Monday
When Barack Obama was president, the Christian right targeted Barack Obama, declaring him a Muslim and a foreigner. While they haven’t been able to get the same traction against Joe Biden (at least ot yet), they have found a surrogate in our vice president. According to Anne Branigan in The Lily, fascist preachers have been calling Kamala Harris a “Jezebel.” As we have learned to our sorrow over the past 12 years, symbols like this must be taken seriously lest we be caught unawares.
A healthy response might be to cite Tom Robbins’s celebration of Jezebel in his novel Skinny Legs and All. Let’s look first, however, at the Biblical story and at how rightwing preachers are employing it it.
The Phoenician queen of Israel king Ahab, Jezebel finds herself involved in multiple power struggles, first with the prophet Elijah and then with his successor Elisha. There are many twists and turns but the final result is a gory death:
Then Jehu went to Jezreel. When Jezebel heard about it, she put on eye makeup, arranged her hair and looked out of a window. As Jehu entered the gate, she asked, “Have you come in peace, you Zimri, you murderer of your master?”
He looked up at the window and called out, “Who is on my side? Who?” Two or three eunuchs looked down at him. “Throw her down!” Jehu said. So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot.
Jehu went in and ate and drank. “Take care of that cursed woman,” he said, “and bury her, for she was a king’s daughter.” But when they went out to bury her, they found nothing except her skull, her feet and her hands. They went back and told Jehu, who said, “This is the word of the Lord that he spoke through his servant Elijah the Tishbite: On the plot of ground at Jezreel dogs will devour Jezebel’s flesh.[f]Jezebel’s body will be like dung on the ground in the plot at Jezreel, so that no one will be able to say, ‘This is Jezebel.’” (2 Kings 9:30-37)
The story is particularly chilling when read in light of the recent Capitol insurrection where Trump cultists sought out those members of Congress who didn’t share their faith, perhaps to kidnap or kill them.
Branigan alerts us to how the Jezebel story is being used:
Two days after Vice President Harris was sworn in as the nation’s first female vice president, Tom Buck let it out.
“I can’t imagine any truly God-fearing Israelite who would’ve wanted their daughters to view Jezebel as an inspirational role model because she was a woman in power,” tweeted Buck, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Lindale, Tex. In the days leading up the inauguration, Buck had quoted scripture about “evildoers” alongside criticism of President Biden’s stance on abortion rights.
Following criticism, Buck didn’t back down:
For those torn up over my tweet, I stand by it 100%,” Buck wrote. “My problem is her godless character. She not only is the most radical pro-abortion VP ever, but also most radical LGBT advocate.”
Branigan notes that
Buck wasn’t the only Southern Baptist preacher to refer to Harris as a Jezebel, a biblical character who has become shorthand for an amoral, wantonly sexual woman. Weeks earlier, before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Steve Swofford, head of the First Baptist Church of Rockwall near Dallas, made a similar statement. Delivering a videotaped sermon, Swofford called Biden “cognitively dysfunctional.”
“What if something happens to [Biden] and Jezebel has to take over?” Swofford asked in the sermon. “Jezebel Harris, isn’t that her name?”
Branigan explains the significance:
The “Jezebel” reference is…highly specific, a trope that speaks to deeply entrenched views about power and what is “normal” or “traditional” in American culture, especially when it comes to racial and gender hierarchies….
Calling Harris a Jezebel accomplishes multiple things: It delegitimizes her power and dehumanizes her. Jessica Johnson, an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of William & Mary, said the term has historically been used as a justification for racial violence against Black women. But the pastors’ rhetoric had an additional level of danger.
Johnson has been researching Christian nationalism, an ideology rooted in the belief that the United States is a Christian nation and that Christians must both maintain and advance their privileged status. The Christian nationalist movement shares many of the same beliefs as the white nationalists,including an attachment to an “authoritarian father figure” running the country, Johnson explained. Calling Harris a Jezebel foments their worst fears: that they will be replaced; that their fate is in the hands of a godless, amoral Black woman.
Tamura Lomax, author of Jezebel Unhinged, adds, “She never did anything sexual. They hated her for her power.” Lomax explained to Branigan that it was
Jezebel’s breach of the social order that led followers of Christianity to accuse her of being immoral. The sexual connotations were tacked on afterward to both undermine her and further highlight her deviance.
Fundamentalists also invoke Jezebel’s name in Robbins’s novel. After fundamentalist preacher Buddy Winkler catches his daughter wearing lipstick and attending a life drawing class in her college, he and other members of the congregation set upon her, scrubbing her face until its raw while calling her a Jezebel. Robbins fights back with a historial explanation of Jezebel’s real crime. The queen, he writes, worshipped the earth goddess Astarte, who was
the Goddess, the Great Mother, the Light of the World, the most ancient and widely revered divinity in human history. Shrines to her date back to the Neolithic Period, and there was not one Indo-European culture that failed to remove with its kiss the mud from her sidereal slippers. In comparison, “God,” as we moderns call Yahweh (often misspelled “Jehovah”) was a Yahny-come-lately who would have approached her enormous popularity. She was the mother of God, as indeed, she was the mother of all.
It’s no surprise, then, that, when
King Ahab’s Phoenician bride started building shrines to Astarte, and when the Israelites started flocking to those shrines—the populace apparently favored Astarte’s voluptuous indulgence over Yahweh’s rigid asceticism—the patriarchs reacted violently against her.
Robbins provides an interesting side one:
[O]ne of the crimes charged to Jezebel, according to the historian Josephus, was the planting of trees. Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation.
Because the devotion to Astarte was “contagious,” Robbins writes, because “it weakened the grip of the Yahweh cult, “Jezebel” was slandered, framed, and finally murdered.” Robbins gives his own account of her death:
When the moment arrived, Jezebel was thoroughly aware that she was to be assassinated. She put up her ergot-black hair, donned her tiara, rouged her cheeks and lips, applied kohl to the lids of her huge Phoenician eyes, and went to face her killer with the style, dignity and grace befitting a reigning queen. So much for painted hussies.
For many Americans, Kamala Harris, with her infectious laugh and her multicultural background, represents an important step in America achieving the dream set forth in the Declaration of Independence and posted on the Statue of Liberty. We need to be aware, however, that, with others, she is triggering hatreds that go as deep as those directed against Obama and Hillary Clinton.
At the end of Skinny Legs and All, Buddy Winkler attempts to strangle a Middle Eastern woman dancing the dance of the seven veils, with each veil representing one of the ways we blind ourselves to the richness of life and human possibility. Such men were active in Jezebel’s time and they remain a lethal threat today.