Of all the thrills and compelling stories of this year's Tokyo Olympic Games―the exploits of Katie Ledecky and Caeleb Dressel in the pool, British diver Tom Daley finally winning an Olympic gold medal, Karsten Warholm of Norway's spectacular destruction of the world record in the 400 meter hurdles, the sportsmanship of high jumpers Mutaz-Essa Barshim of Qatar and Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy, willing to share the gold medal―no doubt the most compelling has concerned the travails of American gymnast Simone Biles, the most decorated and surely the greatest female athlete in the sport's history, dropping out of the team and individual overall competitions, and three of the individual competitions for which she had qualified, because of what she described as the "twisties," the gymnastic equivalent of the "yips" commonly associated with athletes of other sports like golf (Tommy Armour) and baseball (Steve Blass, Steve Sax, Chuck Knoblauch).
Thankfully, Biles received support from many top-tier athletes (Michael Phelps, Rory McElroy, Ledecky) and a large percentage of the public, who instinctively understand the physical dangers involved at the intersection of mental health issues and the spectacular athletic feats her discipline demands, and are unwilling to pry into private matters that are, to be frank, none of their business. Not surprisingly, however, one segment of the population demurs, and has been more than ready to throw Biles under the bus. I am speaking, of course, of a certain kind of "conservative" found, more and more commonly, it seems, in both America and Britain. For example, British windbag Piers Morgan―who himself stormed off the set of "Good Morning Britain" in a snit, never to return, over an argument about Meghan Markle (!) with a co-host―slammed Biles for "quitting" and "letting down" her teammates, fans, and country.
More important, for my present purposes, have been the responses from many self-proclaimed "Christians" to Biles' decision to withdraw from many of her scheduled competitions. For example, college dropout Charlie Kirk accused her of "softness," "shattering into a million pieces" once "the going gets tough," and of being a "sociopath." Jenna Ellis concurred, accusing her of "selfishly abandoning her teammates" and lack of commitment and integrity. Blogger Matt Walsh said much the same, spicing it up with a bit of implicit misogyny (or, at least, anti-feminist animus): "Simone Biles quit on her team because she wasn't having fun. This is called being a quitter. It's completely disgraceful and selfish. I guarantee that most of the people defending it wouldn't be defending it if she was a man."
When reading such unkind moral pronouncements from people who know nothing of Biles' circumstances, the first thing that immediately strikes me is the blatantly unchristian nature of their self-righteous attitudes (more on this presently). But what strikes me, and what makes me even more sad and, if I'm to be honest, mad, is how such attitudes in much of so-called white "evangelicalism" increasingly coalesce with those found in what conservative journalist Charlie Sykes refers to as the "MAGAverse." In Sykes' words:
[T]his is what makes the attacks on Biles so odd.
At least on the surface, there was no tangible flashpoint in the culture war here. The assault on the gymnast wasn’t sparked by any act of protest on her part; and there is no discernible “conservative” principle involved in her concerns for her mental health.
But if the attacks lack a coherent idea, they share an increasingly familiar posture. Despite all the rhetoric about individual freedom, the real fetish on the right is toughness.
Men who show emotion, especially those who cry, are weak. Young women who fail to perform are “quitters.” All that matters is strength, winning and a weird obsession with machismo. Just look at Trump’s rebuke on Wednesday of the “RINOs” he accused of helping Democrats get the infrastructure deal passed: “It is a loser for the USA, a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish, and dumb.” Not responsive to constituents or committed to bipartisanship but weak.
This might sound familiar.
“What is good?” asked Friedrich Nietzsche. “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.”
What is evil? “Whatever springs from weakness.” (If the German philosopher were alive, he’d almost certainly have a show on Fox News.) …
In this brave new world of faux-toughness, Biles as an individual simply does not matter—she is merely an instrument of national greatness, with her actual humanity regarded as an inconvenient afterthought.
That’s why her critics spend so little time dealing with the role that stress, pressure and a history of sexual abuse likely played in Biles’ decision, because that would mean having to think of her as a person, and for critics like Charlie Kirk and the others, that is utterly irrelevant.
This is also the new ethos on the right. Adam Serwer has famously noted that in Trump’s America, ‘the cruelty is the point.”
But in late-stage Trumpism, it is not just the cruelty: The lack of empathy is also the point. Insensitivity is cultivated; compassion is derided as weakness.
So, we are left with this moment of high absurdity, in which a symbol of human excellence and American greatness is being mocked by bloated white man-children for being “weak.”
They have decided that Simone Biles represents everything they oppose.
How revealing is that?
(Read the whole piece here).
This analysis strikes me as unusually perceptive … and damning. Over the past decade or so I have gotten tired of pointing out to lay evangelicals the blatant incompatibility of the ideas of Ayn Rand and those of Christianity, Paul Ryan's futile attempted synthesis notwithstanding. Now, however, what we clearly have is an unwitting, de facto synthesis of Nietzsche and Christianity which, considering the inherent incompatibility of the two, necessarily produces a bastard form of the latter. In the passage cited above, Sykes quotes Nietzsche, from his famous The Antichrist. [1] Subsequent to the words found above, Nietzsche wrote, "The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity."
Make no mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche, for all his impiety and atheism, understood something about the fundamental nature of the Christian faith that is lost to the vast multitudes of American white evangelicals for whom Kristen Kobes DuMez wrote her provocative and compelling Jesus and John Wayne [2] ―those, like John Piper, who tout the "masculine feel" of Christianity and lament its supposed "feminization" and increasing "softness" in recent decades. Indeed, the New Testament talks a lot about power. It speaks of authority. It speaks of strength. But it turns conventional wisdom and thinking about these matters on its head. God's wisdom and God's power, according to Paul the Apostle, find their climactic expression in the cross of Messiah Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:18-31), so much so that he can summarize his message by means of the ultimate oxymoron, "Christ crucified" (christon estaurōmenon, 1 Cor 1:23). The Messiah, by definition, was to be a "winner." Crucified men, on the other hand, by definition, were "losers," vanquished by the reigning imperial power and exposed publicly for the masses to see with their own eyes what happened to those who resisted its will. But God's "foolishness," manifested in the cross, proved wiser than human wisdom (1 Cor 1:25); he chose the "weak things" of the world to "put to shame" (kataischynēi) the strong (1 Cor 1:27); the Messiah's apparent "defeat" on the cross proved in fact to be his public disarming of, indeed his triumph (thriambeusas) over, the dark spiritual powers that had held the world in their grip, working through those worldly authorities that put him to death (Colossians 2:15). Indeed, in the primitive Christian hymn embedded in Philippians 2, Christ's ultimate exaltation to Lordship occurred only after he had refused to use his divine equality (to einai isa theōi, Phil 2:6) for his own advantage (ouch harpargmon hēgēsato), but "emptied himself" by "taking the form of a slave," becoming human and dying a slave's death on a Roman cross (Phil 2:6-11). [3] And it was precisely because he existed "in the form of God" (en morphēi theou, Phil 2:6) that he exhibited such transcendent vulnerability for the sake of those who one day would confess, "Jesus Christ is Lord," to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:11). [4]
This is important because it is not simply a matter of Christians worshipping the Jesus who humbled himself and secured their salvation via the path of weakness. [5] More to the point, Christ's example of weakness and self-sacrifice overturns the values of the world and thus must be the pattern for the lives of those who aim to be his followers. [6] Nowhere is this more clear than in 2 Corinthians 10-13, where Paul takes on self-aggrandizing, boastful Jewish Christian opponents he deems "super-apostles" (hoi hyperlian apostolōn, 2 Cor 11:5). In the middle of his rhetorical response he asks the Corinthians to indulge him in a bit of folly as he proceeds to "boast" to keep up, as it were, with these false apostles. The problem, however, is that the things he boasts in are all the wrong things, whether looked at from the perspective of the Greco-Roman honor-shame culture or that of today's western world: imprisonment, beatings, shipwrecks, sleeplessness, hunger (2 Cor 11:16-29). Capping it off he mentions the time he fled from Aretas IV of Damascus, escaping with, and no doubt afraid for, his life in a basket lowered from the city walls (2 Cor 11:33-36). When the going got tough, he ran!
Fundamental for Paul was the lesson he learned when he prayed for the removal of the unidentified "thorn in (his) flesh" that plagued him throughout his career (2 Cor 12:7). The Lord's answer to this prayer is one all his followers must learn: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:8). For that reason, Paul's only boast was in his weaknesses, for it was only in them and through them that Christ's power could rest upon him and work through him (2 Cor 12:9). C. K. Barrett notes:
[A] scene of human weakness is the best possible stage for the display of divine power. So far from coming to perfection, divine power is scarcely perceptible in the impressive activities of the ecclesiastical potentates with whom Paul has to contend. It is when he is weak, really weak—poor, sick, humiliated, despised, unloved by his own spiritual children as well as scorned by the world—that God's power comes into view. For 'God's foolishness is wiser than men, and God's weakness is stronger than men' (I Cor. i. 25). [7]
Let us never forget that.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. H. L. Mencken (New York: Knopf, 1918) §2.
[2] Kristen Kobes DuMez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020).
[3] Cf. N.T. Wright, "Jesus Christ is Lord: Philippians 2:5-11," in The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 56-98.
[4] Understanding, with Moule, the participle hyparchōn in verse 5 in a causal rather than, as by most, in a concessive, sense. C. F. D. Moule, "Further Reflexions on Philippians 2:5-11," in Apostolic History and the Gospel: Biblical and Historical Essays Presented to F. F. Bruce on His 60th Birthday, ed. W. W. Gasque and R. P. Martin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970) 264-76.
[5] On the early Christian worship of Jesus, cf. esp. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008) 127-51; Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003).
[6] Cf. Timothy B. Savage, Power Through Weakness: Paul's Understanding of Christian Ministry in 2 Corinthians (SNTSMS 86; Cambridge: CUP, 1996).
[7] C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (HNTC; New York: Harper & Row, 1973) 317.
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