Michigan Political Religion - What Have They Done?
thinking an American Studies thesis. part 2.
Thoughts I have while writing my undergrad thesis on implicit white supremacy in my favorite band growing up, Audio Adrenaline.
In the summer of 2008, I was relaxing on my front porch reading a book by Ann Coulter. My dad told me, years later, that he saw me as he drove up to my house to visit and thought, what have I done?
Later that year we would go to a McCain/Palin town hall together. At some point we went and listened to Ann Coulter bluster in a hotel conference room. Later on we would go see Mitt Romney speak, and I would make a quick cameo on the CBS Evening News. We went to all of those events in his car which, until he sold it, had a partially scraped-off Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker in the middle of his back window. For a few months he had become Democratic enough not to vote for Bush, but not enough to stick with it.
Years before all of that, I had spent the day standing on my feet to see a pre-presidential George W. Bush at our community college, and before all of the ‘compassionate conservatism’, there had been white foam vaudeville hats in our house with ‘Robertson 88’ wound around them. I would play with the hats and I would go with my parents to vote, the red, white, and blue striped curtain skimming my hair, everything above my head mysterious and compelling.
When I talk about politics or religion with people who know politics and religion, and I tell them I grew up in Southwest Michigan, I immediately get an understanding ‘ahhhh, ok, yup. Wow.’ Eyebrows go up, heads nod, and a chuckle escapes. They know exactly what West Michigan in those contexts means. While I was wearing Pat Robertson foam hats as a 6 year-old, Erik Prince was graduating high school less than an hour away from me. Growing up in western Michigan in the 1980s and 90s was to grow up in the religious political cesspool that created Betsy DeVos. People wonder how she can be so cruel. I wonder why I am not.
I would not learn until the spring of 2019 that Michigan had been a battleground state for the 1988 presidential election, or that Pat Robertson mustered up evangelicals all across the state and stunned the other candidates by winning a vast amount of delegates. That year, Michigan was the first state to start electing delegates, and Robertson’s win, while ultimately contentious and electorally insignificant, made the point that white, conservative evangelicals could be a political force.
A week before the election, in August of 1986, Robertson said:
“One day, there are going to be millions of people who say, in Michigan, the tide turned. Everybody in this nation who cares about traditional values, especially the Christians of the nation, are looking to you...”
30 years later, Trump was in West Michigan. 3 months after that, Betsy DeVos was in his cabinet. A Vanity Fair profile on Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince called this cabinet position, “a useful vehicle for advancing nationally the revolution the DeVoses had already enacted in Michigan.” You’re welcome, America. I’m sorry.
But what happened in those 30 years?
Lots of things, of course. I became a wildly liberal Democrat. Betsy DeVos ran the Michigan Republican Party. Her brother seems to have done a lot of bad things. Pat Robertson grew his empire, so much so that one day my friend from Michigan would go to Regent, laughing about getting to dance on his front porch. And Betsy and Erik’s families poured lots of money into Christian organizations that tried to shape American society, helping to inflame the battles that we know as the Culture Wars.
There’s an article in Time magazine from 1993 about church and culture and it says that not only is conservative evangelicalism growing rapidly, but that they are “making a real attempt to reach out to younger people.” This reaching out to young people, kids like 11 year-old me in 1993, was what a large part of the christian music industry became geared towards. This environment that had been primed by people like Pat Robertson, and funded by people like the DeVos family, was now ripe for instilling those same values in the next generation.
When, also in 1993, Audio Adrenaline opens their (essentially) first album Don’t Censor Me with the lyrics of
You can take God out of my school/you can make me listen to you
You can take God out of the pledge/but you can't take God out of my head
they are doing something besides being offering up musical entertainment.
They are working with, or very possibly being used by, an industry that is intentionally trying to grab the attention of kids. This industry, which seems to have been run by powerful white men, claimed to be about turning kids into people who followed Jesus. But with song titles like Can’t Take God Away, My Worldview, and of course, Don’t Censor Me, it seems like the music was also about turning kids into certain kinds of adults.
The sort of adults that would be found sitting on their porches reading certain books. The sort of adults that would turn out to see certain presidential candidates, so that when they were standing in that voting booth, the curtain surrounding their personal, individual choice, they would fill in the circle that says R, unaware that the choice had largely been made for them decades ago. But also possibly, the sort of adult who looks back on their votes and says, what have I done?