Skinhead Flashbacks

Introduction

In this next chapter, some of the Caleb Campbell’s motivations became a lot more apparent to me, and it actually had the effect of generating some sympathy for him. I will get to that in a minute.

However . . .

But the sympathy can wait for a minute. We still need to wade through a waist-deep slough of patronizing condescension. And this is what I mean.

He wants to instruct the reader on how to minister to those who have “internalized those deep feelings of fear, anxiety, and rage” (p. 91). He wants to encourage the faithful to reach out to us, for are we not their mission field? We are “trapped, held captive by the lies of the evil one” (p. 94). Things are really bad for us down here in our hole.

The chapter is an almost perfect jumble of good sense, wild assumptions, and serene self-confidence. Many of the things he says would be quite appropriate and wise if you actually were talking to someone in a cult. That’s the good sense. The wild assumptions would be the kind of thing that makes him assume that people who believe the Fed ought to be audited are somehow in the grip of the devil.

And the self-confidence . . . well, that is a sight to behold. Here’s an example.

He talks about what might happen if a true blue Christian nationalist began to worry . . . “what if my attitude toward immigrants is not what Jesus wants from me?” (p. 107).

Yeah, that might could happen. But of course, plausibility structures being what they are, the same identical thing could happen if a card-carrying member of Evangelicals for Immigrants Galore started to have second thoughts about that after yet another subway stabbing. “Maybe they’ll say she has red-pilled, or gone fascist, and she’ll be kicked out of the group.”

The self-confidence is seen in the fact that he has no category for imagining someone getting run out of a liberal group for heterodoxy. Such a thing could not happen. Someone might indeed start to question his erroneous right-wing beliefs, since they are erroneous after all. But no one need ever question their welcoming attitude toward immigration because these are attitudes that are fashioned out of whole grain and sunbeams.

Cultural Adiaphora versus Having a Point

Campbell is actually quite good about some aspects of this. But even where he is good, it still comes off as patronizing because of the other stuff. For example, he describes the patina of an Americana diner, and he is quite generous when it comes to our quaint customs.

And he understands his own impulses when it comes to disparaging the cultural mores of these heartland people. You know, the kind of people who eat at restaurants where the waitress calls you honey.

Stop eating at Cracker Barrel? Well, as recent events have made plain, your terms are acceptable.

But what he is doing here is insisting on the universality of liberal dogma. Different cultural expressions are fine with him, and so we are cleared to have large belt buckles, or to eat chicken fried steak, or to care about the best way to work on old cars. But what he has absolutely no room for is the idea that on some policy or other, the Christian nationalists might have a point.

The liberal missionary to these benighted rednecks has to be considered absolutely correct on all matters of policy, for it is the policies of the Christian nationalists that landed them under the talons of Leviathan. Because if we know anything at all about Leviathan, we know how much he desires to keep dudes out of the locker rooms of junior high girls.

But Then There Came This Surprise . . .

In the course of this chapter, Campbell opened up a bit about his own personal history.

And the point stopped me abruptly, and I stood there for a moment, rubbing my nose. All of a sudden, a number of things came into focus. In this chapter, Campbell had used a fictional “Aunt Betty” as an example of the kind of person who was duped by Christian nationalism. “But Aunt Betty is not giving her allegiance to Leviathan because it makes logical sense. She did not reason herself to this position” (p. 95). I actually suspect that something similar is happening with Campbell.

So Campbell was an angry skinhead, a white supremacist, and lived in that toxic mix for a few years.

He then goes into how a wise member of a worship band befriended him, and was used by God to help him sort through his anger issues. Campbell experienced the kind of care from this man that he thinks he is extending to Christian nationalists.

But here’s the thing. Suppose you are talking with a different aunt, an Aunt Millie. Suppose she grew up in a home that had been wrecked by alcohol abuse. Her father was a surly drunk, and her mother took to drink as a way of coping with how mean her husband would get. She was in and out of rehab three times. Your Aunt Millie was converted when she was sixteen, led to the Lord by a fundamentalist sect that hated alcohol, and she had all kinds of personal reasons to take that doctrine of theirs into the depths of her own soul. You are her favorite nephew, and one day she discovers that you joined a Reformed church that serves wine in communion, and which has as a pastor a man who drinks beer, not to mention bourbon occasionally. You can talk about what oinos means in your Greek lexicon, and you certainly may continue to do so if it amuses you. But if you think that you are going to assuage the agitated feelings of your Aunt Millie by such means, I am afraid that it is possible that you have had too much to drink. And your Aunt Millie thinks the same.

Drunks and moderate drinkers do have certain things in common. I mean, they do both drink alcohol.

In the same way, I have little doubt that all the research Campbell did into Christian nationalism did have the effect of triggering some flashbacks. These flashbacks were not attempting to be judicious and fair, as flashbacks don’t like to be edifying. It is like a former skid row bum being forced to do some investigative research at the Napa Valley Wine Tasting Festival.

Mark Twain once said that a cat that sits on a hot stove lid will never sit on a hot stove lid again. But neither will he sit on a cold one. Let the reader understand.