“You see that face on the TV screen, coming at you every Sunday?
You see that face on the billboard? That man is me
On the cover of a magazine, there's no question why I'm smiling
Buy a piece of paradise and you buy a piece of me”
Hello all, and welcome back to Weekly Wednesday: The sometimes weekly summary of why I always feel like I should start drinking and also why I know I can’t.
Before we get into today’s topic, have our second round of Magic Paywall Subscriber Polls, if the last one wasn’t so terribly uncomfortable that the winners regretted their picks then one of these probably will be:
As always, the cryptic titles are an intentional gimmick and I will not elaborate on what they mean.
The historic youth climate change lawsuit proceeding in Montana has been extensively covered by responsible media, and I have nothing constructive to really add except that my hopes of people in my state recognizing that the weather is demonstrably different now are lower by the year. Instead, this week is going to be an adventure in local religiosity largely informed by me watching Happy Shiny People while learning to sew on a couch this week.
Hearing the clips of the old show and the voices of all the kids was a bit of a shock, since I hadn’t remembered just how much the Duggars had permeated my childhood; they weren’t something I’d paid particular attention to, but their presence in the background had to be constant because the going-to-commercial musical sting is as baked into my memory as the Disney Channel jingle. If you haven’t decided to take a dose of Jim Bob yet, the viewing is well worth your time even if it’s sometimes hard to get through. I am personally fairly numb to discussions of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse (which is probably not a good sign), but for most people parts are going to be rough.
The worst part is that the evil of the IBLP, now known as the ‘Duggar Cult,’ is everywhere in our society.
I am not just talking about how TLC made megamillions off of becoming the propaganda arm of a cult, although that does nicely illustrate the way that big business and the extreme religious right often have interests that align, but the structure and culture that allowed IBLP to thrive and exist to begin with.
We will begin with the Burger Shack cult.
Mudman Burgers is a local fast food operation of the kind that becomes a sort of community mascot, huge burgers sold out of sheds and trailers advertised by a mural of a hippie-ish dude with huge shades. If you told tourists that the name and branding is a reference to some kind of local cryptid, the Flathead Valley Mudman, you would probably be believed.
As it is, the mural is actually a take on a cult leader who likes to interrogate women under his power on their ‘sexual sin.’
After a light 80 hour work week, of course.
The fact that Montana has a problem with industrialized Teen Ranches being used as sources of slave labor is well known, one even hosted Oathkeepers militia training for a time, but the true extent to which churchgoers in general are exploited for free labor in this country is not something we have reckoned with as a country. We’re not even really ready to deal with wage theft in nominally above-board private companies, or the miscategorization of employees as contractors.
Religious orgs are very prone to abuse of laborers, especially the die-hard faithful, since the human impulse to work for the betterment of others and make a positive change in the world can be easily walked by degrees into conditions very near slavery. You are working for a worthy cause and sacrifices are expected, sunk cost fallacy sinks its fangs in the longer you stay and the more of your life you dedicate, and once the work becomes your entire world the FOG of Fear, Obligation, and Guilt obscures any path you might take to leave. You won’t just be quitting a job, you’ll be abandoning a team and betraying people who are likely by now your only friends. This trap can snare people in secular charities and nonprofits, especially the political, and in private business, especially the tech cult kind, but the simple fact that most everyone wants God on their side makes the religious version that much more vicious.
In the case of Mudman, it’s a lot easier to break into the restaurant business if you have a compound of True Believers who will staff your locations for $2 an hour, after hour, after hour.
The appropriately named Potter’s Field Ministries was a nest of abuse and exploitation that fueled the pastor’s lifestyle with a sick system that kept the followers deeply enmeshed. It existed because of an intersection of poor oversight of religious institutions that allowed a company to operate as a church and weak labor laws on internships in general. It has been allowed to return to business as a private company ‘in good standing’ despite protests because the people who write the laws are incentivized to protect anyone like them, large or small, from consequences. Most of all, Potter’s Field is typical.
Potter’s Field Ministries was an affiliate of the Calvary Chapel Association through its entire existence, up until the bad press, an organization notable for a history of relocating and hiding pedophile priests. The utter lack of oversight in a coalition of mutual interests and protection is perfect for getting away with a tiny kingdom of sexual harassment and coercion. If Calvary had cared to police its members and exclude those that abused their following,
Your town’s version might not have a name that ironically references the common graves of the poor and the seedy alternate reality of Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life, but you do have one.
If you cannot identify your crazy church, the prognosis may be even worse. It may be so ubiquitous that noticing it is as hard as picking Mormons out of a crowd in Utah, and it may be just a bit more covert and attempting to worm its way into your institutions.
Montana being Montana, my locality double-dipped and brought on the hopefully now-defunct NaboNexus. In our case, their presentation in attempting to bring “Divine Law and Order” to our local politics soured even conspiracy theory conservatives on them just out of their general shadiness, but they were successful to a degree in their fight to seize the county health board amid COVID conspiracy backlash.
Just like your town, the organized Christian fundamentalist push in mine falling apart does not mean that they’re gone. The lesson learned may simply have been that their efforts to take over the schools and County government were too obvious, and my head is going to have to be on a swivel.
The fact that it’s taken so long for any counter-organizing to happen in my area is galling, but I also have to shoulder some of the blame for it.
The cultural shift that Christian Nationalists are aiming to pull off, Quiverfull, the Joshua Generation, and grass-roots ur-fascist efforts like the Freedom Caucus, can pull from these local resources to adapt and spread. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA has morphed from a Libertarian right capitalism evangelist org into a reactionary church that consistently mobilizes the minority of conservative youth on college campuses unopposed because establishment liberals just assume that college-age youth are in hand by default.
The college youth that aren’t liberal by default are often vulnerable to recruitment by people who seem to really, really like paramilitary training camps for young men. If Stewart had his way, every kook church in every town would have a sniper team training to kill SWAT officers, and letting the people who run these structures of abuse assume control of local government and the political initiative among young people is perhaps the most disastrous thing you could do.
It may be a safe assumption that your area is not vulnerable to a Christian Nationalist takeover, until it isn’t. IBLP was able to franchise through so many churches because the model of extremely patriarchal, dictatorial, and hierarchical control meshed naturally with what was already on the ground and gave thousands of independent sick systems a connective thread to work together. Fighting this could mean spreading the word to boycott a business that operates as a cult, or standing up for your local library when the board is compromised by reactionaries.
Above all, it means constant vigilance.