by Amy Chua
In the last ten years, the growth of the cult has been “meteoric.” The skeleton saint—also known as the Bony Lady or Skinny Girl—now has some 10 to 12 million devotees, who pray to her on Facebook and leave cigars, shots of rum, Barbie dolls, and ashtrays as offerings at her shrines. NBC recently covered her presence in Miami, and in Houston a grassroots movement works to raise money to build her a permanent church.
Santa Muerte is just one of many narco-saints. Another, especially popular in northern Mexico and Southern California, is the legendary bandit Jesús Malverde, also known as the “angel of the poor” or the “saint of the drug dealers.” (Malverde was also featured on Breaking Bad, in the form of a bust on a DEA agent’s desk in a season two episode.)
Malverde’s cult is based in Mexico’s northwestern coastal state of Sinaloa, home to the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, which engineered the prison escape of drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The destination of hundreds of pilgrims each year, Malverde’s shrine in the capital city of Culiacán is filled with photos and plaques. Inscriptions include “Thank you Malverde for saving me from drugs” and “Thank you Malverde for not having to lose my arm and leg.” There are also desperate letters, like this one from Los Angeles: “Dear holy and miraculous Malverde . . . I’m writing this letter so that you’ll help me with a problem I have with some friends I had, so that they won’t look for me anymore. Make them forget the problems we had. Make them please leave my parents and my sister and me in peace.”
Narco-saint cults may strike elites as irrational or ridiculous, but they respond to the distinctive plight and marginalized status of the less well-off, offering them a group affiliation responsive to their needs and sense of exclusion. In the words of a Mexican American lawyer, “Most Mexican-Americans today live in deep social isolation. I’m talking about the overwhelming majority: those with poor education, poor housing, poor wages. There’s a clear distrust of U.S. politics, a perception that only a few control the country, with the rest of Americans being used as labor.” Narco-saint cults are not dangerous in the way that the sovereign citizens or street gangs are, but they are dangerous in another way: they testify to the growing number of alienated poor Americans who are retreating into ethnically insular communities with little sense of connection to the country’s institutions or its civic life.
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The have-not groups discussed so far are outside mainstream American culture; they are so illicit or socially marginal that they have virtually no political influence. But other groups popular with lower-income Americans are very different. Some of them may be equally unknown to America’s elites, but they are much more politically salient—indeed, closely related to the rise of Donald Trump.
THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL
There are sixty-five megachurches in America with more than 10,000 weekly attendees, and almost half of these preach the prosperity gospel. The average prosperity church has 8,500 members. The celebrity pastor Joel Osteen has a congregation of 35,000 at the Lakewood Church in Houston and draws 7 million viewers weekly to his televised sermons. Not far behind, the African American televangelist Creflo Dollar preaches to 30,000 at the World Changers Church he founded in Georgia.
While most elites have never heard of the prosperity gospel, Donald Trump used it to his advantage. On the 2016 campaign trail, prosperity gospel televangelist Mark Burns praised Trump and introduced him with these rousing words (a strange twist on Barack Obama’s): “There is no black person, there is no white person, there is no yellow person, there is no red person, there’s only green people! Green is money! Green are jobs!!”
The prosperity gospel, which is Christian but cuts across denominations, preaches that being rich is divine. Given that Jesus said, according to the Gospel of Matthew, “You cannot serve both God and money” and “It is easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” the theological underpinnings of the prosperity gospel are a little murky—but prosperity preachers have been quite creative.
According to some, despite appearances, Jesus himself was rich. As evidence, they point to the circumstances of his birth. “As soon as Jesus arrived,” noted Dollar (who owns two Rolls-Royces and a private jet), the “anointing to prosper acted like a magnet, drawing wise men with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. . . . Those were not cheap gifts. . . . Prosperity attached itself to baby Jesus immediately, and that same gift to prosper has been given to us as heirs of Christ.” Similarly, on the popular Believer’s Voice of Victory television show, prosperity author John Avanzini observed that Jesus had a nice house (“big enough to have company stay the night with Him”) and wore designer clothes (“You didn’t get the stuff he wore off the rack . . . this was custom stuff”).
Other prosperity movement leaders focus on the Old Testament. “[A]ccording to Deuteronomy,” explained the influential prosperity pastor Kenneth Hagin, poverty was a punishment God brought on people “if they disobeyed Him.” After all, in the Garden of Eden, God “surrounded Adam and Eve with every material blessing they could possibly need.” After the Fall, it was Satan who inflicted misery on mankind. Jesus’ death and Resurrection redeemed humanity not just from sin but from disease and poverty as well. As the African American pastor Leroy Thompson explained, “He took your place in poverty so you could take His place in prosperity.”
One of the most distinctive features of prosperity services is openly praying for money. In her book Blessed, Kate Bowler describes a Sunday service at the Victorious Faith Center, an African American church in North Carolina. It was normally the pastor who riveted the crowd with his fiery sermons, but on this occasion, his wife rose unexpectedly from her seat in the front row and faced the congregation:
Faith requires action, she declared with surprising volume. . . . Her small figure seemed to grow as the room got more excited. . . . “MONEY!” she shouted, the congregation calling out with her. “Cometh unto me . . .”—she paused in anticipation—“NOW!” With that, the first lady began to dance. . . . [S]ome 80 believers, young and old, threw off their inhibitions and joined her. The murmur rose to a din as people began to call out their needs . . . tears streamed down as people remembered what they desired or the losses that they hoped to replace. “Money cometh unto me NOW!” voices called again.
With its blatant emphasis on getting rich, the prosperity gospel has many detractors. Few of its followers attend elite universities in the Northeast, where one is much more likely to find the children of millionaires claiming to be deeply antimaterialistic. But the prosperity gospel holds enormous appeal for have-nots and have-lesses—and it is especially popular with disadvantaged minorities.
For the struggling, the prosperity gospel offers hope, direction, and a community of similarly situated peers—unlike the unrepresentative anti-inequality protest groups. At the same time, it offers the less well off a more dignified self-image. As Bowler puts it, the teachings of the prosperity gospel “lift believers’ chins and square their shoulders.” Osteen preaches that his congregants are not “victims” but “victors.” Creflo Dollar teaches that even the poor control their own destinies. Rather than thinking of themselves as society’s oppressed—or as part of the 99 percent, or even simply as have-nots—prosperity adherents see themselves as the favored, the optimistic, the blessed.
NASCAR NATION
Sports are always tribal. But whereas football, baseball, and basketball are popular across the social spectrum, NASCAR—with 75 million fans, the second-most-attended sport after the NFL—takes open pride in its white, working-class origins.
According to NASCAR lore, stock-car racing was started by Appalachian moonshiners trying to transport bootleg whiskey while evading law enforcement. Although the demographics of its fan base are rapidly evolving—today 40 percent of NASCAR fans are women—the “NASCAR Nation” holds tightly to its image as stereotypically white, masculine, Southern, and rural. Its fan
base remains overwhelmingly Republican, and racing-speak is filled with macho idioms like “If it ain’t rubbin’ it ain’t racin’,” “Gentlemen, let’s get it on,” “Boys, have at it,” and, of course, “Gentlemen, start your engines.”
NASCAR is all about tribalism. Fans are loyal not just to a manufacturer (Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge, or Toyota) and a driver, but also to their corporate sponsors, which include big names like Goodyear, Home Depot, McDonald’s, Geico, Miller, Mountain Dew, and Burger King. A recent study showed that NASCAR fans are more brand loyal than the fans of any other sport and that they feel they are contributing to their team when they buy sponsored products. “I have an Interstate battery in three of my vehicles that I own now,” said one NASCAR fan. “Got to drink Budweiser. If you ain’t drinking Budweiser, you don’t belong here.” Fans are three times more likely to buy a product sponsored by their NASCAR team than an unsponsored product, and this applies to everything from cell phones to breakfast foods. “I have a Nextel phone, so you know I’m a big supporter. I use Tide,” said one fan. “Anything you see out there, I’m using. I eat Cheerios.”
Fan devotion to NASCAR is so intense that it’s often compared to a religion. Sociologists who have studied stock-car culture in America refer to the “NASCAR congregation,” worshipping the “Gospel of NASCAR,” and the “pilgrimages” that fans make, arriving in their RVs the Friday before the race and staying through the weekend. An “important theme,” concluded one researcher, summarizing numerous fan interviews, “was that of belonging.”
Part of the group experience of NASCAR is the sheer physical intensity of attending a stadium event with a quarter of a million other human beings roaring for their drivers as cars hurtle by at more than two hundred miles per hour. “You can’t even hear yourself think,” one fan put it. “That’s why NASCAR’s slogan is ‘feel the thunder.’ If you haven’t been there, you can’t understand.” The “fans scream at one another above the roar, some of them screaming in pure joy.”
At the moment, NASCAR is struggling with its group identity. Its wealthy owner and CEO, Brian France, has been trying to broaden the NASCAR base by reaching out to women and minorities, as well as wealthier Americans. Nevertheless, at NASCAR races, there continues to be a proud assertion of a distinctive regional and cultural identity. Indeed, at the Daytona International Speedway in June 2015, NASCAR fans defied a request not to fly Confederate flags after the Charleston church massacre. “Spotting a Confederate flag [was] easier than finding a souvenir shop, restroom or beer stand,” Fox News reported. “My family is from Alabama and we’ve been going to Talladega forever,” explained a fan. “It isn’t a Confederate thing so much as a NASCAR thing. That’s why I fly it.”
At the same time, NASCAR events are extremely patriotic, with American flags waving and proclamations about “the greatest nation on Earth.” Of course, it’s precisely the merging of these two identities that makes the NASCAR experience so appealing to some and so repugnant to others: the idea that NASCAR’s America is the “true” America.
WORLD WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT (WWE) AND THE TRUMP PHENOMENON
Like adherents of the prosperity gospel, the NASCAR Nation tends to love Donald Trump and see in him the America they stand for; indeed, Brian France endorsed him for president. But the “sport” most illuminating of Trump’s startling political success—and of the class dimension behind that phenomenon—is not NASCAR. It’s professional wrestling.
WWE is perhaps the single best example of the cultural divide between America’s haves and have-nots. For elites, WWE is so unfathomably alien and appalling—gaudy, fake, bombastic, violent, and hypermasculine—it’s not just an object of ridicule but the subject of voyeuristic academic study. When Roland Barthes (a darling of poststructuralism and famed scholar of semiotics) wrote about the “world of wrestling” in his landmark work Mythologies, he launched a cottage academic industry devoted to analyzing—in increasingly abstruse terms—the appeal and meaning of professional wrestling.
Left intellectuals are fascinated, even obsessed in a horrified way, with the “phenomenology” of watching professional wrestling. Do working-class Americans understand they are watching something fake? Do they simply suspend disbelief? Or is it possible that some of them are duped into thinking they are watching an actual contest? Cultural theorists have written about how professional wrestling elides the distinction between real and fictive; how it performs narratives about modern romance; how it represents a modern form of melodrama; how it allows lower- and working-class viewers to play out the drama of good versus evil, might versus right.
In contrast to speculating about the phenomenon of professional wrestling, Donald Trump actually has participated. He once entered the ring, taking on WWE founder Vince McMahon in a mock showdown that ended in a victorious Trump shaving McMahon’s head—an exhibition that, in one Huffington Post writer’s words, was “both mesmerizing and gross.” Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame—inducted in 2013—and is listed on its Web site as a “WWE Superstar.” Trump’s connection to wrestling did not end when he won the White House. Among President Trump’s first cabinet-level nominees was the former CEO of WWE (and wife of its founder), Linda McMahon, whom he chose to head the Small Business Administration. And far from being abashed by his own time in the ring, in July 2017 Trump proudly tweeted a video clip from the McMahon match, showing himself pummeling a figure with a CNN logo superimposed on its head.
The parallels between the Trump phenomenon and WWE are unmistakable. Although WWE has a significant black and Latino working class following as well, the prototypical WWE fan is white, male, single, working class, and, according to some experts, disaffected. Geographically, professional wrestling is especially popular in America’s former industrial heartland and the South—and has practically no fanbase in multicultural California. It’s no surprise, then, that the WWE audience resembles the coalition of voters who buoyed Trump’s candidacy.
Nor is it a coincidence that coastal elites, including the media, find Trump and WWE equally repulsive. In a New York Times op-ed, Gail Collins described Linda McMahon as “[a] political novice who made her fortune building up an entertainment business that specialized in blood, seminaked women and scripted subplots featuring rape, adultery and familial violence . . . [and whose] family yacht is named Sexy Bitch.” By contrast, Trump said of his cabinet pick, “Linda has a tremendous background and is widely recognized as one of the country’s top female executives advising businesses around the globe.”
To understand Trump’s relationship to the WWE and his appeal to its audience is to see a microcosm of the 2016 election. For Trump’s supporters, as in WrestleMania, showmanship and symbols are often what matter. Where progressives saw an uncivilized brute bloviating about his sexual prowess, lying on cue, and viciously dressing down his opponents, Trump supporters saw something familiar and playfully spectacular. In Trump’s world, as in the wrestling world, absurd “alternative facts” are not falsehoods but story lines, fueling an entertainment-driven narrative. Through this lens, Trump is a hero in the mold of Hulk Hogan or Stone Cold Steve Austin: a domineering titan promising to vanquish the forces of evil, to crusade against political correctness, to make aggressive masculinity fashionable again. Riffing off political analyst Salena Zito’s famous statement that the press took Trump “literally, but not seriously,” whereas his supporters took him “seriously, but not literally,” Trump donor—and, briefly White House communications director—Anthony Scaramucci put it this way: “don’t take him literally, take him symbolically.”
AMERICA’S TWO WHITE TRIBES
To many on the left, anyone who even mentions economic factors as having contributed to Trump’s election is either racist or, at a minimum, perpetuating and enabling racism. As a Vox article put it, “As this election fades into the distance . . . we’ll spin a collective fairy tale about how a neglected group of white Americans who themselves were victims simply wan
ted change and used their votes to demand it. . . . There will be a push to ‘understand’ them, and this will be presented as the mature and moral thing to do. . . . And when that happens—when the deep bigotry that fueled the result is forgotten or explained away—racism will win yet again.”
But to see the divisiveness in today’s America—and the forces that brought about Trump’s election—as solely about racism, while ignoring the role of inequality, misses too much of the picture. Even putting economics aside, it misses the role played by white-against-white resentment and antagonism.
Consider the following from a 2016 National Review op-ed about the “white working class”:
[N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves. . . . [T]ake an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—[and] you will come to an awful realization. . . .
Nothing happened to them. . . . There wasn’t a war or a famine. . . . Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. . . .
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. . . . The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.
