Who Gets the Right to be Attacked by Monsters?
It's a scary season. This Halloween we are facing down perhaps the most consequential midterm elections in our lifetimes.
Something that caught my eye this week in the wake of the attack on Paul Pelosi is the way that the American Right immediately invented an alternative story to the facts. In this instance, it wasn’t a matter of conjuring a haunting menace worse than the home invader who wanted, allegedly, to assassinate the Speaker of the House. Instead, it was a downplaying - making the invader into someone who Paul Pelosi supposedly knew - a gay lover with whom he had spat.
Shields is a former MMA fighter with 246k followers on Twitter.
What’s going on here?
It all has to do with monsters - and who the Right. thinks is being hunted by them.
This week we launch Monster in the Mirror, our new limited series by Dr. Lucas Kwong. In the series, Lucas talks about the
In today’s episode, Lucas talks about Christian nationalism as a story : “Christian nationalism isn't just a set of policies or a material network of influencer. It's a story, a story that seduces the imagination, one that's been told over and over, but that is now enjoying a renaissance.”
The phrase “seduces the imagination” really strikes me. The story of Christian nationalism is a story of monsters coming to attack the normal, the ordinary, the good lives of everyday Christians who simply want a country where God - and they - are in charge and no one questions them.
In order to explain why things feels so bad to them, they invent monsters in the form of demons, invaders, aliens, and zombies who are outsiders, less than human, more than human, out for blood, out for vengeance, and always out to destroy God and their way of life.
Here is how Lucas puts it:
“For the triumph of White Christian heroes to feel as cathartic as possible, novelists needed a sufficiently menacing villain. To oppose them. How do you make that opposing force feel plausible, realistic, even in its surrealistic strangeness? Maybe you could do it just by slightly tweaking and exaggerating all that fear, all that panic about racial, national and spiritual decline in these authors efforts to channel those fears.”
What does that have to do with Paul Pelosi and the Right’s attempt to downplay the attack on him?
By spreading these conspiracies, they are revealing the “seduced imagination” that governs the story of Christian nationalism:
We get to be attacked by monsters. Not you.
If you say you are being attacked by monsters, we will downplay it into something ordinary and laughable.
Why? Because you are the monster.
We are the good guys.
So, we have not only the right to be violent against you.
We have the right - and only we have the right - to be stalked by monsters.
This is a scary Halloween indeed.
NOW GO LISTEN TO MONSTER IN THE MIRROR!