#to justify their american evangelical agenda

[dougielombax]

Let me make something quite clear.

Conservative American Christians (at least evangelical hardcore Republican types) do NOT care about the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

Nor do they know or understand them (I’m no expert myself but I’ve read up a bit and know a great deal more about them than those ghastly fuckers! That’s for DAMN sure!)

This is equally true for their idiotic fascist counterparts in Europe!

I’d even go further and say that they DESPISE the indigenous Christians in the Middle East as well.

Perhaps viewing them as usurpers or pretenders.

The Christians in the Middle East who I refer to aren’t rich white evangelical types.

Rather I am referring to the marginalised indigenous Christians who have lived in the region for thousands of years such as Coptic Christians in Egypt, Assyrian people, Maronites, Melkites, Armenians, and Arab Christians.

These aforementioned American conservative far right fundamentalist grifters (and their idiot counterparts in Europe) have never cared about them. They never have, they never did and they never will. If anything they’d rather see them all die, probably.

They only use their plight as an excuse to fuel their own pathetic persecution complex.

When they know nothing of persecution and the suffering those indigenous Christians in the area have faced and continue to face to this day.

These people suffer and those aforementioned American types don’t care one bit, simply USING their suffering as an excuse to fuel their putrid, fascist agenda.

Only pretending to care.

All because they want their stupid end time Apocalypse prophecy (Rapture bullshit!) to be fulfilled. (Or just to prove their bigoted beliefs to be true.)

And can’t abide the fact that they won’t be able to control their grandkids (who they despise) from beyond the grave.

The European far right does much of the same, only they aren’t so much motivated by stupid anthropocentric apocalypse worship like their American counterparts as they are by pure anti-Muslim bigotry for its own sake.

(For instance. You see a lot of this from the Swedish far right, who have also attacked Assyrian refugees in their country.)

The point is, they don’t give a shit and only use their suffering to justify their own putrid persecution complex.

And they’d probably see them all wiped out just to validate their nasty feelings.

They don’t care.

They never have.

And they never will.

Feel free to reblog this.

#personal stuff #dougie rambles #vent post #political crap #armenia #western armenia #artsakh #Coptic people #Coptic Christians #assyrians #Assyrian people #Armenian people #Maronites #palestinians #persecution #bullshit #middle east #reblog this #melkites #christianity #actual persecution #persecution complex #fuck evangelicals #feel free to reblog this #signal boost #signal b00st #signal boooooost #reblog the shit out of this #please reblog this #somebody reblog this

[soup-mother]

the dark lord would have LOVED gay people, you can't be a REAL necromancer of the doomed and not support lgbt rights. those american evangelicals give us a bad name!

the dark lord was a radical anarchist lich of paleness in the occupied necropolis!! The bible of weeping skin doesn't *literally* say "all living beings should be enthralled to the legions of the dead" that's just a mistranslation by living-phobic Romans with an agenda.

the city wasn't destroyed for harbouring living beings it was because they broke hospitality rules! (this is only ever discussed in a later, non-conon apocryphal "tome of the nightmare flesh").

stop trying hide behind your trauma to justify hating necromancers like that, we're not all bad guys ok? just because your homophobic parents sacrificed your dog doesn't mean the religion is evil.

#my post #religion #necromancer skull cult

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

Jews aren't involved in a widespread conspiracy to control American society, but you know who is?

Rich white evangelical christians.

charlesoberonn:

Jews aren't involved in a widespread conspiracy to control American society, but you know who is?

Rich white evangelical christians.

Some books about the subject:

The Family by Jeff Sharlet

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

American Crusade by Andrew L. Seidel

Takeover by Noah Feldman

Also look up Seven Mountains Ideology, the idea that the Church should control the "seven mountains" of society, those being:Media Government Education Economy Religion Art and Entertainment Family

wizard-at-large:

What’s weird is that anyone who grew up in an evangelical household knows this isn’t even a secret. It’s very loudly and openly the agenda.

charlesoberonn:

I didn't say it was a secret conspiracy. There's no need for secrecy when nobody (so far) is trying to stop you or hold you accountable.

More books on the subject:

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart

Taking America Back For God by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry

The Founding Myth, Seidel's first book, is specifically about how Christian Nationalists lie about American history and founding principles to justify their religious takeover.

I also recommend the Youtube channel Belief It Or Not for videos and podcasts about evangelical christianity and christian nationalism.

Extra relevant now that an open and life-long Christofascist is Speaker of the House.

PS

I'm a Syriac Christian, and remaining essentially the same since 33AD (a mixed blessing, I know), you might be surprised by how little we have in common with fundajelicals, when it comes to theology.

Christendom in general, is an eclectic place, and treating us as being otherwise, sounds a lot like just another form of bigotry.

[pageadaytale]

BOOK REVIEW - Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes du Mez

It's been a while. That's mostly for two reasons:

First, I've been reading two of the longest books on my tbr. Jesus and John Wayne clocks in at 309 pages, certainly above average in terms of page density for my non-fiction; and Periodic Tales is 398 pages, the fourth largest book on my list;

Second, I've been trying to digest everything I've read.

Both of these books are a lot, and I'm starting off by reviewing the one about the rise of evangelical fascism in America. It's, uh... timely, we'll put it that way.

Jesus and John Wayne was first published in 2020, following the Trump presidency (don't let me down by forcing me to update it to "first Trump presidency", US followers!), and it discussed the increasing influence of the evangelical Christian vote on US politics and especially on the right wing. It's a fascinating book, delving into the history from post-war USA and the fear of "men gone soft"; we chart the rise of evangelical spokesmen like Billy Graham, a Baptist pastor who was granted personal audience with Richard Nixon and helped to steer US policy on equal rights (curtailing them), political freedom (stoking McCarthyist hysteria), and foreign policy (supporting military intervention in Vietnam).

It's a trend that repeats throughout the book. American Baptist preachers gain fame and fortune for outspoken views on reclaiming "Christian masculinity"; they push an increasingly authoritarian agenda by stoking xenophobic fears of communism, Islam, and the Queer community; and they support ever more authoritarian leaders who push violent foreign intervention and justify it their warped ideals of masculine Christianity. The Southern Baptist Church positioned Jesus as a warrior and muscleman rather than a peaceful revolutionary, and imposed a strict Christian hierarchy of authority within the family. As Ms Du Mez notes, this atmosphere of toxic masculinity and patriarchal command was a fertile ground for domestic abuse and sexual assault, which came to light in the 90's and 2000's in a series of high-profile revelations, but failed to disband the movement. Instead their followers doubled down, leading ultimately to the Trump presidency.

There's a lot more to say - we've barely touched on the Islamophobia, the capitalistic shilling of Evangelical preachers amid the rise of Christian bookstores, or Duck Dynasty. But therein lies my major gripe with the book: what could be an intriguing exposé on the Christian Right-Wing in America is a solid block of academic text which continually retreads the same themes with different names over different decades. Don't get me wrong, it's message is important and it's highly informative; but I got lost in the maze of names and places as Christian radio show hosts melded with one another into a shapeless blob of toxic religious masculinity. The broad message is the same, noting Evangelical tactics in coercing their flock through fear, hyping up right-wing candidates as "a real man" or "a True American", and brushing aside any supposed non-Christian behaviour as "manly". Reading it all at once, it becomes a tiresome retread, as every other decade they're doing this again for a yet-worse candidate.

In many ways, Jesus and John Wayne is a depressing read. It shows a pattern which has continued since at least the Second World War, and has its roots in the late Victorian era; and it's a pattern which shows no signs of abating, as Trump once again looks set to be the Republican candidate. It demonstrates that fear is an effective motivator, that scapegoats can always be found, that there is always someone else Evangelical preachers will point their followers at in order to promote their ideals of "masculinity" and conspicuous consumption. But it's also a telling book: that the right-wing has one set of tactics, which rely on the majority to stay silent and not to challenge them. We have already seen that fail: when Joe Biden was elected in 2020, it upended an American tradition in electoral history and proved that the people as a whole were decent, honest, and preferred to help each other than to hate.

So while it's densely-packed and you're going to get lost amongst the names which are introduced and jumbled about, it's academic and well-researched and it paints a picture which will give any American who leans left some ammunition to fight back against the ever-growing threat of fascism. I suggest at least getting through the first few chapters, and maybe skipping to the last couple about Trump, before this election if you can pick up a copy. It'll give you an idea of what the Evangelical bloc are planning, and how you can counter it. My hopes are with you all for 2024.

#book review #Jesus and John Wayne #Kristin Kobes Du Mez #Religion #Politics #History #US Politics #Christianity

[michaelcosio]

The Zionist fallacy of ‘Jewish supremacy’

by Yoav Litvin

Yoav Litvin is an Israeli-American doctor of psychology/neuroscience, a writer and photographer.

9 Jan 2019

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Pulitzer-prize winner Alice Walker caused much controversy by recommending David Icke’s book And the Truth Shall Set You Free, claiming it was “a curious person’s dream come true”.

Many reacted sharply to Walker’s endorsement of what is widely considered to be an anti-Semitic book, accusing her of embracing Icke’s racist conspiracy theories; others, like Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, defended Walker, claiming her ideas are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic. In her article, In defence of Alice Walker, Abulhawa claimed Palestinians are “killed, humiliated and destroyed in visible and invisible ways by Israel’s notions of Jewish supremacy”.

Omitted from this public debate is an important distinction regarding the fundamental nature of Zionism and its implications on the struggle against injustice.

Zionism is a modern movement, which gained traction among a minority of secular Jews only in the late 19th century in response to Europe’s rising anti-Semitism and romantic nationalism.

Early Zionists syncretised many aspects of European fascism, white supremacy, colonialism and messianic Evangelism and had a long and sordid history of cooperating with anti-Semites, imperialists and fascists in order to promote exclusivist and expansionist agendas.

In fact, throughout the past century, anti-Semites and Zionists have worked towards the mutual interest of concentrating Jews in Israel; the former as a means of scapegoating and expelling an unwanted population, and the latter to combat the “demographic threat” posed by native Palestinians. Further, both anti-Semites and Zionists construct Jews as a biological race, which needs to be segregated as part of a utopia of global apartheid.

Zionism is a racist and settler colonialist movement, which opportunistically coopts aspects of Judaism in an attempt to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide of indigenous Palestinians. White supremacy is dominant within Israeli society, which privileges white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of dark-skinned African Jews, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews as well as African refugees. African/black Jewish communities are often denied recognition by Israeli authorities with some members even deported.

Zionism is based on a distinctly secular outlook, which embraces aggression and expansion as an acceptable response to trauma and denounces the traditional Jewish pacifist approach of viewing hardship as divine punishment for sins. The Israeli regime capitalises on a dynamic of violence and inequality reinforced by fear-mongering and the rewards of resource acquisition to promote a privileged ruling class at the expense of colonised Palestinian people. Zionist strategists manipulate the past traumas Jews have endured to galvanise support for aggressive policies that disenfranchise Palestinians.

The growing, glaringly visible connections between the Israeli government and reactionary, white supremacist forces worldwide, including Brazil, the United States, the Philippines and Hungary further demonstrate the concordance of Zionism and white supremacy. Neo-Nazis have been inspired by Israel’s policies and the term “white Zionism” has been used to describe the emerging “alt-right” neo-fascistic movement. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone as far as revising the Holocaust to serve his political needs and Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked has made openly genocidal, dehumanising threats towards Palestinians, calling them “little snakes”.

In a similar fashion to other fascistic, anti-Semitic regimes, Israel has never tolerated dissident voices, targeting Jewish anti-Zionists throughout its history. In fact, anti-Zionists were targeted from before the foundation of the state of Israel. Today, Jewish pro-Palestinian activists who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are detained, punished and even deported.

The fallacy

To maintain this abusive, white supremacist dynamic, Zionist propagandists have promoted the anti-Semitic fallacy that Israel is a Jewish state, which represents Judaism and thus all Jews. This fundamental canard is at the root of Zionist propaganda (aka Hasbara), galvanising support for Israeli settler colonialism and attacking anti-colonial resistance.

The logical outcome of this fallacy erroneously determines that critique of Zionism/Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic. Successive Israeli governments have employed this trope as a talking point in order to sabotage critique of their criminal policies. Their cynical manipulation of the guilt surrounding the very real history of anti-Jewish bigotry and oppression has bolstered this tactic. Furthermore, Israel consistently strengthens its supposed association to Judaism (by promulgating legislation such as the Nation state law) in order to promote this fallacious anti-Semitic apartheid framework.

Recently, black-Palestinian alliances have become a growing concern for Zionists, who have targeted a series of black pro-Palestinian activists with charges of anti-Semitism, including Marc Lamont Hill and the organisers of the Women’s march. Just a few days ago, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in the US cancelled an event honouring civil rights icon Angela Davis likely due to her pro-Palestinian advocacy and support for the BDS movement. This selective targeting of black activists further demonstrates the white supremacist nature of Zionism.

A second, more obscure, consequence of this fallacy strikes the pro-Palestinian camp. If it is accepted, as it is by Zionists, that Israel indeed represents Judaism and all Jews – an expression of “Jewish supremacy” – then those who are pro-Palestinian must also reject Jews and Judaism.

The adoption of this outlook creates two artificial camps, with Israel, Zionists and Jews in the former and Palestinian people together with anti-Semites, in the latter. Thus, the notion that Zionism is driven by “Jewish supremacy”, reproduced in Abulhawa’s article, splinters the natural alliances of all those who are oppressed by the capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy and bolsters the reactionary narrative which claims that the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” is not a case of settler colonialism with historical precedents and thus has a political solution, but a holy war between Jews and their allies against all those who oppose them.

This outlook ultimately sustains ongoing victimisation of Palestinian people by rendering “the conflict” unsolvable by any means other than violence. This directly benefits Zionist settler colonialism and its propaganda, which has a military force disproportionately more powerful than its Palestinian victims.

In contrast, the understanding of Zionism as a white supremacist movement, which has opportunistically and selectively syncretised Judaism to obscure and bolster its criminal settler-colonialist, genocidal activity, creates a more valid analytical framework.

It gathers all those oppressed by the capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy (black and brown people, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, indigenous people, women, LGBTQI etc) in one anti-racist, anti-colonial camp and places those who uphold it, including Zionists (Jews and non-Jews) and others, like David Icke, who espouse anti-Semitism, in opposition. Notably, white supremacy is an ideology that relates to whiteness as a structure and can thus be advanced by anyone, even its victims.

Consistently, the principled Palestinian-led BDS movement has called for the exclusion of all forms of racism and bigotry, including anti-Semitism, from its campaign.

Thus, the framing of Zionism as “white”, not “Jewish” supremacy enables and strengthens the formation of coalitions between all those opposed to Zionist settler colonialism in particular and white supremacy in general and hinders Zionist attempts at sabotage by lobbying cynical accusations of “anti-Semitism”. Pro-Palestinian advocates are wise when they support principles over people and are careful not to promote anti-Semitic, reactionary or conspiratorial material, which damages the Palestinian cause they champion and exposes it to justified critique.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

[antoine-roquentin]

Downwardly mobile white blue-collar workers and upwardly mobile white small business owners met in the grassroots of the conservative movement. The most substantial failing of The People, No is that it adheres to Frank’s thesis in What’s the Matter with Kansas: that elites manipulated “ordinary people” into the movement with pseudo-populist culture-war rhetoric while enacting their real economic agenda behind the scenes. In fact, when rank-and-file conservatives repudiated the New Deal order, the economic and cultural were so thoroughly intertwined as to be inseparable.

Before they were loyal to national politicians, many workers were loyal to particular firms and employers. The economy that replaced the New Deal order was built by industries that kept alive the capital-P Populist dream of small proprietorship and dignified, autonomous work, even as good jobs in manufacturing and family farming became increasingly scarce. “We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited,” Populist leader William Jennings Bryan thundered in 1896. “The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer” — that is, if his work was productive and self-directed. For many ordinary people, heirs to the Populist tradition, “business man”–style wage work was an appealing alternative to the welfare state dependency — or union dependency — that the contemporary left was depicted as pushing. For all of Frank’s rhetorical sympathy for white “working people,” he is oddly disinterested in the places where they actually worked.

Displaced small farmers had moved into long-distance trucking since the early New Deal period, but it was in the 1960s and 1970s that independent trucking came into its own as one of the great blue-collar romances. An apparent alternative to the corporate bureaucracy and heavy-handed Teamsters union that dominated the industry, the independent trucker burst onto the scene, innumerable country ballads extolling him as one of the last species of American male who truly worked for himself. (“I’m independent,” Kris Kristofferson’s trucker character proclaimed in Sam Peckinpah’s 1978 film Convoy. “There ain’t many of us left.”) Pressure from rank-and-file independent truckers then complemented the manufacturing and shipping lobbies’ successful attempt to deregulate transportation during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The siren song of right-wing working-class populism was not only heard in trucking. Franchised fast food, another artifact of the New Deal order’s investment in auto infrastructure, offered the promise of rapid advancement from menial work to management or even bona fide small business ownership — one of the excuses for keeping wages for entry-level work at poverty levels. Even as corporate franchisees emerged to buy up licenses for dozens of locations at a time, the franchise structure distanced particular sites from the international brand and preserved a simulacrum of community embeddedness.

Up-and-coming retail firms like Amway also used organizational methods to offer employees a taste of what the management literature sometimes called “simulated entrepreneurship.” Amway’s multilevel marketing structure flushed its liability downstream to its often-indebted sales force, but this organizational approach did, at least on paper, provide the opportunity to “build your own business.” Amway’s intensely evangelical Christian internal culture is infamous today. But it’s not as if — extrapolating from Frank’s story about Republican Party culture-war tactics — Amway used Christianity to get unwitting employees in the door to do its economic bidding. On the contrary, Amway’s history is a reminder of the deep intertwining of American Christian culture with economic values of hard work, personal responsibility, and self-ownership. At the end of his life, William Jennings Bryan himself was most famous not for his Populist advocacy but for his outspoken biblical literalism.

The most important post–New Deal retail firm was Walmart. Here too, as the historian Bethany Moreton has written, economic and cultural populism were inseparable. Walmart’s leaders understood the anxieties about proletarianization that its predominantly rural workforce had inherited from the Populist period. Managers worked diligently to encourage employees to conceive of themselves as “associates” rather than workers. They would not simply sell products but would “serve” customers, in an explicitly Christian fashion. Walmart’s practice of hiring wives to work in sales and husbands to work in distribution sought to reforge the family as an economic unit, as it had been before the late 19th-century wave of industrialization and incorporation. Wages were low, but the result was “always low” prices for the stores’ community-based clientele — including its workforce.

As Walmart expanded, the middle-class consumers of Sun Belt suburbia also came to benefit from its always low prices. For the cowboy capitalists, low prices were a hedge against government dependency. By supporting supply chain deregulation and resisting unionization and minimum-wage hikes, consumers could continue to enjoy the “American standard of living” without having to rely on government handouts or high wages attained through class struggle. Behind middle-class consumerism lay the producerism of the Populists’ favorite scripture verse: “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” Low prices were prices that the middle class could pay, ostensibly, with the sweat of their brow.

Walmart workers and shoppers were not loyal to Walmart “because of” Walmart’s cultural conservatism and “despite” its economic conservatism. Rather, Walmart formed a nexus where economic and cultural conservatism were inseparable and even indistinguishable. As with Amway and McDonald’s, Walmart’s strategy was masterminded by elite leaders capable of astonishing cynicism. But the cynicism of elite leaders does not entail, as Frank and other contemporary left-populists often imply, that the commitment of “ordinary working people” to institutions like Amway, McDonald’s, and Walmart — or the Republican Party — is shallower than it appears. Rather, conservative populism fed on the powerful compatibility between widely and firmly embraced cultural values and the economic interests of particular capitalists.

Like many white blue-collar workers, middle-class Sun Belters also dreamed the Populist dream of family capitalism. Instead of the independent trucker, their cultural heroes were the new class of billionaires that historian Steve Fraser calls “populist plutocrats.” These men were not anonymous corporate overlords but charismatic leaders of empires that they religiously kept in the family. Some of them, like Charles and David Koch and — yes — Donald Trump, inherited their fortunes. But others, like Sam Walton and Amway’s Richard DeVos, could convincingly mythologize themselves as self-made.

What the populist plutocrats held out was simultaneously cultural and economic. They offered a seductive glimpse of an economic order where even the most successful captains of industry were hardworking, personally invested owner-operators, not parasitic money manipulators. “Family values,” as Melinda Cooper has emphasized, were neoliberal economic values, and vice versa. Post–New Deal capitalism, its boosters argued, would be controlled neither by out-of-touch Washington bureaucrats nor by robotic, gray-flannel-suited managers, but by families embedded in their communities. This same logic functioned on the level of public policy: even icy-veined technocrats like the Chicago “human capital” prophet Gary Becker justified rollbacks to the welfare state on the grounds that families would have no choice but to pick up the slack, through debt if necessary, returning the family to the central place in the economic order it once occupied. These same family values were at the heart of the renewed plausibility and attractiveness of the conservative vision of work and success. When Sam Walton drove his old Ford pickup truck around Bentonville every day, it represented a promise that any Bentonville Ford driver could become Sam Walton. It was a cynical move, to be sure. But Walton’s gesture worked not just because liberal elites offered no alternatives but because it perfectly played on his employees’ deepest anxieties and beliefs.

[andrewrpierce]

“I spent two years researching the Christian Right. I traveled across the country, spending time in megachurches, creationist seminars, right-to-life retreats, and even took a course taught by D. James Kennedy in Florida called Evangelism Explosion. I conducted a few hundred interviews, and I met many evangelicals of good will and good intentions, but I came away believing that the leadership of the Christian Right cruelly manipulates the despair of its followers and poses a danger to our open society. Doctor James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the Christian Fascists. The warning, given to me more than three decades ago, came at a moment Pat Robertson and other radio and tele-evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations, and finally the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. It was hard at the time to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Fascists, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and Brownshirts. Their ideological heirs would wrap fascism in the Christian cross and the American flag and hold mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. Adams was not a man to use the word Fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained, interrogated by the Gestapo, and expelled from Germany. He left on a night train, with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase, to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so called "German Christian Church," which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer, and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge. Adams saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church. Similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability accompanied by economic decline, see American Fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the Open Society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil, nor the cold reality of how the world worked. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil (a fight that, for him, was a fundamental part of the Biblical call) would come from the Church or the liberal secular elite. Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to ethnic and religious minorities, as well as those who did not adhere to rigid sexual stereotypes. He watched the Nazis use "moral" values to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Thousands of volumes from the Institute's libraries were tossed into a bonfire. The assault was cheered by the German churches. Adams said that the GBLTQ community, Muslims, immigrants, and poor people of color would be the first deviants singled out by the Christian Right, but we would be the next. I remember thinking his warning was perhaps too apocalyptic. But nearly four decades later, the power brokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the White House, the judiciary, and major government departments. FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of the Family Research Council, gave 245 members of congress a perfect 100% for votes that support the agenda of the Christian Right. The Family Research Council, which called on its followers to pray for God to "vanquish the demonic," that's their quotes, "forces behind Trump's impeachment," is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group because of its campaigns to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. Trump has elevated members of the Christian Right to prominent positions of power, including Mike Pence to the Vice Presidency, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, William Barr as Attorney General, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and the tele-evangelist Paula White, who promises her donors their own personal angel, to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative. Frank Amedia, the Trump campaign's Liaison for Christian Policy, claims to have raised an aunt from the dead. And the Christian Right, which makes up as much of a quarter of the country, or close to 80 million people, has its own version of the Brownshirts: the four higher mercenary armies and private contractors amassed by people such as Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos. Reason, science, facts, and verifiable truth are useless weapons against this belief system. I think the Christian Right is best understood as what anthropologists will call a crisis cult. Crisis Cults arise in most collapsing societies. They promise, through magic, to recover the lost grandeur of a mythologized past. This magical thinking banishes doubt, anxiety, and feelings of dis-empowerment. Traditional social hierarchies and rules, including white, male supremacy, will be restored. Those blamed for our decline: intellectuals, artists, liberals, immigrants, undocumented workers, poor people of color, feminists, will be dis-empowered. America, freed from the contamination of these "degenerate forces," will be restored. The Christian Right propagates its magical thinking through a selective Biblical literalism. They hold up as sacrosanct Biblical passages that buttress their ideology and ignore or grossly misinterpret the ones that do not. They live in a binary universe. They see themselves as eternal victims, oppressed by dark and sinister groups seeking their annihilation. They alone know the will of God. They alone can fulfill God's will. They seek total cultural and political domination. The secular reality-based world, one where Satan, miracles, divine edicts, angels, and magic do not exist, destroyed their lives and their communities. This secular world took away their jobs and their futures. It destroyed the social bonds that gave them purpose, dignity, and hope. In their despair, they often succumbed to alcoholism, drug, gambling, and pornography addictions. They endured familial breakdowns, divorce, jail, evictions, unemployment, and domestic and sexual abuse. And then from the depths of suicidal despair, they suddenly discovered that God has a plan for them; God will save them; God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out His holy mission in the world, and to be rich, powerful, and happy. The only thing that saved them was their conversion, the realization that God had a plan for them, and would protect them. These believers were pushed by the wreckage caused by neoliberalism into the arms of charlatans. All who attempt to reach them through the rational language of fact and evidence are hated and ultimately feared, for they seek to force believers back into what they call the "culture of death" that nearly destroyed them. Trump has handed veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts, to the Christian Right. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices out of nine. Almost all of these justices were vetted by The Federalist Society and the Christian Right. Many have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country's largest non-partisan coalition of lawyers. Trump has moved to ban Muslim immigrants. He has rolled back Civil Rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. Trump was the first president to address the radical anti-choice March For Life event in person. He permits discrimination against LGBTQ community people in the name of "religious liberty." He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches which are tax exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His appointees routinely use Biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including: environmental deregulation, endless war against Muslims in the Middle East, tax cuts, and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private "Christian" schools. The iconography and language and symbols of American Nationalism are intertwined with the iconography, language and symbols of the Christian faith. Megapastors will often share Trump's narcissism, rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms. They make millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey on the despair and desperation of their congregations. They distort the Bible to champion unfettered capitalism, the cult of masculinity, the belief that violence can purge the world of evil, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious intolerance, anger, racism, and conspiracy theories. Those within the evangelical movement, such as the editors of the magazine Christianity Today, who have attempted to state the obvious about Trump, that he is corrupt, inept, and immoral, and should be removed from office, are brutally attacked. Nearly 200 evangelical leaders, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former representative Michelle Bachman, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Ralph Reed, signed a joint letter denouncing the Christianity Today editorial. Evangelical Christians who criticize Trump are as swiftly disappeared as Republican politicians who criticize Trump. Trump received 80% of the white, evangelical vote in the 2016 presidential election, and in a poll during the House impeachment proceedings, 90% of evangelicals said they opposed the impeachment and ouster of the president. Among Republicans who identified as white evangelical protestants, that number rises to 99%.”

-Chris Hedges, 24 Feb 2020 

#chris hedges #christian right #dominionism #religion #fundamentalism

[ddstantheman]

The Church

Welcome to my first blog! Hold on and sit tight! This first blog captures some of my pet peeves  when it comes to our North American evangelical practices. Don't misinterpret my words, I love the Word, the church and am confident that hell will not prevail! If I were to be critical of some of the modern Bible translations it is that they wrap their translation through the lens of political correctness or a hidden agenda. They strip the maleness characteristic out of the text when the cultural bias at the time clearly favoured men as women were considered chattel. Their efforts to sanitize the Holy text reduces the radical nature of who Jesus is. And how He came to set all people, including women, free from oppression. The King James version chose the word "church" instead of congregation. The word church is so bastardized from the pulpit that some believers think you can actually commute to a church. The abuse of the word has allowed denominations to spring up dividing the body of Christ even to the point where congregations will verbally attack neighbouring brothers and sisters in Christ. Some people will actually try to justify this sad state of affairs by calling the congregations "tribes" purporting that this situation is somehow what God intended. The church is one body, one people, brothers and sisters justified and glorified by our Savior Jesus Christ. Any other form of or use of the word is blasphemy and from the depths of hell! The word "sanctuary" too gets abused on a Sunday. Allowing the idea that four walls and hard oak seats are somehow special is anathema to New Testament thinking. We enact programs as the infamous "plan to protect"to dance to the insurance companies tune and neglect the true sanctuary which of course is the people. On a Sunday we have a chief executive officer, the board, the members, the headquarters  and the tax! It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out why so few are walking into the building! Of course I use hyperbolic language but consider the underlining truth. Personally I enjoy attending a building and worshiping our Heavenly Father, it is the highlight of my week! I also strongly believe that we Christians are called to corporate worship however I bemoan the fact how North American believers have fallen asleep allowing  the world to be the template for the Bride. Our bodies are the temple and sanctuary of the Holy Spirit. I know dispensationalists out there want to re-establish the old temple and the temple sacrificial system but I believe what Jesus did on the cross was everything. Our infinite God paid for our infinite sins once and for all time! The Covenant of works and the Davidic Covenant is fulfilled. The Covenant of Grace reigns supreme in and through Christ. The basic mistake dispensationalists make is that they interpret the New Testament through the lens of the old. We must do precisely the opposite. However this mistake is not fatal! Only blaspheming the Holy Spirit is fatal! Therefore rejoice with me brothers and sisters of Christ the last days are upon us, the parousia awaits, Come Lord Jesus! Come! Messiah! Come walk with me through the Book of Matthew in my next blog. I look forward to your comments and our journey of learning together because I certainly do not pretend to know it all. Yours Truly D Stan

#church #jesús #faith #spirit #christian #christ #dispensationalism

[confrontingbabble-on]

“It stood by as the core Gospel message—concern for the poor and the oppressed—was perverted into a magical world where God and Jesus showered believers with material wealth and power. The white race, especially in the United States, became God’s chosen agent.

Imperialism and war became divine instruments for purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism, because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the immoral to poverty and suffering, became shorn of its inherent cruelty and exploitation.

The iconography and symbols of American nationalism became intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the Christian faith. The mega-pastors, narcissists who rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms, make millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey on the mounting despair and desperation of their congregations, victims of neoliberalism and deindustrialization.

These believers find in Donald Trump a reflection of themselves, a champion of the unfettered greed, cult of masculinity, lust for violence, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious intolerance, anger, racism and conspiracy theories that define the central beliefs of the Christian right.

Trump has filled his own ideological void with Christian fascism. He has elevated members of the Christian right to prominent positions, including Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the televangelist Paula White to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative. More importantly, Trump has handed the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices out of nine. Almost all of these judges were, in effect, selected by the Federalist Society and the Christian right. Many of the extremists who make up the judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.

Trump has moved to ban Muslim immigrants and rolled back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He has stripped away LGBTQ rights. He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His appointees throughout the government routinely use biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private “Christian” schools. 

I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School with James Luther Adams, who had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. Adams witnessed the rise there of the so-called Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He warned us about the disturbing parallels between the German Christian Church and the Christian right. Adolf Hitler was in the eyes of the German Christian Church a volk messiah and an instrument of God—a view similar to the one held today about Trump by many of his white evangelical supporters. Those demonized for Germany’s economic collapse, especially Jews and communists, were agents of Satan. Fascism, Adams told us, always cloaked itself in a nation’s most cherished symbols and rhetoric. Fascism would come to America not in the guise of stiff-armed, marching brownshirts and Nazi swastikas but in mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, the biblical sanctification of the state and the sacralization of American militarism. Adams was the first person I heard label the extremists of the Christian right as fascists. Liberals, he warned, as in Nazi Germany, were blind to the tragic dimension of history and radical evil. They would not react until it was too late.

Trump’s legacy will be the empowerment of the Christian fascists. They are what comes next. For decades they have been organizing to take power. They have built infrastructures and organizations, including lobbying groups, schools and universities as well as media platforms, to prepare. They have seeded their cadre into the political system. We on the left, meanwhile, have seen our institutions and organizations destroyed or corrupted by corporate power.

The Christian fascists, as in all totalitarian movements, need a crisis, manufactured or real, in order to seize power. This crisis may be financial. It could be triggered by a catastrophic terrorist attack. Or it could be the result of a societal breakdown from our climate emergency. The Christian fascists are poised to take advantage of the chaos, or perceived chaos. They have their own version of the brownshirts, the for-hire mercenary armies and private contractors amassed by Christian fascists such as Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos. The Christian fascists have seized control of significant portions of the judiciary and legislative branches of government. FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of the Family Research Council, gives 245 members of Congress a perfect 100% for votes that support the agenda of the Christian right. The Family Research Council, which has called on its followers to pray that God will vanquish the “demonic forces” behind Trump’s impeachment, is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group because of its campaigns to discriminate against the LGBTQ community.

The ideology of the Christian fascists panders in our decline to the primitive yearnings for the vengeance, new glory and moral renewal that are found among those pushed aside by deindustrialization and austerity. Reason, facts and verifiable truth are impotent weapons against this belief system. The Christian right is a “crisis cult.” Crisis cults arise in most collapsing societies. They promise, through magic, to recover the lost grandeur and power of a mythologized past. This magical thinking banishes doubt, anxiety and feelings of disempowerment. Traditional social hierarchies and rules, including an unapologetic white, male supremacy, will be restored. Rituals and behaviors including an unquestioning submission to authority and acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil will vanquish malevolent forces.

The Christian fascists propagate their magical thinking through a selective literalism in addressing the Bible. They hold up as sacrosanct biblical passages that buttress their ideology and ignore, or grossly misinterpret, the ones that do not. They live in a binary universe. They see themselves as eternal victims, oppressed by dark and sinister groups seeking their annihilation. They alone know the will of God. They alone can fulfill God’s will. They seek total cultural and political domination. The secular, reality-based world, one where Satan, miracles, destiny, angels and magic do not exist, destroyed their lives and communities. That world took away their jobs and their futures. It ripped apart the social bonds that once gave them purpose, dignity and hope. In their despair they often struggled with alcohol, drug and gambling addictions. They endured familial breakdown, divorce, evictions, unemployment and domestic and sexual violence. The only thing that saved them was their conversion, the realization that God had a plan for them and would protect them. These believers were pushed by a callous, heartless corporate society and rapacious oligarchy into the arms of charlatans. All who speak to them in the calm, rational language of fact and evidence are hated and ultimately feared, for they seek to force believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them.

We can blunt the rise of this Christian fascism only by reintegrating exploited and abused Americans into society, giving them jobs with stable, sustainable incomes, relieving their crushing personal debts, rebuilding their communities and transforming our failed democracy into one in which everyone has agency and a voice. We must impart to them hope, not only for themselves but for their children.

Christian fascism is an emotional life raft for tens of millions. It is impervious to the education, dialogue and discourse the liberal class naively believes can blunt or domesticate the movement. The Christian fascists, by choice, have severed themselves from rational thought. We will not placate or disarm this movement, bent on our destruction, by attempting to claim that we too have Christian “values.” This appeal only strengthens the legitimacy of the Christian fascists and weakens our own. We will transform American society to a socialist* system that provides meaning, dignity and hope to all citizens, that cares and nurtures the most vulnerable among us, or we will become the victims of the Christian fascists we created.”

Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers…

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/onward-christian-fascists/

* “There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them...” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

..."democratic socialism" is really social democracy, as found in much of Europe and especially in the Nordic countries.[19] In 2018, The Week suggested that there was a trend towards social democracy in the United States and highlighted elements of its implementation in the Nordic countries, suggesting that Sanders’ popularity was an element in favor of its possible growth in acceptance.”... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Bernie_Sanders

#nonreligious #atheist #agnostic #secular humanist #skeptic #Religion #Christianity #religious insanity

[cogitoergofun]

As a bishop of the church, I am troubled anytime I see Christianity used to justify the injustice, deception, violence and oppression that God hates. Even if Donald Trump had a perfect personal moral résumé, his policy agenda is an affront to God’s agenda to lift the poor and bless the marginalized. The distorted moral narrative these so-called Evangelicals for Trump have embraced is contrary to God’s politics, which have nothing to do with being a Democrat or Republican. But this misuse of religion is not new. It has a long history in the American story.

When the segregationist George Wallace faced the moral challenge of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement in 1960s Alabama, he also called upon religious leaders to vouch for him. “By no stretch of the imagination is George C Wallace a racist,” Dr Henry L Lyon, the pastor of Montgomery’s Highland Avenue Baptist church, testified. “He has shown fairness to all people, regardless of race or color,” the Rev RL Lawrence, a Methodist minister, concurred. They were vouching for the same Wallace who had infamously declared in his inaugural address: “Segregation yesterday, segregation today, segregation forever!” But they had adopted a false morality that framed King as an “agitator” and Wallace as a fair-minded defender of tradition and God’s good order.

This misuse of religion is, sadly, an American tradition. Colonists who cheated Native Americans out of land and forced enslaved Africans to build a new nation worshiped a God whose demand for justice troubled their conscience. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, acknowledging the basic moral contradiction between the principle of liberty he had appealed to in the Declaration of Independence and the practice of bondage that his plantation and the economy surrounding it depended upon. This conflict did not only exist within Jefferson’s soul. It divided every major denomination of the American church in the 19th century.

#religion #us politics #donald trump

[arcticdementor]

Sohrab Ahmari, who previously wrote a decent takedown of the exemplar of nominative determinism Max Boot, but who I’ve otherwise never heard of before, wrote an article in First Things opposing “David Frenchism,” a “persuasion or a sensibility” that he names after the National Review writer who Bill Kristol named as the ideal #NeverTrump candidate for president.

The “Frenchist” disposition, according to Ahmari, is a nice, liberal one. It sees politics as a matter of procedure, institutions, and ‘decency’; it seeks to defend the conservative cause by appeal to the liberal logic of autonomy, and it inherits from its English nonconformist roots a “great horror … of the public power to advance the common good,” leading it to insist that political challenges be solved by the depoliticized measures of “personal renewal” and somehow-organic cultural change.

…

But the apparent endorsement of far-left political violence by American Interest writers is a manifestation of a broader failure on the right: its agreement to the now-bipartisan rule of pas d’ennemis à gauche, pas d’amis à droit. David French is quite willing to endorse intersectionality in the pages of Vox; but Donald Trump is too far. (As Liel Liebovitz pointed out, David French endorsed the Russiagate conspiracy theory.)

This rule, in fact, is part of what ‘Frenchist’ niceness means in practice. Civility and decency are all well and good in the abstract, but who defines them? To what extent can ‘Frenchists’ extricate themselves from the influence of those who insist that the leftist platform is a simple matter of civility and decency? Furthermore, why should the civility among lawyers that French advocates generalize outside the professional realm? What percentage of truly political victories, rather than the legal-procedural ones that French concerns himself with, were won by politeness alone? Our goal must not be to remain unfailingly polite as our losses pile up; it must be to win. Ahmari is right about this: decency is a tactic, and becoming attached to a tactic is a mistake. This doesn’t mean we ought to follow the left in, say, launching coordinated attacks on random children; what it means is that, at least in David Hines’s account of leftist tactics, perhaps those attacks wouldn’t have happened if the journalists had gotten a little more operant conditioning

…

Ahmari’s position, however, is equally untenable. Using the state to forcibly reorder the public square toward the (Christian if not specifically Catholic) “Highest Good” would require a higher level of religiosity, and, more importantly, a higher level of willingness to dispense with old American liberal principles, than can be found in America today, where only half of the population is even nominally Catholic or Evangelical, fewer than two fifths claim to go to church every week, and the single largest religious group is ‘none’. The integralist Adrian Vermeule has argued that the election of Trump demonstrates that the American political landscape can change on a dime; but that doesn’t imply it’s likely to change in that direction. It’s true that the Fifth Great Awakening, or the sixth or seventh ones, could produce mass conversions to Catholicism and usher in an integralist America, but it’s equally true that it could produce the revival of the cult of Tengri and the remythologization of the United States as the greatest steppe empire since the Yamnaya expansion. Get ahead of the curve  — buy your cowboy hats now!

…

But what else does the election of Trump represent? Ahmari positioned his article against ‘Frenchism’ as an explication of a manifesto of sorts that he signed after the 2016 election, which he and others took as a sign of the death of the pre-Trump conservative consensus; but this manifesto is less a comprehensive rethinking of American conservatism than a denunciation of free-market ‘fusionism’ by a religious, socially conservative faction of that consensus, which already had inclinations toward economic populism before Trump. Furthermore, Ahmari’s objection to ‘Frenchism’ is entirely concerned with the socon cause  —  remember what prompted his article!

How can this be said to be the message sent by the election of Donald Trump  — who, as French points out, hangs a Playboy cover on the wall of his office? If anything, the case is stronger for the opposite: for a reading of Trump’s election as signifying the complete collapse of the pre-Trump conservative consensus, the bankruptcy of both right-neoliberal Reaganomics and the ‘political Christianity’ of the Moral Majority, and the prospect (albeit a mostly unrealized one) of conservative reorientation toward worker-friendly economic pragmatism combined with social moderation, rejection of the ludicrous and corrosive bipartisan consensus on immigration, and insistence that America was not fundamentally illegitimate before 1968.

…

Establishment conservatism, it seems, is doubling down on its refusal to reckon with the realities of the American political landscape. It’s true that the ascendant left wants to revoke religious liberty, with the goal of subordinating Christianity (specifically Christianity) to the whims of the woke state; but this is only one facet of its platform. It also promotes a view of white Americans reminiscent of the ethnic hatred stoked against market-dominant minorities in certain countries in the 20th century (never mind that white Americans aren’t even the richest demographic!); claims that our country is fundamentally illegitimate; calls for the destruction of our borders; pushes for a credentialist economy in which no one can succeed without first obtaining permission from a committee of progressive priests, who will dispense it based more on loyalty to the cause than on any apolitical notion of merit; advocates for the abolition of the nation-state in favor of a tightly controlled and managed ‘inclusive society’ in which the inevitable ethnic conflict will provide the ruling structure with a bottomless well of opportunities to justify its own expansion; and seeks to subordinate everything, from colleges to corporations to open-source software organizations to knitting groups, to an arbitrary and intentionally byzantine code of conduct, in order to purge infidels from the whole of society. This is not ‘libertine,’ it is totalitarian. And the totality of that agenda must be opposed.

The conservative debate thus far has been premised on the idea that the proper response to Trump, the proper way forward, is to simply revitalize the platform of the Moral Majority. Not only does this fail to address many of the problems facing our country today ⁠— it has little, if anything, to say about immigration, which is necessarily the most pressing issue because its effects are permanent and irreversible  —  it offers little potential for attaining true hegemony. The conflict between moralists and libertines in America predates the United States itself and is unlikely to result in a decisive victory anytime soon (in other words, it’s Lindy), and it’s sufficiently orthogonal to the main dimension of American politics that there are strains of progressivism that have evolved to accommodate both. Many progressives even oppose drag!

But simply banning drag queens from California’s libraries won’t make America great again. The question of what will remains open, but here are some components of a new conservatism that will be necessary: an end to mass unskilled migration, stricter immigration controls, and an uncompromising defense of borders and the nation-state system; the establishment of policies and culture that support marriage, family formation, and homeownership; a serious drive to retake cultural hegemony from the progressives; a willingness to combat the conspiratorial demographic hatred which casts men as sub-rational pigs and whites as the nefarious, scheming villains of history; and the abandonment of the dead consensus of social conservatism and little else, in favor of a new nationalism that protects both Christian and ‘pagan’ Americans and works to preserve the civilization they have built.

#jacobite magazine #james giuran #david french #sohrab ahmari

[cksmart-world]

SMART BOMB

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

March 22, 2022

NOTHING UP HIS SLEEVE — OR ABOVE HIS COLLAR

Have you heard the news: Utah's great American freedom fighter and sleuth who couldn't find prostitutes at the Sundance Film Festival  — Attorney General Sean Reyes — is “considering” running against Sen. Mitt Romney in 2024. Reyes political skills are, shall we say, remarkable, given that his Midas touch often turns events into something that isn't exactly gold — more of a brownish hue. Shortly after the presidential election, Utah's AG scurried to Nevada to help Donald Trump's team investigate election “irregularities,” after every major U.S. news outlet had called the race for Biden. Nevada AG Aaron Ford politely told Reyes to “mind his own [f---ing] business.” In December 2020, Reyes joined a group of 16 other Republican state AGs in a lawsuit to overturn the results of the presidential election. Critics labeled it “dumb” and The Supreme Court rejected it out of hand. The hits just keep coming: In 2016, Reyes and the boys went undercover at Sundance in search of prostitutes. The Deseret News reported this: “They didn't find anything, but say they learned they might not be looking in the right places." Your tax dollars at work! You could be right, Wilson, maybe the Hawaiian shirts gave them away in that sea of black attire.

“I'D RATHER BE A RUSSIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT”

MAGA Russian lovers are having second thoughts — or are suddenly quiet — about their plutonic relationship with Vladdy “My Daddy” Putin. At CPAC this year, Lauren Witzke, said: “Russia is a Christian nationalist nation... I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.” In August 2018, two men appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer wearing T shirts that proclaimed, “I'd Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat.” After it went viral they said they were “just foolin' around.” Maybe, but evangelist Franklin Graham lauded the Russian dictator for “protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda [like we have here in the U.S.].” When Putin unleashed Russia's military might on Allepo, Syria, a World Heritage Site, reducing it to rubble, rightwing Christians applauded him for protecting Christianity. (We couldn't possibly make this up.) Tens of thousands of civilians were killed. Christian values, indeed. It's no secret that Donald Trump is a Putin toady and that evangelicals believe Trump to be heaven sent to save America from gays, heathens and Democrats. So what if Putin has to kill tens of thousands of innocents to save European Christendom. And please don't ask, what would Jesus do? That wouldn't be fair.

PROTECTING POLICE — CITIZENS, NOT SO MUCH

Utah's law and order lawmakers recently passed legislation that would deny public  access to some police records and that, no doubt, would impede accountability. Meanwhile, Republican legislators refuse to budge on the standard for use of deadly force: When an officer feels threatened or believes others are threatened he may use deadly force. This despite pleas from Salt Lake County D.A. Sim Gill that the law be overhauled. “We are at a point where a legitimately dangerous profession has protections in a disproportionate way to the expectations of our communities.” But hey, here in Utah, cops are trained to shoot first and ask questions later. Case in point: Dillon Taylor, 20, was shot dead outside a convenience store when a cop thought Taylor was about to shoot him. Taylor was not armed but according to Utah law the D.A. had no choice but to find the shooting justified. The civil suit brought by Taylor's family was tossed out of court. The list of tragedies goes on and on. D.A. Gill said the public needs accountability. The trend, however, is in the opposite direction. Republican state Rep. Paul Ray said if people want different outcomes they should lose the attitude. “We're making excuses for people, and I'm done making excuses for people.”

Post script — That's a wrap for another week here at Smart Bomb, where we're done making excuses for the Republican-dominated Utah Legislature and their pledge to take us back to the 1950s. Well, you do make a good point, Wilson, the 1950s are starting to look pretty good (except for civil rights). But remember, Chuck Berry didn't come around until 1955  — one of the first practitioners of rock 'n roll. He released “Maybellene” in 1955, “Roll Over Beethoven in '56, “Rock Roll Music” in '57 and “Johnny B. Goode in '58. And get this: “Johnny B. Goode” was launched into space in 1977 on NASA's Voyager 1 probe along with Mozart and Louis Armstrong — to give extraterrestrials a hint of who we are. You can image how Little Green Men might react when they hear: “Go go/Go Johnny go!/Go, go/Johnny B. Goode!” Of course, we can't ignore Elvis, who rode to fame in 1954 with his cover of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup's rhythm & blues ballad, “That's All Right.” He backed that up with “Hound Dog” in 1956, Big Mama Thornton's 1952 blues hit. The blues is the foundation for rhythm & blues, which, in turn, led to rock 'n roll and changed the world. Outer space? Maybe, if the Green Men dig “Rock Roll Music with a backbeat you can't lose it.”

Well Wilson, you might be driving a garbage truck today if it weren't for Chuck Berry, Elvis, Buddy Holly and the others. We've come along way and the music has been amazing and a magic balm for our troubled world. So why don't you and the guys in the band give our marvelous Attorney General Sean Reyes some balm for his troubles:

Moonlight over the alley Baby, where I come from There's a poison girl, poison girl

Sister do medicine business Three dollar down for the gun She's a poison girl, poison girl I be waiting uptown While she gone underground for a ride I be waiting uptown While she passes some trick on the side Well, I'm sitting here burning my money It worth nothing if only to score With that poison girl, poison girl There's a place and I know Anybody can go for their price There's a place and I know You be putting your soul up on ice Well, well, mama said, "Son, what is your hurry?" Mama did not even know what I have done For that poison girl, poison girl

(Poison Girl — Chris Whitley)

[thefederalistfreestyle]

Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the story of America (New Statesman):

[. . .] Because of the success of Hamilton – it has been sold out on Broadway since August 2015, won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is on tour in Chicago and Los Angeles – there is now an industry devoted to uncovering and explaining its references. Yet the sheer ebullience of the soundscape is not enough to explain why it became a hit. To understand that, we need to understand the scope of its ambition, which is nothing less than giving America a new origin story. “Every generation rewrites the founders in their own image,” says Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of a biography of Aaron Burr. “He [Miranda] rewrote the founders in the image of Obama, for the age of Obama.”

In doing so, Miranda created a fan base that mirrors the “Obama coalition” of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities. (When the musical first hit Broadway in 2015, some tickets went for thousands of dollars; others were sold cheaply in a daily street lottery or given away to local schoolchildren.) He also gave his audiences another gift. Just as Obama did in his 2008 campaign, Hamilton’s post-racial view of history offers Americans absolution from the original sin of their country’s birth – slavery. It rescues the idea of the US from its tainted origins.

[. . .]

There is, of course, a great theatrical tradition of “patriotic myth-making”, and it explains another adjective that is frequently applied to Hamilton: Shakespearean. England’s national playwright was instrumental in smearing Richard III as a hunchbacked child-killer, portraying the French as our natural enemies and turning the villainous Banquo of Holinshed’s Chronicles into the noble figure claimed as an ancestor by the Stuarts, and therefore Shakespeare’s patron James VI and I.

James Shapiro, a professor of English literature at Columbia University, New York, and the author of several books on Shakespeare, first saw the musical during its early off-Broadway run. “It was the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what I imagine it must have been like to have attended an early performance of, say, Richard III, on the Elizabethan stage,” he tells me. “But this time, it was my own nation’s troubled history that I was witnessing.”

Shapiro says that Shakespeare’s first set of history plays deals with the recent past, ending with Richard III; he then went back further to create an English origin story through Richard II and Henry V. “Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture,” he adds. “He might, like Shakespeare, have gone back a century and explored the civil war. But I suspect that he saw that to get at the deeper roots of what united and divided Americans meant going back even further, to the revolution. No American playwright has ever managed to explain the present by reimagining so inventively that distant past.” And where Shakespeare had Holinshed’s Chronicles, Miranda had Ron Chernow.

There are Shakespearean references throughout his play. In “Take a Break”, Hamilton writes to his sister-in-law, Angelica:

They think me Macbeth and ambition is my folly. I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain. Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane.

Shapiro says that these “casual echoes of famous lines” are less important than the lessons that Miranda has taken about how to write history. “Another way of putting it is that anyone can quote Shakespeare; very few can illuminate so brilliantly a nation’s past and, through that, its present.”

[. . .]

I love Hamilton – I think the level of my nerdery about it so far has probably made that clear – but I find it fascinating that its overtly political agenda has been so little discussed, beyond noting the radicalism of casting black actors as white founders. Surely this is the “Obama play”, in the way that David Hare’s Stuff Happens became the “Bush play” or The Crucible became the theatre’s response to McCarthyism. It’s just unusual, in that its response to the contemporary mood is a positive one, rather than sceptical or scathing. (And it has an extra resonance now that a white nationalist is in the White House. One of the first acts of dissent against the Trump regime was when his vice-president, Mike Pence, attended the musical in November 2016 and received a polite post-curtain speech from the cast about tolerance. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behaviour,” tweeted Trump, inevitably.)

Hamilton tries to make its audience feel OK about patriotism and the idealism of early America. It has, as the British theatre director Robert Icke put it to me this summer, “a kind of moral evangelism” that is hard for British audiences to swallow. In order to achieve this, we are allowed to see Hamilton’s personal moral shortcomings, but the uglier aspects of the early days of America still have to be tidied away.

There’s a brief mention, for instance, of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings – whom he systematically raped over many years. But the casting of black and Hispanic actors makes it hard for the musical to deal directly with slavery, and so the issue only drips into the narrative rather than being confronted. There’s a moment after the battle of Yorktown when “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom – not yet”. Another sour note is struck in one of the cabinet rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, in which the former notes acidly, “Your debts are paid cos you don’t pay for labour.”

In early workshops, there was a third cabinet battle over slavery – and the song is available on The Hamilton Mixtape, a series of reworkings and offcuts from the musical. When a proposal is brought before Washington to abolish slavery, Hamilton tells the cabinet:

This is the stain on our soul and democracy A land of the free? No, it’s not. It’s hypocrisy To subjugate, dehumanise a race, call ’em property And say that we are powerless to stop it. Can you not foresee?

Ultimately, though, the song was cut. “No one knew what to do about it, and [the founding fathers] all kicked it down the field,” Miranda explained to Billboard in July 2015. “And while, yeah, Hamilton was anti-slavery and never owned slaves, between choosing his financial plan and going all in on opposition to slavery, he chose his financial plan. So it was tough to justify keeping that rap battle in the show, because none of them did enough.”

***

In March 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to the White House. This time, one of the numbers he performed was a duet from the musical called “One Last Time”, sung with the original cast member Christopher Jackson playing George Washington. After Alexander Hamilton tells the first US president that two of his cabinet have resigned to run against him, Washington announces that he will step down to leave the field open.

It is the political heart of the play’s myth-making, comparable to Nelson Mandela leaving Robben Island. The decorated Virginian veteran was the only man who could unite the fractious revolutionaries after they defeated the British. Washington could have become dictator for life; instead, he chose to create a true democracy. “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on./It outlives me when I’m gone.”

For a nation just beginning to think that Trump could really, actually become its president, seeing the incumbent acknowledge that his time was nearly over was a powerful moment. For Obama watching it in the audience, it must have felt like his narrative had come full circle.

Towards the end of the song, Hamilton begins to read out the words of the farewell address he has written, and Washington joins in, singing over the top of them. It was a technique cribbed from Will.i.am’s 2008 Obama campaign video, in which musicians and actors sing and speak along to the candidate’s “Yes, we can” speech.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had written, “I learnt to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

This was the promise of his presidency: that there was not a black America or a white America, a liberal America or a conservative America, but, as he said in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “a United States of America”. The man who followed him clearly thinks no such thing, but nonetheless the nation must learn to move on.

In his farewell address in January 2017, Obama returned to the “Yes, we can” speech, using its words as the final statement on his presidency:

I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: yes, we can. Yes, we did.

For the playwright JT Rogers, this is the true triumph of Hamilton – giving today’s multiracial America a founding myth in which minorities have as much right to be there as Wasps. It is political “in the sense of reclaiming the polis” – the body of citizens who make up a country. “The little village we live in outside the city, everyone in the middle school knows the score verbatim,” Rogers adds. “They recite it endlessly and at length, like Homer.”

the full long-read here!

#hamilton #meta #u.s. politics #obama #new statesman #history #shakespeare

[newstfionline]

Saturday, January 30, 2021

US jobless claims drop; still at 847,000 as pandemic rages (AP) The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell but remained at a historically high 847,000 last week, a sign that layoffs keep coming as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage. Last week’s claims dropped by 67,000, from 914,000 the week before, the Labor Department said Thursday. Before the virus hit the United States hard last March, weekly applications for jobless aid had never topped 700,000. Overall, nearly 4.8 million Americans received traditional state unemployment benefits the week of Jan. 16. That is down from nearly 5 million the week before and far below a staggering peak of nearly 25 million in May when the virus brought economic activity to a near halt. There is optimism that COVID-19 vaccines will end the health crisis and help stabilize the economy, but that effort is moving forward haltingly and right now, the job market is stressed. Since February, the United States has lost 9.8 million jobs, including 140,000 in December.

Biden faces scrutiny over reliance on executive orders (AP) President Joe Biden and aides are showing touches of prickliness over growing scrutiny of his heavy reliance on executive orders in his first days in office. The president in just over a week has already signed more than three dozen executive orders and directives aimed at addressing the coronavirus pandemic as well as a gamut of other issues including environmental regulations, immigration policies and racial justice. Biden has also sought to use the orders to erase foundational policy initiatives by former President Donald Trump, such as halting construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and reversing a Trump-era Pentagon policy that largely barred transgender people from serving in the military. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that Biden’s early reliance on executive action is at odds with the Democrat’s pledge as a candidate to be a consensus builder. Biden on Thursday framed his latest executive actions as an effort to “undo the damage Trump has done” by fiat rather than “initiating any new law.” Earlier in the day, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield bristled at the criticism of Biden’s executive orders in a series of tweets, adding, “Of course we are also pursuing our agenda through legislation. It’s why we are working so hard to get the American Rescue Plan passed, for starters.”

Christianity on display at Capitol riot sparks new debate (AP) The Christian imagery and rhetoric on view during this month’s Capitol insurrection are sparking renewed debate about the societal effects of melding Christian faith with an exclusionary breed of nationalism. The rioters who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, leading to federal charges against more than 130 people so far, included several people carrying signs with Christian messages, and video showed one man in a fur hat and horns leading others in a prayer inside the Senate chamber. The rise of what’s often called Christian nationalism has long prompted pushback from leaders in multiple denominations, but in the immediate wake of the insurrection, other Christian leaders spoke out to denounce what they saw as the misuse of their faith to justify a violent attack on a seat of government. Russell Moore, president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that when he saw a “Jesus Saves” sign displayed near a gallows built by rioters, “I was enraged ... This is presenting a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ that isn’t the gospel and is instead its exact reverse.” The Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, cited the corrosive effects of “a convergence of a nationalist identity and a Christian identity.” “Certainly I love our country, and as the son of immigrant parents I am deeply grateful for the hope this nation represents,” Kim said. “But as a Christian, my highest allegiance is to Christ.” Yet some supporters of former President Donald Trump say that denunciations of Christian nationalism are a way of attacking them politically. Former Rep. Allen West, now chairman of the Texas GOP, said on a Tuesday panel with several other religious conservatives sponsored by the group My Faith Votes that the term is used against those who “don’t conform to a progressive, socialist ideological agenda.”

Bernie Sanders’ mittens, memes help raise $1.8M for charity (AP) About those wooly mittens that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders wore to the presidential inauguration, sparking endless quirky memes across social media? They’ve helped to raise $1.8 million in the last five days for charitable organizations in Sanders’ home state of Vermont, the independent senator announced Wednesday. The sum comes from the sale of merchandise with the Jan. 20 image of him sitting with his arms and legs crossed, clad in his brown parka and recycled wool mittens. Sanders put the first of the so-called “Chairman Sanders” merchandise, including T-shirts, sweatshirts and stickers, on his campaign website Thursday night and the first run sold out in less than 30 minutes, he said. More merchandise was added over the weekend and sold out by Monday morning, he said. “Jane and I were amazed by all the creativity shown by so many people over the last week, and we’re glad we can use my internet fame to help Vermonters in need,” Sanders said in a written statement.

No Justice, No Peace (Foreign Policy) While headlines may be zeroing in on the latest COVID-19 variants to arise in Latin America, another story—with ramifications for peace and justice in the whole region—took a key step forward this week. After an investigation spanning more than two years, Colombia’s transitional justice court charged eight former guerrilla commanders for crimes they committed during the pre-2016 civil conflict, including kidnapping, homicide, forced disappearance, and sexual violence. Two of the defendants are sitting senators, positions they were granted as part of the peace deal. Under that 2016 agreement, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels agreed to demobilize and undergo investigation in exchange for concessions such as reduced criminal sentences, physical protection, and seats in Congress. That first concession is what is in play now. The ex-commanders can either recognize the crimes and take a five-to-eight-year sentence or face longer sentences of up to 20 years. The defendants’ and other political actors’ responses to these charges—part of the first of seven umbrella cases at the war crimes tribunal—will constitute a temperature check on Colombia’s fragile peace process.

UK PM Johnson ‘immensely proud’ as visa offer for Hong Kong citizens launches (Reuters) Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday hailed a new visa scheme that offers qualifying Hong Kong citizens a route to British citizenship—a programme launched in response to China’s new security laws in the former colony. The scheme, first announced last year, opens on Sunday and allows those with “British National (Overseas)” status to live, study and work in Britain for five years and eventually apply for citizenship. Britain says it is fulfilling a historic and moral commitment to the people of Hong Kong, after accusing China of breaching the terms of a 1997 handover by introducing security laws that London says are being used to silence dissent. The 250 pound ($340) visa could attract over 300,000 people and their dependents to Britain and generate up to 2.9 billion pounds net benefit to the British economy over the next five years, according to government forecasts. It is still highly uncertain how many people will actually take up the offer. Government estimates show that 2.9 million and a further 2.3 million dependents will be eligible to come to Britain.

Macron weighs up a third lockdown despite signs the French ‘can’t take it anymore’ (AFP) Amid risks of a push back from a population wearied by successive restrictions, the French government is mulling tougher anti-Covid curbs—including a third lockdown—after conceding a nightly curfew was failing to suppress the spread of the virus. When it comes to deciding on new measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic, French President Emmanuel Macron and his government are walking a tightrope. Should another nationwide lockdown—the third in less than 12 months—be quickly imposed on the French, as scientists are advocating? Or should the government wait a few more weeks, or even opt for a less strict approach, so as not to alienate part of the population? It is a decision that has left the state’s leaders in a quandary. The French, like so much of the rest of the world, are increasingly succumbing to a generalised state of weariness after nearly a year of living under Covid-19 restrictions. Frustration and fatigue have set in after almost a year in which ordinary lives have been upended. Recent events in the Netherlands, where a protest movement and riots took place after the announcement of a Covid-19 curfew last weekend, would not have escaped Macron’s attention. The police arrested 250 people on Sunday evening and another 70 on Monday. Prime Minister Mark Rutte called the riots “the worst in 40 years”, in a country that has not seen a curfew since the Second World War. At the same time in France, the hashtag “#JeNeMeReconfineraiPas” (#I will not go back into lockdown) appeared on Twitter, where it went viral with more than 40,000 shares. Some of the posts even invited civil disobedience.

Italian grandmother finds treasure at home thanks to confinement (Worldcrunch) The story began grimly, with an all too familiar ring: Another Italian grandmother had tested positive for COVID-19. At the age of 98, Nonna Maria was at particularly high risk in one of countries hit hardest by the pandemic—and though she had only developed light symptoms, doctors told her to remain at home in “maximum isolation.” But it was while in quarantine last November, that this COVID story would take a very different twist: the Nonna (“grandmother”) found a fortune hidden in her apartment in eastern Rome, Italian daily Corriere della Sera reports. Without much else to do in lockdown, Maria had set out to organize her memorabilia and tidy up her apartment. It was in the hidden compartment of an old sewing machine that she found a 1986 government bond that she had completely forgotten about. Her late husband, a former army official, had decided to put his savings into an Italian Post bond originally worth 50 million Italian lira (26,000 euros), before hiding it there to protect it from burglars. An ongoing legal investigation will confirm the bond’s present value. The Italian Post has already offered 200,000 euros, although some have questioned the math and say she could be due as much as half a million, or about 19 times the amount of the initial investment. And the best bit of good fortune: Nonna Maria had fully recovered from COVID-19.

In Afghanistan, Follow the White High-Tops and You’ll Find the Taliban (NYT) The unassuming white leather high-top sneakers with green-and-yellow trim are a best seller for a roughly half-dozen shoe vendors in a sprawling bazaar in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. But they are not in demand because they’re the latest fashion trend. For many Afghans, the sneakers evoke only one emotion: fear. That’s because they’re beloved by Taliban fighters as a status symbol. In Afghanistan they’ve been worn by rifle-wielding insurgents for decades—from the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s to the U.S.-led war that began in 2001. The sneakers have become synonymous with violence, and especially so on the feet of the Taliban. Even in the heart of Afghanistan’s most populated cities, including the capital of Kabul, the shoes evoke a certain sense of dread. “I have seen these shoes worn by the Taliban many times,” Said Mar Jan, a resident of Khost city in Afghanistan’s mountainous east, said. Government militia members, some security forces, criminals and people in rural areas also buy and wear them.

Wake-up call for elite as COVID-19 floods Zimbabwe’s hospitals, killing rich and poor (Reuters) When Zimbabwe’s rich and powerful get sick, they often go abroad in search of the best treatment money can buy; ousted President Robert Mugabe died in a hospital in Singapore in 2019. With travel curtailed by the coronavirus, that luxury is not available, exposing the elite to a truth the majority has long known: Zimbabwe’s health system has been crumbling for years and is now struggling to cope with a spike in COVID-19 cases. Anger among overwhelmed medics is adding to broader public dissatisfaction with President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who pledged an economic revival after he took over from Mugabe following a coup in 2017. “It’s a rude awakening to the government and to the politicians,” said Norman Matara, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights. “If you have decades of continuously destroying your public health system, and then now you have a pandemic, you cannot then overturn that decay ... in one year or in six months.”

Bison rangers (Foreign Policy) As U.K. conservationists plan to introduce European bison to the county of Kent, they are seeking Britain’s first-ever bison rangers. Wild bison—Europe’s largest land mammals—haven’t resided in Kent for millennia. Moved from the Netherlands, Romania, and Poland, the animals will help manage the Kent woodlands. Stan Smith, who works for the Kent Wildlife Trust, told Reuters that while the ideal applicant for the job should be accustomed to animal behavior, they were not expected to have experience with bison, “because you can’t until now.”

#headlines #news

[dailynewswebsite]

Donald Trump is hardly the ‘Republican Jesus’

U.S. President Donald Trump staged a go to in entrance of St. John's Church June 1 in Washington after authorities cleared protestors from the world, prompting the bishop overseeing the church to precise outrage. (AP Picture/Patrick Semansky)

It’s but unknown how U.S. President Donald Trump’s makes an attempt to place himself because the Christian candidate of selection will affect Christian voters in the US — and the way Democrats’ makes an attempt to talk to Christians could sway earlier Trump voters or these not publicly declaring their intentions.

‘Republican Jesus: How the Proper has Rewritten the Gospels’ (College of California Press)

“Dems need to shut your church buildings down, completely,” Trump tweeted in early October. Just a few days earlier, his son, Eric Trump, declared that his dad “actually saved Christianity.”

These statements match a wider sample: Trump has referred to as himself “the chosen one,” proclaimed that God is “on our aspect” and warned that Biden will “damage the Bible, damage God.”

The Trump administration and its Christian supporters have been utilizing Christianity to attract battle strains on this high-stakes election. This Republican political technique that makes use of Christian language to solid Trump as a divinely appointed protector of Christians warrants extra scrutiny than it’s obtained.

In my e book, Republican Jesus, I determine key tendencies in the way in which at the moment’s right-wing influencers interpret the Bible: they view Jesus as a prophet of free-market capitalism who opposes taxes and is in opposition to any regulation that helps social welfare applications, protects employees or prevents discrimination.

Sister Quincy Howard, centre, a Dominican nun, protests President Donald Trump at Saint John Paul II Nationwide Shrine, June 2, in Washington, after the president staged a go to to a church with a bible after authorities cleared the world of protesters. (AP Picture/Jacquelyn Martin)

Greater than faith

The Trump administration and their Christian supporters promote a type of Christianity that students name “Christian nationalism.” That’s an ideology that isn’t nearly faith, however “consists of assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, together with divine sanction for authoritarian management and militarism,” in line with sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.

They’ve demonstrated with survey information that about half of Individuals help some type of the concept that America is, and must be, a Christian nation. Christian nationalists are particularly keen on boundaries — not simply partitions, but additionally social boundaries that solid liberals as outsiders.

These sociologists say about 20 per cent of Individuals are “ambassadors,” an overwhelmingly white group that insists the U.S. has at all times been and should stay Christian. One other 30 per cent are “accommodators,” who lean towards supporting Christian nationalism however maintain considerably extra ambivalent views (for instance, they are saying that “Christian values” ought to affect society however would possibly permit that non-Christians additionally advance these values).

When pro-Trump Christians use the language of Christianity beneath siege, their foremost goal is to courtroom the votes of those “accommodators.”

Company backing

As historian Kevin M. Kruse argues, “the assumption that America is essentially and formally a Christian nation originated within the 1930s when businessmen enlisted non secular activists of their combat in opposition to FDR’s New Deal.” These corporate-funded conservatives claimed that the social security internet breaks the commandment to not steal — that the federal government steals taxes from people to reward the indolent.

They solid Christianity because the free-market antidote to “pagan stateism”: a menace they created to conflate progressive types of Christianity with communism, socialism and Nazism.

Dogmatic adherence to free-market capitalism and restricted authorities is the frequent thread within the historical past of the American Christian proper. By this logic, anybody who favours a extra regulated type of capitalism assaults Christianity.

Within the Civil Rights period, some non secular conservatives insisted that the desegregation of public colleges was authorities overreach and a risk to non secular freedom. Since Roe vs. Wade, they’ve characterised abortions as the federal government robbing unborn residents of their rights.

Politics of exclusion

On Sept. 26, Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and among the many most influential pro-Trump evangelicals, hosted an enormous prayer march that drew hundreds to Washington, D.C.

The printed’s chorus was “this isn’t a political occasion, however a prayer occasion.” But audio system repeatedly invoked the parable that America was based as a Christian nation because the march proceeded on a path by way of the Nationwide Mall (with no social distancing and restricted masks).

U.S. President Donald Trump with Rev. Franklin Graham after a funeral service for Billy Graham, in Charlotte, N.C., March 2018.‘ (AP Picture/Chuck Burton)

It was scheduled simply earlier than Trump’s announcement of a conservative Catholic choose who has ties to a charismatic and secretive Christian group as his Supreme Courtroom nominee later that day.

Each speaker was a vocal Trump supporter, Vice-President Mike Pence made a “shock go to,” and marchers wore each “Make America Nice Once more” and “Let’s Make America Godly Once more” hats and chanted “4 extra years!” Tony Perkins, president of the Household Analysis Council, prayed for regulation enforcement as a result of “lawlessness has been unleashed” in America — an indictment of the Black Lives Matter protests.

A political technique

It might be apparent that American Christian Democrats and a few Christians are outraged by pro-Trump Christians. However as an American educating Christianity at a public college in Canada, I’ve famous that plenty of my college students and colleagues who determine as “evangelicals” or “conservatives” are equally outraged by how Trump’s high evangelical advisers cherry-pick and deform biblical verses to justify xenophobic immigration insurance policies and restrictions on the federal government’s position in regulating well being care, environmental safety, gun management, employment and the social security internet.

Whereas conservative Christians outdoors the U.S. are likely to share the identical “household values” positions (conventional marriage, pro-life) as conservative American Christians, they’re much less usually inclined to agree with their financial conservatism.

The Christian nationalism and financial conservatism advocated by Trump could be perplexing to Christians unfamiliar with the American Christian proper’s historical past of studying the Bible as a blueprint for unfettered free-market capitalism on the expense of the poor. Within the New Testomony, in spite of everything, Jesus calls on the wealthy to promote their possessions and provides them to the poor, and speaks of loving one’s neighbours and enemies.

To some who advocate Jesus’s platform of social justice, advancing totally different views within the language of Christianity can warrant being referred to as a “pretend Christian” or a deluded devotee of the “cult of Trump.” I warning in opposition to these labels, nonetheless, since such exclusionary rhetoric diverts consideration from how the American proper is busy redefining what it means to be “Christian” for their very own political agenda.

The Rev. William J. Barber speaks throughout a rally protesting in opposition to President Donald Trump’s insurance policies in Washington, in June 2019.

Shaping the election?

Democrats’ efforts to problem the suitable’s try to personal Christian identification and values might be important within the ultimate days of the marketing campaign. Within the vice-presidential debate, Kamala Harris acknowledged: “Joe Biden and I are each folks of religion” in response to Mike Pence’s insinuation that Democrats are attacking Christianity. If it weren’t for the eye the suitable’s influencers obtain, Harris wouldn’t have needed to make this assertion.

The Poor Folks’s Marketing campaign: A Nationwide Name for Ethical Revival is asking for “coming collectively to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the warfare economic system, and the distorted ethical narrative of non secular nationalism.” Christian activists Rev. Dr. William J. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis helm this motion organized on the idea of values. It’s supported by interfaith our bodies like The Islamic Society of North America and the Motion Centre on Reform Judiasm.

In the meantime, the mainstream media, politically average and liberal Christian leaders and progressives on the entire should maintain the Christian proper accountable for his or her exclusionary doublespeak and their extremely selective readings of the Bible and American historical past.

Tony Keddie receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Analysis Council of Canada.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/donald-trump-is-hardly-the-republican-jesus/ via https://growthnews.in

#Growth News

[glittergummicandypeach]

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius | Religion Dispatches

Ralph Reed’s new book, For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump (published by Simon & Schuster in March 2020), doesn’t devote much energy to defending Trump’s moral character or articulating his role as an instrument chosen by God to save Christians. Instead, the notorious conservative lobbyist, evangelical apologist, and founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition doubles down on the toxic argument that Trump is an unlikely ally in the Christian struggle for religious freedom. 

During the Clinton presidency, Reed, then executive director of the Christian Coalition, was a fierce watchdog for presidential morality, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez has noted in Jesus and John Wayne. “We care about the conduct of our leaders,” Reed asserted, “and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.” Reed has undergone an about-face: he doesn’t apply the ethics by which he judged Clinton to Trump. Indeed, his book pivots from the usual right-wing biblical justifications for supporting Trump to fully embracing the president’s immorality as an opportunity for the advancement of conservative Christianity. 

Instead of an anointed instrument of God like the Persian king Cyrus, Trump appears in Reed’s book as—hold on to your mask—the Roman emperor Tiberius, the last hope of the apostle Paul, an embattled Christian citizen. Here’s how he puts it:

“Critics of Evangelicals today argue that we should spurn assistance from political leaders who are not perfect or have committed sins. But as a citizen of Rome, Paul pleaded for the help of the most disreputable political leaders the world has ever known. Did this signal he was a hypocrite or compromise his witness for Christ? Of course not. In fact, it did the opposite, and the Bible records that members of Herod’s and Caesar’s households became Christians as a result.”

“Tiberius Caesar was a corrupt, evil, and violent despot who routinely murdered his enemies and allowed their corpses to float down the Tiber River to intimidate his opponents in the Senate. He was also a sexual deviant and pedophile. This is to whom Paul appealed for assistance … because he took his rights as a Roman citizen seriously and treated them as sacred and inviolate. Because of Paul’s faithfulness, the message of salvation through Jesus Christ reached the court of Caesar, and the Bible records that many in the emperor’s household came to faith in Christ (Philippians 4:22).”

“If Paul could appeal to Tiberius, a reprobate and bloodthirsty emperor, then Christian Americans are fully justified in appealing to President Trump, the Supreme Court, and any other elected or appointed official on behalf of their constitutional rights.”

There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to the slaves and freedmen serving in the imperial bureaucracy throughout the empire, not the emperor’s palace or family in Rome.   

But one point here is so absurd and blatantly wrong that it deserves further comment. Tiberius was not the emperor to whom Paul appealed. Nero was! 

Tiberius reigned from 14–37 CE. Acts of the Apostles only refers to the emperor to whom Paul appealed after his arrest in Jerusalem by the generic title “Caesar,” but the other historical figures mentioned as part of Paul’s trials (especially Porcius Festus, who governed Judea beginning around 59 CE) leave no doubt that the emperor in question is none other than Nero (r. 54–68 CE). Later ancient Christian texts such as the Correspondence of Paul and Seneca, the Acts of Peter and Paul, and the Martyrdom of Paul all dramatize aspects of Paul’s encounter with Nero. 

Did Reed, one of the noisiest Bible-thumpers in Trump’s evangelical ensemble, mix up his emperors? Not a chance.

Reed had obvious motives for presenting Paul’s appeal to Tiberius as an analogy for the ideal Christian U.S. citizen’s support for Trump. He wanted to conjure up a Gentile ruler from the biblical world who was indisputably immoral but not as obviously chosen by God as Cyrus, the Persian king described as “anointed” by God to restore Israel from exile in Isaiah 45. Cyrus has enjoyed wide appeal as a model for conservative evangelicals’ understanding of Trump as a Gentile despot sent to save Israel. The origin of this explanation is often attributed to the xenophobic dominionist Lance Wallnau. 

This link has been examined from multiple angles by scholars like Sean Durbin, who has noted how this explanation resonates with Christian Zionists’ theological and political agenda to protect the state of Israel at all costs. Damon Berry has shown how this connection emerges in the conservative Christian consumer culture, with Wallnau selling products such as commemorative coins that associate Trump, the 45th president, with Cyrus, the messiah of Isaiah 45 (the 45 coincidence is rubbish; Cyrus is already praised in Isaiah 44:28 and the chapter divisions are a medieval imposition in any case).

Reed acknowledges the Cyrus theory and declares, “I have no particular view on that subject, but I have never made a similar claim—nor would I. God alone knows his heavenly purpose in elevating a leader.” He goes on to praise Esther and Daniel as biblical models who operated within the government of a Persian ruler to protect God’s people. But the problem with Daniel and Esther is that they were both Judean immigrants in foreign courts. With Paul, Reed could construct a Christian hero who relied on their citizenship to spread Christianity to the imperial court in Rome. This biblical model, however problematic (Paul was a Jewish Christ-follower and not definitively a Roman citizen), fits much better with Reed’s long-standing anti-immigrant positions.  

Reed found in Paul a clear model for the Christian U.S. citizen, but he could not have presented Nero as a model for Trump because Nero is remembered in traditional Christian narratives as a villain. As it turns out, things didn’t go so well when Citizen Paul appealed to Nero. This reviled emperor is notorious for executing the apostles Paul and Peter in the aftermath of the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE, supposedly the first systematic persecution of Christians (a fixture in the Christian “myth of persecution” whose historical basis is disputed by scholars). Nero had started the fire himself, some ancient authors alleged, to clear space for his new lavish palace, known as the Golden House. Writing half a century later, the historian Tacitus created the memorable image of Nero singing about the fall of Troy as the city burned, the basis of the expression that Nero “fiddled while Rome burned.”

Reed’s main defense of Trump is that he has kept his promises to protect Christian “freedoms” (read: privileges), so he could not by any means link Trump to an emperor notorious for blaming the Great Fire of Rome on Christians. 

Incidentally, linking Trump to Nero would also have given credence to the meme that went viral around the same time that Reed’s book came out. After Trump retweeted a curious meme of himself playing the violin back in March, a number of critics mocked him for acknowledging that he is like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns—a fiery critique of him golfing while numerous Americans, especially poor and racially marginalized Americans—died from COVID-19. 

Reed couldn’t associate Trump with a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he opted for Tiberius instead. This is an undeniable historical error. I wonder if Reed’s appeal to Tiberius might even have been influenced by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s bestselling book, Killing Jesus (2013). As I argue in my forthcoming book Republican Jesus, O’Reilly and Dugard also pay far more attention to Tiberius than one would expect. They do so, however, to portray Tiberius as an exemplar of Roman immorality in a way that linked him with what the authors considered the cultural abominations of contemporary U.S. liberals. 

Tiberius is best-known from an invective crafted by Suetonius, an author born twenty years after the emperor’s death and bent on legitimating the later emperor Hadrian as morally superior to his predecessors, as James Kim On Chong-Gossard has demonstrated. Among other depravities, Suetonius’s perverse version of Tiberius indulges in a game where young boys suck on his genitalia like minnows in a pool at his palace on the island of Capri. Reed takes the constructed immorality of this emperor as a factual model not for the sexual culture of liberals, as in Killing Jesus, but as a parallel for Trump. If Paul could have asserted his citizenship rights within the “law and order” government of Tiberius in order to convert the household of this sexual deviant, certainly the ideal Christian U.S. citizen could make inroads within the government of a morally bankrupt president like Trump.

If you’re thinking I’ve gone too far and should give Reed the benefit of the doubt—perhaps he just mixed up Tiberius and Nero (despite having an A.B. and Ph.D. in history)—here’s the rub: in June 2014, Reed reacted to Obama golfing in the midst of crises in Syria and Iraq with this metaphor: “The administration fiddles while Rome burns.”

Reed knows that Nero is the emperor traditionally associated with the Great Fire and Paul’s fatal execution in Rome. He deliberately distorted this biblical narrative to turn Paul into a heroic Christian citizen who could win over the government of an immoral emperor. So long as that immoral emperor isn’t a persecutor of Christians. 

This content was originally published here.