Real American Jesus

According to a recent YouGov survey, a mere 28 percent of registered Republicans (versus 68 percent of Democrats) believe that Jesus would support tightening the nation’s gun laws.

http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/bpuzgpfb2b/tabs_OPI_wwjd_20140702.pdf 

Really?

Of course!

Meet Real American Jesus, who hates fags and war protestors and love guns and free enterprise. Meet Real American Jesus, who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and never relies on the “nanny state.”

This is not the historical Jesus who loved tenderness and compassion. This Jesus bears no relation to the Jesus who animated American activists such as Angela Grimké, Washington Gladden, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King. Real American Jesus has nothing to do with the Jesus who informs and inspires Christian pacifism and social activism in our own time.

Real American Jesus is the emblem embraced by those citizens who pride themselves and their friends on being purer, more rugged, less spoiled, and less decadent than the rest of us.

Real Americanism has been around for quite a while. It is claimed by that portion of the American population—white, Christian, predominantly rural—that has historically pointed to itself as the nation’s genuine solid core, the mytho-spiritual essence of what America is really all about. This is a mythos that lauds self-reliance and personal honor. It loathes government assistance programs. It is “manly.” It owns guns. It tends to be conveyed through a gut-level, anti-intellectualism—an “I know what I believe and I don’t need to debate it” certainty. And it animates much (although not all) of present-day American conservatism.

Gun-owners demonstrate their sense of themselves as America’s true essence in a recent Pew study. There, adults living in a home with a gun owner identified themselves “a typical American” more than did adults in non-gun households (72 percent versus 62 percent). Adults in gun households claimed “honor and duty are my core values” more than did those in non-gun homes (59 percent versus 48 percent). And gun householders reported that they “feel proud to be American” more than those in non-gun homes (64 percent versus 51 percent).

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/the-demographics-and-politics-of-gun-owning-households/ 

Real Americans refuse to complicate gut-level traditional ideas. This was sympathetically noted by historian Eugene Genovese. Genovese identified a manner in which conservatives generally speak to one another: a rhetorical mode of discourse, in which custom is embraced and defended rather than debunked. Genovese distinguished this from the dialectical mode of discourse, through which liberals debate and dissect ideas instead of defending them as received.  [The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (1994).]

Typical of the former was George W. Bush, the Decider, who often bragged that he didn’t need to think too hard to distinguish right from wrong. He simply relied on his gut, which surely didn’t deceive him. He advanced traditional American verities without subjecting them to much scrutiny.

Anti-intellectualism and expressive certainty colored the Republican 2008 campaign against Barack Obama, especially by those claiming that Real Americans mistrusted Obama and opposed his election. Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin led the self-certain charge against “anti-Americanism.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJIQm_7YAUI&feature=related.

During that election we met “Joe the Plumber,” who embodied the Real American mythical ideal—a work-with-his-hands kind of guy who probably could have used economic assistance but would never have stooped that low. Joe the Plumber was the kind of regular guy who hated effete men such as Obama. Joe the Plumber was a rugged individualist. Joe knew wrong from right. He didn’t need no fancy thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL97vWgSp7U. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgEVwcHas0&feature=related. 

For Real Americans, Jesus serves as their symbolic ideal. It comes as little surprise that only 9 percent of registered Republicans surveyed by YouGov respond that Jesus would support same-sex marriage, or that only 18 percent of Republicans imagine that Jesus would support high taxes on the wealthy, or that only 23 percent think that he would support universal health care, or that only 31 percent think he would support reductions in carbon emissions, or that only 28 percent believe that he would support stricter gun laws.

Real Americans may not comprise the popular majority of U.S. citizens. But Real Americans celebrate themselves as the nation’s true, uncorrupted mythic core. And they would affirm, with a Palinesque “you betcha!,” that a twentieth-century Jesus would surely have dwelled among their ranks.