Tag: American Christianity

How Long Will the Trump Delusion Virus Remain Contagious in the Church?

John Fea is a professor of American history at Messiah College. He also maintains one of the best blogs I know of. He writes prolifically at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. 

I am convinced that he either keeps a closet full of hyper-active minions near his office to work on his blog, or he is a much more industrious man than I am.

He recently posted an article entitled, “Evangelical Trumpers are coming to a church near you” describing a pro-Trump “revival meeting” in Hamilton, Montana.

Yes, revival meeting is the most accurate descriptor here. I grew up in churches where we had them regularly. I know what they look and sound like.

I also happen to pass through the town of Hamilton often when I am looking for a new falcon to trap. I listen to what passes for Christian radio in that community.

Upsetting is too weak a word to describe what I hear. Thus, as sad as it is, this story is not the least bit surprising to me.

But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t disturbing and lamentable.

[I am very interested in hearing from you my readers. Are you familiar with similar tent revival type pro-Trump, stop-the-steal evangelistic events like this in the churches of your area? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a note, please! Thanks.]

Here is Fea’s post in full:

Last week we called your attention to an event at Calvary Chapel-Chino Hills featuring pastor Jack Hibbs and Trump wonder boy Charlie Kirk. Today, I want you to see a video from The River, a Southern Baptist church in Hamilton, Montana.

The video captures a special Saturday night service devoted to “education,” “learning,” and “unity.” The topic is the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The speaker is Dr. Kevin Horton, the director of the Institute for Biblical Authority, “a Biblically based nonprofit organization dedicated to upholding and strengthening the principle that the Bible is the life-changing authority for human lives.” The Institute promotes creationism and recently hosted a conference featuring David Barton. The website includes an “American History Quiz” that repeats the widely debunked, and frankly absurd, claim that 29 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were “pastors.”

Watch the video of Horton’s appearance at The River Church on the Facebook page of Montana state senator Theresa Manzella or on the church Facebook page.

The video begins with the congregation milling around the sanctuary while a song called “Potter’s Hand” by Hillsong plays over the speakers. Here are the lyrics to that song:

Beautiful Lord, wonderful Savior
I know for sure all of my days are held in Your hand
And crafted into Your perfect plan

You gently called me into Your presence
Guiding me by Your Holy Spirit
Teach me dear Lord, to live all of my life
Through Your eyes

And I’m captured by Your Holy calling
Set me apart, I know You’re drawing me to Yourself
Lead me Lord, I pray

Take me and mold me, use me, fill me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand
Call me, You guide me, lead me, walk beside me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand

You gently call me into Your presence
Guiding me by Your Holy Spirit
Teach me dear Lord, to live all of my life
Through Your eyes

I’m captured by Your Holy calling
Set me apart, I know You’re drawing me to Yourself
Lead me Lord, I pray

Take me and mold me, use me, fill me
I give my life to my Potter’s hand
Call me, guide me, lead me, walk beside me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand

Take me and mold me, use me, fill me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand
Call me, guide me, lead me, walk beside me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand

The display screen at the front of the sanctuary says “Inciting the Riot?”

Horton takes the stage at about the 5:45 mark after pastor Allen James offers a “prayer for the United States of America” in which he asks the Lord to make us “truly be one nation under God again.” (Italics mine). Horton begins by telling the audience how the Lord prompted him to go to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 to protest the election results. He laments the fact that social media companies removed Trump from its platforms, closed Parler, and even suspended his own accounts for merely “witnessing to the truth” about what happened in Washington D.C. After taking a few required shots at Congress for impeaching Trump, Horton describes what he saw at the U.S. Capitol.

The central argument of Horton’s presentation is that Trump did not incite the riot on the U.S. Capitol. Horton bases his argument on pictures and videos he took at the insurrection. He tells this evangelical congregation that the rioters were not “true Trumpers” and then attempts to distinguish between the “peaceful” evangelical Trumpers and the evil insurrectionists. (Along the way he takes a shot mask-wearing).

At about the 47:00 mark Horton tells the audience that he is boycotting Amazon, Walmart, and Google until they “repent” for their support of Senators who refuse to investigate who was really behind the insurrection. Then he complains about how CNN is trying to “close down” Newsmax and One America News. Horton speaks in a friendly, easy-going style as he defends these conspiracy theories before an evangelical congregation led by a pastor who provided him with the platform to do this.

At the 52:00 mark he describes the election fraud protests as a “fun time” until the “cloud of evil” emerged in the form of the rioters. (If his pictures are any indication, Horton appears to have spent most of the riot only feet away from the doors of the U.S. Capitol).

Horton ends by telling his pro-Trump evangelical audience that we are now “all targets” and are no longer “safe” as Americans. (The assumption is that the insurrections were a demonic force working against the God-honoring supporters of Donald Trump. He stops just short of saying that the Democrats were somehow behind the insurrection. Or at least that is how I understood him). The only way to find peace and safety, he says, is by accepting Jesus Christ as savior. He then moves into a brief Gospel presentation.

As a fellow evangelical, I am disgusted by the way this man stoked fear, lied about voter fraud, and used his presence at the Capitol insurrection as a platform for preaching the Gospel. Apparently the audience at The River Church disagrees. They gave him a standing ovation. Pastor Allen James endorsed everything Horton said, going so far to tell his congregation that the election was rigged. James then calls his congregation to separate the Gospel from politics. This is admirable. But everything about this event sent the exact opposite message.

Critical Race Theory and the Church, Part 1

(This is the first in a series of posts I will make on the controversy surrounding something called  “Critical Race Theory” within the Christian church and the continuing problem of racism in America. Stay tuned…)

The Southern Baptist Convention’s condemnation of something called Critical Race Theory has made this particular approach to understanding racist behavior (both individually and collectively) a controversial issue in the evangelical world.

All six presidents of the Southern Baptist seminaries have gone  on record

Screengrab from the 2019 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting as Danny Akin speaks while other seminary presidents and leaders watch, including Jeff Iorg, Adam Greenway, Al Mohler, and Jamie Dew.

denouncing Critical Race Theory as an expression of “the tide of theological compromise [that Christian’s face in] an increasingly hostile secular culture.”

The heart of this new addition to the SBC declaration of faith says,

In light of current conversations in the Southern Baptist Convention, we stand together on historic Southern Baptist condemnations of racism in any form and we also declare that affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message. (emphasis mine) (For a fuller statement see here).

All six seminary presidents added individual affirmations to the end of the document.

SBC President J.D. Greear speaks on a panel discussion about racial reconciliation during the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention at the BJCC, June 11, 2019 in Birmingham, Ala. RNS photo by Butch Dill

What is, sadly, most telling about the new Southern Baptist position paper is the fact that it was formulated by an exclusive group of white men.

No African-American Southern Baptists were included in this body; neither were any consulted as the group made its deliberations.

As an article in the Religion News Service (1/8/2021) puts it,

Southern Baptist Convention officials admitted it would have been better if they’d contacted Black leaders of their denomination before issuing a statement decrying critical race theory, which led to the departure of several Black pastors…

. . . In late November, the leaders of the six SBC seminaries — all of them white men — declared critical race theory, a set of ideas about systemic racism, was not compatible with the statement of faith of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

After the presidents issued their statement, several Black church leaders announced they were leaving the mostly white denomination.

Obviously, these are horrible optics for the SBC.

But even worse is the denominational reality these optics reveal: both white privilege and systemic racism are thriving within the Southern Baptist Convention, including its educational institutions.

The SBC is now Exhibit A proving the urgent relevance of the very observations, about white privilege and systemic racism, that Critical Race Theory is most helpful in uncovering and confronting.

Honestly, I cannot help but wonder if these white, male, Southern Baptist decision-makers (I am hesitant to call them “leaders”) have actually condemned Critical Race Theory because it holds up a mirror to reveal their true selves.

Perhaps we should not forget that the SBC was originally formed by Southern slave-owners in order to protect the institution of slavery.

I am sure that many Southern Baptists are ashamed of that particular piece of their story. But this recent action shows that it continues to cast a very long shadow.

However much the SBC may have renounced its slave-owning origins, this recent episode in church politics has highlighted both the importance and the validity of Critical Race Theory’s analysis of both white privilege and systemic racism within American society.

Given the fact that the SBC finds the concepts of white privilege and systemic racism as particularly offensive ideas in Critical Race Theory, it is almost comical (were it not so atrocious) to see how the SBC doctrinal committee has made itself the newest poster child (poster children?) for the important benefits that Critical Race Theory has to offer.

Christianity Today: “Humoring the President Was Not Harmless”

The editors at Christianity Today have hopped aboard the mea culpa train with many other conservative, Republican, evangelical news outlets.

However, I don’t know whether to say, “Better late than never,” or “Too little too late.”

On second thought, I think I’ll go with option two. Because it’s all way too little and much too late.

It’s too late because the inevitability of violence, fueled by Right-Wing lies about the election of Joe Biden, was as clear as the nose on your face for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Trump eagerly and persistently fomented it over and over again, every time he opened his foul mouth.

Right-Wing radio and television, a category which includes ostensibly “Christian” broadcasting networks as well, only intensified the already high levels of anger and resentment among Trump’s base over the president’s mythical conspiracy stories.

Yet, I never saw nor heard a single, Christian conservative fact-checker offer even minimal push-back against the bogus election fraud charges cooked up by the Trump-Guliani-Sekulow-Powell-Mitchell cabal of greedy, power-hungry, “legal” opportunists.

Not one.

Yet, now the editorial staff and talking heads at such bastions of Trump- mania as Fox, Newsmax, the Trinity Broadcasting and the Christian Broadcasting Networks (check here, here, and here) have all joined hands to sing kumbaya and condemn the violent assault on our nation’s capitol.

An assault that their reporting had helped to stir up and create.

Christianity Today has now joined this circle of lame repentance at the evangelical campfire.

Yet, it is far too little. In fact, it is grossly inadequate.

Remember, as far back as October 2016, candidate Trump insisted that Hillary Clinton was going to rig the election. He insisted that she could only win if she “stole the election” from him.

Where was this newly discovered evangelical moral fiber then? Trump’s long-term plans were obvious then and there. Why wasn’t he called on it?

Early on in this more recent presidential campaign, Trump was replaying the same old tune warning that “the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged.”

The remarks below were made in August.

Trump was clearly previewing his strategy for contesting the outcome of the election should he lose.

Figuring this out was not rocket science.

So, where was the Christian wisdom and warning about these obvious presidential shenanigans last fall, when it might have made a difference?

Where were the serious Christian warnings about the dangers of conspiracy theories, and the irrational behavior they can cause, when Trump first initiated his ultimate conspiracy theory that is now tearing the country apart?

I don’t have time to run through the litany of impeachable offenses committed by this president over the past four years, but they began in the first week he sat down in the Oval Office when he refused to divest himself of his business interests.

Where were the evangelical voices then, ready to condemn his refusal to abide by the Constitution?

Trump’s habitual violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses were only the beginning of his presidential criminality. And, believe it or not, we see that it his theft has never stopped as his staff now steals — yes, steals — historical artifacts from the White House (see below)!

Where was this evangelical moral concern in January of 2017?

Or. how about the Muller Report’s thoroughly documents claims that Trump had committed obstruction of justice at least 10-12 times in the aftermath of his phone call with the Ukrainian president?

Where was the evangelical worry about telling the truth then? Who was calling out William Barr’s lies for Trump then?

No, “humoring” this president is THE LAST thing his conservative, Republican, evangelical base has been doing.

Rather, they have been enablers, sycophants, co-conspirators, and mindless cheerleaders for the most incompetent, criminal, and psychologically dangerous president in American history.

So, finally I get to it. Below is Christianity Today’s wholly inadequate editorial. It’s facile references to the Bible offer only a veneer of seriousness to an otherwise shallow attempt at self-criticism:

The administration officials and members of Congress who enabled President Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election did not truly believe he won. They chose to coddle the president’s deception (and, I suspect, self-deception) because they thought it would endear them to his most loyal voters, and they assumed no one would get hurt.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” an unnamed senior Republican official told The Washington Post in November. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

I think Trump will indeed leave, as he finally said he would in a brief video Thursday. But that doesn’t mean there was no downside. It doesn’t mean no one got hurt. In Washington on Wednesday, we witnessed a “failed insurrection,” to use the phrase of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in which pro-Trump demonstrators, some armed with guns, stormed the Capitol and rioted inside. The chaos claimed multiple lives as it made credible all but the direst warnings about what Trump’s elevation to the highest office in our country could bring.

Humoring him was not harmless.

For Christians, this should be no surprise. Scripture warns us that small patterns and habits grow to shape our lives in large ways. This is true of both faithfulness and sin, virtue and vice. “Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?” Paul asked the Corinthian church, incredulous at their acceptance of open, incestuous adultery in their congregation (1 Cor. 5:6). . . 

. . . What we saw in Washington last Wednesday is what happens when the president insists he won an election he lost and, instead of telling him and the American people the truth, his allies go along with it. It is what happens when they file lawsuit after lawsuit without a whit of merit, pushing legal claims so bad they are dismissed in court after court, by judge after judge—including judges nominated by Trump himself.

It is what happens when they prioritize power over honesty and cosset mass delusion, even in Jesus’ name. It is what happens after two months of the president and his associates telling millions of disappointed, frightened, angry people that they were cheated, that the foundation of our representative government was undermined, that they really ought to do something about it, that maybe that something should be violent, and that they should “never concede.”

Well, some of them did do something. This is what the dough looks like leavened. This is where dishonesty in the little things leads.

In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s events, I’ve seen defensiveness over assignment of responsibility to white evangelicals because of our unusually high support for Trump at the ballot box. Is it fair, some have asked, to blame all evangelicals for actions (storming the Capitol) many would never condone, or for the election of a president many backed for policy reasons if at all?

What Do Jesus and Rush Limbaugh Have in Common?

In previous posts I have mentioned that whenever I take a road trip I view it as an opportunity to imagine myself a social anthropologist conducting

Rush Limbaugh

primary research on what people are listening to out in the hinterlands.

Thus, when I am not listening to a favorite CD, I am tuned in to either conservative talk radio or local Christian programming (not for the music but the news, commentary, sermons, or call-in Bible answer man shows).

My most recent trip confirmed not just the close similarities, but the near

Shaun Hannity

identity of political-social views on secular and Christian broadcasting. There is no difference whatsoever. And that should send a chill down every disciples’ spiritual spine.

Of course, every talk show was a monolithic barrage of “Stop the Steal” nonstop — usually, asserted with ranting, anger, and fear-mongering, not to mention the repeated threats of looming violence if “the radical, leftist cabal” that stole the election from Trump didn’t move over and get out of the way.

I could not find a single instance of rational, evidence-based conversation or

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: Jay Sekulow, personal attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference during the Senate impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

debate, much less analysis, about the presidential election, the recounts, the court challenges, or the future of this country on a secular radio station.

Worse yet, the Christian broadcasts were no different.

Whether the programming was syndicated or regional, Christian commentators were reading from the same hyper-partisan play book: anger, fear, threats of armed uprisings, calling hell fire onto the leftists, socialists, Marxists, antifa-ists, critical race theorists, and Black Lives Matters communists who are determined to destroy America by turning it into a totalitarian, anti-Christian nation.

The ignorance and misinformation spewed like sewage from a fire hose.

Pat Robertson

The Christians had no more interest in honest conversation, or an examination of the facts available, than the did the Rush Limbaugh crowd. I doubt if a single one of them had even a rudimentary understanding of what socialism really is or that the United States is already highly “socialist” in many ways – highly unjust ways that favor the rich and corporations almost exclusively.

Everyone is convinced that Joe and Kamala are raging socialists chomping at the bit to outlaw private property and confiscate everyone’s guns. Obviously, not a one of these people (broadcasters and callers both) knew the first thing about Biden’s or Harris’ careers.

The truth of the matter is that both Biden and Harris are dyed in the wool crony-capitalists, corporatists, center-right party stalwarts so heavily indebted to Wall Street that I’m surprised either of them has an independent thought in their head.

Jan Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcast Network, with Oral Roberts

Their souls are owned by the same brand of neoliberal economics that continues to fuel the gaping chasm of income inequality that curses sick Americans – especially people of color – to wait in bread lines longer than anything seen in this country since the Great Depression, and to die of covid19 at higher rates than any other country in the civilized world.

The American evangelical church has become nothing more than cheap, shallow reflection of the cultivated ignorance, narrow mindedness, and xenophobia that has always marked American conservatism.

That ghoulish political contortion has become the face of the Republican party AND the Religious Right (read: evangelicalism).

This post is my brief introduction to short series I will write in the next few weeks.

David Brody, political reporter for CBN, author of the book, “The Faith of Donald Trump”

In this series I will have a great deal more to say about the incestuous mánage à tois that has developed between evangelicalism, the Republican party, and American anti-intellectualism.

I will begin by focusing on the role that virulent, Republican racism has to play in both (1) the Republican demonization of the Black Lives Matter movement and (2) Donald Trump’s campaign to persuade his base that this election was stolen.

Stay tuned.

Chris Hedges on “The Great Delusion”

Chris Hedges

Today’s Opinion piece from journalist Chris Hedges is entitled “The Great Delusion.”

Personally, I do not fear the end of the world.

I do fear the increasing magnitude of human suffering that will inexorably pave the way for the final Apocalypse.

And I deeply lament the sinister role now played by the evangelical church in advancing Satan’s goals.

By only reading the book of Revelation as if it were a human history horoscope, the evangelical church (in league with the Religious Right) remains blind to the fact that it has long been conquered by the Beast.

John the Seer warns God’s people that only those “who overcome” will stand victorious in the end.

And that charge ain’t describin’ much of evangelicalism today.

Below are a few excerpts from Hedges. You can read the entire piece here:

Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away. 

But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead”. . . 

 . . . The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks.  A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia.  Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration.  The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. . . 

. . . The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.         

Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped.  At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged. . . 

. . . One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion.  It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy. 

After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.

Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept.  This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country. . .

. . . The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us. . .

. . . We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.

Jericho March Speaker Says, “We have to align our spirituality to our politics.”

First a quick update: I have been away for a while for several reasons.

First, I have finished the manuscript for my next book which will tentatively have a title (I hope) along the lines of Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism, Israeli War Crimes, and Palestinian Suffering.

While I wait to receive the remarks of my outside reader (an expert in the field selected by the publisher; it’s often called “peer review”) I have been slaving away at the marketing questionnaire given to me by the publisher. Yikes! What a task…

Second, I just returned from a multi-day trapping excursion trying to capture a new falcon. My peregrine was tragically killed by a coyote a few months ago in eastern Montana. So I am currently birdless. I was able to trap one falcon of the sort I want, but she was an adult and we are only allowed to keep  immature birds taken from the wild.

Anyway, I have a bundle of posts I intend to make in the days ahead reflecting on the current political-evangelical-Donald Trump industrial complex and its implications for the immediate future of American Christianity.

But for now I want to thank my friend Steve Tompkins, a pastor in Seattle, for sending me an article by Rod Dreher published in The American Conservative. It’s entitled, “What I Saw at the Jericho March.”

I have no affinity for Mr. Dreher’s politics, but he is a fellow Christian with important insights into the feverish pagan ceremonies now consuming certain “evangelicals” — at least, that’s what they call themselves.

Selected excerpts appear below or you can read the entire piece here:

Alex Jones speaking at the recent Jericho March in Washington D.C.

For my sins, I guess, I watched all six hours of the Jericho March proceedings from Washington today, on the march webcast. I say for my sins, but in truth, I decided to watch it because I am interested in what the activist Christian Right is saying, and how they are thinking, in the wake of Donald Trump losing the election.

Except he didn’t lose the election, according to them. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.

. . .It’s one thing to claim that God told you to change churches, or something like that. It’s another thing to claim, especially if you have a national microphone, that God told you that the election was stolen, and that people need to prepare themselves to fight to the last drop of blood — an actual quote — to keep the libs from taking the presidency away from Trump. Watching the Jericho March, I saw that what I encountered for the first time in conversation with my friend over two decades ago is actually pretty common. Most of the Jericho March speakers, in one way or another, asserted their certainty about the election’s theft. The fact that courts keep throwing these Trump lawsuits out only proves how deep the corruption goes.

See how that works? They are willing to tear down the country for a belief that they cannot prove, but that they will not believe is disprovable.

. . .Retired Gen. Michael Flynn came onstage, saying that his MyPillow gave him the best sleep of his life. Then he recited the Our Father. Jesus, America, hucksterism: that was another theme of this rally. At times during the webcast, the screen would split, with the speaker on the left, and a My Pillow commercial on the right.

This Flynn speech was important, though. He said, “The Courts don’t decide the election, we the people decide.” But later: “The rule of law is at stake.”

Well, which is it? The rule of law in our Constitutional republic means that the courts operate in the name of We the People. Flynn declares mob rule over our constitutional institutions in the same speech in which he decried the loss of the rule of law. He obviously didn’t get the irony, nor, I’d wager, did a soul in that crowd.

He also told the people to ignore their minds and listen to their hearts, because in your heart is where you determine truth. It’s. All. About. Feeling. Don’t think, feel. This is 100 percent what Metaxas was saying this week on Charlie Kirk’s show: logic & evidence don’t matter if your heart tells you that Trump won. You watch: this movement is going to end up demanding that Gen. Flynn become the military dictator of America.

Rudolph Hess

Get this: at the height of Flynn speech, Trump appeared overhead in Marine One. Like an apparition! After Trump choppered off to the Army-Navy game, Flynn resumed his address. Every time they attack Trump, he said, they’re attacking you! Total identification of the collective with the individual man, Trump. I despise facile comparisons, but this is a core fascist trope. At the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally, Nazi functionary Rudolf Hess told the faithful, “The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!”

Chris Hedges on “The Collective Suicide of the Liberal Class”

As American democracy continues to circle the drain, the future of our body politic looks increasingly grim.

Chris Hedges

I had planned on writing a post about the long-term social effects of “Trumpism” and the president’s faux-legal efforts to overturn a democratic presidential election, but then I received Chris Hedges’ latest editorial in my inbox.

Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who wrote for many years for the New York Times.

Reflecting on his years as a foreign war correspondent, he also wrote an important book describing the addictive qualities of war-making entitled, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. If you haven’t read it, you really should.

Hedges is one of my favorite journalists and political writers who offers a cogent analysis of America’s unhappy future in words far more eloquent than anything I would have written.

So, here is an excerpt of Hedges’ very insightful and very bleak forecast. Or you can read the entire article here:

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.          

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates. . . 

. . . The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control – wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world’s largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.

The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by U.S. Marshals of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.

Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse’s killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.

All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.

Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the antisemitic parties played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as human embodiments of evil.

This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. . .

. . .The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora’s box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, “once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target.”

This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we. 

The Evangelical Christian Director of the NIH Asks Churches to do “The Altruistic, Loving Thing” and Remain Closed

Dr. Francis Collins is a devout Christian who has never been hesitant in talking publicly about his faith.  Thoughtful, responsible churchgoers ought

FILE – In this May 7, 2020 file photo, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins speaks during a Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool, file)

to pay attention to his advise.

NPR has posted an article by Tom Gjelten accompanied by a 4 minute video describing Collins’ advice to the country.

The fact is that both rates of infection and death from covid19 are MUCH higher than they were earlier in the year when the initial lockdown orders were issued.

This past Wednesday, more than 3,500 Americans died of covid….in a single day. The virus is running rampant in large part because people are ignoring medical advice and listening to right-wing disinformation campaigns instead.

Why are any churches continuing to hold on sight congregational services right now at a time when the virus is infecting and killing more people than ever before?

All those who continue to insist that the new infection rate is itself proof that lock downs and isolation don’t work are conveniently ignoring the fact many locations across the country have never abided by the lock down measures or mask wearing from the beginning.

Below is an excerpt of the NPR article, or you can read the entire story here.

With COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths at record levels, a top public health official called on religious leaders to keep their worship spaces closed, despite rising protests from some church leaders.

“The virus is having a wonderful time right now, taking advantage of circumstances where people have let their guard go down,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “Churches gathering in person is a source of considerable concern and has certainly been an instance where super spreading has happened and could happen again.”

Collins, himself a regular churchgoer who speaks often about his Christian faith, discussed measures that church leaders can take to protect their congregations in a Zoom conversation on Thursday with Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“Most churches really ought to be advised to go to remote services, if they’re not already doing so,” Collins said.

When the Powers-That-Be Decide Whose Religious Liberty is Worth Defending

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

The wildly different responses of the Republican party and the Religious Right to the religious convictions of Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Rev. Raphael Warnock demonstrate the hypocrisy of our political debates over religious liberty.

When Senator Dianne Feinstein told Barrett that she was worried about how” loudly the dogma lives within” Judge Barrett, Republicans went bananas in deriding Feinstein’s “assault” on Barrett’s religious freedoms.

Barrett became the latest poster-child illustrating the supposed liberal hatred of Christianity and the Democratic party’s continuing attacks on religious liberty in America.

But now the tables have turned.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock is a Democratic senatorial candidate in Georgia,

Rev. Raphael Warnock

where he is waiting for the run-off election in early January. He has been the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta since 2005.

Now, the Republicans are deriding Rev. Warnock as unfit for office because . . . wait for it . . . you guessed it: because the dogma lives too strongly within him.

Having gone through the pastor’s old sermons, the Republicans are calling him unfit for office. Listen to Warnock’s most offensive words:

Setting aside the abortion issue, the simple fact of the matter is that pastor Warnock is being condemned for proclaiming the words of Jesus. Jesus’ teaching is clear: no one can serve both the military and God, neither can anyone serve both God and money (Matt. 6:19-34).

The conservative hypocrisy in this backlash is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

CBN News continues to demonstrate that it is nothing more than a “Christianized,” civil religion cut-out of Fox News as it carries water for the Republican party.

The whole escapade is really quite disgusting.

I have very clearly demonstrated in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America, (Eerdmans, 2018), just how biblical Rev. Warnock is when he decries Christian involvement in the military. He represents an ancient Christian tradition.

And Jesus’ condemnation of excessive wealth is a signature trait of his teaching. Remember, “it is easier for a camel to pass through the needle’s eye than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).

In this respect — not forgetting that Warnock is an African-American running for office in the southern state of Georgia — those who condemn this southern, black pastor are imitating the godless leaders who condemned Jesus of Nazareth to hang on a cross.

We are seeing a vivid example of what happens when the truth of the gospel confronts sinful human beings.

It also exemplifies how difficult (if not impossible) it is for a faithful, Christian witness to flourish in the midnight garden of political power.

 

Let’s Put an End to Baseless Calls for “Unity”

The call has gone out for unity. Public figures are talking about the necessity of unifying a divided nation. Religious leaders lament the divisions within their fellowships. Somehow or another everyone is now supposed to find a way to come together, to put their differences aside, and to find common cause.

But the question is, What is the unifying cause?

Unity for unity’s sake is doomed to failure. Its fabric is too thin to hold. The innumerable differences that distinguish us one from another are too sharp. They will not long remain suppressed by the artificial gauze of abstract  mantras like “unity.”

Genuine unity, like authentic community, emerges as the byproduct of a common purpose, a shared mission. Why are we here? What moves us? Where are we going? How do we get there? Why is it worth the effort?

The many Trump supporters who remain convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from their leader know how to answer those questions. They are already united, and they have little if any interest in compromising their political principles – however unprincipled anyone else may think them to be.

The fusion of white evangelicalism with conservative, Republican politics – especially with devotion to Donald Trump – means that millions of church goers now measure spirituality by the yardstick of fervor for a particular set of political outcomes.

Working for those outcomes, such as prayer in school, outlawing abortion, denying homosexuals the right to marry, is what unifies political conservatives and white evangelicals in their spiritual mission. They labor together for (what they believe is) a righteous cause.

No “true believer” is going to compromise their conservative commitments for unity. Unity smunity! That kind of unity is actually compromise in the world of the Religious Right.

White evangelical faith now most powerfully appropriates the immaterial realm of conspiracy theories, evidence-free assertions of election fraud, and the ipsissima verba of Donald Trump. The most important moments of  fellowship throughout the week occur as everyone sits at the feet of Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, Breitbart, and Infowars. These are the prophets and spiritual leaders of white, American evangelicalism.

I heard a sermon a few months ago calling the church to unity. “We need to come together!,” we were told. But we were never told why or how.

The New Testament, however, is very clear in addressing those issues.

Scripture tells us that the adoration, service, and glorification of Jesus Christ is the purpose for unity in the church.

A community of saved sinners collectively overwhelmed by God’s abundant grace, working to conform themselves to the example of Jesus of Nazareth, ready to suffer, to serve “the least of these,” to lift up the downtrodden, and to cultivate humility, that is the brand of unity pleasing to God.

So, when I am told to seek unity within the church, my first question is, “Which Jesus are we linking arms around?” Is he the suffering, crucified Jesus of the gospels or the gun-toting, warlord Jesus who attacks his enemies in the streets? Is it the Jesus who “came not to be served but to serve” or the macho Jesus who ridicules others with demeaning nicknames. cursing, and licentious hands that assault innocent women?

I am sorry. Genuine unity is a function of a common cause, a shared adoration. And I simply do not find that commonality with the vast majority of the white evangelical church today. We are now worshiping different God’s. We serve different Saviors. Our expectations for sanctified living have drifted eons apart.

The evangelical church has crossed a watershed in this nation’s history. The Religious Right has proven itself victorious; victorious in convincing far too many that exchanging their devotion to the kingdom of God for a bowl of secular, political pottage is the right thing to do.

No, now is not the time to call for unity.

Now is the time to call for confession and repentance.

Now is the time for real leaders to require authentic discipleship in following the real Jesus of the New Testament.

Now is the time to emphasize that neither patriotism, nationalism, militarism, nor American exceptionalism have anything to do with service in the kingdom of God. In fact, they are all enemies that work to undermine God’s kingdom, every last one of them.

I cannot be “unified” anyone who does not understand these basic theological truths. I can help them to understand, if they are willing to learn. I can teach the scriptures to them. I can pray with them as we together seek the Holy Spirit’s correction and maturity.

But shapeless, amorphous, contentless calls for abstract unity…well, that’s just a waste of time.