This post is part of my False Prophet Death Watch, where I note the deaths of false prophets who have greatly damaged our society. I wrote about how I identify false prophets in this post.
At first glance, Phil Robertson, the patriarch in the reality TV show Duck Dynasty seems like a weird choice for this series. But I chose to include him for two reasons.
First is that American Evangelicals don’t actually get their theology from the Bible or from theologians - they get their theology from celebrities.
And this goes not only for the esoteric theology, but especially for the practical theology, or what we might call “politics.” That is, how we treat others in society.
These celebrities come in various flavors. Some are mega-church celebrity pastors. You know the names. Mark Driscoll, C. J. Mahaney, John Piper, Doug Wilson. For an earlier generation, John MacArthur, Robert Schuller, Jack Hayford. These are just a few, but you know the sort. Their influence goes far beyond their large churches - during my childhood, there were a plethora of “MacArthur clone” pastors in small churches around California, just like there were a whole bunch of Driscoll wannabes in the aughts.
But probably even more influential than these men (and they are all men, because patriarchy is a core doctrine), are the para-church celebrities. These men (and a few women) had all the celebrity and influence without even the slightest burden of caring for people in their congregation. Think of all the televangelists, faith healers, and so on. Billy Graham. Bill Gothard. James Dobson. Tim and Beverly La Haye. Phyllis Schlafly. Elizabeth Eliot. It’s a large list. These people, more than any actual pastor, have created the theology that Evangelicals believe.
Finally, there are the celebrities that have had tremendous influence without being “officially” para-church. These have largely come about as the result of “reality” television. The Duggars are certainly celebrities of this sort. Donald “Grab ‘em by the Pussy” Trump is another. I might also include Tucker Carlson, whose malignantly racist views I hear spouted verbatum by white Evangelicals, particularly of my parents’ generation.
So, I have included Phil Robertson in this category, as a representative of a certain kind of celebrity christian. The reality show christian. The representative of MAGA America. White. Conservative. Bigoted and proud of that fact.
While I don’t think Phil Robertson ever rose to the popularity of the Duggars or even Honey Boo Boo, he always seemed to be more mainstream, if you will. Less dysfunctional, more Mayberry. (And I mean that in multiple ways….) He and the show were held up as examples of what a “real American” was like. In contrast to those blue state liberals, of course.
The second reason I want to include him in this series is that he is a perfect example of the ways in which anti-LGBTQ bigotry is inseparably linked to sexism and misogyny.
During his television run, Phil Robertson was notable for two controversies.
The first was when he did a disastrous interview with GQ Magazine. He was asked to describe sin (since he tended to rattle on about it a lot.) The first thing to come out of his mouth was "Start with homosexual behaviour and just morph out from there."
No, literally. That’s what he said. His first idea of what sin was had to do with other people’s genitals. And he kept doubling down, comparing it to beastiality, displaying ignorance as to how any male could be anything other than horny for females, and generally making an ass of himself.
The troubling part about this wasn’t so much his anti-gay beliefs, which are shared (unfortunately) by many religious people. It was that the first thing that came into his head was “gay people.” That’s what he thinks about when he thinks about sin. Stuff “those people” do.
As a christian myself, this is definitely problematic. If I were to name sin off the top of my head, I think greed and selfishness would be the ones I would name. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, both personal and in society. We should look to our own sins first, not police the orgasms of people we don’t even (in Robertson’s case) understand.
Back in those halcyon days - 2013 - this bigoted statement got Robertson’s show suspended. Now? Probably the Trump Regime would investigate the network for “anti-christian bias.”
Soon afterward, though, another video came to light, which even many conservative evangelicals found profoundly disturbing.
In it, Robertson advised men to marry girls when they were 15 or 16, and certainly not when they were as old as 20.
Ah yes, let’s go all-in on child marriage.
Why? Well, when a girl gets to 20, she is able to think for herself. You want a little servant-wife? Get her young, when she will still pick your ducks. At 20, she’s just out to pick your pockets.
Yeah, that’s creepy AF.
And the two are absolutely connected.
With very few exceptions, I have found that people who are obsessed with hating gay people are also raging misogynists. They see women as property - like Robertson did - expected to devote their lives to serving and servicing men.
As I wrote at length about previously, the very root of anti-LGBTQ bigotry is misogyny. LGBTQ folks exist outside a rigid gender hierarchy, and thus threaten male supremacy.
This is why I entitled this post “Dick Dynasty.” Because what Robertson stood for was the supremacy of the penis. People with one were created to rule over people with vaginas, and men who abdicated this rule by having sex with other men were the most obvious and worst of sinners.
Oh, and I also might mention some of the other bilge that Robertson loved to spew.
He, like other false prophets, claimed that Hitler and Nazism were the result of atheism. (They weren’t: in fact the biggest supporters of Fascism in Germany and elsewhere are always the conservative religious people.) He slandered Muslims, claiming they and their religion were inherently violent. (They aren’t. The 3 million Muslims in the United States actually commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born white people.) And, of course, he blamed every evil in the world on non-christians, ignoring the many millions killed in the name of Christ over the centuries.
And, as you probably guessed by now, he also stepped in it on race, waxing nostalgic about the Jim Crow era:
"I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field. ... They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, 'I tell you what: These doggone white people' -- not a word! ... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues."
If you think that sounds like Doug Wilson claiming race relations were the best ever during slavery…you would be right. I guess to them, life was so much better when black people just knew their place. Typical white racist nostalgia and obliviousness, of course, and also willful ignorance.
Isn’t it fascinating how everything fits together?
Scratch an anti-LGBTQ bigot, it seems, and before you know it, a misogynist bleeds. An Islamophobe bleeds. A white supremacist bleeds. It’s all connected.
So, Phil Robertson is dead.
As I have stated many times on this blog, I haven’t believed in Hell since Jr. High. And certainly not Spooky Mormon Evangelical Hell™.
But if there is a Hell, let me be clear: by the standard of the doctrines the false prophets claimed to believe, they are currently burning in Hell.
So, for Phil Robertson, who stood for proud bigotry, here’s to him. May he find a better mercy than he ever showed to others.
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