At their core, the (No Kings) rallies resemble bad group therapy—gatherings that offer validation, solidarity and emotional release. They feel good in the moment. Participants vent, find reinforcement among like-minded people, and leave feeling heard and aligned. The experience can seem productive, even clarifying. But like bad group therapy, it stops at validation. The feelings are processed but not challenged, reinforced but not examined. There is relief but little resolution, and the underlying problems remain. It offers the feeling of progress without the substance of it.
Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert
Wall Street Journal
Allow me to use Alpert’s piece here to connect some dots.
1.) We have been saying here at Iron Ink for some time that as a culture becomes more and more consistent with its rebellion against Christ the result will be an ever-increasing psychological brokenness expressed especially with the presence of narcissism. As fallen man, no longer checked by a culture informed by Christian categories, or a Christian ethos will no longer have a reason to stay on the leash of even pretended self-denial. A culture losing the transcendence of God to keep it in check only has one place to turn and that is the inner self. With the turn to the inner self, the inner self becomes the transcendent that must be served and the result is the mental illness we call “narcissism.” The “No Kings” rally is merely a mass gathering of narcissists and neurotics as Alpert observes.
2.) Were we to put a slight spin on Alpert, we would say that not only are these “not protests but bad therapy sessions,” but these protests are religious worship services. There is a connection here as bad worship can also be labeled as bad worship service. I mean bad worship can be described in exactly the same way that Alpert describe bad therapy sessions. Gatherings that,
a.) offer validation
b.) solidarity
c.) emotional release
d.) feel good in the moment
e.) venting
f.) reinforcement
d.) departing feeling heard and aligned
One only has had to attend your average contemporary Church service to understand all that the “No Kings rally” and your average Pentecostal or Seeker Sensitive worship service have in common. The only thing Alpert doesn’t mention is the shared commonality between the “sermon” one gets at church and the keynote speaker address one finds at your average rally. Whether it is a “No Kings rally” or whether it is your average church service one is just looking at bad therapy sessions.
3.) This observation in turn informs us that when looking at these narcissistic political rallies what we are often seeing is just another bad expression of religion. The “No Kings rally,” and those like it, have largely exposed the attendees as religious devotees. As politics has replaced Christianity as our national religion this all stands to reason. As we have noted here before people intuitively understand that the state has become our god and there is nothing that people will more fight and protest over than the championing of their favorite god, or conversely, the pulling down of the god they don’t favor. Many narcissists don’t like Trump, who they view as the current unworthy God and so they take to the streets, much like the prophets of Baal of old, to cry out, lament, and protest. You can bet that if they thought that cutting themselves would work, they would be opening their veins as well.
4.) So, look at these rallies as old-fashioned revival services. In the old revival services, you would see the same exact thing you are seeing at these “protests.” Great tears. Anguish. Emotion filled expression. People becoming unhinged and beside themselves.
5.) This reminds us that religion never goes away. One can either serve the God of the Bible who is a God of order, self-control and stability or one can serve the God of the narcissistic/neurotic self and/or whatever the self will project itself onto. (In this case politics.)
6.) We have arrived here, as noted above, by rebelling against the Lord Christ and His Law-Word. Let us tease this out a wee bit. We have, over the course of generations, increasingly cordoned off the public square from the any influence of the Christian faith. There are whole theologies, such as Radical Two Kingdom theology, that insist that we need to leave the public square naked from the influence of the Christian faith via the voice of the Church. The impact of that is to strip the public square of any “word of the Lord.” The result is that which we have made completely “secular” (public square) has to come up with the voice of the sacred and the voice of the sacred we have invested in is the State. In the state we live and move and have our being. So, because the dejure “secular” state has become the defacto sacred verbum Dei, religious adherents viciously fight over who will control the god. Behold “No Kings rallies.”
7.) As Gods brook no competition what we can increasingly expect to find is that the enemies of the favorite candidates will be demonized. We have already seen this in recent decades. People who do not agree with the “No Kings” protestors are demon spawn. People who did not agree with Biden were imprisoned. Trump also routinely demonizes people who dare disagree with him. Joe Kent being the most recent example. In this narcissistic/neurotic world one is either feted or headed to the guillotine.
8.) When this kind of revolutionary religion rises, the difficult thing for those who see all of it is to know how to respond. Some of us have family members who if they were not at the “No Kings” protests would still feel right at home with the narcissist/neurotic crowd. There is no reasoning with these people. In the OT God had only one solution for them, but that solution is not available to us. So, we navigate in this mess the best we can and pray for wisdom from above in knowing how to lean into this cultural insane asylum.
It’s all religion folks. Apart from the rending of heaven yielding Reformation, it is going to get worse before it gets better. Interesting enough, what all this is going to eventually birth is a culture of repression. Eventually, some tyrant is going to grab the reins of power and that will be the end of all “No Kings” rallies, as well as the end of all loyal opposition. The current narcissist/neurotics will be shut down and like the old Soviet Union, protest, if it exists at all, will be underground and only at the risk of one’s life.
And you can the farm that the visible Church will be as silent then as it is now.