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“Why so angry?” That’s the question many people have when confronted by Christian and social conservatives who have different views on politics, religion, or policy than they do. We understand the differences. We understand that in a large, complex society there are bound to be significant differences. We understand that those differences can stir powerful emotions. But the vitriol those conservatives aim at their political and social opponents still feels like it’s out of all proportion to the issues at hand and the task of living together. In this episode, Dan reflects on this question, arguing that conservative Christian theology effectively demands that they demonize their opponents to justify what they view as God’s commands for society.
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Hello and as always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am here with you this episode.
My name is Dan Miller, as you probably know, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, thrilled to be with you.
As always, welcome your insights, comments.
Critiques, encouragement, feedback, episode ideas, clarifications, whatever you have, you can email me, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
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That feels like that's a tongue twister, I should say, before I start recording.
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I want to dive in today.
I've been reflecting on a question that, it's a big question.
It's bigger than a, you know, 20-ish minute episode.
It's bigger than a, you know, a weekly roundup.
It's bigger than a single podcast.
But the question really comes up, and people pose it, and I've been pondering on it, about just the sheer vitriol of the contemporary culture war as it relates in particular to cultural and Christian conservatives and Christian nationalists and so forth, right?
And people encounter this with family members.
They encounter this maybe sitting in a pew.
They encounter this maybe when they see images online or on the TV or as they drive by and they see protesters and so forth.
And basically the question is like, you know, I get that conservative Christians disagree with me.
I get that they think, you know, the lifestyle elements of my existence are wrong.
I get that they think that I, you know, run afoul of what God wants or whatever.
Fine.
But why so angry?
Why that level of vitriol?
Right?
Why the demonization of those who disagree?
And there's two elements to this.
One, you know, we talk a lot about in the podcast, and I talk a fair amount about The spiritual warfare framing of these culture wars, and in some cases we say, you know, the demonization of others, and it's literal, right?
You have this notion that they are demonic forces, or I heard a right-wing commentator the other day talking about the Democratic Party is a demonic construct and so forth.
Literal demonization, and that is certainly part of this, right?
That those are, they're not just political opponents.
They don't just have different social views.
They didn't just grow up differently or in a different part of the country or something like that.
Nope.
They are demonic forces serving the interests of Satan and opposed to Christians, right?
But even taking it down a notch from that, we're talking about demonization and it's more run-of-the-mill, less literal use of the term, right?
You know, when we engage Uncle Ron, it's not just that, you know, people who, let's say, affirm abortion access have a different understanding of when human life starts.
It's not just that queer folk want to, you know, be allowed to live their lives the way that other people live their lives.
It's not that, you know, trans kids want to just have a sense of self that feels good, right?
That feels right.
Can't be that.
Nope.
They have to demonize it.
They have to be evil.
They have to be a danger.
They have to be a threat.
And so this is the question that the people pose, and again, in a way, it's the question, right?
The question we talk about all the time, but I've been giving it some thought over the last couple weeks.
You know, people say, why can't they just disagree?
Why can't they just say that or acknowledge that somebody else who disagrees with them is, you know, voting their conscience or whatever, or that they have a different view on policies?
Why does it always have to become, you know, so angry and so much about the other person being evil or a threat or whatever?
Or likewise, on the flip side of the conservative Christian, if they just oppose something because it doesn't go with the Bible the way they interpret it, why can't they just say that?
I view myself, I experience myself as limited by what the Bible says.
Here's how I understand the Bible.
Therefore, this is my view.
Why not just leave it at that?
Why does it have to turn into confrontation and attack and condemnation and so forth, right?
And here's what I think people are getting at, or what I'm trying to get at in posing this.
It's this question, why do conservative Christians have to make everyone they oppose the bad guy?
Why do they have to be the bad person?
Why did that have to be bad?
Not just different.
Not just somebody who doesn't agree.
Somebody with a different view.
Nope.
Has to be a bad person, right?
And again, this has been on my mind a good bit lately, partly because so many people post questions like this, and partly because it's a question that, you know, I just think about a lot.
And, you know, I was thinking about it, and here's the dynamic that I think is at work.
And this is what I want to sort of decode today, is again, why it is, the sort of impulse that I think is behind this kind of demonization that fuels the vitriol, okay?
So, in a nutshell, I'll expand on this more, okay?
Despite conservative Christians' insistence that the laws or commandments of God determine what's right or wrong, okay?
In other words, this is the view, the common argument that one can't have morality without God or without being a Christian, right?
That God's will articulated in commandments of, you know, responsibilities to do things, prohibition against doing other things, and so forth, that these are what determine what's right and wrong, okay?
And most conservative Christians, if you ask them and say, where do our standards of right and wrong come from?
How do we know what's right and wrong?
They will say, God tells us, okay?
But here's the thing.
I think that despite that insistence, And when I say this, I am reaching all the way back, not just to observations now, but to my experience as a high school student in youth group, as a Christian college student, as an evangelical pastor.
I think that this was at play in all of those levels, okay?
Despite that insistence, despite that profession, That God is what determines what is right or wrong, I think that conservative Christians are actually deeply bothered about the idea that God is simply capricious or arbitrary.
In other words, they will say God is our source of right and wrong, but I think they're also bothered by that for various reasons.
And to try to illustrate this, I want to think back to a discussion that Plato, the philosopher, ancient Greek philosopher Plato, had.
Now, if you know anything about ancient Greek philosophy, Plato writes these dialogues, and they are purportedly the teachings of Socrates, his mentor and teacher.
Socrates didn't write everything, so, you know, it didn't write anything, rather.
So there's sometimes some debate about, you know, where you're getting Plato, where you're getting Socrates, whatever.
But in this story, Socrates is talking with somebody and poses this question that is a perennial sort of philosophy of religion or metaphysics question.
And it is still very much with us.
And the question is this, does God will or command what is good because it's good?
Okay?
In other words, if we agree, if we could agree that whatever God commands is the good, does God command it because it is good, or is it good because God commands it?
Does the fact that God commands it make it good?
And the typical conservative Christian, and especially conservative Protestant answer, here we're into theology and Catholic theology and Protestant theology can be really different on this point, right?
Or pre-Protestant Catholic theology in the form of, say, nominalism and so forth, okay?
The typical conservative answer to this question, and if you asked Uncle Ron and said, you know, or somebody said to you, we know what's good, right or wrong, because it comes from God, you say, well, does that mean that God does it because it's right or wrong, or is it right or wrong because God says it?
They'll say, well, because God says it.
God makes what is right, makes what is wrong, wrong.
God calleth the shots.
God is the one who wrote the rules for the game, okay?
So most conservative Protestants will basically say that because God is omnipotent, that means that whatever is good is good because God commands it.
And the reason that that's an answer people want to give—and this, again, goes all the way back to Plato.
I'm not making anything up here, certainly not being original, right?
But this was Socrates' point in the story that Plato tells.
If we say otherwise, if we say that God wills something because it is good, the idea is that that makes God beholden to something sort of higher or preeminent or something that exists before God, that God is in a certain sense subject to something, that God acknowledges the good as a highest value, and God is not God's self the highest value, which is more platonic, right?
Plato's highest form in his metaphysics is the good, capital D, capital G, the good, right?
The good is preeminent, but conservative Christians have rejected that answer, okay?
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So what almost all conservative Christians will say is, what is good or right is good or right because God commands it.
It's what a lot of evangelical theologians teach.
You will get some hard-boiled folks who might say something different, but the more they affirm God's omnipotence, the more Reformed, for example, their theology is, The more likely they are to say that what God says is right because God says it, right?
It's what people have heard in their sermons.
It's what I heard in sermons growing up.
It's what I preached.
Okay?
It's why they understand the Bible essentially as a book of divine commands, right?
Whatever is right is right because God says it.
Where does God say it?
God says it in the Bible.
That's why the Bible is so important.
Okay?
Most of them, if you were putting this into terms of what's called moral philosophy or just ethics, they accept a theory known as divine command theory.
That that which is ethical, the good, is determined by the fact that God wills or commands it.
Okay?
That is, I think, and again, reach out.
Tell me if it's otherwise.
Tell me if you grew up in an evangelical church and your pastor said something really, really different from that.
Okay?
But I think that that's the standard line.
Okay?
Here's the issue.
They don't actually believe that.
Uncle Ron probably doesn't actually believe that.
The people in the pew don't actually believe that.
A lot of their pastors don't actually believe that.
They want to believe that.
They may think that that's what they believe.
I thought that's what I believed for a long time, but it's not actually what they believe.
Why?
Because there are some real difficulties with this view.
And again, this is not unique.
There were debates about this.
Hundreds of years ago, they have existed, you know, throughout Christian history.
This is nothing new.
But the difficulty is that it essentially makes God into an a-hole.
And it makes his followers into a-holes, and nobody wants to be an a-hole, and nobody wants to worship an a-hole.
Okay?
Why do I say that?
It's because what it basically does is make God or morality into a because-I-said-so morality.
Why is being gay bad?
Well, God said so.
Why should women submit to men?
Because God said so.
Why shouldn't I have premarital sex?
Because God said so.
In every case, it essentially makes God capricious or arbitrary, right?
If you say, why did God say this?
Why did God command this?
There can literally be no reason, because God is not beholden to anything, including logic or some conception of the good or something else.
It becomes simply arbitrary.
Whatever God willed is what God could will.
And there were even theologians—I'm reaching back to the medieval period here—who advocated this view, who went to the extreme of saying that we can't even be sure that God won't simply contradict God's self and will something different tomorrow.
That's what it means to say that morality and everything else comes from God, has its origin in God.
And I think most people, even the ones who profess this, are profoundly uncomfortable with that idea.
And like, why?
Why are they so uncomfortable with that?
Well, because like most of us, they recognize, or I think that they feel, how much that concept of right or wrong contradicts their own fundamental sense of fairness or rightness.
We all recognize, for example, we can all remember at some point when our parents or grandparents or somebody, you know, you ask why, you ask for a justification or something, they say, well, because I said so, or as long as you live under my roof, these are my rules, or whatever.
And we remember how that made us feel.
Most of us who are parents probably try not to parent that way.
Many of us who supervise people at work, we probably try to give reasons and rationale for the policies we have.
If you're a person like me, nothing drives me more nuts than policies or rules that seem to have no rational basis at all.
Somebody can't tell you why it is.
They just have to appeal to their authority.
Well, I'm your boss.
I said that's how it's going to be.
Certainly don't trust politicians who advocate a notion that they should just be able to do whatever they want because they're a politician, right?
So the trick is that we all expect that when people command something, require something, create a policy, make a demand of us, that they have reasons for doing so.
And even the conservative Christians do the same thing to God.
So they make it important, and I think it's often implicit, it is often unrecognized, modification to their notion of God's commands.
Yeah, they'll say we should do what God says to do or not do what God says not to do because God says it, but God doesn't just say it to be arbitrary.
God doesn't do it because God is capricious.
The reason God commands what God does is that God cares for us and wants what is best for us.
In other words, what God commands or prohibits is commanded or prohibited because it is good for us.
That is the reason.
It's not just because God commands it, it's because it is best for us.
God is essentially transformed into a parental figure who gives the commands God gives, not because God is some all-powerful deity you can simply give commands, but because God's a caring, loving parent.
Okay?
And what that means is—let's bring this back around then, these kind of theological reflections to the culture war stuff—when we turn to concrete issues, like the ones that occupy that culture war space, what Christians demand in the name of God has to be demanded, in their view, because it is what is good for us.
It is what is best for us as humans.
It is what is best for society.
And what God opposes is opposed because it is bad for us.
So let's take something like patriarchal social structure, women's submission, the notion of male headship.
They'll say, God doesn't just command this arbitrarily.
God commands it because it's how we've been created as humans.
The kind of social order that comes from a patriarchal authoritative structure is what is best for us.
And conservative Christians don't want to say that God is opposed to non-patriarchal family systems where people thrive.
They don't want to say that God is opposed to women using their intellectual capacities and energies in ways that they find fulfilling.
They don't want a God who is capricious enough to condemn people who are happy, who are productive, who are flourishing, who aren't bad people.
Despite the fact—and yes, somebody, if you ever sat in a seminary class, you read some theology, you'd be like, well, but wait, the Calvinists will say, like, they'll really emphasize that nobody is a good person, so God is justified in condemning everybody.
Yep, that's what they will say.
In practice, most Christians are fundamentally uncomfortable with that articulation of their faith.
They want a God who condemns people because they deserve to be condemned.
Not just because of who they are, but because of what they do, because they are a threat or a risk.
And so what they will do is instead of creating a God who condemns people who seem to be good in all respects, they have to demonize those people.
They have to construct those people as an enemy.
So women who oppose patriarchy, men who oppose patriarchy for that matter, have to be a problem to be confronted.
Or let's take queer inclusion in the queer community.
They will say, God doesn't oppose queerness for no reason.
God opposes queerness because it's dangerous for us.
They don't want to condemn people that they can look at and see that they're in committed relationships, and they're fulfilled, and they're happy, and they have families, and their children thrive and do great, the same as other children do.
They don't want to condemn people who seem good or normal in every respect.
So, because that makes God seem cruel to them.
Why would God condemn a bunch of people who are just, they're raising families, they're raising kids, they're doing all the same stuff other families do.
Why would God condemn that person?
Well, because they're dangerous.
They're not living happy, fulfilled lives.
They are groomers.
They're a threat to the family, and by threatening the family, they threaten Western society and so forth.
We fall very naturally into the rhetoric that we've all heard in the culture wars.
Or take, as just a final example, and we could spin out the examples all day, right?
Example after example after example.
Take affirmation of abortion care.
Right?
It's not enough for just say, well, you know what?
There are some really long-standing disagreements about when distinctly human life develops.
Or these are people who are like everybody else and they find themselves in a situation where maybe there just aren't any good options and the least bad option for them or the option that benefits the most or whatever is to have an abortion.
And lots of people who have abortions It's not that they woke up one day dreaming of that.
It's a situation in which they find themselves, and they are like everybody else, they're just generally good people trying to make their way in the world.
No, it can't be that, because then God seems like an a-hole for condemning them.
So instead, they have to believe that these people hate babies, that they deny the value of life, that they want to destroy society and so forth, that they're fundamentally selfish.
They have to do this.
They need abortion seekers to be deviant.
They need them to be evil so that they can justify God's condemnation of them.
Okay?
What I'm trying to highlight here is that the reason why we have the vitriol and the level of anger and the demonization we have is that conservative Christians have what we might call sort of a felt need for a God who is not simply arbitrary, who doesn't simply demand things because God can, But demands things because they are what is best for us.
That God is the caring parent, and just as caring parents should only give commands or, you know, demand obedience from their children in ways that are for the children's benefit, so God's commands are for our benefit.
And so where it isn't apparent that that works, and folks, in every example I'm giving, I think this is nonsense.
This is part of what moved me out of evangelicalism.
Long list of things that moved me out of evangelicalism, this is one of them.
They have to demonize them.
They have to.
The conservative Christian God needs demons.
To justify what conservative Christians say God demands the society be like, to justify the views that God has against those who conservative Christians oppose, they have to demonize those people to justify those demands.
So if you map this onto the particular God that is worshiped by contemporary conservative Christians, and again, I want to say there are lots of other ways of being Christian, not all people who profess Christianity worship this God, right?
It'd be an interesting topic on its own, right?
Sort of like Christian polytheism, you know, the pluriform vision of the Christian God, whatever.
It's a recipe for social disaster.
They worship a God that has to have demons, that has to have enemies.
And so when they look around the world and they see it not lining up with what they believe God says it has to be, it's not enough to simply try to change it into something more God-like, something God would approve of.
They have to demonize others.
They have to make those others into enemies, to identify them as enemies, so that they can justify the actions of God in the world.
And what that means is that in this Christian worldview, culture war becomes perpetual.
It is not something that just happens.
It is not a contingent fact.
It is a necessary part of being a Christian in the world, is that one must oppose the enemies of God, and everybody who lives in some way that doesn't accord with that Christian vision, with their Christian vision, has to be an enemy.
And the irony, of course, is that the reason they have to be an enemy is because they identify them as the enemy of God in the first place, but then they have to demonize them to justify that identification.
And on and on and on, as I say, a cycle of perpetual culture war.
So that's part of what I think is going on.
As I've been reflecting on this, I'm like, why the level of vitriol?
Why the level of anger?
Why the consistent demonization?
Once again, I think it's in the code.
It's in the code of conservative Christian theology.
Their theology, as they live it, as they experience it, involves a God who needs evil forces to be opposed to justify the commands that God gives.
And so we are stuck in this perpetual culture war.
In my view, that doesn't change unless one radically changes one's conception of God and or of what God commands.
That's a whole other discussion.
I want to thank everybody for joining me for this discussion.
As I say often, there are lots of things you could do with your time besides this.
I am thankful, grateful, humbled that you've chosen this, you know, 20 or so minutes to listen to me talk about this.
Please reach out, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I respond to as many emails as I can.
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As I say, I'm behind even more than normal at the moment, but I'm working to close that gap.
Value all of you so much, the encouraging words, the challenges, and what have you.
Thank you all.
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