Enough with the pearl-clutching!
As if many rightwing Christians have nothing better to do, on Friday they set X alight with outrage over a scene from the Paris Olympics opening celebration. Drag queens were part of a DaVinci’s Last Supper pose, oh my!
Susan Shaw
So with their acute provincial snowflake watchfulness for any perceived slight and no sense of diverse cultural sensibilities, the pearl-clutchers castigated the Olympics and the French for “mocking” Christianity.
Never mind that their Bible-hawking, adulterous, authoritarian, convicted felon of a presidential candidate says he never has asked for forgiveness. Drag queens in a Last Supper pose is what Christians really need to worry about.
The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.
Of course, why would we expect anything different from average pew sitters when conservative leaders like Nikki Haley and JD Vance have made their own Faustian bargains with the Donald? He’s unfit to serve, they say, until, of course, they need him to have access to their own share of political power.
“The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.”
Not that drag queens at the Olympics is the only instance of right-wing pearl-clutching of late.
Just look at the angst female pastors have caused among Southern Baptists, and I’m not talking about women as senior pastors. Even women serving as children’s pastors are causing people like Al Mohler and Mike Law to reach for their pearls.
And now, God forbid, we have a woman — a Black and Indian woman, no less — running for president of the United States of America! Cue the racism and misogyny. Never mind she’s a Baptist, a Christian, a lifelong public servant. Still, JD Vance may soon learn that crossing childless cat ladies is not such a good idea. We don’t clutch pearls. We fill out ballots, donate and campaign.
The Right has gone so far as to mock Kamala Harris’ laugh, but maybe it’s time we had a little joie de vivre in the White House. How much better to dance in Converse sneakers than incite insurrection with a tweet.
And as for drag queens in Paris, if some of these folks actually bothered to study history, they’d learn there’s a rich tradition of sacred clowns whose role is to make fun of our most sacred traditions so we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
Again, if they bothered to read the Bible with a little more scholarship at hand, they’d also discover that, at points, it’s hilarious, and Jesus himself was not above cracking jokes and using a little well-timed sarcasm.
I’ll be the first to admit this piece is a bit snarkier than most of my pleas for sanity and good will among Christians, but I’m finding it exasperating and hard to take seriously all the pearl-clutching, defensiveness, hypocrisy and meanness of people who call themselves Christians and act anything but Christ-like. They give the rest of us a bad name.
Surely, there are more important things for Christians to do in the world than worry about drag queens, although you wouldn’t know that from the legislation in a number of red states.
What if Christians spent their time actually doing the things Jesus said God’s people ought to do, like feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, making peace and loving our neighbors?
I know we progressives have to take the pearl-clutchers seriously, though, because we’ve seen what they do when they are in power. Project 2025 lays out such a dystopian vision that The Handmaid’s Tale seems child’s play.
As a process theologian, I believe God is at work in every particle of the universe, calling it to achieve its divine aim, and so we can’t give up on those who clutch their pearls and often throw them before swine. And we can’t simply call them out. As Black feminist activist Loretta Ross says, we have to call them in.
The stakes are too high for us to sit on the sidelines. We have to speak the truth. Two plus two does not equal five. The emperor has no clothes. And drag queens at the Last Supper aren’t a threat to Christianity. Trump, however, is, and he has already dragged down a large swath of evangelicals into his cult.
Now is not the time to clutch pearls.
I imagine Jesus would have had a good laugh with the drag queens. On the other hand, keep in mind, when he had his chance to amass political power, he did not make a deal with the devil.
Susan M. Shaw is professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore. She also is an ordained Baptist minister and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Her most recent book is Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide, co-authored with Grace Ji-Sun Kim.
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