On White Evangelical Protestants

[The Magistrate]

I found this piece recently, and it is definitely worth a read.

https://www.editorialboard.com/p/for-white-evangelical-protestants


For white evangelical Protestants, the degradation of democracy is not regrettable. It's desirable.

The point is rule by God's chosen.


WEPs (White Evangelical Protestants) are not panicking. They are not embracing anti-democracy out of fear of losing their place in the republic. WEPs are anti-democratic because that’s what it means to be a white evangelical Protestant. Young adherents are leaving not because the faith has become politicized but because they have realized how deeply political the faith already was.

WEPs believe they are God’s chosen (or will be). They tend to believe the United States was given to “real Americans” by God to be ruled in His name. Those who are not God’s chosen are pretty much disposable. (After all, He knows who the righteous are.) The WEP identity is furthermore based not so much of what they are but on what they are not. We are not them. They are enmeshed in the world. We live here temporarily until The End. They represent a multiracial republic. We believe Christ is our King. The degradation is democracy isn’t regrettable. It’s desirable. Theocracy is the goal.

[Wounded Bear]

1. Large, organized religions tend to embrace authoritarianism...nt

[SheltieLover]

5. Of course. They are socio-political control mechanisms.

[Wounded Bear]

7. And generally very hierarchical in organization...

[SheltieLover]

10. Absolutely!

Man made rules in this regard fail to impress me

[erronis]

2. That's why it is so hard to have an intelligent discussion with them.

Their belief system is all they have. If they allow a question about one of its pillars, the whole sham will come tumbling down.

I have some people I deal with daily like that (social services for the elderly.) I don't mind listening to them and I don't try to change any minds. I just make it obvious that I'm not too interested when they get into their talks about whites vs. them, etc.

[MayReasonRule]

48. That's right!

Belief = Faith

Each rejects doubt and in so doing embraces delusion.

They are one and the same.

The basis of reason is doubt.

Reason ceases to exist, in the absence of doubt.

Hence, Faith/Belief is without reason.

May reason rule.

[cbabe]

3. Sarah Vowell's amazing

delightful funny hardcore historical research best book ever explaining why we are the way we are.

'The Wordy Shipmates'

Puritans: a great political enterprise. Our philosophical, spiritual, moral ancestors. And do they have a lot to answer for.

Easy reading you will want to read out loud to friends and family.

[plimsoll]

22. I don't know,

People are prisoners of their era, 1540 to 1700 England was a cesspit of religious factionalism. Keep in mind that we hold up New England as our philosophical, spiritual and moral ancestors, I think that's really only true if you're from a Northern Tier state. The settlements from all the colonies tend to mirror their parents. We think of the New England colonies as the forebears because it's probably the least offensive.

And get it on audiobook. Sarah Vowell reading Sarah Vowell really can't be beat.

[roamer65]

4. If these freaks are in heaven, send me to hell.

At least I’ll know what to expect in hell.



See the Kingsman church scene for additional thoughts.

[malaise]

40. Just keep them away from me

please

[roamer65]

41. U and I will stick together.

[malaise]

42. Yes

[PortTack]

6. They can spin it however they want. It's code for racism..whites only

[Nevilledog]

8. K & R

[cilla4progress]

9. I figured out why they are having shit fits

about the evolving virus instructions - they cannot handle uncertainty or complexity. It's what they want in their religion, their politics, and their "science:" dictates, immutable and predictable. They can't handle change - such as demographic change.

And it's all fear-based.

[Jilly_in_VA]

12. This is true of conservatives generally

They're hard-wired to deal only in absolutes. There's a whole psychological study that was done on in awhile back that was fascinating.

[cilla4progress]

39. Absolutely.

...

[crickets]

11. Good editorial, and one of those rare times when reading the comments pays off.

LIBA Jul 13

...In addition, you also leave out the conservative Catholics that are utterly critical to the theocratic project. While conservative Evangelicals (again, of all races-- not just white), may be louder, more numerous, and supply the bulk of the votes, I would argue that its the Catholic fundamentalists that are the "brains" behind the operation. I don't think its a coincidence that all 6 Republican-appointed SCOTUS judges are conservative Catholics. Not to mention former VP Mike Pence, former AG Bill Barr, Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo (who was responsible for picking almost all of Trump's judges), Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and almost every leader of the most prominent anti-choice orgs. The list goes on and on and on. Its not a coincidence that this is the case. And yet, for some reason, just about every critic (including yourself) of the Christian Right limits their criticism to the "WEPs" and say next nothing to about the Catholic theocrats. That needs to change.


John Stoehr [author] Jul 13
Good point re conservative Catholics.

[plimsoll]

24. +1

[Thomas Hurt]

13. Exactly, the christofascists have been working toward a christian theocracy since Reagan.

[Alice Kramden]

14. True also of Dominionists, who are mostly Catholic

Pence, Pompeo, Bill Barr, and probably some Supreme Court justices are Dominionists. They want theocracy. Between the WEP and them they are a tremendous threat to our democracy.

[Grins]

15. True! And going back more than a century!

A great history is the opening chapters of “The Family” by by Jeff Sharlet. The goal is an American theocracy on their terms. What Sharlet wrote in 2008 is even more true today.

[dalton99a]

16. +1. Excellent book

...

My “brothers” were members of a very peculiar group of believers, not representative of the majority of Christians but of an avant-garde of the social movement I call American fundamentalism, a movement that recasts theology in the language of empire. Avant-garde is a term usually reserved for innovators, artists who live strange and dangerous lives and translate their strange and dangerous thoughts into pictures or poetry or fantastical buildings. The term has a political ancestry as well: Lenin used it to describe the elite cadres he believed could spark a revolution. It is in this sense that the men to whom my brothers apprenticed themselves, a seventy-year-old self-described “invisible” network of followers of Christ in government, business, and the military, use the term avant-garde. They call themselves “the Family,” or “The Fellowship,” and they consider themselves a “core” of men responsible for changing the world. “Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people,” instructs a document given to an inner circle, explaining the scope, if not the ideological particulars, of the ambition members of this avant-garde are to cultivate.1 Or, as a former Ivanwald brother who’d used his Ivanwald connections to find a foothold in the insurance industry told my brothers and me during a seminar on “biblical capitalism,” “Look at it like this: take a bunch of sticks, light each one of ’em on fire. Separate, they go out. Put ’em together, though, and light the bundle. Now you’re ready to burn.”

Hitler, to the Family, is no more real than Attila the Hun as drafted by business gurus who promise unstoppable “leadership” techniques drawn from history’s killers; or for that matter Christ, himself, as rendered in a business best seller called Jesus, CEO. The Family’s avant-garde is not composed of neo-Nazis, or crypto-Nazis, or fascists by any traditional definition; they are fundamentalists, and in this still-secular age, fundamentalism is a religion of both affluence and revolution.

...

The more I learned about the Family, the more difficulty I had in classifying its theology. It is Protestant, to be sure, though there are Catholic members. Its leadership regards with disdain not only the mainline denominations, but also evangelicals they consider “lukewarm.” And yet they distance themselves from the bullying of televangelists and moral scolds as well, in part because of theological differences (Jesus, they believe, instructs them to cultivate the powerful regardless of their doctrinal purity) and in part based on style (the Family believes in a subtler evangelism). “They take the same approach to religion that Ronald Reagan took to economics,” says a Senate staffer named Neil MacBride, a political liberal with conservative evangelical convictions that put him at odds with the Family’s unorthodox fundamentalism. “Reach the elite, and the blessings will trickle down to the underlings.”

...

But at Ivanwald, or in a prayer cell at the Cedars, or in conversations with world leaders, the Family’s beliefs appear closer to a more marginal set of theologies sometimes gathered under the umbrella term of dominionism, characterized for me by William Martin, a religious historian at Rice University and Billy Graham’s official biographer, as the “intellectual heart of the Christian Right.” Dominionist theologies hold the Bible to be a guide to every decision, high and low, from whom God wants you to marry to whether God thinks you should buy a new lawn mower. Unlike neo-evangelicals, who concern themselves chiefly with getting good with Jesus, dominionists want to reconstruct early Christian society, which they believe was ruled by God alone. They view themselves as the new chosen and claim a Christian doctrine of covenantalism, meaning covenants not only between God and humanity but at every level of society, replacing the rule of law and its secular contracts. Since these covenants are signed, as it were, in the Blood of the Lamb, they are written in ink invisible to nonbelievers.

...

[paleotn]

19. Son's of Jacob?

[lindysalsagal]

43. Invisible ink. Just like their invisible god.

Deranged fools. They'll be our ruin.

[cayugafalls]

23. +1000000, required reading for anyone wondering what is really going on today.

Bang on book...

Literally, scared the shit out of me when I read it.

[mountain grammy]

33. Yes, read it way back then..

scared the crap out of me.. the Family, more than anything, is the reason for trumpism.. it is trumpism.

[paleotn]

17. I once heard the uber jackass, James Dobson,

of Focus on Your Own Goddamn Family fame, once say that democracy was an inferior form of government and that a monarchy of the "righteous" was far superior. A monarchy awaiting Jesus's return. That was in the late 90's. Yep, Handmaid's Tale the documentary.

To be honest, I cannot even begin to express how I truly feel about those people without being banned from DU for life.

[patphil]

18. They may be chosen, but not by God.

It's pretty evident, by their words and deeds, that they don't know God.

[keithbvadu2]

20. What will they say/do when it is not their version of Christianity in charge?

What will they say/do when it is not their version of Christianity in charge?


http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist= ;

Madison also made a point that any believer of any religion should understand: that the government sanction of a religion was, in essence, a threat to religion. "Who does not see," he wrote, "that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?" Madison was writing from his memory of Baptist ministers being arrested in his native Virginia.

[lees1975]

21. From a white Evangelical protestant

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2021/07/an-evangelical-christian-perspective-on.html

[The Magistrate]

27. Not Bad, Sir

But the quietists are not in the saddle, and we have to deal with what has brought itself front and center.

And that is the deep-seated tendency described above. People able to say with feeling 'One man and God is a majority' are a civil problem, and in our country an apparently intractable one.


"Saints should be presumed guilty till judged innocent."

[mountain grammy]

31. Wow!

this:

During one of the greatest persecutions ever brought against the church, for more than 200 years under the successive rule of some of the most cruel, evil men ever to serve in ancient world government, the church never participated in an insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government or a rebellion aimed at fighting against it. It continued to pursue its mission and purpose, living righteously in the middle of a pagan culture. It was a position that caused people to take notice of them, putting them in a position to hear their testimony and come to redemption through the gospel of Christ. Instead of being wiped out by persecution, the church experienced revival, in terms of impact on the world, greater than any that has happened since. It succeeded in bringing about a change in the government, conquering by transformational and spiritual change, not by violence.

and this:

So put down your sword. You're not going to bring revival to the United States, or fulfill the purpose of the church to glorify God by overthrowing the government. It's not going to come about by making deals with a President who celebrates his immorality, uses it to enhance his personal fame and uses the benefit he gets from your support to do more of it. And no matter how you have personally evaluated the "worldview" of the other side, they're not stopping you from carrying out the mission and purpose of the church, which is glorifying God and testifying to his grace and truth through the redemptive message of the Gospel of Jesus.

Get away from the politics that makes you blame the other side, and stop using them as an excuse for why you're not doing what the scripture says you should be doing, and you might actually see a revival.

[90-percent]

25. Frank Zappa despised televangelists

these two songs were written in the mid eighties concurrent with the Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye scandals.

The Beatles medley's had some lyrical overhauling by Frank which is quite amusing. Yes, humor does indeed belong in music.

The songs are from Frank's last performance in the U.S. I attended this show. And about eight others in the northeast back in 1988.

-90% Jimmy

[Elessar Zappa]

44. I love Frank Zappa.

He’s a role model of mine. I wish I had been alive when he was still holding concerts. A true genius.

[90-percent]

47. frank

my first show was october 16 1971 stony brook late show. just another band from l.a. is a very close version of that show and my first album. like gail says, once you're in, you're in for life. Material about frank was hard to find back then. you to scan rock mags on the drug store magazine rack. rank was real good at press releases and so the local paper had his releases published from time to time. friends, radio.

nice to meet you. there's so much info about him and related stuff and i learn things every exploration. like this site, which is astounding.


https://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/They%27re_Doing_the_Interview_of_the_Century,_Part_1

-jim

[mountain grammy]

26. Absolutely true..

Even Barry Goldwater knew it when he said

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

My husband said goodbye to his WEP family over 50 years ago when he graduated from high school and skedaddled. Even if it meant being drafted (he enlisted) and risking his life for a year. He was glad to get away. We remained part of the family until Trump. That was it.

[Hekate]

28. As I sit here, hubby's reading a book that's making his hair stand on end...

Shadow Network: media, money, and the secret hub of the radical right, by Anne Nelson

First off, he said, “You were right,” and I said what do you mean? which opened the floodgates. I said, “Welcome to my world.”

I will have to read that book when he’s done, but a bunch of stuff that he’s read aloud so far has its basis in the research on Dominionism that I did in the first few years I was at DU (today, btw, is my 19th DU anniversary). The proofs of the “network” are still shocking, despite how much I have come to suspect over the years.

Cheers, Sir. May we meet in better days.

[monkeyman1]

29. religion & politics don't f@$king mix ! - like water & oil !!!

[NanananaFatman]

30. Of course. Didn't everyone know this?

It’s a death cult. Most religions are.

Why would you expect anything else from its acolytes and victims?

[TygrBright]

32. A departure from the history of the evangelical denominations to whom we owe the 1st Amendment.

It was the evangelical denominations in the colonial and post-Revolutionary times who greatly feared the establishment of official state religion(s) in America, based on the then-dominance of large mainstream Protestant denominations, particularly the Episcopalian power centers in New England.

Funny to think that we owe the guarantee of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" to the very Baptists, Congregationalists, etc., who are now trying to establish their religion as having state-like authority to dictate to everyone regardless of their faith.

How the proud are humbled, especially those who would make a show of their religious superiority.

reflectively,
Bright

[The Magistrate]

34. At Times, Ma'am

I suspect not establishing a state church was a mistake.

Exempting places like China, where attitudes towards the divine have long been fluid and transactional, and belief or disbelief was never much an issue, the most irreligious countries are those in Europe which had established churches. Over time the result has been a nominal allegiance, without much force, whether individual or civic. Religion became regarded as just one more aspect of state bureaucracy, and the general distaste for the latter eroded and engulfed the former. I have little doubt religion would have less political force here and now had the Founders established some variant of the Anglican denominations as the church of the United States.

[TygrBright]

36. It's entirely possible. On the other hand, given our incredibly strong cultural support...

...for immature anti-intellectual and anti-government "you're not the boss of me" libertarianism, it could have become the fault line it is today, two hundred years earlier. Would the Republic have survived, I wonder?

Interesting also to speculate on how an established state faith would have related to "the peculiar institution" and how that would have played out.

historically,
Bright

[Elessar Zappa]

45. Interesting theory.

You very well may be right.

[lees1975]

46. The difference is that the basic doctrines of those colonial "Evangelicals" has changed

The groups you mention, Baptists and Congregationalists, had in common the congregational governance of their churches. There was no clerical connection between churches, each church called their own pastors and conducted their own business with all members participating.

What has changed, at least among the Baptists, is the influence of a futurist interpretation of Biblical Eschatology, or end-times views, known as Premillenial Dispensationalism. It attempts to use the Bible to try and apply modern events to a timeline that ushers in the "rapture" or literal resurrection of the church, the millenial reign of Christ, a literal "tribulation" and the return of Jesus. Dominionism is tied to it.

It's a gross misinterpretation of the Bible, requiring a way of looking at it that goes way outside the boundaries of its historical context. And it has an effect on the church's "worldview" with regard to its role in ushering in the second coming.

[hunter]

35. I think they should be randomly crucified, one in ten thousand annually...

... to reassure them of their faith.

If the unvaccinated White Evangelical Protestant accepts this test of faith as more than good enough for a mindless virus then it's certainly good enough for the law.

[Celerity]

38. roflmaoooooo

[Blue Owl]

37. I am glad they are a shrinking minority

Fuck ‘em.