If Bible America
In some ways The Holy Bible, or parts of it, belong to that genre of the European or British observer of the USA. Alexis de Tocqueville has a great early one, and some of his observations, such as on the cheapness and bad quality of mass-produced goods for sale in the US, ring true today. Angela Carter’s 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve tells the story of young British man, Evelyn, who travels to the USA and gets kidnapped by a desert feminist cult who surgically transform him into a woman, Eve, to be impregnated with a new messiah. Eve escapes, and on her journey encounters an army of Christian child soldiers. Using not satirical science fiction but reportage, Martin Amis charts moments in the political rise of the US Christian right in his stronglytitled The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), a collection of previously published newspaper articles. There are pages dedicated to Reagan’s presidential campaign, and, in “Too Much Monkey Business: The New Evangelical Right” (1980), he recounts a trip to televangelist Jerry Falwell’s headquarters in Lynchburg, Virginia. Amis betrays a sense of amazement at the apparent religious sincerity of the born-again Christians he encounters: you can’t be serious, he seems to be asking himself. He can barely keep a straight face, but beneath the laughter, lies a conceited confidence that they do not represent a genuine threat. Yes, this movement “will have to be heeded” but “I don’t think the Evangelicals will soon be running the country” (Moronic 118) he says, with what now looks like a depressing lack of foresight.
In many regards it has come to pass, they do run the country. The Republican Party, over the past thirty years, has become the political arm of Christian conservatism. At time of writing Republicans rule thirty-one of the fifty states. They pass theologically-inspired laws across a range of areas: education, abortion restriction, anti-LGBTQ, ecological deregulation. Openly theocratic discourse dominates domestic and foreign US policy, from George W. Bush’s neo-medievalist “crusade” on terror and his conversations with God, to recent homophobic “religious freedom” laws. In the US, the words of Christ, a man who socialized with lepers, pariahs and prostitutes, is used to sanction and justify war, the death penalty, vast accumulation of wealth, homophobia. It’s no surprise The Holy Bible and the Manics never caught on there.
In BBC documentary Factory: Manchester from Joy Division to Happy Mondays, Paul Morley mentions a small influential Sex Pistols gig in Manchester, discussing Jonny Rotten lecturing to the crowd: “You know, like Darwin, the world has changed, this is what it is now, evolution is the truth, the Bible is dead, and so we all believed it.” But this has proved not to be the case. We now live in an era some are calling post-secular. The atheistic Eden that Nietzsche prophesized has not come to occur; religion not only endures, but rises up once more emboldened, and theocratic states abound. Even on the left, secularist or atheistic positions are increasingly regarded as problematic. The idea of a post-religious society has been overly optimistic at best, and it is through religious extremism and ethnic identity based on religion that global conflicts today flare.