Ownership of Reality
The Epiphany of January 6
January 6 is the traditional date for Epiphany. And January 6 four years ago was certainly an epiphany.
Jess Piper, who lives in the same state that I do (Missouri), but who grew up in Arkansas, writes a very good Substack, and the other day, as a reflection on January 6, she wrote this: The Danger of Miseducation. Piper writes …
I understand miseducation — I received one myself.
I grew up learning that the Civil War was fought because of “northern aggression.” It was the Lost Cause. Slavery was just a peculiar institution.
I don’t remember learning Black History in high school, but if it were taught, I imagine it a side note when we studied the Civil War. History was dominated by white men and I grew up hearing excuses for slavery.
Black folks were enslaved but don’t forget about white indentured servants.
The enslaved were taken care of by benevolent masters.
Black folks were content with their lot in life and happy to be in America.
I learned these things from the textbooks I studied.
We know some former slaveholders and their descendants worked to construct a romanticized memory of the antebellum South…they started writing their revisionist histories almost as soon as the ink was dry on the papers at Appomattox.
Unlike Jess Piper, I was not lied to about the nobility of the “Lost Cause” in High School, in the small Missouri River town that I went to school in, which was settled by Germans and filled with families with German last names. What they did teach us was that Germany wasn’t really responsible for World War I and that the Germans got the raw end of the deal.
Sometimes it’s more subtle than that. I know of a teacher who teaches clearly about the evils of slavery, but who says that any soldier can be noble if fighting to defend his country - including Confederates. Except, of course, the Rebels were NOT fighting to defend their country; they were fighting to defeat their country.
Which brings us to January 6.
Piper writes …
Yesterday was the four-year anniversary of the insurrection. The riot turned mob that stormed the US Capitol.
Most of us watched it live. Traitors pushed back the police line and beat officers with our flag and entered our Capitol to block our peaceful transfer of power.
Some of the insurrectionists broke into the Capitol with the intent of murdering lawmakers. They built gallows on our Capitol lawn.
I watched my own Senator raise a closed fist in solidarity with the mob.
We all watched it unfold. We have seen irrefutable evidence for years. We saw the worst of the offenders sent to prison and hundreds given probation.
We saw it happen. We know what happened. We can’t deny what happened.
And yet the January 6th apologists have already started to revise history. They started just days after the attack. Just like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They need to revise history — it is a common theme among right-wing Christian nationalists. A common theme among traitors.
In fact, this sort of thing has been going on in Super Catholic circles for a long time. I am sorry to say that I swallowed the whitewashed, gaslit, fake version of the history of the Catholic Church when I converted twenty-five years ago. I didn’t do the due diligence of finding out the truth. We were told the Crusades were a defensive action, that they really weren’t that bad, that the Galileo thing had nothing to do with science - and of course, while it was actually going on, we were told that bishops enabling and abetting the sexual abuse of minors was fake news.
It soon became apparent, however, that the abuse was real and that it was systemic. And so the Super Catholic strategy since then has just been to ignore it (though it continues) - and only to acknowledge it when you can use it to criticize the other team: the bad guys, the liberal bishops and priests (even though the abuse was endemic in both the left and the right wings of the Church).
Rewriting history is, after all, a major theme of the novel 1984, and demonstrates what Robert Jay Lifton calls an attempt at “the ownership of reality”, common to all cults and totalitarians.
Piper continues …
I was teaching on January 6, 2021. I couldn’t keep up with the attack minute by minute, but I checked the news during passing period. When the bell for 7th hour rang, my Department Chair walked down and said, “Turn on the news.”
I was horrified to see the smoke and people scaling the walls and the mob attacking the Capitol. I turned my computer off and taught the next 50 minutes trying to hold it together. I told my students that our Capitol was under attack and it looked like Americans were responsible.
That night, every teacher in my district received an email from our Superintendent. She instructed us not to talk about the insurrection the next day. I was enraged…were we just going to remain mute on an attack on democracy?
And here is something worse — the revisionists are already on school boards. A Kansas school board recently refused to adopt a teacher-created social studies curriculum because some on the board viewed the curriculum as biased and “anti-Trump.”
My god…
I know of another teacher who tackles the problem head-on. He teaches history and social studies in a public high school in Missouri, and they confront current events, using Trumpism as a gateway into learning about civics - and the vulgar parody of civics that we now live with.
I wasn’t sure how to deal with the attempted coup in the classes I was teaching at the time. For nine years, I taught for an online company that catered to Catholic homeschooled students, and I wanted to avoid divisiveness in class (most of the families I taught were rabid MAGA) - and I wasn’t teaching history or current events, so the attack on the capitol was not germane … even though we dealt with the COVID lockdowns as they were happening, because everyone was so upset. I mean, how do you teach Literature or Theology when the worst possible thing that has happened to this country since 9-11 had just taken place - live on TV? Indeed, Trump’s attempted coup was worse than the planes flying into the World Trade Center in one big way: on September 11, half of the country was not cheering for the planes.
But, though I dodged the issue in class, I confronted the attack head-on outside of class. While the coup was unfolding, and Raymond Arroyo of EWTN News was all giddy about it, I emailed EWTN and told them I would not appear in any of their programming again (after appearing in dozens of shows over a twenty year period, and even though I was scheduled to portray Bishop Fulton Sheen in an upcoming episode of Saints and Scoundrels). I wrote a piece critical of the coup for the Catholic publication The St. Austin Review and it was rejected - because it was critical of the religious right. I refused to appear at any Chesterton Conference until and unless the religious right’s role in this was acknowledged and repented of.
What was the effect of all of these actions? Simple. I was shunned by the vast majority of people I thought were friends of mine.
January 6 was the Rubicon. And we crossed it.
Speaking of Caesar, I did try, once, in teaching my Catholic homeschoolers, to approach the horror obliquely. I spent an hour teaching the Funeral Orations from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and I ended by saying, “This is what demagogues do. They do what Marc Antony does in this scene. They whip up the emotions of susceptible people, turning them into rioting mobs for their own political advantage.”
In other words, I led the horse right up to the water to see if he would drink.
One of the students sent me a private Zoom chat: “You’re right, Mr. O’Brien! Those liberals can make crowds believe anything! Just like the George Floyd riots!”
First Citizen
Come, away, away!
We'll burn his body in the holy place,
And with the brands fire the traitors' houses.
Take up the body.
Second Citizen
Go fetch fire.
Third Citizen
Pluck down benches.
Fourth Citizen
Pluck down forms, windows, any thing.
[Exeunt Citizens with the body of Caesar, rioting. Antony is left alone on stage. He has won. He says a brief prayer to his god, Mischief.]
ANTONY
Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt!
And the mob becomes violent and destructive, tearing Rome apart - and maybe even carrying a Confederate flag into the Capitol that they’ve just breached and whose police they’ve been assaulting, whose speaker they indend to hang, and whose walls they’ve smeared with their own excrement. All of which we’re supposed to believe never happened.
To make a long story short, I quit teaching for this online Catholic company last year and I began teaching for other online schools - secular ones only, having decided to get as far away from Evangelicals with Rosaries as I could. In fact, I taught 1984 last semester and, as an assignment, since 1984 is about propaganda and “ownership of reality” through lies, I asked the students to identify at least one example of propaganda in today’s media. One of them wrote: “Here’s propaganda that I can’t believe people swallow - the lie that vaccines are effective.”
Yep.
This denial of reality remains a hallmark of what used to be the moderate right of the American church, but which has become the off-the-charts extremist right of the American church. In fact, the disgraced and fired former bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas taught that vaccines were immoral, that Catholics would go to hell if they voted for Democrats, endorsed people who said the pope was anti-Catholic - and also spoke at the January 6 rally before the riot. Awful, right? But he also spoke at an online conference sponsored by a Catholic homeschool organization - after he did all of the above.
What can we do about this?
I’m not sure.
Six months after January 6, my friend Dawn Eden Goldstein spoke up about the antisemitism of author GK Chesterton at the 2021 Chesterton Conference, quoting liberally the many awful things Chesterton said about the Jews. I am told that the Society has pushed back by saying (in so many words) that Dawn can’t be trusted. Of course, anybody can verify what Dawn said by looking these quotes up (which tend to be worse in context), but arguing in real life has become like arguing on the internet. Nobody cares about actual evidence or facts. Nobody reads the link at the Original Post. Nobody cares about reality. Except they claim they own it.
Recently, I re-read Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World, and was surprised to find GKC making jokes about lynching - and implying that good old fashioned American lynchings are a form of amateur street justice, as opposed to the official and professional justice doled out slowly and inefficiently by the State. What’s Wrong with the World remains a fascinating and witty (and annoyingly witty) book, with an argument that we never dealt with clearly in the Chesterton Society because it’s an argument with all sorts of holes in it: including the claim that women should not be allowed to vote because it would tarnish their natures by involving them, remotely, in wars and executions. Women, of course, could be killed as civilian casualties in all-male wars and executed by the decisions of all-male juries, but they should not be allowed to vote, poor things. They could not join in running the system that was allowed to run them.
But we never really dealt with Chesterton as Chesterton. We dealt with our image of him, our idol of him, our cuddly teddy bear version of Chesterton. We thereby did him a great disservice. In effect, we rewrote Chesterton the way my former friends are trying to rewrite history.
The same can be said about God. We would much rather deal with our image of God, our idol of God, our cuddly teddy bear version of God.
But if God is anything, He is what we call the Mystery of Reality.
And we have no more “ownership of God” than we have “ownership of reality”.
But we sure as heck try to own both, don’t we?