As hard-right movements rattle or control European governments, the words of George Steiner animate James Carville.
“Nationalism is the venom of our age,” Steiner wrote in his 1965 essay on the Holocaust, A Kind of Survivor. “It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin.”
Those words prompted Carville, the centrist Democratic political consultant who guided Bill Clinton to the presidency, to say: “The greatest distinction in the world is between patriotism, which is positive – a piece of ground as an idea – and nationalism, which is tribal, exclusionary and, yeah, poisonous.”
Carville zeroed in on the US variant: white Christian nationalism, particularly as embodied by Mike Johnson, his fellow Louisianan and the US House speaker.
“Johnson has no skill, no background, no majority to speak of,” the so-called Ragin’ Cajun declaimed on Saturday, hours before he watched the Louisiana State Univeristy quarterback Jayden Daniels win the coveted Heisman award.
Football is as dear to Carville as politics and his Roman Catholic faith. A graduate of LSU and its law school, he wears the Tigers’ gold and purple shirts in many of his TV appearances, accentuating his flamboyant presence.
“What Johnson does represent is a level of breathtaking hypocrisy,” Carville said. “His anti-homosexuality and young earthism are hypocrisy on steroids.”
In a 2004 Shreveport Times op-ed on gay marriage, Johnson wrote: “If we change marriage for this tiny minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists and pedophiles will be next in line to claim equal protection.”
“Young earthism” signals Johnson’s belief that the planet is 6,000 years old, a literal interpretation of Genesis. In a 2021 interview celebrating the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which lies 40 miles from Ark Encounter, Johnson said: “The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”
Johnson, his role as lawyer, helped the gigantic ark attraction secure significant funding from the state tourism budget, Reuters reports.
Itching for a fight, Carville is challenging the speaker to a debate at Louisiana Christian University, a small Southern Baptist campus in the town of Pineville.
Carville calls LCU “the epicenter of Christian nationalism”.
“The debate I want begins: ‘Resolved, Christian nationalism is a greater threat to America than al-Qaida,’” Carville said. “I want students to see real debate and make up their own minds about what kind of America we want.”
Before his election to Congress, Johnson was founding dean of a campus law school to be named for Paul Pressler, 93, a retired Texas judge, legislator and Southern Baptist potentate. In 2018, the Houston Chronicle reported Pressler paid $450,000 to settle a lawsuit by a man who alleged that Pressler sexually assaulted him as a high school student in Bible study. The law school never materialized.
Carville, 79, and Johnson, 51, stand a generation apart, their lives mirroring the state’s divided history. Once a Democratic party stronghold of the Gulf south, Louisiana has gone deep red: Republicans hold the major state offices and a heavy legislative majority. The attorney general and governor-elect, Jeff Landry, boasted of the former president Donald Trump’s endorsement as Landry coasted to an outright, multiparty primary victory.
Carville lives in New Orleans with the Republican political operative Mary Matalin, his wife. But he grew up 16 miles south of Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River in the town of St Gabriel, in the Carville neighborhood, named for his grandfather.
The oldest of eight children, he attended mass in a church built in the late 18th century, taking comfort in the gospels as he does today. The 1960 election of John F Kennedy, a Catholic, was like a magnet pulling Carville into politics.
Johnson is a firefighter’s son from Shreveport – far upstate, an area more culturally akin to Alabama or Mississippi. He came of age as Pentecostal Christianity became a political force. He won election to the House in 2016, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message newspaper: “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”
He claimed the speaker’s gavel after it was wrested from the retiring congressman Kevin McCarthy, emerging from the subsequent Republican infighting.
For all of his spitfire attacks on Johnson and “the blood and soil” Make America great again (Maga) agenda pushed by Trump, Carville draws on a wellspring of faith. He says he has “a Catholic construct of the world” – and that attending mass daily at 8am calms and comforts him.
“I like the predictability of the gospel readings,” Carville said. “So much of my life is unpredictable.”
The church’s ongoing clergy sex abuse crisis eats at him, in part because one of his cousins is an ordained priest who holds the elevated title of monsignor. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about that,” Carville said. “Like most people, I struggle.”
Although Pope Francis is a widely admired global figure, the American church is as deeply torn as the US’s red v blue political split. Carville draws a careful distinction between the power structure of bishops and the people in churches with priests they like.
“I’ve seen how [bishops] try to repress people while they were allowing predators, covering up, lying to people and hiding behind their lawyers,” Carville said. “I hold the Roman Catholic church to a higher standard than I would Ford Motor Company.”
The hard-right network of Catholic organizations such as the Napa Institute, Church Militant and Eternal Word Television Network offend Carville for similar reasons that send him into attack mode against Trumpism and Johnson.
“The essence of Trumpism is that politics has run over you,” Carville said. “I understand why people feel that – the idea of loss, what people once had. In the church, we’re seeing a real defense of power in reaction to the hypocrisy and rottenness that’s been exposed. So the right wing doubles down.”
Carville was delighted when Francis sacked the American cardinal Raymond Burke from his Vatican apartment and salary. Burke, a former archbishop of St Louis, is known for his lavish, regal attire and attacks on the pope’s agenda of “radical mercy” – reaching out to migrants and people on the margins, seeking to make the church more welcoming to LGBTQ+ believers, divorced Catholics and women.
“The Cardinal Burkes of the world are telling you that you have to protect power at all costs,” Carville said. “That branch of the church has never really liked democracy, an open society or anything approaching bodily autonomy.”
Like most liberal Catholics, Carville finds a bulwark in faith in the form of the big tent, the messy, sprawling people of God packed into sacred spaces that unite them on Sunday to hear the gospel, take the host and go back to their different lives.
That sensibility, quaint though it may seem to myriad of others aghast at the church scandals, nevertheless holds a ray of hope for the likes of Carville. Down in the mud pit of politics, he is worried about more than just Christian nationalism.
“I have all kinds of people tell me: ‘James, this is not the country we grew up in,’” Carville said.
And they’re right, he says – but probably not in the way they mean.
Carville said: “I actually hear [white people] say: ‘People knew their place.’ Well, I graduated from LSU law school with one Black and three females in the class. You go to any law school today and half the class are women. That’s a profound change in my lifetime. You can’t show someone a Norman Rockwell painting, say this used to be America, and expect the world to change.”
Carville’s greatest concern about the 2024 election is Joe Biden. He points to a recent Wall Street Journal poll that had the president at 31%.
“I don’t think he should run,” Carville said. “I like President Biden. I like people who get scarred politically and come back and survive – he’s that kind of guy.
“But he’s too old. It’s that simple. The Democratic party has breathtaking talent, but no energy. We’re keeping it bottled up. If you ask the average person in Terre Haute, Indiana, what do you think of the Democratic party, they’d say two things: ‘They’re for the cities and they’re too old.’ We need to change that image.”
