Apocalyptic thinking

LITTLE ROCK — In a highly charged political environment like this, storylines explode with great pace and ferocity.

Such is the case with God.

Someone suggested to me last Thursday evening that the Almighty might be a developing major character in the currently raging political narrative.

Then I heard a version of that again Monday night.

Then, inside 24 hours of that, the Lord was . . . well, I guess you might say omnipresent.

It becomes necessary in this context to explain that I refer not to an expansive or universal god as accepted in different ways or forms by different people of assorted spirituality in distant places. I refer only to the one accepted within conservative fundamentalist and evangelical Christian churches prevalent in the southern United States, including Arkansas.

First, on Thursday, I had finished describing for a small gathering the seemingly inevitable Republicanization of Arkansas that presumably will take full effect November 6. I talked about our state’s rural conservatism and how it had been artificially kept Democratic for decades by a static culture as courted and charmed by especially talented Democratic candidates.

I said, without the least profundity, that our state’s aversion to Barack Obama had pushed us over the edge, which, actually, I called a high cliff.

So a soft-spoken and seemingly thoughtful gentleman wondered if perhaps I hadn’t missed something.

All of what I described actually started, he said, in 1980 when Ronald Reagan and the Republicans recruited and embraced Christian evangelicals as a vital cog in the conservative Republican base. That, he said, was a development that would prove inevitably decisive in Arkansas where we are uncommonly Baptist and Pentecostal and Churches of Christ and nondenominationally evangelical.

By “evangelical,” I mean groups that believe that they do not fully or properly practice their divine rightness unless they lure all of us to that same divine rightness.

Why, yes, I said, now that you mention it.

In fact, the Tea Party in Arkansas strongly overlaps the conservative Christian movement. They gather loosely under an umbrella of apocalyptic thinking.

That is to say that both groups—Tea Partiers and Christian conservatives—believe that we are hell-bound, or bound for some form of certain destruction, if we think differently from the way they think.

So then, on Monday, I was speaking to a larger gathering of well-informed persons, mostly senior citizens. I presumed to chart the major events that have defined this perhaps epic presidential race.

Afterward, a woman came to me and wondered why I had not listed—among those major charted events—the Democratic National Convention’s resistance to the inclusion of any reference to God in its platform.

I did not mean to distress her, though I seem to have done so, by saying the people who were most outof-sorts about that were Republican voters already, and that the dispute did not rise to the level of major consequence in the presidential race.

She was stunned—as a Christian, she said—that such an analysis might be correct.

Perhaps I was wrong.

The very next morning, the state Republican Party released its latest radio commercial. It recounts a floor vote at the Democratic convention over an insertion of a reference to a previously omitted God. There were substantial “no” votes to that inclusion before two-thirds passage was declared.

The commercial suggests that maybe there were Arkansas Democrats out there shouting “no” to God. It says that such heathenism flies blasphemously in the face of the real Arkansas values that the Republicans now exclusively represent.

For the record, Democrats—probably not from around here—were simply making the fatal political mistake of being sensitive to religious expansiveness and disparate beliefs.

And I would seriously doubt if any shouted “no” votes came from the distant rafters in Charlotte to which the Arkansas delegation had been relegated.

Then, finally, there was this: I heard Tuesday afternoon of a poll conducted Monday evening. It reportedly showed that Jon Hubbard, the angry right-wing Republican state representative who wrote a book saying slavery might have been a good thing for blacks, was ahead of his Democratic opponent by several points.

I asked around and people told me I shouldn’t be surprised.

Jonesboro is a very conservative Christian place, they said. Hubbard wraps himself in showy pronouncements of Christianity, they explained, while his Democratic opponent merely practices his religion but is less the preening political peacock about it.

By some evangelical thinking, the preening peacock performance is commanded.

The idea that a man who saw positive context in human slavery could be the preferred Christian choice . . . well, that’s a nuanced study for another day, and worthwhile and relevant

only if he wins.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.