Meh, every group thinks it’s persecuted.
Just ask a WASP – they’ll tell you their private asset manager is skimming off the account.
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Protestantism was invented by the rich, and for the protection of the rich. How else do you explain these sects all making the richest man in the land the head of their church? Would their even be a church without that support?
You say unhinged, I’m saying you can’t see what is plainly right in your face. The rich have always got what they want, and having a church in your pocket is as guaranteed a method of maintaining your wealth as existed since the beginning of time.
You need to have questioned more. Like most people, you’ve shipped a fair amount of unqualified information without applying even the most basic of logic or understanding. Americans never question the money, though.
The Huguenots were rebels against the church and the power structure at the time. You’d claim some kind of pity for them. You act surprised they were vilified because they’re your people.
Scotland was where I was raised. A genocide was committed there that didn’t make it into your Protestant history books. Which is to say, all modern history, yet it did occur.
Americans have been minting their own Protestant style sects from the beginning. It is the lesson of the Reformation. Seem righteous, shake and roll, quote some scripture, go to the bank.
Ultimately malleable to those with influence. A business friendly white Jesus with a whole bunch of useful, interpretable nonsense as a preamble.
You’re watching them rewrite the founding documents as we speak, every day at the SCOTUS. The embittered underclass has been well armed, and a fathead Protestant new King angles for the throne.
Find out too late.
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I simply don’t believe the church’s particular corruption led to the Protestant revolt. I think that’s Western history, which is Protestant history if you’re an English speaker. What corruption could the church commit wholesale when the bloodlines and inheritances were unchanged by the church during the time of RC hegemony - if they had that kind of power, why have kings?
I don’t believe we are much different in mind from those days. Germany, Denmark, England, Holland. These were some of the most developed and powerful nations in the world at the time. What had been a tax of grain a thousand years before was now substantial wealth and growing exponentially. It was inevitable that the ancient kings would rebel against the church. The church had no real control, it had no army, and it was diffuse.
It makes complete sense to me that a rationale would be found to ensure the money stayed with the king, and all those sects of Protestantism made the king of their country the spiritual leader of the country also. Every king a pope. What closes the deal is that the burgeoning wealth of these nations had elevated the wealth of those in the courts of the royal families, and that power was a threat.
In those times, there was the king, the rich, and everybody else was living in the dirt. The new religion allowed for the violent overthrow of that middle class in the name of the new pope-king, granted a license to violent righteousness for the ‘true’ believers of the ‘true’ church - pick your Viking progenitor - and elevated a faithful and ultimately grateful and obedient underclass.
Mary was cast aside as a figure of worship, the ‘Judeo’ in ‘Judeo-Christian’ was added to the practice of Christianity, and used as a thrilling tale as well as an endlessly interpretable and vague text that allowed for the diminution of all other races by skin and creed, and drove the theft and murder of millions worldwide. Today, it protects the oil industry. In the name of whomever is now closest to God.
I can imagine it happening today. It tracks with everything I’ve learned about humanity. That there is a violent and preternaturally self righteous element in our society that equates wealth with Godliness, that it is uniformly white of skin, is vigorously racist, hates al other religions, and will turn up tomorrow in a special shirt to do essentially the same things they’ve been doing since the Reformation. The eager, murderous tool of the rich.
We’ve had most decent jobs in this country sent to communist and third world countries over the last 20-odd years. Not a peep from the general populace. That’s what happens when enough of the population is bred to serve, and has the capacity to blame anything else. America is a Protestant country.
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I just noticed that the book-link at the end goes to a TPM-branded version of Bookshop.org!!1! I love it.
And that’s also how I remembered to pick up a copy of Huxley’s Devils of Loudun. (I recently saw The Devils and it blew me away.)
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“There is a violent and preternaturally self righteous element in our society…” Though I don’t disagree with your drift, my opinion is that that violent and preternaturally self-righteous element resides in each of us; and may be evoked under certain contingencies. Projecting such a proclivity on “them” is an ongoing tactic in human history. Taking responsibility for one’s own shadow requires the honesty and hard work of owning up to it and taming its energies for the good of one another. Acknowledging the ambivalences and ambiguities in life together is a level of maturity we, and our institutions, aspire to, and also fail again and again to achieve. One way to deal with our failures is to accuse and blame “them.” Another is to try again, and again…
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The human engine, except, some humans are necessarily more evolved than others. More able to parse their animal instincts.
All the anger and the rage and the violence is coming from one group. White, Northern European Protestants. My contention is they are predisposed to violence. We can only suffer for the sophistry.
Bravo!
This is an area religious and non-religious people generally agree (though we rarely acknowledge it): we are each responsible for cultivating good character in ourselves.
The religious say this is because there’s a magic boogeyman out there, seeking to win souls by hook or by crook. The non-religious say it’s because human thriving has fixed requirements, and we share our world with predators who sow dysfunction within us in the hope we’ll trade wealth and power for their temporary remedies.
So, both sides see the path of wholesomeness as beset by crafty and relentless danger. Both sides recognize that nobody but ourselves can make our equine nature drink the water of wisdom and health.
But one side gets to that water by devotion to a fairy tale, and the other side gets there by relentlessly tearing down anything too weak to support the weight of the universe, so instead of drinking, we throttle each other on the shore.
It’s so funny, it breaks my heart.
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Your comment dredges up images of silent film characters Laurel & Hardy helplessly experiencing their car fall apart while they are sitting in it. It is funny how we defend against catastrophe; and yet it is not. Despair vs hope.
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Why the only church?
Oh, right …
Yeah, poor Father Coughlin …
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You can’t deny the sheer hegemony of that one ideology for a millennia in the West, embryonic and otherwise.
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Exact proof of my contention. A vain man from a group that was profoundly marginalized since the founding of America and had survived by aping in extremis the prevailing sentiment.
Staking out a radical position and being well rewarded for it I’m sure. Endless vanity. There is a breed of people that know what those around them are waiting for someone to say. A politician.
The first Catholic president they shot, the second we’ve got. Two hundred and fifty years.
I can’t get into the comments for Morning Memo, but I do have questions. Don’t lawyers have “calendaring” software in their computers and phones that alarm as critical dates, such as the running of the statute of limitations for the action, approach? In this Nevada Fake Electors case, how is it that venue was not settled much earlier, like within a few months of the filing of the case in Clark County? And if nothing was happening with the judge allowing the time bomb to just go off, why was there not a motion to dismiss without prejudice and refile in Douglas County? Three years is a lot of time, so I’m wondering if somebody in the prosector’s office retired or moved to a different job.
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