Some July 4 Thoughts on Nationalism, the Post-Debate Anti-Biden Media Frenzy, and the Stakes of the 2024 American Election

An Update and a Recommendation

Hello, fellow bugbears! I suspect that many of you are feeling disheartened this week, as I am. The last week brought such a deluge of bad news—not to mention copious bad commentary and opinion writing—that it’s been hard to tame my swirling thoughts and feelings enough to focus and concentrate.

Even so, I have been doing some writing lately, as well as pitching (not always successfully) and putting some work into various projects.

Early this week, I published a guest post on STRONGWILLED, Krispin and D.L. Mayfield’s deep dive into authoritarian evangelical Christian parenting. I have often said that if you want to know how the Christian Right would govern America, you should look at how they run their own institutions—churches, Christian schools, parachurch ministries, etc. But it is equally true that you should understand how they perceive “the family,” and what social roles they prescribe to husbands and wives, parents and children. This of course relates to that broader institutional subculture, in which extreme and authoritarian parenting advice comes to evangelical parents from the pulpits of their churches and from the evangelical media empire, which in the area of parenting is dominated by Focus on the Family, the mega-ministry founded by the notorious James Dobson.

While evangelical homeschooling parents often go for even more extreme approaches, such as those prescribed by Michael and Debi Pearl or the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) founded by disgraced abuser Bill Gothard, Dobson is more or less the evangelical gold standard for parenting. Among Focus’s emphases are: corporal punishment of children is required by God; children’s wills must be broken so that they will obey adult authorities immediately, cheerfully, and without question (this applies especially to “strong-willed” children, about whom Dobson wrote an entire book); homosexuality is egregiously “sinful,” and sexual orientation can be changed.

For a deeper empirical and analytical dive into all of this, I highly recommend STRONGWILLED. Now, if you’re more interested in recovery from an authoritarian Christian upbringing or similar trauma, you might prefer D.L. Mayfield’s Healing is My Special Interest. And if you’d like to know more about my origin story, and how I belatedly came to recognize the queerness in myself that an evangelical upbringing caused me to repress, check out the guest post I contributed to STRONGWILLED that dropped on Monday—here’s that link again.

The Obligatory Subscription Spiel

This is the part of the newsletter where I remind you not only that The Bugbear Dispatch is a reader-supported publication that can only exist thanks to paid subscribers, but also that my summer sale is still on, and will be through the entire month of July! You can save a dollar a month on a monthly paid subscription (currently $6, normally $7), or $15 off an annual subscription, currently at $60, normally $75.

Every paid subscription means the world to me, as does any word of mouth sharing or posting my content to social media. With a few hundred more paid subscribers, I could potentially make The Bugbear Dispatch my full-time job, producing more content on a regular schedule, in addition to hiring a copy editor and commissioning some branded art. I could also pay the occasional guest contributor. But more importantly than all that, I’d love to build something that generates good discussion and a sense of community in the comments, as well as solidarity among people who care about democracy and human rights and have an interest in understanding how authoritarian Christianity threatens those values in contemporary America.

In any case, I am grateful to each and every free and paid subscriber for going with me on this journey to see what we can make of The Bugbear Dispatch, wherever it takes us. I welcome feedback from all good-faith readers, so feel free to send yours my way.

Deconstructing the Fourth of July

I thought about starting this essay with, “I’ve never loved July 4.” But that isn’t, strictly speaking, true. Since becoming an adult who’s learned to think for herself, it is true, and I’ve written at greater length about my feelings surrounding the holiday both here and here.

But as a small child steeped in Christian nationalism, I belted out patriotic songs with naive but sincere enthusiasm—and who doesn’t love fireworks, amirite? I used to lead a silly little “fireworks show,” with the safe and legal little fountains and such you can set off in your own driveway, for my family and a couple of others back in our Fishers, Indiana neighborhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was a ham and a goofball of an MC, and it was fun.

That’s what a holiday means to you as kid, and when everyone is telling you that you live in “the greatest country in the world”—a claim you lack the context and life experience to evaluate—you tend to believe it. Later, I would meet Germans who found any display of performative patriotism gauche at best and claims of national greatness disturbing, and later still a Russian woman who had come of age in the Brezhnev years and wistfully recalled living in “the greatest country in the world”—the Soviet Union.

I ultimately concluded that Russians and Americans have a lot in common—much of it unhealthy—including what I think of as an “imperial provincialist” outlook, a tendency toward grandiosity and conspiracy theories, and a penchant for violence. No wonder we’ve spent so much of our history as frenemies. Incidentally, I recently encountered a Russian-American sovereign citizen, which was on one level shocking, but on another not at all surprising. As the kids say (I think), that checks out.

Meanwhile, I concluded that the young Germans I knew—I studied abroad in Germany as a double major in history and German, but I’d already gotten to know some German families a bit through informal exchanges arranged by my high school German teacher—were right to reject notions of national greatness out of hand as stupid and dangerous.

Graffiti from a wall in Brno, Czech Republic. By Robert Schöller, via Unsplash.

Because Christianity and nationalism are intertwined in evangelical subculture, my deconstruction of the one went hand in hand with my deconstruction of the other. But lest this turn into an anodyne essay on how travel broadens, I’m going to turn my focus back to contemporary America—the country where, in a few months, we face an election between a Republican fascist who will politicize the federal bureaucracy from top to bottom and vows to punish his political enemies, on the one hand, and on the other, probably, incumbent Democratic president Joe Biden.

The Post-Debate Media Frenzy and the Stakes of the 2024 Election

I wavered on whether to write about this at all. I might be wrong, and I would welcome readers’ thoughts on this issue in the comments or in my DMs. But here goes…