Matthew D. Taylor, _The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Democracy_

 I HAVE RECENTLY been reading several books that try to map out ideological configurations of Trumpism. This one covers the Christian nationalist angle. On the whole, I found it not quite as illuminating as Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes de Mez (who provides a dust jacket blurb here), but it adds some valuable detail to that portrait.

Taylor focuses on what he calls the independent charismatics. Charismatics are Christians who believe that the miraculous powers bestowed on the apostles on Pentecost--speaking in unknown languages, healing, prophecy, handling snakes without getting bitten--can still be obtained by those open to the Holy Spirit. Some charismatics belong to traditional denominations (e.g., Roman Catholicism), and some belong to denominations explicitly dedicated to tapping into the Pentecostal powers (e.g., Assemblies of God). Other charismatics, however, find the whole institutionalized structure of a denomination--creeds, polities, seminaries, ordination, and so on--an obstacle to the flow of the Holy Spirit, so they just set up shop for themselves, so to speak. These are Taylor's independent charismatics, and there are a lot of them out there.

These are not your familiar run-of-the-mill evangelicals, by the way. Those folks tend to support Trump, but find his style a little off-putting. The  independent charismatics, however, are truly on board, and were much in evidence on January 6, 2021...yea, even on the very ground of the Capitol Mall itself.

The main body of Taylor's book looks at several of the leading personalities of this tendency. The "independent charismatics" are not formally organized, of course, but they are highly networked and do sometimes coordinate activities. The late Peter Wagner, at one time of the evangelical-but-not-necessarily-charismatic Fuller Theological Seminary, was particularly effective at networking and coordinating. Dutch Sheets worked up the "ekklesia" movement, based on the idea that the Greek word "ekklesia," usually translated "church" when it occurs in the New Testament, should really be translated "assembly," hence the church and the government ought to be one and the same. Lance Wallnau came up with the "Seven Mountains Mandate" metaphor, a version of "dominion theology" (i.e., again, fusing church and state) asserting that (charismatic) Christians should aspire to control the seven crucial dimensions of a society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. We also meet Paula White, Cindy Jacobs, Ché Ahn, and Sean Feucht, all of whom Taylor deftly evokes. (Not sure what his own theological orientation is, but he almost sounds like an insider at times.)

The main idea seems to be that the United States ought to be guided by the Holy Spirit, which practically means it ought to be guided, perhaps ruled, by independent charismatics. Bringing this about may require battling demons--that is, it may require violence. "We will not take dominion by remaining passive. We will only take dominion if the Body of Christ [= Christians, the church, the ekklesia] becomes violent and declares war on the enemy!" That's Peter Wagner, from his book Dominion!, p. 118 (Taylor is scrupulous about his sources). 

The saying of Jesus that gives Taylor's book its title--"From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11: 12)--was quoted by some of those storming the Capitol five years ago today, and according to Taylor, it has become a watchword among Christian nationalists.

What in the world do they see in Trump, though? Does he ever seem to have been seized by the Holy Spirit? (His babbling could sound like talking in tongues, I suppose.) The answer to this puzzle is the "Cyrus Anointing," another Lance Wallnau trope. Just as King Cyrus of Persia, not himself an Israelite, delivered God's Chosen People from bondage in Babylon, so Donald Trump, not himself one of the saved, will deliver God's Chosen People from bondage in a secularized, multicultural, woke USA. 

Joe Brainard, _The Nancy Book_

WHAT EXACTLY DREW the brilliant writer and visual artist Joe Brainard (1942-1994) to Ernie Bushmiller's comic Nancy? 

There have always been a few strips that attracted more educated and sophisticated readers (Krazy Kat in the 1920s, Pogo in the 1950s, Peanuts in the 1960s, Doonesbury in the 1970s, Calvin and Hobbes in the 1980s), but Nancy seems an unlikely candidate for that kind of attention. Its humor was broad, its drawing plain and reduced to essentials, its vision of the culture straight down the middle of the road. Yet Brainard is by no means the strip's only admirer: Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, and Bill Griffiths are also advocates.

That Nancy is a kind of apotheosis of ordinariness may be what fascinated Brainard. His astonishing "I Remember," among its other virtues, holds nothing back in its embrace of ordinariness. So when Brainard adds Nancy's face  to a De Kooning, or a Picasso, or a Goya, the juxtaposition of a drawing style meant to be infinitely reproducible with revered works of individual genius, there's a beauty in the sheer incongruity, masterpieces made cozy and homey by the bare-bones geometry of Nancy's face, Nancy elevated to the firmament by her placement in iconic paintings. 

Or, when Nancy and another comic character, the silent Henry, engage in athletic sex, we get a different effect, not unlike the détourné comics of the Situationists. The domesticated is re-wilded, the complacent surface of the family newspaper is ruffled by anarchic winds, the sanitized and safe rendered dirty and dangerous.

The Nancy Book is an homage that becomes a work in its own right. That one could not imagine such a project with, say, Blondie, may reveal in a roundabout way the nature of Bushmiller's idiosyncratic genius.