Spiritual Fidgeting

How Evangelicals, right and left, only go in circles.

Google is a very useful tool. Google’s advanced tools are scary tools. With some simple clicks you can search not only what’s popular now, but filter for what was popular in any given time range. It’s like taking a cut into the temporal pie of time. Each cut is unique. Some of them have juicy pieces, others are a tad bland.

Have you ever tried searching Evangelical topics?

While a young hip college kid I started noticing a trend. It seemed ever few months Evangelicals would find some new term or author or theme to obsess about as some great old thing, and then drop it and go obsess over some new one. I thought maybe there was some kind of liturgy of topics they went through, mostly having been raised Catholic and assuming churches had some kind of rotation they go around. But as the experiences multiplied and the topics contradicted more often than not, I realized this was merely chaos in action. Whatever faction of Evangelicals was holding the reins of power that year was who got to decide. Perhaps some famous pastor fucked a teenager? Focus on family faithfulness. Perhaps a black youth was shot down? Focus on justice. Ask if unfaithful fathers has anything to do with how cops treat ethnic groups? Well now you’ve gone to far. How dare you question their message?

It’s fun, then, to see this erratic behavior of the Evangelical as he attempts to balance the towering stack of talking points for every new wind that gusts from Leviathan’s hosts. Hey Alexa, what was popular in 2002?

Ah, of course. We had just gotten bombed, after all. Hey Alexa, what was popular in 2013?

Ah well, suddenly we’re enemies in the year of riots, isn’t that funny. Evangelicals are very often like this. Very open to forgiving people they’ve never met half a world away, brutally vengeful for dissidents in their own churches. This is a very fun exercise to pull off on any given topic for any given year. Evangelicals will switch their opinions on any issue under the sun. This is a trend I like to call Spiritual Fidgeting. It’s a term I imagine I will return to many times in the months ahead for 2021.

I’ll end with one good note. And it may be the best thing Trump did in his 4 years as President. He drove a wedge right through the heart of the Evangelicals. Now there are the Trump Worshiping lunatics, and the Social Obsessive Compulsive lunatics. They’re finally starting to split. The Fidgeting has grown to fist fighting.

For discovering why, use the trick above.

Anyone could have predicted this.