A Stroll Down Memory Lane

How the "retelling" of history corrupts the tenderhearted TikTokker

I wandered down a rabbit hole yesterday when I was supposed doing other important things all of which I failed to accomplish. Kristin Kobes du Mez retweeted this person’s TikTok about a protest of Mom’s For Liberty having the gall to invite Kirk Cameron to read stories to little children in a library instead of the usual Drag Queens.

Photo by Angel Santos on Unsplash

Kirk Cameron, as you must know if you spend any amount of time online, is literally Hitler for wanting to read stories that aren’t about sex to the babes of Alabama. This TikTokker, under the moniker “Bhambluedot” is determined to save the littles from such vile corruption, clearing the way for men dressing as women for reasons of kink to bend the minds and hearts of all the infants to their new “moral vision.” And then I just kept clicking and clicking and clicking for, indeed, I could not stop. The problem is that the TikTok genre is mesmerizing. The form is so short and breezy, even if the content is fatuous.

I thought maybe I could embed some of the TikToks, but I can’t, so I guess I’ll just have to believe that you’re going to click and watch. If you click more than three, you’ll see that Bhambluedot’s life was absolutely changed by reading Jesus and John Wayne, which must be what drew K du Mez’s attention to her. She, Bhambluedot, who appears to be running for office, brings it up over and over and always says the whole title—How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation—with obvious relish and then tells you to get a copy the way I tell you to go to church.

Before I say anything else, I was charmed a few days ago when Megan Basham tweeted out my review of said book. (I just took a screenshot, since I can’t embed):

This thread of tweets, or X’s or Whatever’s, sent me on a short journey down memory lane, even as I continued scrolling around Bhambluedot’s TikTok. The shape of American politics and religion has been a sort of mini-apocalypse over the last three years. My eyes were certainly opened, though not in the way I expected. I discovered that human nature is always the same, no matter the time or place. Without the scriptures to critique the inclinations of individual people, those people will quickly invent decadent and corrupt ways of being “good.”

My first time reading J&JW, unpleasant as it was, I was able to apprehend, because of the style and content both, exactly the direction K du Mez was headed. If, all those years ago, you had read her book with a truly open mind, you would have been able to see that she would shortly apostatize by affirming the L.G.B.T.Q. way of things. And, in due course, she did.

The book presented that particular view of the world, if not in so many words, at least in the manner in which she described the “white evangelical.” What’s been interesting to me is the number of people who hadn’t, before 2016, imagined that it was the “white evangelical” who did all the corrupting and fracturing. Those who counted themselves amongst that now hated group thought they were only one part of the bigger American story. They didn’t know, yet, that they were the literal villains.

For those who yet possess a longer view of history, you might remember that evangelicals, of whatever particular ethnic flavor, as well as other kinds of Christian groups, had been reacting to the long, corrupting, fracturing slide of American morality into the decadence of our current hour. Many evangelicals tried hard to stop to slide, however ineptly. But then suddenly, one morning, they woke up and discovered they were on the wrong side of “history” if that word can be taken to mean only one moment in time, pried off of its contextual mooring and made to float like a shabby bauble across a turbulent and choppy cultural sea. Which, of course, is not the meaning of the word “history.”

I finally finished Christopher Lasch’s chapter on Nostalgia in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, a book and chapter I can’t recommend highly enough, and have got to “History as a Progression of Cultural Styles.” Lasch writes this about the way American people began to have no idea of time or their own historical context:

History had come to be seen as a succession of decades and also as a succession of generations, each replacing the last at approximately ten-year intervals. This way of thinking about the past had the effect of reducing history to fluctuations in public taste, to a progression of cultural fashions in which the daring advances achieved by one generation become the accepted norms of the next, only to be discarded in their turn by a new set of styles. The concept of the decade may have commended itself, as the basic unit of historical time, for the same reason the annual model change commended itself to Detroit: it was guaranteed not to last. Every ten years it had to be traded in for a new model, and this rapid turnover gave employment to scholars and journalists specializing in the detection and analysis of cultural trends. (110)

And the manner of making economic considerations the only meaningful moral question, which Life Magazine thought was such a clever idea, and which K du Mez similarly thinks “explains everything”:

It is interesting to see which aspects of the fifty-year history of the century the editors chose to emphasize and which they chose to ignore. There was almost nothing about politics or diplomacy, except for a reminder that the cold war confronted Americans with a challenge to which only a mature people could rise. Economic history was reduced to the history of technology, itself treated as another branch of fashion in which yesterday’s technology (horsepower) was bound to be superseded, like yesterday’s fashions. (111)

One thing that history always shows is that most people don’t start out trying to be bad. Most people want to be good. Discovering themselves to be “bad” they are quick to change their thoughts and feelings about contemporary fashions. Bhambluedot appears as a fair (both literally and metaphorically) representation of our shifting moral fashions. She swallows the moral camel trying to filter out the gnat. She thinks that Kirk Cameron represents everything that is wicked while failing to see that the men dressed up as women don’t really love women, though they do, for some vile reason, desperately want to read stories to the children.

Have a nice day!