Within the world of conservative Christians, there are some who survey what the Christian nationalists want and recoil.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1487127
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1487127
Thank you for this very well researched article. It is useful to see the complexity in what seems to be a monolith from the outside.
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Who’s more dangerous: the incels who look and sound like they peaked with admission into their prison gang, or the guys who believe their own bullshit so purely that they’re embarrassed by the first group?
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Is there such a thing as an evangelical Christian and if so…does it mean they’re some form of sooper dooper Christian or have they just taken on a name to make something of themselves? What does one have to do to become an Evangelical? It seems no more than adopt the name and then expect the fame. Like being a Biker. No work. No study. No dedication. Just claim the name. So why do these folks deserve one squats more consideration than regular Christians? Or folks that haven’t joined the Christian club but live the life expected of a Christian. Why do we talk about them as if they’re deserving of something from us? Some heightened reverence.
They are not really a thing and they don’t matter.
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In both bullshit is the salient factor. Incells claim to reject woman for some principled reason or another when what’s really going down is woman reject them. In the case of Evangelicals the game is being a superlative Christian thinking that makes them deserving. Both full of shit. Both to be rejected.
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A popular conservative thought is that no money should be spent on foreign aid when there are so many problems here in the United States. I’ll take it under advisement when the idea starts penetrating churches.
One thing I like to do when I hear rightists bitching about some problem such as homelessness, is google up how many churches there are in the state, vs how many homeless people there are.
Churches outnumber homeless in so many states that my third question is why are churches begging for more money to send their own kids to summer camp and to go on junkets in Africa and Central America, than to help Americans right here at home?
Talk about only understanding their critique when they’re issuing it against other people. If only there had been a wise and well respected Teacher who ever had anything to say about that.
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It’s an interesting view inside the snake pit, but it’s still a snake pit when one of the Never Christian Nationalist Evangelicals says "abortion is nothing short of legal child sacrifice.”
So this guy doesn’t think conscience should be forced by the government, but who do you think he’s going to vote for in local, state, and national elections? Who do you think he’ll encourage his followers to vote for? It’s a distinction without a difference between these two groups when the rubber hits the road. Pure hypocrisy.
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I don’t separate one strand of faith over another, I find the whole thing bizarre.
The church has taken over this country already. Their financially useful moral prop has gone on too long.
The more Christian your state is, the bigger a failure it is.
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It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who thinks Christians are under attack in this country. From my point of view it’s the Christians who are doing the attacking. Not too Christ-like IMO.
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My father was an Evangelical Christian. We didn’t see eye to eye when it came to religion, but I loved him dearly, and he loved me.
Once when at his house (several years after 9/11), my stepmother’s sister started disparaging Muslims and their God Allah. My father immediately corrected her. Not only did he explain that the word Allah is merely the Arabic word for God, but he also explained to her that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God.
Though he was who he was, my father respected and understood other religions.
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They own all those buildings too, all that shelter.
Shame they are only open one day a week.
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The never Christian nationalists are no less extreme than their brethren they tamely critique. I’m a Christian and a Black woman (so maybe that makes a difference) and these people are heretics, fakers, liars and hypocrites to me.
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Opinion | We have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it?
The Founding Fathers feared that Americans would someday reject their many freedoms. That’s what the 2024 election is really about.
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For some time, it was possible to believe that many voters could not see the threat Donald Trump poses to America’s liberal democracy, and many still profess not to see it. But now, a little more than six months from Election Day, it’s hard to believe they don’t. The warning signs are clear enough. Trump himself offers a new reason for concern almost every day. People may choose to ignore the warnings or persuade themselves not to worry, but they can see what we all see, and that should be enough.
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Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?
Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.
For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial, and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.
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Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”Six decades ago, people like Rushdoony were responding not to “woke” corporations or Black Lives Matter but to civil rights legislation. Today, anti-liberal conservatives complain about school curriculums that acknowledge the racism that has shaped America’s history, but even five decades ago, before the invention of “critical race theory,” anti-liberal White people such as Rushdoony insisted that the “white man” was being “systematically indoctrinated into believing he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro.” Nor is it new that many White people feel that the demands of minority groups for both rights and respect have “gone too far” and it is they, the White people of America, who are suffering the worst discrimination. In the 1960s, surveys taken by the New York Times showed that majorities of White people believed even then that the civil rights movement had “gone too far,” that Blacks were receiving “everything on a silver platter” and the government was practicing “reverse discrimination” against White people. Liberalism is always going too far for many Americans — and certainly for anti-liberals. Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.
Some do realize it. The smartest and most honest of them know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government. What they have in mind is a Christian commonwealth: a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”
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Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”For these intellectuals, Trump is an imperfect if essential vehicle for the counterrevolution. A “deeply flawed narcissist” suffering from a “bombastic vanity,” as Deneen and Ellmers note, he has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” But this can be remedied. If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them” — a most Leninist concept indeed.
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Yup. Tomato, tomahto.
ETA: if they direct some of their energy into internecine squabbling, so much the better.
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The author buys into the right wing evangelical pastor framing of the left. It seems the idea that the left is promoting homosexuality or gender transition among six year olds is taken as an actual fact. If you accept a cult’s propaganda framing of the rest of society you are part of the cult.
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My impression is that his main worry is positioning. When the takeover comes, will his sect be in power, or will some other group of christianists be persecuting him? No apparent understanding that the freedoms he wants should also extend to non-evangelicals, much less Jews, Muslims or atheists.
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Sorry, but the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend, and certainly not in this case. These are the same religious fanatics who want the same religious restrictions on all our lives. They just disagree about long-term strategy and tactics.
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Back in the late 70s when all this shit really started, the early adopters ran around calling themselves “born again” because Jesus said “unless a man is born again he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” So the first dipshits took that literally and took on the name. That’s how deeply these morons think about anything. So, yeah, it’s all bullshit. Even their bullshit is bullshit.
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overcorrect by giving the power of a civil magistrate the opportunity to determine what is blasphemy and then to punish accordingly
This is John Locke 101, and the reason that the U.S. has carved out all its special exceptions for religious belief. It comes down to, if I have a megachurch that has all the tax protections that come with this view, do I gamble double or nothing that I can be made the Duke of Texas in a Christian theocracy, or do I enjoy the benefits of toleration?
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I did a lot of time in a church-based soup kitchen. We put out a decent daily meal for whoever came it. There were usually about 250 people a day. Eventually the pastor was forced to shut it down by other parishioners who were not volunteers. Their complaint was that the food we gave out enabled the clients to spend more money on dope and alcohol.
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