Mine Eyes Have Seen the Gory of the Coming of the Sword

Earl Fowler

Born in what was then Bombay into a Kashmiri Muslim family on June 19, 1947 — two months before India and Pakistan threw off the yoke of British rule at the stroke of midnight that Aug. 15 — Salman Rushdie regularly laments that India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has invented a “Hinduism” that isn’t Hindu at all.

This is from a speech the renowned novelist gave at the PEN World Voices Festival in 2014:

“Hinduism” is an amalgam of belief systems. It has no single holy book, no single god, and no requirement for collective acts of worship. In its place the new ideology declares the Ramayana to be the book of books (why? The Vedas are older and have at least an equal claim), Ram to be the most important god, and the return of “Ram Rajya,” the rule of Ram, to be the most desirable happening (this, even though there are many parts of India where Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu, has no such history of preeminence); and mass acts of worship, resembling nothing so much as Nuremberg rallies, have become regular events.

This argument has the merit of being true, but Mr. Modi (Narendra Modi, the leader of the BJP who has served as the Indian prime minister since 2014) and his people have created a movement out of this new Hinduism that makes old truths irrelevant. The new Hinduism is Hinduism now, and its intolerance has become India’s intolerance.

At least since the bromance between evangelist Billy Graham and that eminent Quaker Richard Nixon — who wasn’t much good at abstaining from swearing and drinking but at least had the virtue of being a terrible dancer — it’s been evident that Protestantism has been undergoing a similar transformation in the United States.

In the last half century or so, traditional Protestant congregations — such as those of the Episcopal, Lutheran and Presbyterian persuasions — have glumly acquiesced in their relegation to the back benches and rear pews as radically conservative evangelical and/or Pentecostal and/or Southern Baptist beliefs have increasingly come to define what it means to be an American Christian today.

The stacking of the U.S Supreme Court with arch conservatives, the Advent of Trump 2.0 and the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk have supercharged this conversion — praise the Lord! — to the point where being a non-Catholic Christian in America today has come to mean being about as unChristian as a person can be. That is, if the Social Gospel that held sway in both Canada and the U.S in the early 20th century meant anything at all.

The loving your neighbours part, I mean. Now it’s all about bullying and bigotry and hatred.

This is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, so let’s start with a story about a casserole.

Imagine, if you will, a quiet church basement in suburban Ohio — folding tables, plastic forks, the faint smell of mildew overpowered only by cream-of-mushroom soup. This is where Christianity used to live in America. It’s where it prayed quietly, wore beige cardigans and debated predestination while eating something called “Lutheran Jell-O salad,” which contained neither lettuce nor salvation. Possibly tiny marshmallows.

The point is, American Christianity used to be a bit like your grandma’s living room: fusty, floral and unfailingly polite (except when being rabidly antisemitic, of course, or griping about those godless dogans). You might not have liked it, but it wouldn’t bite you or shout at you in tongues.

Fast forward to the present, where “Christianity” in the U.S. has been — how to put this without inviting either spontaneous combustion or a good old-fashioned brimstone missile attack— rebranded. It’s now cowboy-hatted, flag-draped, occasionally AR-15 accessorized, and prone to confusing the Sermon on the Mount with the Second Amendment. What used to be a Sunday morning thing has become a 24/7 identity — a spiritual NASCAR, all noise and torque and sudden acceleration toward authoritarianism. The pews are out. Smoke machines are in.

1. Jesus Is Lord, and Also Apparently a Republican from Texas

Theologically, this new Christianity™ is not really “new” in the sense of containing any new ideas. (If it had new ideas, that would be heresy, and heresy is reserved for people who say climate change isn’t a Chinese hoax.)

No, what’s changed is the vibe, the aesthetic, the whole vibeology of it. If you walk into one of these megachurches — and let’s be honest, it’s probably located in a repurposed Sears — you will encounter:

• A guy named Pastor Phil, who used to be a minor league pitcher and now wears $300 sneakers to tell you about spiritual warfare;

  
  

• A praise band that looks like Coldplay after a Jesus intervention;

  
  

• Several large screens depicting a white Jesus who seems oddly concerned with border security and low corporate tax rates. (He is, however, completely down with the money changers and the merchants at the Temple who sell anointed candles and what those pesky papists used to call Indulgences).

  
  

• Did I mention that Pastor Phil’s surname is Pharisee?

  
  

There is a drama to it all, a pageantry that feels more Vince McMahon than Vatican. And at the centre is a narrative that wouldn’t be out of place in a Marvel origin story: We, the good Christians, are under attack from the atheistic, communist hordes — Harvard professors, trans baristas, James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Christopher Wray, Jimmy Kimmel, Liz Cheney, Jack Smith, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Arthur Engoron, Alvin Bragg, Michael Cohen, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Oscar the Grouch, etc. etc. Lock ’em up! (No, wait. I’m pretty sure Oscar’s a fan of Fox & Friends. That’s why he’s always in such a snit.)

The fact that white Christians still make up the single largest demographic bloc in the country is irrelevant to this narrative. You can’t have a hero’s journey without some persecution, even if you have to manufacture it from a Starbucks cup.

Onward Christian fascists, marching as to culture war.

Saturday night’s all right for smiting.

2. Where Have All the Lutherans Gone?

Meanwhile, the old mainline U.S. denominations — the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and those ever-anxious Unitarians — are mostly … still around? But like antique furniture in an IKEA world, no one’s really sure what to do with them anymore.

They still publish thoughtful theological statements, most of which are ignored even by their own congregants. Their pastors still wear stoles and talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But in the Great Marketplace of American Religion, they’ve lost the branding war.

See, the problem is that nuance doesn’t sell. Christianity-lite, now with fewer calories and 100% less damnation, may be theologically sound and ethically rigorous, but try fitting that on a bumper sticker. The evangelicals have slogans: Jesus Saves. Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People. Real Men Love Jesus and Their F-150s. Meanwhile, the Episcopalians are still debating whether the Nicene Creed is overly gendered.

3. The Holy Spirit Now Has a TikTok Account

At the heart of this transformation is a kind of spiritual re-mythologizing. Just as Rushdie noted with Hinduism — that a once-multivalent, localized, loosely codified belief system has been collapsed into something monocultural, militant, intolerant, violent, and highly exportable — the same thing has happened in the U.S.

Once upon a time, Christianity in America could contain multitudes: liberation theologians and snake handlers, Quakers and Southern Baptists, monks and megachurches. Now, we are trending toward a singular idea of what a Christian looks like, sounds like, votes like. The Holy Spirit, it seems, only speaks in King James English (albeit with a Tennesseean accent) and especially through well-versed pitchmen named Charlie.

This “New Christianity” is less a faith than a lifestyle brand. It has its own music, movies, politicians, home decor (Live Laugh Love, but make it Jeremiah 29:11), and even its own economy. You can go your whole life only buying things from “Christian businesses” and never interact with a secular thought, which is, of course, the dream.

The parallels are striking. Sunni Islam has been similarly subverted by the Wahhabi movement that serves the Saudi royal family so well; Shia Islam by Iranian theocrats. Three little words are the key to all of this channelled religiosity, and they aren’t “God is great.” Try “follow the money.” And then there’s the spine-chilling transfiguration of Judaism in the ultra-nationalist Netanyahu era. Half a century ago, American-born Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Meir Kahane and members of his notorious Kach movement were considered terrorists in both the U.S. and Israel for advocating that all Palestinians be driven into the sea. Since the Hamas terror attack of Oct. 7, 2023 — at least until the current ceasefire (and it remains to be seen how this one will play out) — uncompromising Kahanism (Kach sucking, if you will) has been for all intents and purposes official government policy. Paradoxically, it’s the backing from American Christian nationalists — who believe all Jews will roast for eternity in hell if they don’t accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour — that helps keep Netanyahu in power. And let us not forget that many of those Christian nationalists profess to be Catholics: justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett of the current U.S. Supreme Court that has completely upended the American judicial system, among them. Not to mention JD Vance, who had an evangelical upbringing but converted to Catholicism in 2019. Wife Usha is a practising Hindu, by the way, but that’s not much of a talking point in conservative circles … except in India.

Ah, India. On the subcontinent, the rise of fascistic Hinduism — let’s call it what it is — has resulted in the razing or burning of hundreds of Christian churches and the rebranding (there’s that marketing word again) of 200 million Muslims (with ancestral roots in the country going back to time immemorial) as non-citizens and interlopers. Autrement dit, illegal aliens.

It hasn’t received much attention in the West, but Indian authorities began forcibly deporting Muslims — including Indian citizens — to neighbouring countries following the militant attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir in April, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

I don’t know how to say “ICE, ICE, Baby” in Hindi. But I do know that when cynical, corrupt, power-mad leaders reach a point where they can silence dissent by weaponizing their justice systems, controlling the media and unleashing the powerful language of religion to punish enemies, all forms of sadistic barbarism are sanctioned by God in the minds of devout, deluded believers. (Note that Donald J. Trump — who fakes knowing the Lord’s Prayer at evangelical gatherings but is obviously all about forgiving those he views as having trespassed against him — has taken to calling the Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.”)

In a series of private lectures delivered over the past month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel — Vance’s puppet master and a charter member of the PayPal mafia that includes Elon Musk— branded Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and critics of artificial intelligence as “legionnaires of the Antichrist.” The language is apocalyptic — Fatwa-esque, you might say. The Satanic Verses author Rushdie knows a thing or two about the near-fatal consequences of that kind of inflammatory rhetoric.

So again, that’s the dream. German poet Heinrich Heine pithily expressed the concomitant nightmare 200 years ago: “Where books burn, so do people.” For you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.

4. Jesus Flipped Tables, Not the Electoral Map

The irony here is that none of this is remotely Christian in the historical or theological sense. Jesus, famously, did not say “Blessed are the tax-cutters” or “Love thy neighbour as long as they’re a documented citizen.” He did not build a wall around Jerusalem or host rallies to “Make Galilee Great Again.”

This mutation of Christianity is not about spiritual growth or moral rigour. It’s about power. And what Rushdie calls “divinely authorized bigotry.” And the dopamine rush of moral superiority disguised as piety. The problem is, once religion becomes indistinguishable from politics, you’re no longer worshipping God. You’re worshipping your own reflection, only with a crown of thorns photoshopped on. Not that I can think of a single vitriolic, racist, sexist American autocrat with that kind of ego. Well, maybe one. Gloria in excelsis Donald.

5. So Now What?

So where does that leave other Christians — those poor, half-damned souls who grew up with flannelgraph Jesuses and youth group lock-ins and are now watching their childhood faiths get hijacked by televangelists in designer denim?

Maybe they go back to the casseroles. Maybe they dust off the old hymns and the old doubts and start over, in small rooms with bad lighting and good hearts. Maybe the way forward is not a rebranding, but a remembering: that faith, real faith, is quiet and weird and uncomfortable and often totally useless in the world of algorithms and elections. Give them that old-time religion. It might just be what saves them from themselves.

Or maybe we should all just become Unitarians and try not to talk about any of this at Thanksgiving. How about those Blue Jays?

Amen.