Tomorrow never knows

Greenland, though.

Again, if you asked any MAGA court evangelical in 2024 about the Proper Christian Stance on U.S. policy toward Greenland, they would have said the same thing that 99% of Americans of any religious or political stripe would have said: “Why on earth are you talking about Greenland?”

These MAGA evangelicals who obsess about having the official and mandatory Proper Christian Stance on everything did not then have any “stance” on Greenland because it was freaking Greenland. Way back in 2024, nobody had or needed to have a “stance” on Greenland any more than they needed to have a “stance” on Ellesmere Island.*

Think again of all of those MAGA evangelicals we looked at on Monday as they recited and affirmed their brand-new revised and expanded Proper Christian Stance on Venezuela — folks like Franklin Graham and Mike Huckabee and Eric Metaxas and Johnnie Moore. Every one of them, back in 2024, held a different Proper Christian Stance on Venezuela.

And every one of them, back in 2024, would have laughed at the absurdity of your bewildering question about Greenland.

And then — because their lives are governed by the need for everyone, everywhere to always line up behind every mandatory Proper Christian Stance on everything — they probably would have guessed that you were testing them about their adherence to the PCS on something like melting glaciers and climate change. They’re always testing one another with pop quizzes like that, and they’d be ready for this one. So maybe after a brief moment of confusion over the bizarre and seemingly out-of-nowhere nature of your Greenland question, they’d have resorted to a creedal recitation of the PCS on climate change — that it’s a socialist/Communist conspiracy** promoted by America’s enemies, etc.

That would get them back on the sure footing of established Proper Christian Stances circa 18 months ago. Look at this 2024 Voter Guide circulated by the Family Research Council. It outlines the PCS on climate change and the Green New Deal, so they would know what the correct answer was on that.

But that 2024 Voter Guide didn’t say anything about Greenland.

Today, however, just a little more than a year later, those MAGA evangelicals all understand that there is now a Proper Christian Stance on Greenland, one that holds that this semi-autonomous, sparsely populated Danish territory in the far north ought to be, for some reason, a colony and possession of the United States.

That 2024 Voter Guide is now hopelessly out-of-date — a relic from a distant and forgotten past.

And if the Trump administration, emboldened by the military prowess displayed by its raid on Venezuela, lurches forward with its scheme to invade and seize Greenland, the new Proper Christian Stance on Greenland will be not just loudly proclaimed, but enforced. Any American evangelical who does not affirm and celebrate this weird new stance — on Greenland, of all things — will be swiftly condemned, farewelled, Ciziked and Throckmortoned into oblivion.

The eponymous verbs there take their names from two conservative white evangelicals who were booted from evangelical institutions for their deviation from Proper Christian Stances. Richard Cizik was fired from his long-time job at the National Association of Evangelicals after a Fresh Air interview in which he said that he might kinda maybe be willing to support some kind of non-marriage civil union recognition for same-sex couples, and in which he mentioned that he had voted for Obama. That was four strikes for Cizik — he was insufficiently anti-gay, he voted for a Democrat, he voted for a Black Democrat, and he spoke politely to Terry Gross without flouncing and denouncing her and NPR like Bill O’Reilly did. Warren Throckmorton is a retired psychology professor from Grove City College whose blog was terminated and deleted from Patheos’ evangelical channel because … well, we still don’t know why, exactly. Maybe it was because he was too vocally critical of David Barton’s dishonest pseudo-history or maybe it was because he kept pointing out that “conversion therapy” was a cruel scam or maybe he stepped on some invisible third rail that angered some wealthy ultra-right donor. But one day he was there and the next he was gone.

And that’s what will happen to any white evangelical who dares to deviate from the mandatory Proper Christian Stance supporting the glorious American invasion of — yes, really, it sounds like a warped joke but it’s not — Greenland.

This is the thing about Proper Christian Stances — they’re always changing. They have changed in unpredictable and unforeseeable ways since 2024. And they will change again in unpredictable and unforeseeable ways in 2026. They are unfixed and uncertain in the most terrifying, Orwellian sense because they are a form of party-line enforcement as capricious and inconstant as the party line in 1984.

I’ve written about this perilous uncertainty before — see “Memory vs. Hobby Lobby: Evangelicals and contraception and why Denny Burk is not a conservative.” That post was about how the official and mandatory Proper Christian Stance on contraception in 2013 was radically different from the Proper Christian Stance on contraception in 1984 (the year, not the novel) and different even from the PCS throughout the George W. Bush years.

That radical change caused trouble for any white evangelical with ties to white evangelical institutions who wasn’t paying close attention to the constantly changing and updating PCS. Those who made the mistake of reciting, in 2013, what every good white evangelical knew that everyone was expected to believe in 2003 were forced to recant and apologize lest a Ciziking or Throckmortoning ensue. The same punishment could be meted out to anyone working for a white evangelical institution who publicly acknowledged that the PCS had changed from what it had been just a few years before. Memory was a form of deviation, and therefore a punishable offense.

Here’s what I wrote toward the end of that post:

What does it mean to follow leaders who are not bound by fact or memory?

It means that they might tell you anything — absolutely anything — and expect you to follow along.

You may wake up tomorrow only to learn that all right-thinking evangelicals now believe in transubstantiation.

But wait, you’ll protest, we’re evangelicals — most of us are not even sacramental, this is a contradiction of what evangelicals used to believe. And they will tell you that evangelicals have always believed in transubstantiation, that the fries and Coke we consume at the Eucharist literally become the body and blood of Christ. You’ll start to say something about bread and wine, but they’ll cut you off, reminding you that evangelicals have always believed that the Last Supper was fries and Coke, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with that isn’t really a true evangelical or a good conservative.

My attempt there to present an absurdly exaggerated hypothetical was somewhat over-the-top, but is it really any more absurdly over-the-top than the actual surreal reality we are now facing involving the potential invasion, seizure, and annexation of freaking Greenland?

* My personal “stance” on Ellesmere Island is that this foreign territory constitutes a grave threat to American national security, looming just a few short miles off the northwestern coast of our beloved territory of Greenland. The only strong and forceful way to counter this threat is to send most of America’s Border Patrol and ICE agents to guard every square inch of the Nares Strait. This essential task should be overseen, personally, by Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, and Secretary Kristi Noem. Gov. Greg Abbot is also invited to accompany a contingent of Texas National Guard to assist with this vital mission.

** I’m so old I can remember when the official PCS was that climate change was a New Age conspiracy promoted to pave the way for the coming New Age Antichrist’s One World Government.

This change from a “New Age” bogeyman to a “Green New Deal” bogeyman is generational. The generation of white evangelical leaders who watched Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment and resented that they couldn’t sleep with her was eventually replaced by a generation of white evangelical leaders who watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Fox New and resent that they can’t sleep with her.