Shadow Elites And Religion UPDATE

by Paul Rosenberg [courtesy of Open Left - Front Page]

My series, "Shadow Elites And Religion" was interrupted after its first two installments (Part 1, Part 2), mostly because I'd built up such a head of steam that I wanted to do a lot more digging for the third installment, focused on John McCain and his ties to two Word of Faith ministers--John Hagee and Rod Parsley.  All sorts of other stuff intruded, and, well, the hiatus continues.

But meanwhile, Sarah Posner, Word of Faith expert extraordinaire, has posted an excellent piece over at Huffington Post--"McCain's Pastor Problem", while Gary Kamiya chimes in at Salon with "Psycho Christians and the media", and there's even signs of catchup with my second installment, "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon", as noted in a frontpage post at DKos, "Moonshadows ", by DarkSyde, which focuses on recent attention to the connections between Moon and Bush Sr.--connections that I didn't delve into in my post, because I wanted to focus on the deep structural connections, but that are quite considerable in themselves.

Darkside highlights this piece at the Houston Chronicle, and   John Gorenfeld's book, Bad Moon Rising.

I'll be writing more this weekend, but one thing worth highlighting now is the thinness of the McCain defense--"He's not my pastor, so it's not my fault."
Well, turn this around--since he's not your pastor, then why all the investment in associating with him in the first place, and the reluctance to condemn him in the second?

Kamiya writes:

even if Hagee and Parsley had been McCain's pastors, it's hard to imagine that the media would have attacked him as relentlessly as it has attacked Obama over Wright and Farrakhan.

The media's double standard is all about deference to perceived mainstream norms, and tiptoeing around the Christian right. Despite their cartoonish views, the media treats Hagee and Parsley as quasi-mainstream figures, which makes McCain's relationship with them non-newsworthy. The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus. The issue isn't that journalists share Hagee and Parsley's views so much as that they know that they are widely held, which makes them reluctant to acknowledge how truly outrageous they are.

This is all quite true.  It's also true that qustioning these charlatans would involve acts of actual journalism, and as Chief Wiggums famously said (regarding his chances of having an actual friend), "What are the chances of that?"

Posner, too, takes on the "he's not my pastor" trope:

When Hagee and Parsley were revealed to have spewed bigotry from their pulpits, many people wondered if McCain had a "pastor problem" like Obama's supposed problem with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The rejoinder from the McCain camp was that he was not responsible for every sentence uttered by people who endorse his candidacy. But his pastor problem is not just his own, it's his party's too. And it's not about candidates bearing responsibility for odious sermons. It's about bearing responsibility for propping up religious demagoguery in order to win elections.

"He's not my pastor" is a narrative trope.  As the  TVTropes Wiki explains:

"Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations."

A large part of the work that the right has done over the past four decades has involved consciously pushing its tropes.  This is a major part of cultural hegemony and the Gramscian "culture war"/"war of position" is all about.  In such a context, something sounding "reasonable" is much more important than anything else.  If it "sounds reasonable" it will be far less likely to be questioned, even if it has little or nothing to do with the underlying facts.

After all, who's going to look at the facts if reasonable explanation tells them there's no need to even look?  Only those with a bad attitude, that's who!

That means us.