Even After Political Wins, Right-Wing Pastors Are Still Afraid of Susan
The IRS reversed seven decades of precedent this summer by repealing the Johnson Amendment, which prohibited religious nonprofits from partaking in electioneering. Since Congress in 1954 approved an amendment proposed by then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, any pastor, preacher, priest, reverend, imam, or rabbi who told his congregants how to vote risked having the 501(c)(3) tax exemption stripped from his religious organization. In 2016, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump promised to scrap this regulation if elected—a promise now fulfilled.
One might think that the consequences of this political liberation of religious speech will be heard from pulpits across America. Don’t bet on it. It will likely change nothing.
That’s because, by way of Donald Trump, the populist right has only seized political power; they have not seized cultural power. Nearly every facet of American culture is still dominated by the left, including religion. As late Chronicles columnist Samuel T. Francis warned, “political power is ultimately dependent on cultural power.”
The overarching theme of the essays in the September 2023 issue of Chronicles (“The Great Apostasy: Secularism Is America’s Religion”) was the leftist domination of Christianity. Our contributors—who hailed from Catholic, Lutheran, and evangelical sects—highlighted their experiences with left-wing persecution.
What explains this cross-denominational phenomenon?
The best heuristic for comprehending what’s going on in the Church is the popular meme from Catholic social media, “Susan From the Parish Council.”
Susan From the Parish Council is a female Baby Boomer who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s. She marched with various civil rights leaders and feminist icons. Today, she sits on her church’s parish council, and countless other councils and home owners’ associations, because she loves nothing more than getting up in everyone else’s business. Susan From the Parish Council is a fictional character, but as an archetype—the parish left-wing busybody—she’s all too real.
To take a common example of how Susan exercises her influence in American Catholic Churches, when the pastor moves the tabernacle behind the altar—where it belongs—Susan calls the chancery downtown and alerts the bishop that the right-wing pastor is acting out again. Someone from the chancery quickly calls Susan’s pastor—now identified as a reactionary—and tells him to knock it off. Meanwhile, a priest down the street plays gangsta rap during his Masses without a peep from the chancery. In fact, Susan intends to bring Monsignor Hot Rhymes to her parish for a similar crosscultural liturgical experience.
Lutherans and evangelicals suffer the same left-wing nonsense from their own version of Susan. The Protestant Susan conducts a whisper campaign against the pastor who took down the Pride Month flag too early this year, who demonstrated insufficient concern for the plight of undocumented migrants, or who seems not to understand his own white privilege. She lets it be known that the pastor will see the results in the collection basket and hear about it from some congregational authority.
Say what you will about Susan, but she understands power. She knows that America’s prevailing culture will condemn any reactionary clergyman in a white parish, but not the rapping cleric in the inner-city parish, because acting against the former is considered virtuous, while acting against the latter is considered racism.
Conservatives and traditionalists still consider Susan to be an ally because, in most cases, she detests pornography and abortion. There are certain social evils that all sane Christians detest. Any cleric who cares for his flock must address the prevalent evils of pornography and abortion; he would be derelict not to! Catholic priests in particular must speak out against such immoral things because their Church claims to have a special charism of infallibility on moral matters, and the Catholic Church bears the responsibility of safeguarding the natural law.
Now, with the Johnson Amendment gone, clerics of any denomination can tell their congregants to vote for laws restricting, or even banning, pornography and abortion! But they won’t address the root cause of these problems: They won’t tell their faithful that abortion, as it exists today, is a woman contracting the murder of her own child in the womb. That pornography is the result of a woman filming herself and then uploading the video to her OnlyFans page.
The issue at the heart of both abortion and pornography is the bad behavior of women. And no church council hierarch, bishop, or pastor wants to take notice of—much less condemn—female misbehavior. Calling out female misbehavior is like calling out nonwhite misbehavior: It’s a great way to get branded a bigot, misogynist, racist, or some other naughty name, and dragged through the public relations wringer by a dozen powerful groups that advocate exclusively for the interests of nonwhite minorities and/or women—the left’s coalition of the fringes.
Every pastor knows that Susan won’t hesitate to call in reinforcements from various progressive groups. Often overlooked, however, is Susan’s ability to call in reinforcements from so-called conservative groups. Susan has no problem working with conservative groups to rein in supposed right-wing reactionaries, because such groups pose no challenge to Susan’s leftist victimology—rather, they accept and reinforce it.
For example, in 2016, candidate Trump told MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews in an episode of his now-defunct show Hardball that women who get abortions should face some sort of punishment. Predictably, the pro-choice side denounced the Donald— but the pro-life side was even stronger in condemning him! The Susans who run Pro-Life Inc. informed The Donald that punishing women for murder is not okay because, of course, women are the victims of abortion—just as they are victims of pornography, even as they become fabulously wealthy from making and selling it.
Here’s the tricky thing about Susans: They exist in both progressive and conservative causes and churches. Indeed, many Catholic Susans attend the so-called Traditional Latin Mass (feminists in chapel veils, if you will) and volunteer for Pro-life organizations. The traditional cleric is well aware of Susan’s presence and, more importantly, he is well aware of the widely accepted leftist cultural narratives regarding minority and female victimhood. which Susan and her friends work so hard to perpetuate.
The Trump administration did the right thing by repealing the Johnson Amendment, but the right-wing clerical brigade isn’t charging into the breach after the president.
Cultural power is determinant. All the apostles snoozed in the garden while Christ suffered, and Peter denied Him three times. The Church has been cowering before the extant culture for 2,000 years.
Until the populist right builds a true counterculture with groups and publications that challenge leftist victimology, no cleric will confront major social issues in any meaningful way.