David Brooks has been wrong about everything. It never stops him. Now he has swooned into the arms of Anne Snyder, a religious bigot, his former research assistant and apparent mentor in a conversion to another brand of unintegrated thinking and confusion.
Brooks is written about in a recent New Yorker. Snyder steps in to correct David’s misconceptions about grace, dragging up the Catholic straw-man beloved and imagined into existence by Calvinists, that you can earn your way into heaven with good works.
Catholics never believed this.
Catholics believe in an interplay of discipline and the “spirit” and that someone can never assume they are saved—hence the need for discipline. Calvinists experience salvation like an electrical arc or bolt from God, breaching the chasm between the spirit and "the flesh." They are forever changed and saved in persevering perpetuity. They can’t be unsaved.
All of that, from a visit to a revival. Jimmy Swaggart is there. Franklin Graham will help. Hell, the NRA will help. A chasm it is. Catholics believe creation is good. Calvinists believe it is shit. Catholics believe in free will. Calvinists believe in fate and predestination.
Catholics believe in love. Calvinists believe in hate.
Catholics believe in community and commonality, Calvinists in superiority. That was surely the lure for Brooks. He had suspicions and inklings of superiority. Remember, it was Calvinists who said the Bible supported slavery—predestination applied to matters of race.
Republicanism is Calvinism applied to politics—superiority and exclusion.
Right wing superiority has its new apotheosis in Donald Trump, the choice of evangelicals everywhere. Brooks is keeping characteristically good company. Let him try to deny it. And, he is still getting paid to write dross and drivel. Now he knows he is saved.
Supremacy or superiority, it’s all the same thing. Welcome to the New Jerusalem—white dominance, Calvinist utopia and Trump’s (same thing) reign of hate. Brooks had suspected he was superior. Now he knows. He was chosen. By Anne, and himself, at least. They can bask happily together in the certainty of salvation, superiority or whatever:
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