The Lesson of Oliver Anthony

Why “Rich Men North of Richmond” resonated

Source: YouTube

Upping my output a bit this week due to the time-sensitivity of today’s and yesterday’s articles. Look for one more Thursday/Friday for paid subscribers!

To say Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” has taken the culture by storm would be an understatement. A month ago nobody knew the man’s name. Now his song is beating Taylor Swift to the top of the charts.

A lamentation over the state of our culture and the difficulties of American life in 2023, the song’s popularity has not been universal.

Predictably, Christianity Today obtusely slammed the song for not “Loving its neighbors” (yet again occasion to link my article on the abuse of that verse).

Sure, he didn’t need to use the language he did. And no amount of poetic point making turns country into good music. But is there value in what he said? What should we as Christians make of this?

The song’s massive resonance gives us into some truths we had better understand about the culture around us.

It’s another opportunity to learn a lesson that has evaded many of us for nearly a decade.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton labeled Donald Trump’s fans the “basket of deplorables,” many evangelical leaders responded with hearty “amens.” Russell Moore and David French still carry the torch of those who decry MAGA populism and lecture Christians who vote for such.

At the time of the deplorables comment, I was pretty anti-Trump myself. (I’m not his biggest fan, but I do understand his appeal now in a way I didn’t then.)

But as I and my preacher friends took our swipes at Trump and his supporters, I was hit with a wave of cognitive dissonance. I was being told how deplorable these people were, and how such Christians were selling their souls to support the man.

Yet the two biggest Trump supporters I knew were also the two most honorable men at my rural East Texas church. They were not perfect, but they had hearts of gold and loved the Lord. They were anything but deplorable.

Why were they willing to overlook the man’s obvious flaws to support him so strongly? That’s the question many of us in church leadership were failing to ask. We were stuck on “How could you?” without trying to understand “Why do you want to?”

The answer to that latter was simple: it was because he saw their plight. He was the only candidate in decades, probably since Pat Buchanan in the early 90s, who saw the slow erasure of the American way of life. Manufacturing jobs for the working man are gone. Taxes are too high. Gas costs too much.

While one party was willing to demonize my plain, good-hearted, country friends for being evil “cis hetero old white male oppressors,” and the other party pretended to care about them but clearly did not understand their values or priorities, there was something that heartened them to see a billionaire speaking to their concerns.

And the concerns are legitimate. When you zoom out of everyday life and try to transcend the normalcy bias that thinks the way we live is fine, you realize how bad things are.

It is not normal to have to pick between a two income household without kids or with the kids constantly stashed in daycare, vs. a household in which dad has a job and three side hustles to afford even modest housing. It is not normal to lock people in their homes and destroy the country’s currency while the people at the top get richer and richer by the minute. It is not normal for the food affordable to working class people to be literal obesogenic poison. It is not normal (or sustainable) to be surrounded by degeneracy in our entertainment and education.

Yeah, we have iPhones and streaming services now, but we’ve received that in exchange for a truly human way of life. And there are people directly responsible for all of this. Primarily, they are wealthy men who reside an hour or two drive up the road from Richmond.

And yet that evangelical leadership class still hasn’t learned that lesson. Thus, the scolding over Oliver Anthony. Everything he said relates directly to the common man, which is exactly why the Christian elite class recoiled at it.

Rather than hearing these complaints, we hammer people for being worldly minded and not caring about the Gospel. The lesson they learn is that the Gospel is a purely spiritual concern and they’re going to have to look outside their Christianity for answers to their rising grocery costs and utility bills. Then we become baffled when they turn to Donald Trump and Oliver Anthony.

We have lost touch with our people and would rather side with the government and media in scolding them. Many talk a big game about “standing for the downtrodden,” yet their typical way of doing that is to align with movements that have unanimous megacorp support. Give me a break.

Oliver Anthony is famous because his song actually stands for the actual downtrodden. His reading of the lament and imprecation in Psalm 37 at his first event post-explosion showed he understands those verses and how they apply better than many Christians and church leaders.

It is not the downtrodden everyman who is the villain of our day. No, it is indeed the rich men north of Richmond, but also the regime mouthpiece preachers who side with them and their media influencers against the people. It is people like me in 2016, who got back pats for kicking the Americans left on the ground through decades of predatory policies.

Stop asking how so many people could resonate with Oliver Anthony. Start asking what people are going through that has brought them to this, and why they feel they have to turn to a foul-mouthed musician because their religion doesn’t have the backbone to say what’s right and what’s wrong in a rapidly decaying culture.