Confessions of a ’90s Christian Culture Warrior

It is hard to overstate the searing power of imagery like this for many right-wing evangelicals who experience themselves as embattled victims in the American culture war. The passage above comes from Frank Peretti's best-selling Christian novel This Present Darkness (1986), and exemplifies the lurid imagery of a narrative depicting demons charged with vanquishing Christian witness from earth. When I first read this passage as a high school student in the early 1990s, the image burned into my consciousness, intensified by the larger ideological passions of the evangelical culture I was in at the time. While it may be easy for those ensconced in progressive enclaves to wave away such novels as regressive fantasy, I would caution against doing so, for few cultural artifacts so fully reveal the cosmic imaginary driving right-wing political praxis today.  

I myself know what it is like to have those burning demonic eyes behind my culture-making and political work. When I was twenty years old, I was part of a U.S. Supreme Court case revolving around the student-run magazine Wide Awake at the University of Virginia. As Christianity Today described it at the time:

Ron Rosenberger and I were close friends, and when he graduated I took the editorial helm of the publication — just as the case was coming before both the Court and the wider culture. As I witnessed the Supreme Court justices debate the issue on the morning of June 29, 1995, I had the sense that I was participating not only in American but in cosmic history. For fiction such as This Present Darkness had transformed my consciousness into viewing the case beyond its immediately tangible, earthly frames of reference. The novel's title comes from the Book of Ephesians, where the Apostle Paul frames the Christian struggle in supernatural terms: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."3 Accordingly, Peretti's novel takes shape around a demonic plot to subsume the fictional American town of Ashton under infernal rule, crushing all signs of Christian faith and practice; the storyline shuffles back and forth between the plot unfolding in Ashton and the invisible activity of angels and demons to bring about these events. With this cosmic drama in the background, my physical body may have sat in the Supreme Court that morning, but my gaze pierced the heavens: beyond whatever legal complexities of the case, this was a war between absolute good and absolute evil, and my call was to fight with the angels.

On reflection nearly 30 years later, I can now more clearly scrutinize aspects of the case that, at the time, were impossible to countenance given this supernaturalist framing. Take, for instance, its vertiginous juridical complexity. The First Amendment's establishment clause was on collision course with its free speech clause. In the context of a public institution, was funding a magazine that engages in open Christian proselytizing (our explicit aim was to make converts) tantamount to state promotion of religion? Not an unreasonable question. But what about our right to speak on equal footing with other competing worldviews that themselves were making persuasive claims based on their viewpoints? Not an unreasonable question either. Countless such questions proliferated around the central issue at hand, and looking at it from different perspectives now reveals diverse possible approaches. Moreover, as I recall conversations with our various interlocutors at the time, even the ones most resistant to our cause, I can now see that they were in large part reasoning in good faith, asking questions that are healthy to voice in a free society. Sure, there may have been persons on campus who seemed to really hate Christianity, and might have actually preferred to see us go away for good, but such instances were rare, I now feel, and shaped, I now suspect, by extraordinary circumstances. These were, after all, people, not demons.

Or were they? The countervailing possibility baked into my consciousness under the influence of not only Peretti's novels but also other evangelical bestsellers of the time, such as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Left Behind series, which cast the world in militant, agonistic terms. (The summer after the case, I would go on to intern at the Christian Right organization headed by LaHaye's wife in Washington, D.C.). For the ideological aim of this fiction is to deny the fundamental cognitive capacities of evangelicalism's critics, making it impossible for Christians to envisage any of the reasonable nature of their disagreements. Instead, their rational operations get absorbed into a glistening imaginary of malevolent animate forces. "Everyone knows," as Candida Moss writes, describing this dynamic in The Myth of Persecution, that "you cannot reason with the devil," so "efforts to negotiate or even reason with one's persecutors are interpreted as collaboration and moral compromise. We should not attempt to understand the other party," Moss continues, "because to do so would be to cede ground to injustice and hatred."4 All in all, Christian Right literature transposed St. Paul's imaginary of transcendent warfare onto the immanent culture war of the 1990s, hollowing out the legal and psychological complexities of the Rosenberger case and collapsing it within a dualistic metaphysical framework.

In my development as a young Christian, I hadn't always espoused such a Manichaean view. In middle school, years before I attended the type of church where Peretti's novels filled the ideational atmosphere, I frequently attended Catholic Mass with my grandmother. I'd had my first spiritual inklings after these church services; as we walked home silently through our working-class New York neighborhood, I increasingly sensed the surrounding world as vast and wondrous and somehow mysteriously alive. The shimmering medieval visual imagery of the church structure, together with the sublime sensation of incense and organ, inspired me with the sense of a hidden face behind the world. And its beauty shone through nowhere more numinously than in the human face. Walking home from school in those early days, I began perceiving a profound sacredness in the human — particularly in the homeless, whom I befriended, squirreling away food and money to share with them, feeding them with love, laughter, and conversation. But later, in high school, the mandatory reading of my evangelical church paralyzed this expanding consciousness, assimilating the splendor of the world into the dark drama of a cosmos under siege.

Benighting the drama of human affairs, this fiction's narrative technology works to intensify evangelical consciousness with a particular moral clarity. Before I read these novels, my moral understanding was shaped more by literature like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where evil is represented as a diffuse gravity pulling on the human mind, striving to transform it into a black hole of consumption (both of objects, like the "precious" ring, and of other human beings). Within this view, the forces of evil are as much here in my own self — even the pure-hearted Frodo is susceptible — as they are anywhere else. My job is to stand guard against my own heart from the perpetual temptation to destroy what is good by voraciously consuming it. But the work of This Present Darkness is to project evil outward and to concentrate it in visible loci outside of me. Evil has a legible face, and this is what it looks like: the New Age group "Omni Organization" has purchased Ashton's local community college as part of its progressive colonization of the town. My world began to binarize into light and darkness, light gathering into hard, concrete spaces in the visible world, and darkness loosed upon the vast outside, flashing from the glowing eyes of the New Age movement, the liberal state, the Marxist university, and their ideological spawns of pluralism, diversity, and relativism. Otherworldly phenomena are mapped onto this worldly phenomena — and vice versa — in a manner that grants the latter hermeneutical clarity.

In the battle for the world, moral clarity is then supercharged with fantasies of persecution. In Peretti's novel, the heroism arises from the two main characters, Marshal Hogan, the local newspaper's editor-in-chief, and Hank Busche, a local Protestant pastor, who awaken to the spiritual nuances of what is changing in their town and, as they begin to know too much, undergo a barrage of persecutions aimed at silencing them. They are falsely accused of crimes, unjustly jailed, terrorized, and actively repressed. Christian Right fiction relies heavily, in this way, upon an entire tropology of persecution and martyrdom belonging to Christian history. The texts that make up what Christians call the New Testament were written at a time when Christianity was a minority Jewish sect within the vast Roman Empire, and as such was an object of imperial persecution. For resilience, the early Christians had at their disposal the entire Hebrew Bible, which documented the history of ancient Israel's experiences under various forms of oppression and captivity, such as in Ancient Babylon. The early Christians were able to re-ignite that language in their experience of Roman persecution. Emperor Constantine, however, upon his conversion in the fourth century, exalted Christianity into the new official state religion, forever altering the dynamics of Christian persecution.

To be sure, Christians have, since the time of Constantine, faced actual persecution for their beliefs — and continue to in such countries as in North Korea and Afghanistan.5 But what happens when a once-persecuted minority newly accompanies the emperor himself in the seat of power? And what happens then when, hundreds of years later, that dominant religion diminishes into just one among a plurality of mutually contested/contesting beliefs in an open democratic society? This can be a difficult psychic experience indeed — the loss of totality. As Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor characterizes this space — which is how he defines secularity — each religious viewpoint, due to the cross-pressure it experiences from all the others, becomes hyperaware of its own fragility.6  It can either embrace that new place of contestability, learning the humble task of crafting a more attractive pitch in the marketplace of ideas. Or it can fight to reclaim its erstwhile dominance. And in the case of American Christianity, S. Jonathon O'Donnell argues that the latter course activates its drive to re-assert power by means of demonological projections presumably militating to dismantle it.7 For O'Donnell, the Christian imagination mobilizes these projections precisely out of a sense of its own "tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness and instability."8 Across American history, this mobilization has resulted in three demonological tropes: the "Jezebel" figure wars against Christianity's integrity; the "Antichrist" figure wars against its incontestability; and the "Leviathan" figure, which arguably animates evangelical fiction most, wars against its inevitability.

With the demons thus in full swing — operating, in Peretti's hands, through the instrumentalities of the liberal state — the Christian imagination now has full warrant to claim the status of victim. And here, the ancient biblical language of persecution becomes quite handy. As Alease Brown writes, persecution

As a young evangelical, I viewed the Wide Awake courtcase not as a complex labyrinth of constitutional principles that have themselves been under perpetual societal scrutiny and juridical renegotiation across the centuries — no. It was a lot simpler than that. Dark ontological players animated the liberal "agenda" of our persecutors. They had names such as "Ba-al Rafar," "Strongman," and "Lucius." They wanted to efface our very presence in the world.

So, at the time, I deployed the entire rhetoric of persecution to our defense. The university was engaging in malicious "hostility to" and "mistreatment of religion."10 We co-opted language from 1960s Civil Rights discourse: "I don't think Christians should be treated as second-class citizens," Rosenberger claimed, "and I don't think Christian students should be treated as second-class students."11 I invoked the martyrs of old: "People have given their lives for this across the centuries." And, perhaps most to my shame, I reverse-engineered the language of early queer activism to frame evangelicals as forcibly "closeted": "We Christians can't," I once wrote, "upon the denial of an appropriations check, cower back into our closets of anonymity, quiet and defeated, to rot forever." "Out of our closet we've come tumbling," I thundered in my first Letter from the Editor; "here we are."12

Finally, if demonization granted us moral clarity, and persecution granted us the high ground, together these combusted into all-out war. I wrote and spoke extensively during the Wide Awake case that we would "fight" to the finish. "Check or no check, funding or no funding, help or no help," I said, "this is something that people believe very strongly in."13 The only analogue I have for the psychic power of moral clarity and persecution right now, beyond the current Christian right, is in Ukraine, where actual moral clarity and actual moral high-ground are supercharging Ukrainians with a will to fight that has awed the world. That same emboldening, in the hands of a waning power-structure, is a frightful thing indeed. It hyper-emboldens the already bold, and demolishes psychic barriers to the exertion of power outward.

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My hands tremble as I write this. But I can't close without one final observation. As I reflect upon that era of my life, I become newly aware of how I experienced a tormenting cognitive dissonance throughout it all. I knew something was off. I too often caught intuitions of the mystery — that untouchable penumbra — of those who disagreed with us. The same spiritual inklings that graced my childhood, back in the most primordial moments of my faith, strove to press through my embattled fantasies of persecution, insisting on the sacredness of the human in all its permutations.

Now I serve as tenured professor of English at a small Christian college in the American Midwest, where I get to work with students who themselves struggle with how to posture themselves as Christians in an increasingly pluralist society. And since my earlier wrongs had to do with flattening that world, I now get to enact the glorious penance of re-dimensionalizing that world. I help my students see Christianity's critics, even the fiercest among them, as beings of unimaginable majesty: perhaps in fact the place to which they should be turning their gaze if they want to find God. And for this purpose I can think of no more powerful tool than the sort of twentieth-century literature I teach in the classroom, narratives that, as I have written elsewhere, serve not as technologies of othering but of revelation.14 Writers particularly of the postsecular vein, such as Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, help loosen the grip of demonization, expanding my students — and me — toward the irreducible excess of the world, the sacred fragility of the Other. I try to show that the difficult task of loving our enemies is the true work of angels on earth.

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Erick Sierra is Professor of English at Trinity Christian College, in Palos Heights, IL, where he also directs the Writing Center. His current research project is in the theo-poetics of the imago Dei. 

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