The National Religious Broadcasters is a large white evangelical trade group representing most Christian-brand television and radio “ministries,” as well as a host of other white evangelical publishers, websites, nonprofits and parachurch organizations.
Every year the NRB gives its “prestigious NRB Board of Directors Award” to an individual “who demonstrates integrity, displays creativity, and makes a significant impact on society.” The recipient of that award this year was Fox News personality Todd Starnes.
Todd Starnes is most famous for lying — extravagantly, outrageously, transparently. It seems odd, then, that the NRB would choose to honor Starnes for demonstrating “integrity.” I wrote about this a while back in a post titled “Honoring liars & silencing gays: The NRB epitomizes the toxic pathology of white evangelical tribalism.” All still true.
But Todd Starnes himself has loudly pointed out that there’s another important aspect to this story. Starnes has taken to Twitter to remind us all that he’s also a big honkin’ racist:
I’m immensely critical of Starnes for many things, but the man is a skilled communicator. He expresses his thoughts and his intent clearly and well. We need to honor that and to accord him the respect that is due for that.
Todd Starnes affirms racism and he unambiguously wants us to know and to acknowledge as much. He can write. We can read.
The folks at the National Religious Broadcasters can read too.
The question then becomes what role Starnes’ racism played in the NRB’s decision to honor him with their “prestigious” award.
It seems to me there are two possibilities.
The first possibility, obviously, is that the NRB chose to honor Todd Starnes precisely because of his propensity for affirming racist sentiments, ideologies and mythologies. It is possible that this, specifically, is what NRB President & CEO Jerry A. Johnson meant when he praised Starnes for having “a very positive impact on society.”
If that is the case, then we should understand that Johnson, the NRB and its many member stations and affiliates are celebrating racism. We should understand that racism is, in fact, one of the core values of the NRB — a guiding principle essential to its mission and to its understanding of that mission.
By honoring Todd Starnes as the individual who best exemplifies its vision and mission, the NRB certainly invited us all to draw that conclusion. They perhaps even forced us all to draw that conclusion. But I don’t actually think they intended for us all to draw that conclusion.
And that’s why I lean toward the second possibility — which seems to be the only other possibility. And that is this: The NRB simply does not care about racism. At all. They are perfectly indifferent toward and unconcerned with that form of sin.
Starnes’ enthusiastic affirmation and reaffirmation of racist sentiments, ideologies and policies was simply not a factor in the NRB’s decision to honor him with its Board of Directors Award. When Jerry A. Johnson evaluates the kind of “impact on society” that Starnes — or anyone else — has, Johnson simply does not include racism as a variable worthy of his consideration.
And note, again, that this really is the only other possibility. If the NRB did not honor Starnes out of its high regard for his racism, then it must have done so out of its disregard for it. The fact that NRB honored him with the award means those are the only options. The fact that his advocacy of racist ideology did not eliminate him from consideration for that award means that every other possibility is eliminated from our consideration as an explanation for that award.
Either they’re affirming Starnes’ racism or they’re not. And if they’re not, then they can only be ignoring it completely as unimportant.
I suspect the latter is the case. I suspect the NRB just doesn’t care and that its passive acceptance of Starnes’ racism does not constitute its own active affirmation of racism.
That suspicion is supported, I should note, by the group’s decision a few years ago to honor infamous pseudohistorian David Barton with that same Board of Directors Award. Barton is the living embodiment of what the philosopher Harry A. Frankfurter has classified as “bullshit.”
Frankfurter’s ethical reflections are helpful here, because he also suggests why it is that the NRB’s passive unconcern for racism may actually be worse than if the organization were actively affirming such views.
Racism is, among other things, a lie. And Frankfurter argues that those St. Augustine identified as pure liars are not the greatest enemies of the truth:
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
The NRB’s decision to honor Todd Starnes may not constitute a rejection of the authority of the truth, but simply a disregard that “pays no attention to it at all.”
The NRB’s decision to honor Todd Starnes may not constitute a rejection of the authority of love, but simply a disregard that “pays no attention to it at all.”
Or, in the words of Walter Sobchak, explaining his contempt for nihilists: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude. At least it’s an ethos.”
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