In 1890, in the American West, out there where the streams are fast and clear and the rivers are slow and muddy, a Native American named Wovoka started preaching the Ghost Dance.
It wasn’t a good time to be Native American, as it hasn’t been since. The buffalo were gone. Ravaged by disease, hungry, drunk and preyed upon, the remainder of the people squatted forlornly on pieces of land the white people didn’t need for a pipeline yet. There was no longer any way to live the way they used to live just a generation ago. In this manner, they were much like people in the Midwest whose fathers worked in the auto plant, but the plant’s gone, so they clerk at the 7-Eleven.
Wovoka’s theology was pretty simple, as is the theology of many right-wing Christians.
If you danced the Ghost Dance, if you integrated that way of prayer into your life, things would get better. Things would get hugely better.
Did they listen to Wovoka? Sure they did. They didn’t have much left to do but dance, the way unemployed white people now don’t have much to do but read Breitbart. It’s better than nothing.
If you danced the Ghost Dance, Wovoka said, the white people would go away and the buffalo would return. Things would be the way they once were, back when things made sense.
In America, where it’s lonely at the top and crowded at the bottom, Donald Trump preached the Ghost Dance.
It wasn’t a good time to be white in America, or so people said. You had to go to college or trade school or junior college to get almost any kind of good job. You couldn’t just step out of high school and into a unionized factory that made toasters or cars or curling irons. Ravaged by painkillers, pension-less and working jobs that didn’t include health insurance, the people worried that the government would encourage flag burning and kill you for praying, instead of the other way around.
Trump’s theology was simple, as was the theology of Wovoka.
If you danced the Ghost Dance, Trump said, the black people would go away and the factories would return. Also, the Muslims would go away, and most of the Mexicans and the gays. Things would be the way they once were, back when things made sense.
If you danced, and if you chanted, “libtard sheeple,” and posted Facebook memes showing a pistol and the words, “THIS is my president,” the Chinese would quit making iPads, or at least they’d open an iPad factory in your town, out of respect for how sincerely you danced.
It was a beautiful thing to believe, and you rose to your feet and danced in the glow of the television or the computer screen, as the Native Americans danced in the light of the fires.
The beauty of Wovoka’s theology was that it was just for Native Americans. The white people wouldn’t get anything good out of it, and they weren’t meant to get anything good. They would go away. They would be destroyed. The Native American culture would be the only culture left. And the buffalo would come back. It was a theology that promised good things only to some people.
Wovoka’s Ghost Dance didn’t work. The white people didn’t go away. The buffalo did not return. It was just a dancing dream in the firelight.
Wovoka’s theology wasn’t a theology. It was just a dream of living the old ways in the old days. Trump’s theology isn’t a theology, either. It’s just a denial that there is anything out there, out beyond the weak light of a small fire and a clumsy dance.