There has been a lot written about United States Senator Katie Britt’s Republican response to the State of the Union Address last week. I don’t have much to add to the political conversation, but as I watched the response, I had one word come up in my mind - “church!”
I thought to myself, “I know this voice, this way of oratory and argument.” I have heard it in some evangelical settings. The voice has been described recently as “baby fundie voice” - a childish whispery overly earnest way of talking that derives its authority from its supposed interest in non-authority.
You might know that evangelical culture, like culture as a whole, has had kind of a thing with the authority of women. When I was quite young, a church I attended was in the process of hiring a new senior pastor. For the final meeting of the search committee, one of the committee members did not show up. It turns out that the reason was that the committee member was a woman and her husband held the view that women should not have authority over men. She felt okay attending search committee meetings as long as the final decision was not being made. As the committee finished its work and recommended a man for the job, she did not attend the meeting at which a vote of recommendation took place because doing so, in the mind of her husband, would break God’s law against a woman holding authority over a man. In this kind of context, women were given, or found, subversive ways of holding power.
When I listened to Katie Britt (again, a United States Senator) I heard some of the results of these unwritten rules.
How is a woman allowed to speak if she is upset?
Suggestion: Whisper emphatically.
How is a woman allowed to express anger?
Suggestion: Cloak it as selfless moral outrage.
What gives a woman authority?
Answer: Mostly her role as wife and mother. So, Katie Britt records her official response from a perfectly clean, disturbingly empty kitchen.
In the process of doing so, she tells a terrifying story of a young immigrant woman who was, in Britt’s description, raped multiple times a day. Britt tells the story as moral outrage directed at President Biden and his border and immigration policies. However, it turns out that the story, as told by Katie Britt, is not true. The person, who she does not name, is real, but she was sexually assaulted in Mexico, not in the United States, and the events took place, not during the administration of Joe Biden, but during that of George W. Bush. Britt clearly told the story to foment outrage at Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
When Britt was confronted, a few days later, with the truth of the story, she doubled down. The woman who suffered the ordeal went public to say that Britt did not tell her story accurately and that like politicians in general, Britt was interested in using (and changing) her story for their own political interest. When I say that Britt doubled down, I mean that she denied not telling the truth.
As much as I find no joy in saying it, I have seen this in evangelical culture as well. I am sure that this is not just a church thing, it is a human thing. You might assume that people who say we should erect monuments of the 10 commandments might themselves care about “bearing false witness.” The trouble is, that in some religious circles, truth has to do with what you feel. That is, if you feel something earnestly enough, if you are convinced of your moral superiority, even if that moral superiority is subversively energized, then what you are saying is true because you feel that it is true, even if it it appears to be a lie to outsiders, perhaps especially then.
In my experience of evangelical culture, the ways in which women were allowed to hold authority and express truth was different than for men. I mean this in general, of course. I don’t mean that everyone acted like this. Men might whisper for emphasis, but they were allowed to holler and yell as well. When they did whisper, they did so with a kind of aggressive authority, like an angry, but loving, older brother. To a congregation this might be displayed as the minister shaking his head while whispering, “Friends …”
Sometimes, I listen to something that I quite like and think, “They learned to sound like that in church.” I heard a famous sportscaster speaking not too long ago, going on a long diatribe about some football related matter. It was good and compelling, and had the energy and cadence of a particular style of preaching. He had perfected it. In music we hear it all the time, celebrity singers who clearly adopted a style or voice from church music.
Hearing the “church” in something does not at all mean that it’s terrible, not always at least. However, when I heard Katie Britt delivering her whispery, angry response to the State of the Union, I heard someone who had been trained politically, and also religiously, to present something that is not true as being extra true, as if our lives and and nations, and our very eternal destiny, depended on it.