I'm not sure Jesus ever said, "We need more God in our government!"
America doesn't belong to White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals...it belongs to all of us
The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
Today I come before you as a friend and an ally and a fellow believer to ask for your help and your support and your prayers for this country. I make you a simple promise: In my first term I fought for Christians harder than any president has ever done before, and I will fight even harder for Christians with four more years in the White House.
Donald Trump
To say that Donald Trump “fought for Christians harder than any President has ever one before” is, of course, patently absurd. Trump fights for no one harder than he fights for his own self-interest. If that happens to dovetail with those of Christians, or German-Americans, or Packers fans, that’s pretty much purely coincidental.
And the interests of “Christians” he’s referring to aren’t everyday, run-of-the-mill Christians, but rather Christofascists who believe he’s been ordained by God to lead America to…well, to where is anyone’s guess.
For whatever reason, he believes that his Reign of Error © from 2017-21 was a YUUUGE success, especially when it comes to advancing the interests of Christians.
“We did things the likes of which nobody has ever done for Christians in this country, and I’m very proud of that and honored by it,” he added. “Just think of what with God’s help we already achieved in our historic first term under my leadership and working with you.”
“For four years, we went through a great period [where] you were able to speak, and we’re going to make that on a permanent basis,” Trump continued. “Because you’re the people we want to hear from: the pastors and the ministers and the rabbis. The people in this room are the people we want to hear from and they have to have a political voice.”
“You have such power, but you really weren’t allowed to use that power,” Trump told the audience. “You’re now allowed to use it. If I get in [to the White House], you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used it before.”
There has never been a time in this country when Christians have not been allowed to speak. Nor have they ever not been allowed to use their power. What they’re not allowed to do, because of the Constitutional separation of Church and State, is to merge ecclesiastical power with secular governance. That is, of course, the ultimate goal of some Christian sects like Seven Mountains Dominionism, but the separation of Church and State has always been, and remains, sacrosanct.
Trump is dangling the prospect of temporal power in front of Christofascists who want to control every aspect of American life and turn America into the Republic of Gilead.
He’s right in that Christians have never been able to use their “power” in the realm of secular governance. That’s as it should be. Christians are are certainly free to run for office just as any American is, but Christian churches cannot exercise political power. That’s something that can be traced back to the Treaty of Tripoli and Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists. The Treaty of Tripoli specifically states that the American system of government is in no way based on the Christian Church. That was the express intent of the Founding Fathers.
The volatile mix of Christofascism and grievance politics has fused in the MAGA movement behind Donald Trump. We saw this on January 6, 2021, when supporters of Trump staged an insurrection to keep him in power despite him losing a free and fair democratic election.
So much of what’s heard to day from Evangelicals who support Trump is about “taking things back”- taking America back, taking back their rights to worship openly, taking back their rights rule America by Biblical principals.
These grievance ignore a few very basic realities:
The Constitutional separation of Church and State
The fact that Christians are not and never have been a persecuted majority
The fact that Christians have always been free to worship
The reality that they are neither the only nor the most important faith tradition in America, merely one of many
No one is America gets to force their faith tradition on others
No one is above the law…not even Donald Trump and his supporters
Every American is free to practice their chosen faith…or none at all if that’s their choice
This potent mix of grievance and religious fervor has turbocharged the support among a wide swath of Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war, according to interviews. And many, who are swimming in falsehoods about the presidential election and now the riot itself, said the aftermath of Wednesday’s event has only fueled a deeper sense of victimhood and being misunderstood.
Lindsay French, 40, an evangelical Christian from Texas, flew to Washington after she had received what she called a “burning bush” sign from God to participate following her pastor urging congregants to “stop the steal.”
“We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light,” she said, declaring that she was rising up like Queen Esther, the biblical heroine who saved her people from death.
“We are tired of being made out to be these horrible people,” she said, acknowledging there was some violence but insisting on the falsehood that Antifa was behind it.
And yet they’re being made out to be horrible people precisely because they were/are horrible people. They staged a violent insurrection, did millions of dollars in damages to the US Capitol, spread human feces in the halls of Congress- those are not things good people do when visiting the Capitol.
Sorry, Ms. French, but y’all broke numerous federal laws, and many of y’all are doing serious jail time for it. All because you wanted to overthrow the federal government and keep Donald Trump in power. That’s a federal crime- sedition, if my non-legal brain has it sorted correctly.
Yes, you and yours on January 6, 2021 were terrible people. That’s just an undisputable fact.
It would be easy to write many of the insurrectionists off as just plain “nuts,” and one could argue that many of them were. Judging by the off the wall philosophy/theology/politics many were spouting on January 6, 2021, up to today, there’s a segment of the electorate that’s arguably out of touch with reality, facts, and the law.
These folks have created their own fact-free world out of whole cloth. They feed off Right-wing media and are immune to fact-based information. Conspiracies feed their convictions, they believe what they believe…and what they believe is impervious to truth, facts, and reality. Especially when this is the way the assault on the Capitol began:
WASHINGTON — Before self-proclaimed members of the far-right group the Proud Boys marched toward the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, they stopped to kneel in the street and prayed in the name of Jesus.
The group, whose participants have espoused misogynistic and anti-immigrant views, prayed for God to bring “reformation and revival.” They gave thanks for “the wonderful nation we’ve all been blessed to be in.” They asked God for the restoration of their “value systems,” and for the “courage and strength to both represent you and represent our culture well.” And they invoked the divine protection for what was to come.
Then they rose. Their leader declared into a bullhorn that the media must “get the hell out of my way.” And then they moved toward the Capitol.
Donald Trump has cunningly woven together grievance politics, Christofascism, and profound hatred and fear of Brown People into a Trump-centric Christian nationalism that’s Christian in name only. Donald Trump is at the center of the theology, America comes in second, and the teachings of Jesus Christ are a very distant third.
Truthfully, all Jesus does is lend his name to the doctrine for purposes of providing legitimacy. When prayers are offered, they’re offered to God in hopes that He will strengthen America to fight off those who would weaken America. This is, of course, code for keeping out those who aren’t White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals.
The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal — from QAnon to the “stolen” 2020 election — has attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Donald Trump and his advisers. By some estimates, adherents of these overlapping movements make up as much as a quarter or even a third of the electorate. Whatever the scale, they are determined to restore what they see as the original racial and religious foundation of America.
“While these elements are not new,” Robert Jones, the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote by email, “Donald Trump wove them together and brought them out into the open. Indeed, the MAGA formula — the stoking of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right — could accurately be described as a white Christian nationalist strategy from the beginning.”
MAGA has always been about racism, about keeping America “safe” for White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals. It explains Trump’s Muslim ban when he became President in 2017. It also explains calls from Republicans to close the borders to immigration.
This, of course, flies in the face of American History. America is what it is today BECAUSE of immigration. Unless you’re Native American, all Americans are here because their forebears came from somewhere else. My ancestors are Norwegian, German, Irish, Scottish, and Bohemian (Czech). So for White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals to demand that immigration be stopped (except for folks who look like them, of course) is absurd. Almost all of us are originally from somewhere else.
America is America because of immigration…and a whole lot of slavery, of course.
Today, though, Christian nationalism finds itself linking arms with the Great Replacement theory:
I asked Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” how much Christian nationalism and the great replacement theory intersect. “The answer is complex,” she said. “There is definitely a wing of the Christian nationalist movement that overlaps with the great replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general.”
At the same time, however, she continued, “there are other wings of the movement that depend less on explicitly racialized thinking and whose concerns are centered more on religious and cultural paranoia. Christian nationalism is making significant inroads among some Latino communities, for example, and there the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.”
Instead of Christian nationalism, Stewart prefers the use of “religious nationalism,” which she describes as
a reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the “right” religion in recovering that lost greatness. This mind-set always involves a narrative of unjust persecution at the hands of alien or “un-American” groups. The specific targets may shift. Some focus their fears on the “homosexual agenda”; others target Americans of color or nonwhite immigrant groups; still others identify the menace with religious minorities such as Muslims, Jews and secular “elites” or perceived threats against gender hierarchy and sexual order. And of course, many take an all-of-the-above approach.
A generalized basic view holds that Christian nationalism clings to a “mythical vision” that America is a “Christian nation” whose status as such must be “protected and preserved. It “frames the country’s founding as sacred and rooted in Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values.” It also defines it defines “a “real” or ‘good’ American today” as a someone- a patriot- committed to upholding and living those values.
We can see how the great replacement theory overlaps with Christian nationalism. Both view some specific population as “real” Americans, whether that is defined explicitly as white Christians or in the more vague and coded language of “real” or “native born” or “legacy” Americans. And both frame demographic change as threats to both that population and to the country’s essential character. Finally, although not all flavors of Christian nationalism include a conspiratorial element, some versions share with replacement theory an imagined cabal of nefarious elites — often Jews, communists/socialists or globalists — who are intentionally promoting racial and/or religious diversity in order to diminish white Christian power.
What’s happening in the MAGA movement is a fusion of Whiteness, Christianity, and Americanness in good, God-fearing, patriotic White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals. It’s created a belief system that holds that only White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals are fit to hold positions of political power and social influence, including religious power.
As White Christians have seen their numbers drop, from 54% of the electorate in 2008 to 47% in 2016, they’ve become less sanguine about seeing their traditional power and influence wane. And so many of them have become more radical in their belief that they’re being “replaced” by immigrants who want to erase “our way of life.”
Racial and ethnic resentment has grown far beyond the political fringes, Jones argued, citing levels of agreement in P.R.R.I. polling with this statement: “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Among all voters, according to [Robert] Jones [of P.R.R.I.], 29 percent believe that immigrants are invading our country; among Republicans, it’s 60 percent; among Democrats, 11 percent; among QAnon believers, 65 percent; among white evangelicals, 50 percent; and among white noncollege voters, as pollsters put it, 43 percent.
Not only that, Jones notes:
White Americans who agree that “God has granted America a special role in human history” (a softer measure of Christian nationalism) are more than twice as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (28 percent vs. 11 percent). And white Americans who agree that “God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians” (a harder measure of Christian nationalism) are four times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (43 percent vs. 10 percent). And white Americans who believe that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic values” are more than five times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (45 percent vs. 8 percent).
“True American patriots.” “Europeans Christians.” White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals are seeing their unquestioned position of dominance and authority erode before them, and they’re not happy.
When you believe that America was created for you and yours, I suspect it’s tough to see that demographic reality changing for the worse. Christian nationalism has too often become the response to that, and the belief that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic values” is a response to forces largely beyond anyone’s control.
The truth, of course, is that America has always been changing. Immigrants have always come to America in search of shelther, opportunity, a new life, new beginnings. Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian refugee. That story has been repeatedly endless through our history.
How much of American life do we owe to refugees and children of refugees? More than any of us probably realize.
Perhaps instead of looking at immigrants as coming to take our jobs and change our culture, maybe we could see them for what they add to America? In most cases, they end up doing jobs most Americans won’t. In others, Mohammed the neurosurgeon isn’t going to take your job at the machine shop, knowhutimean?
The lives of most Americans won’t be adversely impacted by immigrants…in any conceivable way. The people who show up at the border promising to keep Brown People out more often than not are filled with hate and need a way to express it.
And those who call themselves Christian nationalists are, frankly, neither. They’re Christians like I’m Randy Rainbow…and they’re nationalism is merely hatred of anyone who doesn’t carry an American passport.
That’s not love of country; it’s hatred of anyone who doesn’t look, vote, live, worship, and/or love as they do. How pathetic is that?
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The "grievance politics" technique is SOP for fascist populism. (The term I use is "cult of victimhood." Convince a privileged majority that they are actually oppressed, and that basically "only a god can save us."