Thoughts on What Happened in the House of Representatives and Memories of the Southern Baptist Convention
When it looks like conservatives are fighting, too often they are actually not only capitulating but colluding
I fell asleep several nights last week to the lulling sound of the House clerk’s roll call in repeated votes for the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives. The back and forth — “Crenshaw—McCarthy—-McCarthy,” and “Cortez—Jeffries—Jeffries” like an obsessive cadence with a foregone conclusion was the perfect cure for insomnia. Not only were the sounds predictable. The context and final outcome felt safe and comforting because nothing was going to happen that hasn’t happened already a thousand times before. I knew that no renegade speaker was going to displace McCarthy. I was prepared for what was about to happen because it’s the same thing that has happened every year for the entirety of my years as a Republican.
Watching right-wing outlets like Gateway Pundit excite themselves over the thrill of some faint victory against the Republicans In Name Only and McCarthy’s machine brought back memories. I can't forget the feverish weeks after the presidential election of 2020 when many people on such sites believed wholeheartedly that Trump would become the next president. Every looming court decision, every hearing before state legislatures, and every press conference promised to these eternal optimists that something huge was about to happen, something huger than anything we’ve seen before. All of the Democratic cheating machine would be exposed and Trump would have four more years to advance the bold agenda he sold to his supporters.
I fell for some of the carnivalesque hopes in 2020. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t buy into any of the hoopla over Matt Gaetz's supposed uprising against McCarthy. I don’t think McCarthy should be the speaker of the House. He is incredibly corrupt. He hails from California and has almost no cultural connection to the Midwestern, Southern, and Rust Belt working class that now gives the party its lifeblood. We know exactly who McCarthy is. We have known it for a long time. He shills for the party elite that didn’t want Trump to become president and which played a game of hopscotch between loyally dissenting from Trump or feigning delight over his populist revolution, depending on which rhetorical play would create more fundraising opportunities. McCarthy is of that gatekeeping class that guarantees you can never get the grand change that always appears, like the ripe fruit dangled before Tantalus’s eyes in the Greek underworld, just within reach if only you can do this or that one little strategical trick right.
I have become too jaded to believe things will change. Nor does it really matter at this point. But regardless, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert went to the trouble of showing America how wrong our system has become. The US Constitution was not written to enable entrenched political party machines. The speakership was never supposed to be a legacy seat passed down to an anointed golden boy so he can manage his unquestioning and pacified constituents. Leaders were supposed to compete for such plum spots, make the case to the public by showing a good track record, convince voters they can be trusted, and then go away if they fail to perform.
It is good that Gaetz and Boebert, along with their small contingent, went to the trouble of showing this to America and forcing the populace to admit how much our government has decayed and drifted from its original purposes. But we’ve been here before—the “awareness” stage of political reform movements that never get past “awareness.” “Awareness” is like “concern,” a useless mental state if knowledge of a problem never prompts people to change anything. When people are stuck in the awareness stage, they can be dangerously duped by people who offer them the false image of action. The illusion of something can be worse than doing nothing. That’s because when people are stuck in the awareness stage they haven’t yet figured out what effective action looks like. They are full of outrage and indignation, inflamed with passionate desires to see things get better, and that energy only comes once in a while. If you waste that energy on a wild goose chase, you will probably never get the chance to apply the energy again.
So what happened at the end of a week amounting to a painful lesson in civics from Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and the Freedom Caucus? McCarthy finally won his position as speaker of the House. I’ve read multiple reports about how he promised in writing a bunch of concessions. The rules package was passed by the Republican-controlled House as soon as McCarthy got sworn in. So according to one conservative publication, these were the winners:
Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz, because they showed us they had guts (even though they didn’t actually stop McCarthy from becoming the speaker.)
Kevin McCarthy, because he stood his ground and showed he could compromise (even though the whole reason people objected to him was that he has a track record of saying one thing and doing another, and the’s the same man he was last month, except now he has a lot more people to begrudge on his own side.)
The Republican Party, because they showed they could come up with a grand compromise (even though this “compromise” involved the small Freedom Caucus finally letting McCarthy get the position because 200 House members stonewalled them for fifteen votes), and
The Democrats, because they showed they could stick together.
I’m not seeing much of a victory here. They can call for a vote of no confidence on the speaker, but if in fact the Republican delegations could not block McCarthy from becoming Speaker how are they going to remove him from the position with a vote of confidence, given that the composition of the House is the same? They have been promised investigations, but years of Benghazi, Hillary’s emails, and hearings about Obamacare have cured me permanently of any belief that investigations go anywhere good, whether they are led by Democrats or Republicans. They will investigate, pronounce, denounce, and announce until everyone has gone to sleep. They may even vote against Biden’s agenda, but then they know that these votes are symbolic because the Democrats can block anything in the Senate. The White House will veto if Biden doesn't get his way.
And in the end, I know from the debates about LGBT issues that the Freedom Caucus isn’t socially conservative in any meaningful sense. For all their bluster, they did remarkably little when Paul Ryan was the speaker of the House, and McCarthy is weaker than Paul Ryan. They never even repealed Obamacare even though that was their main talking point for over half a decade.
If the conservatives had voted “present” at the very beginning and handed the speakership to McCarthy without all this fuss, we’d honestly be better off. Perhaps turning 50 a few years ago made me exceptionally jaded, but I don’t believe snakes change, especially snakes as old as McCarthy. Whatever concessions have been forced on him, he will work around them. The only difference this spectacle made was that he now hates a few people he didn’t necessarily hate before, and that’s dangerous in a passive-aggressive and disingenuous heart like McCarthy’s. The old lessons people taught me in the corporate world some thirty years ago have reawakened in me with a vengeance. I can recall wise elders telling me, “if you take on someone in leadership, you have to get then fired. You don’t stab what you can’t kill.”
The Southern Baptist Convention
All of this takes me back, of course, to 2017, and the movement to remove Russell Moore from the presidency of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore was perennially hated by conservative Baptists. He took over the presidency of their precious public policy body in 2013 and immediately undermined the Baptist position on important issues like LGBT, abortion, immigration, and gender roles. But no matter how many times Moore angered Baptists, he had infinite allies in the conservative press, at places like Federalist, Stream, First Things, and National Review, and a small army of smarmy columnists would come to his rescue. Editors blocked anything critical of him reaching the press.
So in 2017, major pastors of churches like Prestonwood Baptist came forward and said they would withhold giving to the ERLC unless Russell Moore stepped down. Much ado transpired in the press. Supposedly Moore was embarrassed and harmed by all the negative publicity—or so said the people who were angry about Moore’s abuses. Actually, here is what happened: Moore remained in his position, with the same shrewd and passive-aggressive personality he had before. Only now he had a hit list of people he wanted to see gone. You see, all those anti-Moore rebels backed down at the last minute. They demanded the trustees of the ERLC investigate Moore’s impact on the Convention, as if this investigative report would have any impact. To the surprise of zero people in the SBC, the trustees issued a report praising Moore and saying he was doing a wonderful job, even as thousands of Baptists were pulling out of the Convention.
Moore was called into a meeting with Frank Page, in which Frank Page was supposed to dress him down. Or something. Frank Page was gone within a few years over a sex scandal. So was Paige Patterson. So was I—Moore’s friends at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary called me in to tell me I shouldn’t dissent publicly from Moore’s pronouncements if I wanted to keep my job. When I said I would continue to speak my mind, I got fired.
Moore eventually left the Convention, in 2021, but by then all six SBC seminaries were purged of conservative leadership, most of the archconservative leaders had all been driven out, and Moore had the golden opportunity to burn the Convention down on his way out. His correspondence was mysteriously and fortuitously “leaked” to the press just as he was exiting, which made it possible for a gigantic sex abuse investigation to gain traction. The Executive Committee of the SBC, compelled by the frenzy of another hysteria, waived their attorney-client privilege, something which Moore did not even do. In fact, the main complaint that arose from Moore’s leaked correspondence was that the SBC leaders knew about sex abuse and mistreatment of survivors but did not do anything about it; which is devilishly ironic given that Moore was responsible for the SBC’s response to the sex abuse crisis for a full three years before he left. He was appointed by then president J.D. Great to lead a task force on the issue in 2018—one year after surviving the supposedly “damaging” rebellion against him.
The lesson from Moore and the SBC is crystal clear. These little rebellions mean nothing if you cannot remove the bad actor. Moore and McCarthy work on roughly equivalent wavelengths. By taking him on but letting him stay in power, the anti-McCarthy camp created a monster that will surely consume the party. If he reacts at all the way Moore did, McCarthy will settle old scores by using the petty powers granted to him by the position he holds. He can do that even if he grants these small concessions to Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
Personally speaking, I don’t worry that much either way. I pulled out of SBC life when I realized how irresolvable the Convention's games were. The SBC will burn whether I stand there with a bucket throwing water at the inferno. The Republican Party is much the same way. America is at that place Cicero described when he saw Rome falling. We can survive neither the disease nor the cure. All we can do is do what Cicero advised: find a library and a garden, and read interesting things.