Jesus Loop

I think, perhaps, that the Super Bowl is my yearly reminder of the fact that I’m very much out of touch with a gigantic part of the US, namely the part that loves Jesus and wants to turn our country into a theocracy. The first example of this came yesterday when Josh Groban was introduced as a “multi-platinum” recording artist. Multi-platinum, and I’ve never heard of him? Gotta be xtian rock. Apparently, that’s not entirely true. Groban sings more of an adult-contemporary fusion called popera. (not, sadly, “popery,” though he did do a holiday concert at the Vatican…) But, still, Happy Heart Music has no trouble hawking his wares.

Then, the uproar about the boob at halftime must also be somehow related. I can’t believe that MTV has now been booted off of being able to produce any more halftime shows. I can’e believe that CBS was “flooded” with calls. What’s the big deal? A second of skin. Of a boob, no less. They have no problem with a song as racy as “Rock Your Body” being performed in the first place, but have issues with a boob? This country’s crazy.

I got a few other reminders of Jesus over the course of this weekend, too. First, a poster to the Red Sox list wrote about how his daughter had sent Trot Nixon a photo to have him sign it. Here’s what she got back:

In only a couple weeks she received the photo back beautifully signed and Trot also included a card he must of had printed up, also signed. The card was a testimony of his life and included some of his favorite scriptures.

“Testimony of his life”? I don’t even know what that means. Is that like how on the back of Chick tracts one can sign a little certificate that reads something like “I, (name), accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Personal Saviour on (date)”?

Then Salon carried a feature on the Democratic paradox in the South, where people will continue to vote for Bush just because he “hears God”–no matter what kind of other crazy stuff he does. There are some passages in the article that just strike me as so far beyond what I could imagine thinking, that it suggests something completely schismatic might be afoot. Here’s what we’ve got:

The trouble is, economic issues don’t seem to trump the cultural issues that are important to many Southern white voters. In part, at least, that’s because some of them have simply not suffered much from the nation’s economic woes. At Forest Drive Baptists, for example, the women gathered around the table say that most of the families in the church continue to do relatively well. There’s a reason for that, says Susan Thomas, an elementary school P.E. teacher who is married to the church’s senior pastor. “There’s a verse in the Bible that say the righteous, you’ll never see them begging for anything,” says Thomas. “Honestly, God has been very gracious to many of our people, in preserving them. We find that yeah, we have some tough times and some tough stuff . . . but God has been so gracious, and our church has been very blessed.”

I can’t, at all, imagine saying something like what Thomas does. I can’t even imagine my role as a citizen in any way leading me to say something like that. But the author, Tim Grieve, also does not address something fundamentally flawed in that kind of perspective on the world. Maybe he’s trying to write straight news, I don’t know, but there’s something problematic about the framing of homosexuality and abortion as “cultural issues”–as the only cultural issues, too–in play. There’s a lot of work being done these days pointing out what a devious scheme it has been for GOP social politics to convert the private sphere into the site of citizenship in the US, and whenever I read an article like this Salon one, it just reminds me what a dastardly and sneaky scheme that is. Forget about helping the poor, which is something Jesus explicitly tells his flock to do. Instead, cook up a reading of a chapter of Genesis to fuel a war against gays. That’s right–ridding the planet of gays is much more important to Jesus than helping the poor.

It’s craziness, but it’s how things are run these days. But now I can barely even form my thoughts coherently, as this is so weird to me.