guess not a lot of nuance, either. Sometimes it be that way.

I’m reevaluating (again) the places where I get my news. Some of my favorite Substackers got this one really, really wrong. There was an indulgent dive into wish-fulfillment and an unwillingness to look reality in its face. I did it, too.

I’m grappling with the truth that this election was the first time I ever put a sign in my yard for a candidate. The first time I spoke publicly at partisan events, despite a lifelong history as a political independent who’d interned for a Republican congressman. And for what? To be ignored and dismissed? To be told that at least we lost really well and gave a great concession speech?

No, thanks. Today is a day of reckoning and hunkering down for the long haul.

I’ll be here. My book on the radicalization of young boys and men in America comes out in March. It’s more timely and relevant than ever, unfortunately.

I’ll be back on Sunday with the Sunday Stretch, and I’m preaching at Lake Nokomis Lutheran in Minneapolis. In that medium, I’ll get to draw on the Holy Spirit and the theology of the cross, and in doing so we’ll get to the hope, with God’s help.

But hope is only valid if it’s grounded in the truth. Death before resurrection. Cross above it all.

Thanks for reading,

Angela

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