Who Would Jesus Hate?
Yesterday morning, I watched over Eileene’s figurative shoulder a CNN clip of Anderson Cooper interviewing a woman from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the cult in the news since its “retreat” was raided on allegations of child abuse, polygamy, and rape posing as forcible marriage—allegations which look increasingly likely to be vindicated.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the whole thing, nor do I feel even now that I’ve missed anything. I stayed only long enough to learn that she was angry about the state taking children from the ranch, and that she grounded her complaint on freedom of religion: the guv’mint ain’t got no right to seize our children; we’re religious. It put me immediately in mind of Abraham Lincoln’s dead-on description of a slavery advocate’s attitude toward universal freedom: “That if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”
Such an attitude is indefensible, of course, and anyone embracing it will weasel as best they can from being confronted with that bald formulation. Predictably, the woman on TV was evasive, too. When Cooper observed that several women had made almost word-for-word identical statements and asked, “At the risk of sounding cynical, were you coached in what to say?” she replied only “Well, what would you do?” Whatever that means.
But I didn’t have to wait even long enough to hear three or four sentences to distrust whatever she had to say; even for an empathy-challenged guy like me, it was obvious.
She never looked at the camera. It made her look shifty. Later, I considered that she may have failed to look in to the camera for a reason. Maybe there was a little live-feed screen off camera, designed to let her check her own appearance, but on further reflection, someone absorbed by their own camera image probably isn’t speaking from the heart when they cite Constitutional freedoms. Maybe the fundamentalists trained her to avert her eyes from men, or from strangers. If so, the way her sense of identity has been twisted is pathetic, but hardly reason to trust what she may say as her own.
She had a stupid look to her. I can’t tell you what “stupid” looks like, but sometimes you can see it in a person—a vague, vacant look is part of it, as is a look of intense concentration over small tasks like tying shoes or listening to big words. She stumbled over words in a way that confirmed a sense that they were not her own; she seemed not to understand them all. I don’t know why such a dim bulb was chosen to speak to the cameras. Maybe she’d had critical thought beaten from her; maybe people who could think for themselves had already left the FLDS; maybe the church leaders specifically selected mothers who could be made to repeat the elders’ message for the interview, or they had been isolated so long that they couldn’t see how badly she would reflect on their church. But again, whether she had trouble speaking because she was, in fact, as stupid as she looked, or because she was parroting someone else’s words, or because she was distracted by being on camera, I don’t see much reason to think she was speaking from the heart, with the sense of concern for the children she professed.
But above all, what dominated my instantaneous impression of the woman was the grimace of hatred on her face. It was utterly unmistakable, and remained in place through the entire segment, whether she was listening or speaking, and independent of the immediate topic of the sentence. However questionable her concern for the children might be, her fury for the government, the larger community, and even for the news crew she felt compelled to address was genuine. No devotion to truth could survive in conflict with hatred that deep, deep enough that she could not be bothered to conceal it even momentarily when the whole purpose of her appearance was to garner public sympathy.
Never trust a Christian church that inculcates a notion that its own agenda are more important than Jesus’s injuction to love.