This is not the proclamation of an expert. This is the confession of a fool.
I should explain.
I wrote the words you’ll find between these covers after August 2017, which was a key date in my rapidly dawning awareness of the true nature of my country.
www.the-reframe.com/very-fine-pe...
August 2017 is when tiki-torch waving Nazis invaded Charlottesville, Virginia, in defense of treasonous slaveholders and their own perceived supremacy.
August 2017 was also when the White Christian president defended those who marched with the Nazis as “very fine people.”
We know the Nazis were Nazis because they were chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil,” and all the other Nazi hits, and because they believed in Nazi causes and utilized Nazi symbology, and so on.
We know the president was the White Christian president because the people who support him overwhelmingly identify as "white" and “Christian,” and the White Christian president makes quite a show of representing U.S. citizens exclusively based on whether or not they support him.
And there were those who noticed that the White Christian president’s words amounted to a defense of the Nazis, and this act of observation offends his mostly white Christian supporters to no end.
Presidential defenders drew a distinction they expected us to find important: he was not defending the Nazis who were there, he was defending all the *other* people there, who were not Nazis. The very fine people didn’t chant the slogans, I suppose; they just marched for the same basic cause.
But I knew better then, and I imagine you did, too. The White Christian president’s words were clearly meant as a defense of the Nazis, because the presence of the very fine people did what it always does whenever very fine people find common cause with Nazis.
Christian nationalists and other authoritarian supremacists only ever rise on the permissive shoulders of masses of very fine people willing to lend moral authority to a monstrous cause. Their very fine presence in solidarity with monsters defends and enables the monstrousness.
I find myself thinking a lot about them—the very fine people.
They’re *my* people. I am somebody deemed “white.” I was raised Evangelical Christian. When the White Christian president made a show of representing white Christians, it is people exactly like me that he means.
In August 2017, the White Christian president, like all cheap hucksters, knew well which lies people would believe, knew well what lies his people wanted to hear, and knew quite well the lies they depended on for fortune and identity.
So he told the lie of the very fine people.
It’s a popular lie. It’s a traditional lie. It says that if you think yourself nice, and you seem nice to other nice people, then you can't possibly support evil, so what you support must be good.
For most of my life, to one extent or another, I believed it.
And so I am a fool.
Once upon a time, and for most of my life, I believed in the lie of very fine people.
This made me think that fascism would be unpopular, particularly with people such as us. That white supremacy had been defeated, specifically by people such as us.
And so I am a fool.
This was the rapidly dawning horror for me as 2015 bled into 2016: the understanding that this—THIS—was not only what my very fine people were willing to go along with, it’s what they had wanted all along.
This was the anointed one they’d been waiting for, the pain messiah they’d finally summoned to hurt the people they wanted to see hurt, to control the people they believed it was their natural right to control, and to ensure their comfort would continue to be treated as supreme.
The answer to the question “what outrages against humanity will white Christians in the United States tolerate?” proved the same as the answer to the question “what proofs of its own inhumanity will they look the other way to avoid knowing?”—that is, "anything and everything."
What I learned was this: the moment of falling away won’t ever come, not because very fine people don’t see the disastrous and unsustainable course we’ve set, but because they perceive some advantage within it for themselves, and so have decided to decide that the course is good.
Not just good, but goodness. Not just right, but righteousness. Not just *a* way of living, but “our way of living”—a phrase in which the most interesting word to ponder is “our.”
I... don't mean to be annoying, but the phrasing of "the White Christian president" is ambiguous enough that I thought you were saying Trump was a Christian too. Now I can see the intended reading, but it wasn't the first one to come to mind.
Not annoying, but I do define the term immediately after dropping it. Might be clearer on the page than in a thread. In any event I maintain that the WCP is exactly what he is, for as long as Christians want to be the primary reason he is empowered. bsky.app/profile/juli...
We know the president was the White Christian president because the people who support him overwhelmingly identify as "white" and “Christian,” and the White Christian president makes quite a show of representing U.S. citizens exclusively based on whether or not they support him.
Also, he is literally selling Bibles. He claims a mantle of Christianity whether or not he believes it or practices it, and I’d venture to say that’s true for quite a lot of politicians and preachers who are called Christian without any significant pushback.
