The bizarro world of the fundie baby voice
In the movie “Wall Street,” corporate raider Gordon Gekko tells a meeting of the shareholders of the fictional Teldar Paper Company, “I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them.” A similar declaration is made about women in the cult of evangelical Christians. They are not destroyers of women, they maintain with Gekko-like insincerity, they are liberators of them.
In the evangelical Christian hierarchy of power men are always at the top. Always. Women are given breadcrumbs, with a kind of sweet condescension and an unspoken expectation that they should receive those breadcrumbs with blubbering gratitude. It goes without saying that this power structure is abused in ways too varied and horrible to relate here.
The women who buy into this malevolent idiocy conform in odd ways that are instantly apparent. One of the ways is in their highly affected manner of speech. This affectation includes a cadence, word choice and childlike, saccharine sweetness that’s simply bizarre to the uninitiated. The comic genius Dana Carvey captured some of it in his Saturday Night Live rendition of Enid Strict, better known as the Church Lady.
As with Carvey’s rendition, the word “special” plays a pivotal role. “Special” is frequently modified with “just really,” and enhanced with iterations of “really,” as in, a particularly good thing might be said to be, “just really, REALLY special.” And so on. Evangelical Christian women aren’t supposed to have much in the way of a vocabulary. The same purpose and principle can be found in Orwell’s Newspeak.
Detractors of this mode of speech refer to this odd lingual mannerism as the Fundie Baby Voice (FBV). In my youthful decade inside the evangelical cult I recall mocking this pretentious nonsense with some of the smarter members of the tribe. Yes, some of us were awake enough to notice and disdain it.
Even some evangelical men invariably adopt some of the vocabulary of the FBV. But its raison d’etre remains, I am convinced, the subjugation of women members. They are kept in their place by the accents and word choices of their very language.
Which brings me to Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s grotesque official Republican response to Joe Biden’s the State of the Union address. If you were wondering why she was speaking with that odd, forced modulation and affected pattern of speech, wonder no more. Katie Britt delivered her address with the vocal tones and mannerisms of Fundie Baby Voice under full, unabashed sail, somewhat (but only somewhat) modified with the slightly elevated vocabulary of a United States Senator.
It was no accident that Britt delivered her speech from her kitchen. Apart from in the bedroom, that’s where evangelical men like to keep their evangelical women the most. Neither was it an accident that her green blouse was open just enough (but no more) to display her simple gold cross on a simple gold chain. The breathless affectation, over-acted with a near chuckle at the end of some of her sentences was vintage FBV.
Here is a woman who has devoted years to suppressing her true conversational voice, so that she can become just another bot in the cult promoting Christian nationalism. Her actual job is to serve the people of the state of Alabama without reference to or influence of her personal religion.
In the course of her speech Britt recounted a story about a woman who was abused in Mexico when George W Bush was president. She tried to use her FBV to manipulate viewers into thinking that this decades-old abuse, indisputably awful to be sure, was somehow Joe Biden’s fault.
The moral to all of this, if there can be said to be one, is that evil words spoken with sweet, childlike baby tones remain evil. Sadly, many people bought into Katie Britt’s affected bullshit. The good news is most did not. On balance Britt’s speech did Republicans considerable harm, and for that we can be grateful. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.