I am thankfully distant from US politics, having lived here for almost fourteen years, so although I had heard about the policy fiascos emanationg from the Trumpocratic party I wasn’t aware of any particulars. So I was startled to observe that the Texas Legislature was considering a bill to require all classrooms to post the Ten Commandments (in the King James Version).
I gave a talk at the 2005 gathering of the Ekklesia Project a talk about politicians’ oxymoronic obsession for making fetish objects of the Ten Commandments; that’s the talk in which I coined the word ‘Sacramerica’ to describe the USA’s proclivity to autapotheosis, and in that talk I proposed some counterhacks to help us resist the ideology of American divinity. A few years later I edited and extended that talk into a chapter in Sam’s and my book about the Glasgow School of biblical interpretation; in the loonger recension, I discussed the case of Roy “Mall Creep” Moore who made a career out of trying to install Christian iconography in civic settings, in patent defiance of Constitutional mandates against establishing a state religion.
It already felt a little out-of-date when the book came out in 2013–14 — but I suppose that it’s a successful metacynical tactic, so right-wing nihilists will keep trotting it out to win elections (and fungible campaign contributions). I’d say ‘Plus ça change,’ but we all know that Americans will believe anything about French people….