Page 62 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

46 Ideologies

to affect its operations in an empowered way, means that the only way it
can be “ saved ” is through some entirely illogical, arational event like the
direct intervention of an all - powerful being who can set right the seemingly
uncontrollable forces that now trouble their lives. In a sense, Christ in
evangelical life is what Hitler was to conservative Germans in the 1930s – an
all - powerful savior who compensates for their economic disempowerment.
The same emotional matrix explains why such people have in the past been
attracted to conservative authoritarian political forms such as Nazism that
supply comfort and security, a rigid sense of direction that addresses and
rectifi es the forces that overwhelm them.
In contemporary America, those overwhelming forces are by and large
associated in conservative discourse with liberals and with government.
Liberals seek to change the world, to make it a better place, and they do
that by taking hard - earned money from rural conservatives who can ill
afford to have it taken away. The rules of capitalist economics allocate them

scarce resources so that a financially powerful elite minority (many of
whom are another, quite different kind of “ conservative ” ) can lay claim to
much more for itself. The result is religious ideologies such as evangelical
Christianity that link liberalism with threats to physical and “ spiritual ”
survival. In Left Behind , the villain is someone named Nicolae Carpathia,
a European who is associated with liberal causes such as the desire to
eliminate hunger and economic inequality and who operates through the
United Nations. That in the narrative such things turn out to be the work
of the Devil is a metaphor for the fact that liberalism can be harmful to
rural conservative constituencies. It erodes traditional assumptions about
what is morally permissible that provide a sense of stability in an unstable
and uncaring economic world in which failure can result in homelessness
and death, and it erodes incomes by taxing for the sake of supporting
government programs to alleviate poverty and to spread social justice.
Rural conservatives compensate for their victimization by seeking
great control over their environments, and authoritarianism provides
such a sense of control. Liberals in such a vision are dangerous because
they remove control to distant places in Washington, New York, and
elsewhere.
Eventually, in the Left Behind series the prayer group that will save the
world from the liberal Anti - Christ evolves into a paramilitary group, and
that narrative evolution registers a geographic reality of rural conservative
evangelical culture, which is also steeped in pro - gun ideology. The narra-
tive enacts a structure in their lives that places religion and gun ownership