"Constitution be damned, just rule with an iron fist"

Matt Walsh-bot sez WUT??

This cheap Matt Walsh imitation seems nice, eh?

I do have to say, though, that when you feel forced to defend your call for a Caesar-like dictator as “descriptive” (what COULD happen) and not “prescriptive” (“what SHOULD happen), you’re already in dangerous territory.

I know little about Joel Webbon (and care even less about him), but I am concerned when people with a platform (in this case, a podcast) use it to proclaim why America needs a dictatorship.

When your reasons for declaring that America needs a dictatorship are

1. Americans are degenerates (I enthusiastically reject any standard that uses Webbon’s reasoning as a yardstick),

2. Men need to be governed (I’d argue this might be true for the idjits wearing red MAGA hats, but what do I know?),

3. The Constitution doesn’t work anymore, and

4. Webbon hasn’t gotten laid since the first Gulf War.

And the poor man’s Matt Walsh knows that the only way he’s going to get laid is in a dictatorship. No woman with even the barest shred of self-esteem would want anything to do with this Neanderthal of her own free will.

Earlier this month, Right Wing Watch posted a couple of clips of far-right pastor Joel Webbon laying out his Christian nationalist vision for America in which this nation is controlled by a Caesar-like dictator who “rules with an iron fist” and forces everyone to at least “pretend to be Christian.”

In response to Right Wing Watch’s post, Webbon dedicated an entire episode of his podcast to insisting that his call for dictatorship was being misrepresented because, he claimed, he was merely speaking descriptively (i.e., explaining what could happen) and not prescriptively (i.e., explaining what should happen).

We’re not sure we buy that defense, especially given Webbon’s explicit declaration that “men must be governed” and “you need a Caesar-type” dictator to do that governing could certainly be interpreted as a prescriptive statement.

Isn’t performative Christianity what Republicans are doing today? How would a “Caesar-like dictator” change that? And how does he propose to “force” Americans to at least “pretend to be Christian.” What would be the purpose of forcing people to go through the motions when that’s all it is?

I can’t help but wonder if Joel Webbon has thought this through. Is Donald Trump truly the “Caesar-like dictator” he wants? With all of his dementia-adjacent behavior and statements, unhinged rants, and complete lack of seriousness, how would a Trump Reich be an improvement?

Of course, Christian Nationalism is nothing but a combination of the worst of both words. It uses a bastardized, Christ-less Christianity to push a racist, misogynist, homophobic, America-First-Fuck-Everyone-Else nationalism. It’s the worst of the American ethos condensed into an ideology and “legitimized” with a patina of faux Christianity.

We are even less convinced by that defense after watching the rest of Webbon’s podcast as he very clearly laid out a prescription for how he’d like to see his Christian nationalist worldview implemented.

“I love the Constitution,” Webbon claimed. “I absolutely love it. If there was anything that I would do to the Constitution at all—if revival swept through the land, or we got an American Cesar and he was Christian … One of the first things that I would advocate for is not even changing the Constitution, but simply adopting to the Constitution a preamble of the Apostles’ Creed.”

“Other than that, I love the Constitution,” Webbon added.

It might be a good time to remind Webbon of the separation of Church and State, though if he’s a Christian Nationalist, he rejects that idea out of hand. Then there’s the reality that of the four-thousand-odd words in the Constitution, none of them are “Jesus,” “God,” or “Christianity.” That’s because the Founding Fathers purposefully steered clear of the intermingling of Church and State.

They wanted a country in which each institution had its place, stayed in its lane, and didn’t interfere with the other's operation. They cited England and its deeply corrupted State as a contemporary example of what can happen when the Church becomes the State and vice versa.

While important to Christians, the Apostle's Creed has no place in a secular document. America, as I’ve argued many times before (and supported), is not a Christian nation. It is a nation in which roughly 3/4 of the populace self-identifies as Christian, but it’s retained secular governance from the outset, almost a quarter-millennium ago.

Webbon later insisted that nations must be governed by men who use their power to ensure that “we will serve the Lord, whether you like it or not.”

“We are going to behave as a Christian people,” Webbon proclaimed. “And what does that mean? It means we’re going to ban pornography. It means we’re going to ban no-fault divorce. It means we are going to absolutely, utterly abolish abortion, including in vitro, including the hormonal birth control pill, every single one of its forms; not just the Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas, but we’re going to go down to the local CVS and we’re going to start knocking those pills off the shelf. No more human sacrifice. So, a civil magistrates can do that. He can and should do that.”

For someone who defends his “love” of the Constitution, he conveniently forgets that freedom of religion is an essential component of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….

Neither Joel Webbon nor anyone else has the right to inflict their flavor of God on anyone else. Period. End of story. No questions allowed.

Webbon concluded by completely agreeing when his co-host asserted that it is preferable to see the United States become a Christian nation under whatever form of government is necessary to achieve that result rather than to see it remain a republic.

“I’d rather have a Christian monarchy than our current state of affairs,” Webbon replied.

In other words, Webbon contradicted his statement about loving the Constitution because everything he said runs entirely counter to it.

You can’t claim to love the Constitution—but only the parts that allow you to impose your religion and rules on those who happen not to share them—especially when the 1st Amendment proscribes you from doing so.

Nor can you cherry-pick and obey only those parts of the Constitution that you find convenient and agreeable. That’s not Christianity; that’s straight-up tyranny.

Instead of accusing Americans of being “degenerates,” I’d suggest that Joel Webbon take a good long look in the mirror. He might find one of those “degenerates” staring back at him. At the very least, he’ll see a hypocrite and a faux Christian looking at him.

Christian Nationalism is, at its most basic, a lazy exercise in hypocrisy. It’s a philosophy with no solid intellectual or moral footing. Insecurely rooted in the soft, unstable sand of hypocrisy and religious bigotry, Christian Nationalists are neither. They love neither Jesus Christ nor America. All they worship is political power; “Christian Nationalism” is merely a facade, beneficial for what its adherents believe to be a veneer of credibility.

(You can repeat this all you like, but it’s untrue. America doesn’t belong to Christians—or any religion. Read your history, Ms. Robinson.)

When all is said and done, “Christian Nationalism” will be revealed to be a Potemkin village providing cover for corrupt, power-mad tyrants interested only in political power. And money. There’s always money involved, and generally large sums of it.

Intellectual and moral nonentities like Joel Webbon merely reveal how unfit they are to lead. For them, it’s not about service. It never has been. It’s all about personal gain. Ultimately, they’ll collapse under the burden of their greed and ambition.

And they’ll be neither well-renowned nor long-remembered. Small people and petty tyrants seldom are.

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