Of Course Republicans Don't Care About Herschel Walker's Abortion
Of Course Republicans Don't Care About Herschel Walker's Abortion
To the shock of absolutely nobody, Christian warrior and wholesome family guy Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, paid a woman to have an abortion. This is just one of I don’t even know how many poignant demonstrations of Walker’s poor character, but Republicans haven’t budged an inch from his side.
But, I’m not writing about politics today. If you want to read some smart takes on what this might mean for the Georgia Senate election, there is plenty of good stuff out there for you. What it really boils down to is this: the Republican Party and the Republican voters don’t care about about this abortion. But, if some swing voters don’t like that Walker is fine having an abortion but wants to ban all abortions for regular folks with no exceptions, then it might actually cost him the election. That is what Republicans care about.
That’s all the politics that matter.
What interests me in this abortion scandal is the religious side of things. To a lot of people, this just looks like the same blatant religious hypocrisy conservative Christianity has shown over and over again. But, this is only true if we understand Christianity to mean what it used to mean—a religion centered around the teachings and miracles of a 2,000 year old Jewish Rabbi. But conservative Christianity isn’t about that. Conservative Christianity has become more of a Christianite identity than a religion. Understand American Christianity as more of a Christianism and there is nothing hypocritical about Herschel Walker, or any of the number of other Republican officials who have also had an abortion.
I wrote about all of this in a lot of detail in my book. If you’d like to do deeper, I suggest reading it. But I’ll say a few things here that I didn’t say in the book.
The basic perspective of conservative Christians was perfectly summed up by Dana Loesch when she said “Winning. Is. A. Virtue.”
For Loesch winning the Senate majority for Republicans is all that matters. She even goes out of her way to claim that she is not compromising or contradicting her principles at all in her defense of Walker. And she’s right.
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Christianity, like all Abrahamic faiths, is a religion that emphasizes the importance of pleasing God. How one pleases God is the most important marker for understanding the Abrahamic faiths. Whatever the means of pleasing God, the only way to show others that a believer has done so—and, quite often, to make themselves feel like they are righteous and holy—is to please God more than someone else, or at least more than they did yesterday.
At times this is helpful. Many Abrahamic followers have felt they please God by helping others in need—Mother Teresa comes to mind.
At times this is harmless. Rabbinical Judaism, for instance, strings wires called eruvs around entire cities so that they can technically call all areas within the city “home”, and are thus free to move anywhere within the eruv on the Sabbath. This sort of strict dedication to the law allows followers to signal the lengths they are willing to go to keep the law, and allows themselves to feel justified before God.
But at times, this desire to please God can be harmful and even deadly. In Wahhabi Islam, the strict and literal adherence to the Quran has led to real social harm, such as women being treated as property. When some Wahhabis felt the need to further prove their faith, they developed jihadist terrorism ideology to demonstrate their holiness to God. The KKK was hardly different.
In First Century Judea the desire to please God and feel righteous was also creating great harm. The most important message of Jesus’ teachings was that people ought to please God the way Mother Teresa did. This stood in stark contrast to the religious elites who emphasized strict adherence to the Law of Moses, to the point that Jesus criticized them for creating suffering among the poorest and most vulnerable in Judaism. At this same time there were bands of rebels called Zealots, some of whom became Jesus’ disciples, who thought that violent revolution against Rome was the only way to please God. They were fond of ambushes and guerrilla attacks—some might consider them to be the world’s first religious terrorists.
The goal was to rebuild the literal Kingdom of God, and establish Israel as the great global power they believed it had been under kings David and Solomon. Then, from Jerusalem, God himself could literally rule the world and finally win the dualistic struggle against the cosmic forces of evil that caused so much pain and suffering.
Many of Jesus’ closest followers believed he was chosen by God to lead this fight, and it took Jesus’ death to make them see things differently.
A few decades after Jesus’ death, a band a assassins called Sicarii terrorized those in Jerusalem they felt were not doing their best to please God. The behavior of these Zealots and Sicarii eventually convinced Rome that the destruction of Jerusalem, and later the exile of all Jews from Jerusalem, was the only possible solution.
This is the natural pattern for Abrahamic faiths. However one maps the route to pleasing God, the truest believers, the most faithful, will always feel the need to one up their peers. Each successive step toward pleasing God must be larger and more grand than the last. It is a religious pitfall that can cause followers to quickly spiral into extremism. This is how religious cults survive.
In Christianity there is an additional compounding factor not nearly as prominent in Islam or Judaism—the Holy Spirit. Many Christian sects—particularly evangelicalism—believe they have the right to directly know the will of God through manifestations of the Holy Spirit. How the Holy Spirit is felt differs from sect to sect; some handle rattlesnakes, some speak in tongues, some see visions or incarnations, but nearly all believe they can know the will of God through these manifestations. The result is a particularly strong emphasis on feeling within Christianity. Feeling the Holy Spirit, feeling Jesus in one’s heart, feeling the presence of God around you.
This creates a dangerous, even if genuine, misidentification problem. In a context where faith pushes believers toward greater and greater expressions of faith, simply feeling like God wants a particular action makes that action more likely.
Scientists have found the significant role of placebo in spiritual manifestations,1 and that these experiences are often related to functional brain patterns and not necessarily God or the Holy Spirit.2 This is not to say that God never communicates with believers through the Holy Spirit, but that believers are primed to understand their own emotional functions as spiritual. If something feels a particular way, it must be God speaking to you. This emotional priming is why churches design their music to elicit emotion. It’s also why horror movies use music to prime viewers to expect an emotional response. This explains how Catholics often see the Virgin Mary in their toast and Pentecostals speak in tongues, but rarely is it the other way around.
It might be the case that Catholics see the Virgin Mary because that is what their sect primes them for—which would suggest spiritual manifestations are just tautological brain functions. Or, perhaps these are authentic spiritual manifestations, and being in one particular sect simply creates a suppression of “unapproved” manifestations. Either way this is a dangerous catalyst. If spiritual experiences are just emotions, then it’s easy for a person to justify what they already want as God’s will because it feels like God’s will. If spiritual experiences are genuine, but some experiences that don’t conform with the expectations of a believer’s sect must be suppressed, then most of what God might be trying to tell someone will get ignored.
Either way, if a person believes they can know the will of God by the spirit—by a feeling—then it is easy for the perceived will of God to be manipulated by emotions or by sectarian norms. In a conservative Christian context, when keeping up with the holiness of the Joneses is important, an emotional reaction can be mistaken for genuine spiritual guidance. Worse yet, wolves in shepherd’s clothing can manipulate emotions to make believers become more and more extreme.
Jesus, whether the Son of God or just the wisest construction worker in history, understood this. That is why his message pointed his followers toward helping the lowliest among them. For him, the Kingdom of God was not found on the throne of David. The Kingdom of God was within (Luke 17:21).
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Why isn’t this obvious hypocrisy, by Walker, Loesch, and others, hypocrisy?
Because the Kingdom of God for conservative Christians is not within. It is a literal, tangible thing. Today, the most important part of the Moral Majority of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell is not morality, but majority.
As fewer and fewer Americans identify as Christian the white Christian majority has felt their iron grip on society fade away.
Only about three of five adults identify as Christian, and many of those (like me) find it impossible to group their faith in with the conservative Christian crowd. Without the power and clout they felt they had before the Civil Rights era, or during the Reagan years, conservative Christians have cared less and less about the teachings of Jesus, and more and more about the Kingdom of God.
Or, at least the Kingdom of God as conservative Christians understand it.
In the United States the way Christians believe they please God has changed a great deal in the last half century. Christians have opted less for the Mother Teresa route to pleasing God, and much more for the Zealot strategy. Christians understand their role to be one in which they must build a literal Kingdom of God in order to prepare Earth for the Second Coming of Christ, as they understand it from their scriptures.
As the Moral Majority and Reagan tightened the association between conservatism and Christianity, the way to be more holy and righteous than the next Christian was to be more conservative than them. God always demands more. Politics is more visible than spirituality, so a believer can demonstrate that their faith meets these demands far more easily through their politics. Now, what may have began as an opposition to abortion or civil rights has swirled and stirred anger until there is no distinction between politics and Christianity. Being a Christian requires being a Republican.
Because this is the way Christians believe they please God, each new step becomes more extreme. Conservative Christians believe the Constitution was crafted by God’s hand, and that the United States was born with the purpose of readying the world for the Second Coming. That the latter does not necessarily follow the former, even if the former is assumed to be true, is a logical pollution conservative Christians are uninterested in considering.
The behavior of conservative Christians doesn’t mirror that of Jesus, but that of a tribe that has wandered in the desert for 40 years. They believe they are God’s chosen people; that God created this nation for them, and if they don’t keep it just the way Pat Robertson said it should be, then they have failed God. History is ignored in favor of convenient narratives, because facts don’t actually matter.
In fact, any history that pollutes this Christian nationalist purpose is blasphemy. So often they tell liberals that “our grandparents didn’t fight for freedom so that socialism could take over”, ignoring that both the communist and fascist parties were about as prominent as the Libertarian Party today. Slavery can even been seen as good because it converted Africans to Christianity. Racial discrimination is solved, and doesn’t need to be considered. Indigenous peoples were just savages.
Like the Israelites in Canaan, dominance is all that matters. It is what God demands, no matter what kind of violence must be carried out or what morals must be sacrificed.
That is why Herschel Walker’s abortion doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters.
In the conservative Christian quest to build their Kingdom of God, the evil forces aren’t unseen cosmic demons that tempt and harass as they were in Jesus’ day. Satan has an actual human army of loyal worshippers, but the rest of us just call them Democrats.
Christianity is no longer a matter of morals, it is a matter of teams. Herschel Walker is on their team. Donald Trump is on their team. They will accept, even elevate, any team member over an evil Democrat. No sin is too great if the sinner is on their team; losing is the only true sin left. Even the most vile sinner is better than an evil person with good character. Because evil isn’t about character, or integrity, or morality. Evil is just about standing in the way of the Kingdom of God.
In this new sense of what it means to be a conservative Christian, the teachings of Jesus take a back seat. They might apply only after victory has been won.
The meek aren’t blessed (Matthew 5:5), they are cucks.
The poor aren’t blessed (Luke 6:20), they are dead beats.
The merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemaker? (Matthew 5:7-9) All losers.
The only Christian beatitude that still matters is proving to others that you are persecuted.
But for conservative Christians persecution doesn’t actually mean enslavement or exploitation; it doesn’t mean being slapped in the face, flogged or lashed; it doesn’t mean being beaten with rods or pelted with stones; being persecuted doesn’t mean being shipwrecked, hungry, thirsty, or being imprisoned (2 Corinthians 11:16-33).
No, no.
Being persecuted now means for someone to ask you to behave more like Jesus.
If a private company decides that letting you be angry, uncivil, racist, sexist, inciteful, or harassing on their platform is bad for business, then you have been persecuted.
If a private company asks you, while you are on their property, to take basic measures recommended by medical professionals to protect other people, and then the world thinks your a douche for screaming about it, then you have been persecuted.
If you decide to ignore experts in law, elections, statistics, and cybersecurity and get arrested for forcibly entering a government building and obstructing an official proceeding—and possibly assaulting people, including officers of the law—then you have been persecuted.
And, if people think you shouldn’t be their senator because you are allowed to have abortions but they aren’t, then you have been persecuted. You know, just like what the Sanhedrin did to Jesus.
The personal responsibility that Christians used to preach has lost its savor, now they trod it under their feet.
Winning. Is. The. Only. Virtue.
When Christianity is understood as what it has become rather than what it once was, it’s not the least bit surprising to see conservative Christians rally around Herschel Walker. In fact, it was the only possible outcome.
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Kohls N, Sauer S, Offenbächer M, Giordano J. Spirituality: an overlooked predictor of placebo effects? Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Jun 27;366(1572):1838-48.
Moreira-Almeida, Alexander. "Implications of spiritual experiences to the understanding of mind–brain relationship." Asian Journal of Psychiatry 6, no. 6 (2013): 585-589.