Firstly, style is dead in the West. We have lost the romantic prettiness of the vintage era, the hot chic of the mid-20th century, and more. Neither the tiara of a Victorian heiress nor the glamour of a golden age movie star does our era possess. It is not merely that the Kardashians are vain, they are a sad parody of style. I like Taylor Swift, not for her philosophy or character, which I regard as septically toxic and deeply immoral, but her style which I thoroughly and immensely adore. She, despite her epic size, is the exception and not the rule. She is a fan of Fitzgerald and if we lived in the 1920s, I’d be with the IWW and Eugene Debs and she’d party with the stars and capitalists I protested which is what she openly fantasizes about. With bourbon and cocaine bought with the sweat of toddlers in textile mills.
If one is going to be vindictive, vain, proud, elitist, hateful, and with a career built on purveying those vices among the species, it is best one does it with finesse, grace, and aesthetics which make a stunning villianess. The angels, of course, can also wear Prada. The Jews have Tel Aviv, the Muslims have Dubai, but there is no chic, stylish, city for the Christians. The Jewish nation and the Muslim nations have style. Their conservatives may engage in mortal sin with regards to the Palestianians and their migrant workers but, at least, they’re good at sin. Dubai is extremely evil and so is what causes the poverty of the Gaza Strip. I don’t say we should do that but that the style culture of the West should not be purely secular like it is and we should have a culture that is much sleeker than it is and infused with our religion.
In the realm of disability, one of the things I am doing is designing sensory-safe parties. Not only are they supposed to be safe for the disabled but also safe for women. I am working with sororities at the College of Charleston and a major issue is there are no cool alternatives to the shit-faced fratty parties. We both want to be cool enough for sororities and adult enough to not condescend to lower-functioning people who mostly have preschool-like events into adulthood. How to be safe, chic, edgy, and wholesome. It is a challenge in style and while I lack a background in anything fashiony, I come from politics and religion. Fields that built cathedrals, painted masterpieces, wrote speeches that ring throughout the ages. My political career, the stuff I got paid for, was ghostwriting.
The nation proposed by the Christian nationalists may be unseemly but it is also trashy and classless. When we did theocracy and holy war, at least, we had cathedrals and masterpieces. They want the bad stuff back with the pretty stuff gone and in its place, strip mall megachurches with pinstripe pastors. That looks less like a religion and more like an MLM scheme. Many of my fellow liberals condemn the more ornate art of my religion and while I could make a sophisticated theological argument to defend the cathedrals, I’ll just scream “Fuck you!” To them. I support the cathedrals and want to build more of them.
While some of the Christian nationalists have production value, they lack poetry or fashion. What I get from them, more than anything, is an inability to articulate why Christianity is better than the other religions and, not comprehending the philosophy of Christianity, and just believing in it, more or less, literally and without spiritual interpretation, have no metaphor or meaning with which to make art. They can’t make poetry so all they do is worship Jesus. They also lack the ability to think about a Christian lifestyle outside of worshipping Jesus save for token things like sexual abstinence.
These people can’t take apart a parable or talk about living with grace. I follow some Christian influencers and to use an example, Kristin Johns talked about how Jesus saved her and her husband’s life from a car crash. Her Youtube channel claims no charity content, nothing about forgiving slights or loving the difficult to love, no love shout-outs to the marginalized like Ukrainian refugees or the homeless after Hurricane Ian. If her vlogs reflect her life, I see no Christianity. The point, here, is that without poetry, spirituality, or a template for a Christian lifestyle then there is nothing to build a Christian chic with. If the Christian nationalists wish to make a nation worth moving to, they need to begin there. If you’re going to beat the secular culture, you have to be the good girl who beats Blair Waldorf at her own game.
The Autistic Resistance 