How the cool hot kids make you feel safer
The story’s like those painful- teen- years books where the cool guy or hot girl transfers in and everyone wants to be their friend, and the kids they deign to befriend become cooler and hotter than they’d ever hoped to be, while the uncool unhot kids (the ones likely to read a book like that) (or, let’s face it, a newspaper column) drop even more steps down the status ladder.
Recently, the hard-right celebrity Candace Owens entered the Catholic Church. You can guess the reason that at 34 she’s risen so high in the MAGA-FoxTrump world. She’s one of the right’s cool hot kids.
You can hear its leaders saying, giddy with happiness, upon discovering Ms. Owens: “She’s a woman! And a pretty one! She’s Black! She’s MAGA! And she talks like Trump, only coherently! And did we mention she’s a woman and she’s Black?”
And she’s coming to a hotel conference center near you. She’s now the Catholic right’s cool hot kid.
Anxious about identity
But this column’s not mainly about her. It’s about the uses to which people anxious about their changing place in the world put her, and celebrities like her.
I’m writing about traditionalist Catholics, a world I’ve observed, but the same anxiety and same desire for external validation can be found among almost any group with a strong identity to some degree at odds with their society.
The identity can be religious, national, cultural ethnic, racial, economic, even ideological. (I think of the members of an anarchist commune I once knew, who never stopped fretting that they were failing as true anarchists.)
Whatever the identity is, it’s always at risk from a powerfully homogenizing society. Think, if you’re from a generic American family, of the movies about the children of immigrants who want to live like normal Americans while their parents want them to succeed in the world but remain culturally as they were.
The parents hold to an identity that shapes how they live in the world, that makes sense of their lives, that works for them. They see real problems in the wider society, which they don’t have, and they really don’t want their children to have. They value their extended families, for example, compared to the loneliness and somewhat ad hoc relations they see among their neighbors.
The parents also see how attractive is this wider society in which their children have to live. They know how many people work very hard to separate their children from their culture.
Advertisers serving corporations that don’t care what they destroy as long as they sell their product, for example. Settled cultures reduce profit.
As the World War I song said, “How are you going to keep them down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paris?” The conflict is inevitable and so is the anxiety. And it’s irresolvable.
The anxious Catholics
A group of very conservative Catholics puts on an annual “Catholic Identity Conference,” which they’re holding in late September in Greentree.
They despise Pope Francis, who to them represents the triumph of the wicked modern world over the church. His church doesn’t draw the lines and build the high walls they think necessary.
Not coincidentally, they tend to be strong Trumpians, including believing in election denial and similar ideas, and believe that politics the true Catholic politics. (It’s not.)
But they’re also anxious, I think, from observation and conversation. They have a strong settled identity, and one they believe God-given. They live a culturally marginalized life, one that many people around them find offensive and dangerous.
They tend to talk about the world defensively and negatively. They don’t affirm, don’t seek common ground, don’t look for the good their enemy — who is the enemy and not just someone who thinks differently — pursues.
And they fret about “Catholic identity” and feel themselves the beleaguered hated minority defending the identity their Catholic peers — and the pope! — have cast away to join the hateful world.
They’re not wrong to feel that the dominant culture with all its talk about diversity doesn’t really believe in cultural diversity. They’re not wrong to feel anxious about the world’s effect on their children.
Thus Candace Owens
And that’s how you get Candace Owens, brand new convert, popping up at a conference to talk about Catholic identity days after she adopted it. And with a record of problematic, at best, comments about Jews, beliefs that the church (the “modern” church) has condemned.
Whatever you hold dear, you can understand feeling it threatened. The stronger and more explicit your identity, the more threatened it is. You’ve built the walls as strong as you could, and still the world flows in like a tidal wave, and threatens to sweep your kids away.
Celebrity validates you. Converts tell you that you’re right after all. And if she’s a hardright cool hot kid, that’s like official papal approval. Or better. It’s like Trump’s approval.