Cultural Welfare Queens
Who makes your meaning?
Former President Donald Trump traveled to Bozeman, Montana, last week. To locals, Bozeman and its Gallatin Valley barely count as Montana anymore. It has been overrun by out of state wealth over the past fifteen years. The average Bozeman house now costs more than in Portland. Nearby farm communities are turning into a suburban sprawl of bunched-up townhomes, plus hundreds of one to ten acre McMansion-clad ranchettes spread across the hillsides for the high rollers. Each of these with a septic tank dug into the same dirt as their water well, which in turn is dug into the valley’s dropping water table. Meanwhile, former farm kids are leaving “Boz Angeles” and moving to the coasts, to spend the money they made selling off their family’s land.
Thirty miles south of BZN proper is a ski town called Big Sky, built around a mountain resort just north of Yellowstone Park. Big Sky home prices start around ten million, then get truly crazy. It is the land of billionaires and those hoping to get there. There is nowhere nearby where those who serve these mega-wealthy homeowners can afford to live. So, the servant class is bused long distance into the “Yellowstone” zone, to help keep the regional maids, cooks, gardeners, and nannies from turning into dreaded “welfare queens” living off “government handouts.”
Gallatin Valley is the perfect part of Montana for Trump to visit. White Evangelical pastors make good money plying their trade in towns like Bozeman, Whitefish, and Kalispell, selling tax-free praise music and judgy sermons to rich white immigrants from Arizona, Texas, and California (only 40% of Montanans, including this writer, were born here). Such folk move here to love Trump, and to love all that loving him implies, like the mythologies of bootstrapped self-reliance. Myths rich with irony when recounted here in a state founded by pioneers who only survived the winters and droughts by showing up for others and helping each other out.
If you listen to white Evangelicals for a while, you will inevitably hear their deepest and most fundamental wail: American life has lost meaning for them. They lament about how symbols, myths, and beliefs derived from their preferred bible interpretations are no longer mandated as law. U.S. Courts are open on equal terms to atheists and Christians alike. Few judges display Ten Commandments on their courtroom wall any longer. Women make decisions about what happens inside their bodies, not priests and legislators. Homosexuals are offered the same hundreds of marriage rights and responsibilities as heterosexuals. Trans people are treated with increasing dignity and care. Black, brown, and red people are strong political forces, not just whites. And, so many stores and restaurants are open all weekend that Chik-Fil-A bases its public image on overrated chicken sandwiches and staying pointedly closed on Sundays, with big signs out front to remind everyone how very Christian they are for doing so. From an Evangelical view, America is descending into chaos. Cultural diversity has simply gone too far, for them, and must not just be stopped but actively rolled back.
While many Western nations offer similar legal protections for speech and religious belief as America, none bake them into their founding laws as the very “first” rights to be protected, as we do. We remain somewhat unique in the high prominence we give to protecting freedom of expression and religious practice.
But, how often do any of us feel responsible for doing something with all the cultural space these freedoms create? Do we stop to wonder how to best use all the mental breathing room we have? Most of us have never experienced anything different, so we take this breathing room for granted. Immigrants don’t. Many come here specifically to think for themselves and speak as they choose, because they could not wherever they were before. In much of the world speaking your mind remains dangerous.
Short of inciting immediate, specific violence, Americans can say and do virtually anything we want on public property. We can burn the flag. We can call for revolution and defunding the police. We can call for more cops and police crackdowns. We can mock our nation’s history or glorify it, our call. We can even try to blatantly revise it and see if anyone buys the lies. We can invent any religion we want, follow it or not, and change our mind about it each week. No American can force any other American to believe anything about God whatsoever. No American can force another one to read our favorite book, watch our favorite show, or listen to us preach (you are free to click away from this page at any time). We Americans are often so used to these freedoms we never stop to consider how fortunate we are, in context of global history and much of the world still today1.
Most paths towards finding a sense of meaning in life involve some form of creativity, philosophy, or spirituality, whether this looks like creating cool fishing lures in the garage, or building a movement dedicated to eradicating poverty and disease. The First Amendment, and the centuries of judicial interpretation following from it, declare vast runways of human creative potential both wide open and protected by law for whatever any American wishes to run down their length in hope of flight.
Yet, many Evangelicals want a theocracy instead. There is a grassfire-growing movement within so-called “Bible-based Christianity” that seeks to gut the U. S. Constitution and remake us as a nation covered in laws dictating the culture we are permitted to enjoy. Theirs. Which seems remarkably lazy of them.
I have several relatives in Montana who, while each lovable in their quirky ways, are also old, white, Evangelical baby-boomers. They live out their retirement days glued to Fox News, rustling through their Bibles, paging around in the Book of Revelations, and praying to “Father God” about the “end times.” If asked, they fervently insist America is a “Christian nation” already, and always has been. They declare we have lost our way and just need a strong leader (you know who) to lead us back onto the path of “godly righteousness.” All of us. The whole country. That means you, too. They seem impervious to facts — like the consistently declining crime rate over the past fifty years2 — but also love a nicely fried chicken breast with some potato salad on the side. And, who doesn’t love a nice piece of fried chicken from the hot case down at the store, right? It is easy and tasty, no work required. You can just pick up a bag of fried food and eat a wing right there in the parking lot, if you like.
Many Evangelicals' deepest desire is just as simple. They pray for the smallest possible government that can still pump their lives full of meaning, by making everyone else believe and do just as their faith commands. They see no internal contradiction in praying for a small government big enough to enforce a national police state on their behalf. They do not want to engage with other cultures. They just want a white, “Christian” country served up on a plate. Love it or leave.
People who expect a government to embody and enforce their aesthetic and religious values are quite literally asking for a handout. They pray fervently with hands raised high for the government to make their culture for them. Like both historical and modern authoritarian regimes — Hungary, Russia, China, North Korea, and the like — Christian Nationalists want an American government that does all their work, popularizing their preferred myths, promulgating their preferred ethics, and dictating laws to enforce their preferred values. Not just for themselves, but for everyone. In the name of Jesus, of course.
The problem facing these prayers for cultural and legal domination is that we live in a nation that actively makes room for everyone’s views, not just theirs. We have a legal system founded quite specifically to protect wide open mental and creative spaces to be filled by whatever any one of us may choose to think or express, short of immediate incitement to specific violence. Our Constitution is not a creed. It does not tell us what to believe. It says that we are free to speak and believe as we choose. As a consequence, we are each not only free but also affirmatively responsible for making sense out of life for ourselves. We get to find our own meaning for being alive (or not, if we prefer despair), just like everyone else. American law just expects us to be mature enough to live peaceably alongside others who are doing the same for themselves.
Said differently, Christian Nationalist Evangelicals want to be cultural welfare queens. They want a big fat cultural handout from the government. They want Uncle Sam to define and enforce the myths and beliefs they prefer, so they can feel their life has meaning without having to think or work at this for themselves. Because there are some folks who only “love freedom” until they figure out everyone else has it too3.
Freedom House monitors expressive freedom and democratic participation worldwide.
https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2024
U.S. violent and crime rates have plunged since the 1990s, regardless of data source.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
Americans love free speech, until they find out everyone else has it too.
Think Western MT will become another CO, but I like the concept of “cultural welfare”…though we don’t really have much culture here in the States, except Jazz, Blues, rock n roll, Coke and Levi’s, all so young.
I struggle with a notion of adding time to culture, yet we are time, culture as artifacts traded for an identity or an emotion or to fulfill a desire from a lack. The consumerism we experience here is trending in many other cultures across this planet. So perhaps you need not wonder if communication is culture. “Cherish the dull moments”