Toxins

On Nietzschean Christianity. Plus: A belated take on Anora, and some recent writing

I’ve mostly avoided the podcast I described as Ross Douthat’s Dr. Strangelove of the Week¹ but some combination of horror and responsibility drew me to the interview with Allie Beth Stuckey, the podcaster famous for accusing moderate evangelicals of the eponymous vice in her book Toxic Empathy. It was disappointing; Stuckey herself is obviously not a very clear or serious thinker on any particular topic and has the habit of either changing the subject or retreating to vagueness when ever so gently pressed. Even when stating the views she’s most publicly identified with, the transcript reads like a badly memorized mid-model ChatGPT answer to a prompt on how to use the Bible to justify putting immigrants in camps. And Douthat, to the extent that he even tries, quickly gives up on getting her to say anything interesting. It’s shoddy stuff, but I guess it’s quite popular and influential so it is at least symptomatic. And it’s part of a larger trend I’ve noticed among American evangelicals.

Stuckey’s claim, as I understand it, is that moderate and liberal Christians indulge in “toxic empathy” when they think about how badly people are being treated (when, for instance, they can’t get an abortion for a high-risk pregnancy, when they have no access to the civil rights available through marriage, when they get snatched off the street and taken to a detention camp in another country with no due process, or when they are forced to inhabit a gender identity they reject). Instead, Christians should be thinking about how bad those people are—how they are violating God’s laws on marriage, girls wearing girl clothes, agricultural guest worker programs, and so forth.² This flows from Stuckey’s commitments as a “Reformed Baptist,” for which Christianity is a set of positive laws to be enforced upon all of humanity, not a self-revelation of God or a covenant of grace mediated by Jesus Christ or a foretaste of a redeemed and liberated world. It’s a religion in which there is no God and He wrote the Bible, to paraphrase the line attributed to Santayana. And its application to contemporary politics is very straightforward. “What does the Bible say about X?” is the typical question and the answer is provided in the manner of a fourth-grade writing assignment. “What does the Bible say about marriages between citizens and immigrants and the nationality of their resulting offspring?” one might ask, and sure enough there’s “evidence” in the Book of Ezra showing that the men were made to expel their foreign wives and ethnically mixed children.³ Questions like “does the historical context tell us anything about this action?” or “what role if any does this episode play in the story of salvation which Christians believe is centered on Jesus of Nazareth?” or even “was this in fact a good thing for Ezra to do?” are, in this world, fake questions for nerds and squishes. It’s in the Bible, being done by the good guys, therefore it’s good and anything we do by analogy is also “Biblical.” There is nothing in this hermeneutic philosophy of the Word of God, the mighty, living address from God to humanity that is not given for us to sift through and “apply” as though we’re God’s judicial clerks, but that is meant to change and transform us.

As a bit of hermeneutic malfeasance this is rather dull. Like everything else, Protestant fundamentalism is adaptively sloppifying itself for a post-literacy age. But Stuckey is hardly alone in elaborating this rejection of core tenets of the faith, this Christian anti-ethics. It’s the old project of rejecting Christianity’s “slave morality” and embracing the moral pragmatism of power and its exercise. From the rehabilitation of Mark Driscoll to the heel turn of Al Mohler to even the LCMS’s Matthew Harrison capering and cringing for the smear artists of the DOGE campaign, we’ve seen this turn happening across the ideological elite of American evangelicalism. J.D. Vance has even given it a vaguely Catholic gloss in his argument that Christianity is, actually, about whose welfare you aren’t obligated to think about. It’s a trend that is even more obvious in the woolier corners of the evangelical world, from “Seven Mountains” dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation to the Christian Nationalist doctrines of “kinism” and even Christian racism. It’s a daring synthesis of Christianity and Nietzschean will-to-power philosophy.

This attempt is not wholly new. Syncretic compounds of these elements have been attempted before. “Vitalism” and “life force” ideas wormed their way into the work of Tillich and others, and the Deutsche Christen certainly cobbled some of the spare parts together in their fascism-optimized nationalist religion. American evangelicalism, however, is creating a Bible-Nietzche synthesis that explicitly preserves the worst of each while rejecting what is good and noble about either. Christian sentimentality and self-pity without charity or self-sacrifice; Nietzschean cruelty without tragedy or existential courage: this is what’s on offer. The appeal, I guess, is that it asks virtually⁴ nothing of you with respect to your neighbor (to say nothing of Christ incarnate in your neighbor) and nothing at all in the public square except to stifle whatever qualms you might have about Donald Trump’s sexual morality or his fondness for prison camps. It promotes childish servility when a member of the team is doing or saying anything (“I really like Stephen Miller,” Stuckey says in an aside utterly unworthy of a Christian influencer) and adolescent petulance when a liberal or an egghead doctor or a foreign-aid crybaby is. It’s the gospel of Alligator Alcatraz, the deep emotional satisfaction at watching suffering from a distance, Arbeit Macht Frei in distressed-wood word art.

I’ve been over some of this ground before, at least as it relates to my own vocation:

And indeed I am still sometimes struck by the thought that I am old enough to remember feeling an obligation to answer the arguments of someone like Al Mohler on the substance and the merits; to have felt that they were pressing a validly-stated Christian claim, maybe even one which commanded the conditional deference of the consensus of the ages on certain topics. But for the most part, what the Nietzschean Christians are offering today is not even a theological argument at all but a sort of ham-fisted application of Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, underneath which all substantive Christian claims are at best merely stipulated.⁵ It’s worthless as proclamation and theology and meaningless except inasmuch as it displays for all to see the horrors that American Christians are being primed to accept and to cheer on.

“I don’t have f***ing Instagram, I’m an adult”

That was the one good line in the entire film Anora, which I finally got around to watching last week. I have the feeling that this is one of those Best Picture winners that is already on its way to a genteel oblivion. It is a creature of a moment in which the sex worker is thematic shorthand, the Noble Savage of late capitalism. And it reflects a decline in expectations of skill and fluidity in movies to the point that the clumsily-composed and badly-paced second act wasn’t held against it. It’s not a good movie and even as a failure I didn’t find it very interesting. It’s like a botched Altman tribute that morphs into a botched Coen tribute. There’s something, I suppose, in the ugliness of the oligarch’s mansion, both inside and out a monument to the total contemporary disconnect between wealth and refinement. And the shallow and desperately foolish main character brushes tragedy eventually as it comes to seem that she was in fact a Victorian-style tart with a heart of gold after all, waiting to be loved and rescued. And more tragic that she falls for it in such a tawdry and shoddy form as the oligarch’s son Ivan.

But it does have that line about Instagram, uttered by Toros, a miserable fixer employed by Ivan’s parents to mind their silly and useless son. As the interminable and pointless search for the boy drags on through Manhattan nightlife, his frustration mounts and periodically overflows at the trivial young people he has to appeal to for information. I don’t think the filmmakers really settled on a tone for him or for any part of that section of the film, but whether he was supposed to be a clown or a heavy or some combination of both, he was the only character I actually found interesting. There is no louche vacation or childish fantasies of escape for Toros, there’s only the unending work of cleaning up the messes of short-sighted, irresponsible and exploitative others. I wish they’d made the film about him.

At this point I have admitted to myself that a longer essay on the politics of moral austerity in leftish movies and television that I have started a few times is never going to be finished, but Anora fits part of the thesis so here’s a short version. The class politics of these works—I’m thinking of The Menu, the first two seasons of The White Lotus, and Triangle of Sadness—are superficially socialistic but generally treat their non-sex-worker working-class characters as cannon fodder or as stooges. Anora gets a stagy line about needing a 401k and health insurance to consider her employment at the club an actual job (and fair enough, exotic dancers get terrible treatment in those respects), but the movie has nothing but disdain for the people working for a living outside of the club. Anora feels like an end-stage case for this leftish trend in upper-middle-brow entertainment. It depicts no goodness or beauty worth sharing and no human solidarity that can mobilize to share it. If anti-semitism is the socialism of fools, this genre is the socialism of misanthropes.

Anyway, the “working-class girl swept off into the world of socialites” plot is a venerable one; if you like it with dialogue and characterization, I recommend the original Sabrina (or if you like the sexual/class politics of Anora but prefer something grittier and also actually funny and insightful, The Apartment is great). If you’re interested in the “overnight journey through a city” genre, Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky is a much better film. Unrecognized at the time of its release in 1976, its reputation has only grown. There are worse things than not being appreciated in the moment.

Writing in Other Venues

Both of these are now pretty stale, news-wise, but I thought they were good. I wrote about Medicaid cuts before the final passage of the OBBA for the Dallas Morning News:

The idea is simple: If people have to do enough paperwork proving that they qualify, and if state-administered Medicaid systems have to keep up with that paperwork, people will make mistakes and lose their Medicaid. They’ll miss a renewal notice, or file the wrong documents, or misremember a deadline. And even if they do everything right, an overburdened state administrator can delay the renewal process long enough that they lose coverage anyway.

When Arkansas was allowed to experiment with a work requirement, the state required recipients, many of whom did not have reliable internet access or computer skills, to create online accounts connected to reference numbers sent by mail to record their work hours. The state website was unavailable between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. every day – the hours people who work or attend school are most likely to be free to pay the time tax.

I also wrote about America owing George III an apology on this year’s Independence Day for The Christian Century:

It was a revealing moment: in an interview with Terry Moran of ABC to mark the first 100 days of his administration, the president of the United States was asked about the framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging in the Oval Office. “What does it mean to you?” Moran asked, in the softest softball that has ever been lobbed over a presidential home plate.

“It means exactly what it says,” Trump said. “It’s a declaration of unity and love and respect. And it means a lot. It’s something very special to our country.”

…

One might view this as a peculiar sort of national humiliation, like a pope confessing that he doesn’t really know what Peter the apostle did. A foundational document becomes, in real time and at the highest level of our government, forgotten lore. But it’s not just that Trump, surely the person most completely ignorant of any aspect of American history or law ever to occupy the office of the presidency, doesn’t know the first thing about the Declaration of Independence. It’s that the very crimes and oppressions of which the signers accused King George III in the Declaration’s text have become commonplace during Trump’s time in office. Perhaps we owe King George an apology.

What follows is a list of some of the striking parallels between the accusations in the Declaration and the news coming from the current administration.

While executive overreach and the “imperial presidency” are nothing new, what we have witnessed in the last nine years, and particularly in the last few months, is a daringly straightforward attempt to redefine the state by making the presidency an office unbound by any law whatsoever. From withholding congressionally appropriated funds to handing out the personal information of Americans to private actors to punishing individuals and institutions without trial—all of which are now surrounded by a high wall of legal immunity granted by the Supreme Court—the American presidency is granting itself power beyond the ambitions of any pale, bewigged Hanoverian monarch.

1. Unrelated but I heard somewhere, probably on the Rest is History podcast, that physicist and H-bomb patron Edward Teller would hang up the phone on interviewers when they asked if he was Dr. Strangelove.

2. I am not going to get into the theological issues here but I will note that a problem both progressive Christian social ethics and conservative Christian anti-ethics can fall into is the depiction of Christians as always being the ones in a position to help, rather than being the suffering Body of a suffering Christ. The important question always seems to boil down to whether I the Christian, as a free moral agent, am either obligated to care about another human being’s welfare or forbidden to do so. Whether ethics (or anti-ethics) might be done from the perspective of a person with unmet needs, or whether Jesus himself is actually present in the person with unmet needs, easily becomes lost.

3. In fairness to Stuckey, she cites Ezra and Nehemiah on the subject of city walls, whose existence demonstrates the Scriptural basis for throwing abuelas into prison camps, contrary to literary everything the Scriptures say about actual migration. That case is merely nonsense so I’ve tried applying it to an edgier but more logically coherent case. Douthat should have asked her about it, in my opinion.

4. Stuckey does mention how nice it is to help fellow overburdened moms on airplane jetways. I’d class that less as an exercise is non-toxic empathy or Christian ethics than as good manners but it’s at least something.

5. The Isaac Chotiner interview of Al Mohler linked above is unintentionally eloquent here. There’s an element of “gotcha” with Mohler’s past statements which only gets you so far. It’s the weird dance he plays with “pragmatism” and “utilitarianism” that really gives the game away. Mohler insists that he’s still a “moral realist,” by which he means that moral laws are real and binding on other people but utilitarian pragmatism is appropriate for him and his team.