MAGA America Goes For A Ride
Part 3 of Dominionism: The Damnable Heresy of the Last Days.
The Christian Right has devolved into a counter-Reformation, authoritarian, self-righteous Handmade’s Tale Christian Nationalism in the service of plutocracy. Its significance is the neo-Tory destruction of the Founding Father’s vision of what actually made America great.
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed;
2 To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!
3 And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help? and where will ye leave your glory?
4 Without me they shall bow down under the prisoners, and they shall fall under the slain. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
-Isaiah 10:1-4
MAGA America: The emergence of the “Christian Right” in the late 1970s is a sordid tale of fraud, racism, and finding a way to sell one Catholic extremist’s vision of a right-wing, anti-democratic, neo-feudalistic vision for America. It has depended upon a lot of manipulation and promotion of massive ignorance—ignorance of American history, Church history, world history, the value of democracy, the importance of the global Great Commission, Enlightenment-era ideals that represent the best of the American story, and much, much more.[1] Its promotion of a militant Christian nationalism is creating an apostate, end-times Church, part of a MAGA America harlot riding the back of the American Antichrist (Rev 17:3). It is a big part of the “strong delusion” of the last days (II Thess 2:11).
Unfortunately (or fortunately, actually), their “agenda” as they put it, has not been popular with the American people. But their stubborn resilience has been made possible by the quiet but lavish funding of a much wider and deeper organizational infrastructure than the public has been aware of—a class of wealthy plutocrats who see these Evangelicals as useful tools, and a political base for their own equally unpopular agenda.
This new aristocracy of wealth began with the Robber Barons in the 1880s who wanted to buy up a political party and found one in the Republicans, previously the most progressive party in the country. By the 1920s, they became generally known as “Wall Street,” and were not very popular with the Christian world, because the latter at least knew what the Bible taught about the dangers of greed and wealth and its abuse. Christians back then were generally supportive of FDR’s common man New Deal right up through the 1970s.
That kind of Christianity being transformed into today’s Christian Right is due to an ever-expanding right-wing media archipelago so generously underwritten and yet hidden, one can hardly see who’s behind it and its overall intentions. Its messaging has been marked by pet wedge issues on the one hand (e.g., abortion and other sex-based or family issues), and the explaining away or ignoring of even the most basic spiritual principles of the Bible.[2]
Patiently-executed and ever-evolving, it was designed to spew forth lies, half-truths, distortions, defamation, slander, fear, hysteria and anxiety, day in and day out. Its strategy is age-old divide-and-conquer, its evangelists both sincere yet deluded and calculating, with some so brilliant, cunning and cynical (like the Sekulow dynasty—Eph 4:14), as to run rings around the minds of their hapless listeners, starved for truth, and harried by the pressures and stresses of modern life. The psy op mind control technique of getting you to believe that “The Left” (anyone who disagrees with this) is the epicenter of sin in our day, and who are all out to get you, is typical of the endless agitprop.
This has all been done for the sake of “saving America” through the seeking of raw political power and dominion without the freely-given consent of the governed. It has brought us to the current absurdity we find ourselves in—Donald P.T. Barnum “There’s a sucker born every minute” Trump as the champion of The Faith, their “Anointed” now no less, who will lead America out of Babylonian bondage. Spare me.
The Founding Fathers Got An Idea Rolling
MAGA America: Before explaining what the Christian right’s history is and why it is so scandalous, we need to understand the larger context it functions within. Although it’s a huge story and I’ve touched upon it elsewhere, I’ll try to keep it short and concise.
MAGA reactionaries are not just content with taking everyone back to the 1950s; they are actually playing on Americans’ ignorance of the birth of the United States, and in some cases, wanting to “take us back,” to medieval days! This they do by manipulating quotes from the many Founding Fathers, who were all over the map with their ideas, as they groped with piecing together a new kind of governmental model to bring the world out of feudalism and into the modern world.
Thus, “America” supposedly represents a set of ideas and ideals that were revolutionary for the time, but which have evolved and been refined ever since. To complain that “the Constitution is not a living and breathing document like the liberals always insist,” is a dishonest, deceitful and non-sensical argument.
No less than 26 Amendments have been added to the original Constitutional model. During a political gridlock era, what the Founders did was lay the foundation for the eventual enfranchisement of all of “We the People,” transforming them from peasants to citizens. Plainly said, political freedom in any realistic sense, is not ultimately possible outside of a democracy model in a world of imperfect leaders and people. It may look messy, but anything less will eventually die of its own lack of creativity, personal and collective responsibility.
One of these revolutionary ideas was “a rule of law, and not of kings” (“tyrants,” as they called them) wherein even the government would be subject to the laws it made, and no one above it. This includes the President, and especially the President, the most powerful citizen of them all.[3] Yet on the other hand, the Founders were also very distrustful of “the mob” and “mob rule,” such as we saw in Trump’s Insurrection, given their experience with the unruly American frontier people.
What they started then was a republic, which means a system of representative officials whether elected or appointed. In the original Constitution, Senators weren’t even elected, but were appointed by state legislatures, while Congressional representatives were elected, but only by a narrow percentage of the population (white male property owners).
Not until 1828 did white males in general get the right to vote. This was followed by the right of black males to vote after the Civil War in the 15th Amendment (theoretically!)[4] After that, the enfranchisement of women in 1920, the actual right to vote for all black Americans in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the lowering of the voter age to 18 in 1971, etc.
This of course has been an abomination to these Wall Street neo-plantation owners. So much of American progress has been the building out of not just a Constitutional republic, but a democracy as well, and that for many reasons. Thus, what the US government has been for two and a half centuries is an evolving Constitutional democratic republic. It is a very complex form of government, and deliberately so, the product of hard knocks and intricate attempts to ensure fair play for everyone.[5]
Not All The Tories Went Back To England
MAGA: All of this held until the right-wing’s precious, so-called “Reagan Revolution,” which began to reverse the trend and take us backwards, to where it was as if the Tories had won the American Revolution, and America either remained a colony or became a monarchy in its own right. The recent horrific decision by the Supreme Court to give Donald Trump king-like powers, and even encourage him to exercise them aggressively (as if he needed any prodding!), was the most mendacious step yet in this Republican frenzy of betrayal and ignorance.
But the Founding Fathers won that battle against England and the American Tories now, didn’t they? Any true conservative would want to conserve that victory, not undo it like today’s Republican regressives are doing, all in the name of culture wars and forcing their personal values on to everyone else.
Yes, the Tory sentiment never left American culture. It first resurfaced with the Southern plantation system, wherein the richest among them, hostile to the empowerment of common, working-class people, used race to divide and conquer. That oligarchical spirit they wanted to spread to the whole country, but they lost that “appeal unto heaven” didn’t they, to Lincoln’s democratic Republicans?
But hey, if you can’t beat them, why not just buy them? By the 1880s, a new class called the Robber Barons arose in the North who wanted their own political party, so they bought out the Republicans. These white men, always men, were ruthless in their business tactics and greedy of gain (“Robber”), and aristocratic and entitled in attitude (“Baron,” as in, you know, “Barron Trump”?).[6]
This Gilded Age plutocratic class you could liken to an American version of 19th Century England, of which Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge and his “born again” transformation. England at this time, which prided itself as the flagship nation for Protestant Christianity, was a heartless society with a few “morbidly rich” people as Thom Hartmann often puts it, lording it over multitudes of the poor, living in squalor.
This is why FDR called for a “Second American Revolution” by the 1930s, this time against the “Economic Royalists,” the neo-Tories of his day. These were members of his own class who despised him for caring about the working man, and tried a coup on him before he even took power.[7] They accused Roosevelt of every name in the book—communist, socialist, etc—but in truth he was only trying to save capitalism by making it work for everyone. It was a massive and popular success until the Reagan Revolution deliberately began to undo it all.
The Empire Strikes Back
MAGA: In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell sent out his prickly, now-infamous “Memo” to the American Chamber of Commerce and corporate world,[8] pleading for America’s wealthy to fight back against the shrill leftist rhetoric of the time, inflamed by their outrage against the Vietnam War and resistance to recent Civil rights legislation. What it set in motion though, was a much better-funded effort by the wealthy class of America to eventually reverse about every point of progress made on behalf of the “General Welfare” of the American people since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and his progressive Republicans at the turn of the 20th Century.[9]
Powell was rewarded by Richard Nixon with a Supreme Court seat the next year, from which he began to rule on behalf of the plutocratic class. He was not alone in such efforts. A Southern economist James Buchanan, sought to undermine the growing Civil Rights movement by promoting a theory designed to keep working people poor and down. Professor Nancy MacLean of Duke University has done some marvelous work uncovering his influence with her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains.[10]
Likewise, in the 1970s a Goldwater Republican named Jude Wanniski, tired of watching his beloved party get regularly trounced in elections by the wildly-popular “tax and spend” Democrats, came up with his cynical “supply side theory,” what I call “banker con man economics.” Wanniski reset the conventional economic wisdom for 40 years until the administration of Joe Biden who has created a booming economy by reverting back to Keynesian, New Deal economics.
George Bush Sr., running against Reagan in the 1980 primaries, rightfully called it “voodoo economics,” yet it soon became holy writ to right-wing crazies to this day. It has resulted in a 51 trillion dollar transfer of wealth out of the pockets of working people into those of the “morbidly rich” as Thom Hartmann calls them. It became the basis of every other political, social and spiritual problem we’ve had ever since in my opinion, or at least the vast majority of them (James 5:1-6). And all a second Trump administration will do is double down on this exact wrong direction while pretending to care about the working classes!
Then there’s the mendacious influence of Ayn Rand’s Libertarianism and its “virtue of selfishness” thinking that captured an entire generation of “tech bros” and economic elites. The pursuit of one’s self interest has no inherent virtue to it, and it’s the easy part anyway. It’s the willingness to yield to the equal rights of others and society that’s the hard part, and that deals with stone cold issues of morality and ethics. You know, those things that the Church is supposed to be the expert of experts in (I Tim 3:15)?
All of these factors and more have contributed to a huge concentration and redistribution of wealth upwards, out of the pockets of America’s middle class and into the hands of the top .1% of income earners.
It is this broader context that must be kept in mind to understand the success of such an unpopular agenda as that of the Christian Right—the fact that they are so lavishly funded by this plutocratic class in a way that democratic forces simply cannot compete with, except at the ballot box, yet in the face of a massive voter suppression campaign by the Republican Party in the name of “voter integrity.”
Their evolving plan is to concentrate all wealth into their hands, purge out dissent, and use largely race and disinformation to get the public blaming one another for the economic squeeze. This is essentially where we are in this dire hour. The role of the Christian Right was to give them a political voting base for their unpopular measures, and provide a veneer of piety and righteousness for it all as we saw in the last installment.
Enter the Christian Right
MAGA: It’s important therefore, to understand this context of American history when seeking to understand the significance of the Christian right, and how it’s been co-opted by the plutocracy to be their useful tool. And it might surprise most Evangelicals to find out that the single-most responsible figure for what became known as the Christian Right was a radical Catholic named Paul Weyrich. So widespread and insidious has this one man’s damage been, that I would put him among the top three people who have done the most to destroy the United States post World War II, as we have known and loved it, the other two being Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.
And by Catholic, what I mean is a kind of “fundamentalist Catholic,[11] one that never saw the Reformation as legitimate and a necessary effort to return to the de-centralized model of the early Church.[12] It shouldn’t surprise us to find he never really appreciated the Enlightenment which was a kind of a secular philosophical version of the Reformation applied to politics.
Nor modern democracy. His natural bent was toward medieval Christianity—centralized, hierarchical, authoritarian, dogmatic, anti-democratic, feudalistic, elitist, repressive and superstitious. In fact, you’d be surprised how many Catholics are thought leaders in this ostensibly-Evangelical Christian nationalism.[13] Weyrich, Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation), Leonard Leo (Federalist Society), John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett (Supreme Court), JD Vance, Newt Gingrich, Paul Gosar, Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik (Senate and Congress), William F. Buckley, Jr, Joseph Sobran, Pat Buchanan, William Barr, William Bennett—are/were all Catholics.[14]
So it’s hard to conceive how much damage Weyrich did to American Protestantism and the American democratic experiment, simply by pursuing his subconscious Catholic instincts in my opinion. He first came upon my radar around 1993. I remember working in a basement at the time, listening to a tape of a popular speech by him going around called the “Goo-Goo Syndrome”:
Well, at least he was honest about his cynicism and contempt for common man democracy, which apparently had gripped those Allied Powers so much that it left thousands of dead Americans all over Europe and the Pacific. Weyrich was one of those likeable, bright, highly-educated and sophisticated fanatics who, like Trump after him, could say the most provocative, even bombastic things and hardly be challenged for it. I too fell for the goo-goo argument. After all, I was still pretty extreme and fanatical myself at the time, wanting to be “sold out for Jesus,” in every way I could.
Weyrich came to Washington, DC in the 1960s with a desire to weaponize America’s many Evangelical churchgoers into a base for the Republican Party, which was deeply unpopular at the time. By his own admission, since the 1964 election, he had tried many issues to mobilize them—school prayer, pornography, the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), feminism—the usual things. But he got nowhere until he lighted upon one that really incensed the Deep South Bible Belt—de-segregation of private schools.
The Left Is Right—It’s Often About Race
MAGA: Ever since Brown v. Board of education in 1956, there had been almost universal white flight into private Christian schools in the South. These also wanted tax-exempt status as well, but courts had been not ruling in their favor, and Nixon had been enforcing one of those court mandates to de-segregate their schools if they wanted to be able to deduct donations from their taxes.[15]
Weyrich found in this the wedge issue he could exploit. By redefining it as a matter of “government interference” and “religious freedom” (previously-known as “states’ rights” and “segregation”), he convinced a growing network of “segregation academy” pastors like Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones to get behind the cause.
But Weyrich still couldn’t find an issue to drive the Evangelical masses to vote Republican.[16] After all, the optics were like, so bad if they rallied around racism, a decade now after widespread integration.[17] But when he found out he could defeat four Democratic candidates in the 1978 mid-terms by flooding church parking lots with anti-abortion literature, he knew he had his front issue.
In fact, you could characterize elements and personalities coming together at this point as a Perfect Storm to bring about the Reagan Revolution of 1980, the point where American plutocracy really began to strike back. Dr. Francis Schaeffer of L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland had a big hit movie in 1979 called Whatever Happened To The Human Race? making the rounds in American churches. Schaeffer became one of the biggest anti-abortion voices after his son Frank convinced him to take up the issue:
Theoretically, because the Catholics were against abortion at first made Dad very suspicious of the issue. …But his suspicion of it was also mirrored [by] people like Jerry Falwell and [Pat] Robertson and these other guys who at first said the same thing when he came to them. … Their whole reaction was: “What do you mean? That’s a Catholic deal. Why would we take a stand on that when we believe in contraception and all these other things?…We’re all about Jesus Christ and a personal relationship with the Savior. Why would we want to be sidetracked on this stuff?”
If it had gone slightly differently, we would have had a completely different history of the United States at this point. There would have been no Ronald Reagan, no George Bush, no religious right, no evangelical groups to back these people. It was on a knife edge there in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Could have gone either way.
Falwell, Robertson (son of a Republican Senator) and other Evangelical leaders may have initially felt this way but saw what Weyrich was saying about the power of abortion to get Evangelicals out to vote. It was he who suggested the name Moral Majority to Falwell for the latter’s new organization. Falwell also quickly revised history to tell a different story, claiming that the day Roe v. Wade came out, he just sat there looking at the newspaper, disturbed beyond all words.[18]
Truth be told, he never gave a sermon against the subject until more than five years later. His own Southern Baptist Convention hailed the decision when it broke, given the inhumane stories of “back-alley abortionists” at the time, and reconfirmed their favor throughout the 1970s. Yet the myth that it was Roe that gave birth to the Christian Right and not de-segregation persists to this day.
Weyrich’s ultimate cynical goal though remember, was to put Republicans in power to undo 70 years of social welfare measures begun with the progressive Republicans of Teddy Roosevelt’s day. But Jimmy Carter was the President. Though an outspoken Evangelical and Sunday School teacher,[19] he was still a Democrat. So they petitioned Ronald Reagan, who signed into law one of the most pro-choice laws for California when he was governor there, to make a pact with them. When Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign, he chose Philadelphia—not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the cradle of American liberty, but Philadelphia, Mississippi, the tiny town where three voters’ rights workers were murdered in 1964 by local police and the KKK. How’s that for a subtle dog whistle?
As a postscript to this ignominious beginning to the Christian Right, in a move of how typically unpopular Republican values are with Americans, the Reagan administration backed off on their promise to the Evangelical plaintiffs:
When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.[20]
This informative video is a short, concise explanation of this genesis story:
A Busy Little Beaver
MAGA: In spite of this failure, the Reagan administration accomplished a lot for this new, ascendant religious-political movement. Waiting for the crew as they moved into the White House was the Heritage Foundation’s original Mandate For Leadership manual, the first of nine such editions for Republican administrations ever since, the most recent being the nefarious Project 2025.[21]
This one was full of 2000 measures they wanted Reagan to implement, about 2/3 of which he made good on. One of them included, “developing a new strategic bomber by using B-1 and advanced bomber technology,” because, you know, that’s so much a part of the Great Commission and “saving America from moral decline.”
In fact, Weyrich’s special genius seemed to be in his organizational skills and seeing the need to establish institutions with benign-sounding yet Orwellian names that would better sell his neo-medieval political vision. Typical of this was his first, “The Heritage Foundation” in 1973. Though it naturally conjured up cultural memories of the Pilgrims and the like in the minds of his gullible, untaught Evangelical audiences, the question remains, given his own historical biases—“whose heritage”? The socially-regressive nature of the latest HF work product, Project 2025, seems to be something of a logical, final outcome of the Weyrich mindset.
Funded by the Coors beer empire and inspired by Lewis Powell’s clarion call, Heritage always sought to promote culture wars in America, a nation built upon the principle of liberty (of “minding your own business,” and tolerating different lifestyles and matters of conscience as much as possible). The effect, if not the original intent, was to pull Christians into becoming as politically divisive as possible to cover for a plutocratic subversion of the New Deal. Heritage’s purpose from its start was to, “counter liberal views on taxation and regulation, which they considered to be anti-business.”
Just Getting Started
MAGA:Weyrich also co-founded that same year of 1973 one of the most destructive organizations to ever assail American democracy—ALEC or the American Legislative Exchange Council. Working in tandem with the rise of the Federalist Society and the lobbyist system, ALEC has done more than its fair share to corrupt the US governmental system.
It worked this way. The Federalists would shepherd judges in the mold of Powell into the judiciary, who would rule that opening up the floodgates of unlimited and anonymous amounts of money, even foreign cash, into Congressional and White House elections was not really legalized bribery after all. No, no, it was “free speech.”
The effect of this was to force elected officials to spend more and more of their precious time dialing for dollars rather than researching, holding hearings and writing legislation. That function would be helpfully fulfilled by ALEC which would simply write entire bills for them, chockablock full of plutocratic goodies, and introduce them through their network of Republican front men.
Here’s a withering list of corporate funders of ALEC.
And you were told it was all about “safeguarding your values.” As the Church Lady would say, “Isn’t that special?”
Weyrich was just getting started however. In 1976 he founded the apocalyptic-sounding Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC),[22] later changed to the Free Congress Foundation because, you know, the rest of Congress is just so un-free, especially after the Republican agenda gets through with saddling it all with a flood of filthy lucre.
This “Free Congress” creature had an interesting pedigree:
CSFC “became active in eastern European politics after the Cold War. Figuring prominently in this effort was Weyrich’s right-hand man, Laszlo Pasztor,[13] a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, which had collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich. After serving two years in prison for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach arm of the Republican national Committee,” author Martin Lee wrote in 1997.
Ah yes. Shades of the glories of Victor Orban’s contemporary Hungary, which was in turn inspired by Putin’s Russia. This is the inspiration of today’s decrepit MAGA Republican Party. By their fruits ye shall know them.
But perhaps the coup de grace of this stealth, underground Republican subversion of “the greatest nation that ever was!” found its apotheosis with the Council for National Policy. To be fair to Weyrich, this time he can’t be blamed for all of it. He shared co-founding credit with Tim LaHaye along with “Nelson Bunker Hunt, T. Cullen Davis, William Cies, [and] Howard Phillips.” From its beginning, the CNP has sought to be “the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations.”[23]
That’s right, the CFR! That long-standing nemesis of right-wing America, that secretive group of trans-Atlantic elites plotting to bring about world government has been thankfully replaced by a devious, secretive global Christian caliphate. I feel better already.
“The Council for National Policy (CNP) is an umbrella organization and networking group for far right Christian nationalist and Republican activists in the United States. Its ultimate goal is to establish a Christian autocratic theocracy in the United States of America [2] It was launched in 1981 during the Reagan administration by Tim LaHaye and the Christian right, to “bring more focus and force to conservative advocacy”.[1][2][3] The membership list for September 2020 was later leaked, showing that members included prominent Republicans and conservatives, wealthy entrepreneurs, and media proprietors, together with anti-abortion and anti-Islamic extremists. Members are instructed not to reveal their membership or even name the group.[4] [24]
Lovely. Really important moves to make God and Christ happy. The CNP is one of the wealthiest, most regressive organizations of what’s left feeding off the dying carcass of the once-great American experiment. Its style is antithetical of everything we once stood for. It truly deserves a major official investigation of its subversive, plutocratic, anti-American activities if you will. But don’t hold your MAGA breath.
They Really Are Serious About This
MAGA: The previously-mentioned Project 2025 has become wildly unpopular in recent months, as a multitude of researchers and journalists have sounded the alarm about it. So much so that it has resulted in the resignation of its director Paul Dans (“too close to the former Trump administration”), the postponement of the book’s publishing till after the election (nothing like transparency with the public), and Donald Trump’s insincere whining that he knows nothing about it.
Compiled by over 100 Christian Right organizations, a thousand contributors, many former Trump administration staff and underwritten by big, big bucks, it’s largely a plan to accommodate the governmental fantasies of Donald Trump, no matter how much he tries to run away from it.[25] That Trump’s likely successor J.D. Vance is directly linked to Silicon Valley billionaires shows you that they are dead serious about turning America into a neo-feudal plutocracy.
After decades of loudly proclaiming a monopoly on patriotism and a love for America approaching near-idolatry, the Christian Right has ended up deciding the Founding Fathers didn’t really know what they were talking about after all, and are offering the world a rejection of the entire modern era (I Tim 4:2)! Talk about the blind leading the blind. Is it any wonder that this fraud is the apostate Christianity of the end of the age?
How Late Is It Really?
MAGA: Revelation 17:3 describes a harlot on a joy ride on the back of The Beast of chapter 13 (“the Antichrist”). It is identified as the Great Babylon (“Tower of Confusion”), mentioned in chapter 16:19, with its economic capital described in chapter 18 (New York City).
As I argue in American Babylon, American Antichrist, that Babylon is the latter day United States, especially as she’ll be if and when under the control of the MAGA cult. She is also described as “the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth” (17:5), perhaps because that amalgam of religion and faux democracy that the Russians are suffering under, at least is found in a country that never had a history of democracy to throw away.
Who knows what other fascist abominations we could inspire around the world through our sorceries (18:23) of gaslighting the world and inverting reality? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Notes: MAGA
[1] The 18th Century Enlightenment or “Age of Reason” was sort of a secular version of the Reformation and its principles. It represents to me the pinnacle of human philosophy, one that “co-exists” or resonates best with the Kingdom of God without blurring that line between Church and State as we saw. Most of the Founders were thus Christian men who sought to create a secular (“earthly”) government that would honor that bright line, unlike Christian Nationalism.
[2] The Bible is loaded with myriads of examples and observations about the characteristics of what makes up “the righteous versus the wicked” (twistedness, the crooked path), all of which add up into portraits of what the redeemed vesus the damned look like. Just a few examples of these spiritual principles include seeking to serve rather than rule (Mk 9:34,35), fair-mindedness rather than wild, railing accusations and defamation (Jude 1:9; Ex 20:16), redemption rather than self-righteousness (Lu 7:44), peacemaking rather than division, being good witnesses rather than hungry for power (1 Peter 2:17-20), etc. The Bible is not a manual for the ideal political system, how to prosper, how to use God, etc.
[3] A number of state governors at the time had the absolute immunity (impunity) the Supreme Court just granted Donald Trump (July 1, 2024), they debated it vigorously for two weeks and left it out of the Constitution. They were clear they didn’t want another king.
[4] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/15th-amendment
[5] You can have an outright aristocratic republic wherein all representatives are appointed or elected by an entitled class while the vast bulk of the people live in peasantry squalor, but you can’t have a modern free society without democracy, without government of, by, and for the people—all the people—as Lincoln put it.
[6] John D. Rockefeller, Sr in his day was perhaps the most infamous of these barons, whose subsequent influence on American society was incalculable. The difference between his day and now is that the public recognized men like him for the tyrants they were.[6] It is no coincidence that the little cartoon character of the business tycoon with the top hat and tails on the sarcastic board game Monopoly, was modeled after John D. Influenced by his devout mother, Rockefeller was a life-long Baptist and faithful tither who apparently thought he could pay off God while spending the other six days of the week deploying his ruthless business tactics (I Sam 15:22).
[7] Roosevelt for his part “welcomed their hatred” as he put it, and called them out constantly. This is the reason he has traditionally been rated among legitimate historians as the third greatest President behind Washington and Lincoln. Today because of right-wing history revisionism, we are subject to inane propaganda like “Jimmy Carter was the worst President ever;” “Donald Trump is the greatest President ever,” etc. Spare me.
[8] As someone who lived through that time and vividly remembers how it all went down, it wasn’t until the “Weathermen” New Left group started bombing banks, corporate headquarters and the like, that the popular movement pulled back from the precipice. Will today’s fascist movement have their own such moment? With Donald Trump at the head of their parade, don’t count on it.
[9] What had Powell all in a bind was the recent work of Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. Nader had the audacity to seek government-mandated safety standards for automobiles, and Carson’s book The Silent Spring heralded the call for an ecological program in the face of the out-of-control air and water pollution of the time.
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_MacLean#:~:text=Democracy%20in%20Chains%20(2017)%5B,%5B20%5D%5B21%5D%5B22%5D
[11] He later converted to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.
[12] They include the likes of another Catholic, Leonard Leo, the longtime gatekeeper of the Federalist Society, who made sure his brand of lawyers would get shoveled through Republican administrations and onto the federal bench. Obsessing over “liberal activist judges” who “legislate from the bench” is a meme long-talked up by people like Weyrich and Leo to pound into the brains of American churchgoers. Of course, now that they’re in power, people like the six conservative Federalist Society justices of the Supreme Court, five of them Catholic, are making their liberal predecessors look like amateurs.
[13] “Howard Schweber, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes that ‘in the past two decades’, ‘Catholic politicians have emerged as leading figures in the religious conservative movement.’”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right
[14] This is not meant to imply some sort of conspiracy on the part of these people, nor of some allegiance to the Vatican, etc. Neither are there not a few Protestant autocrats in this movement as well. It is to point out that all such “leaders” do not understand the “logic of America,” and no wonder. Hierarchical, authoritarian, medieval Christianity is the very paradigm the Founding Fathers sought to come out from.[14]
[15] This was the usual motive behind large donations to schools and churches—tax write-offs.
[16] “But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.” https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
[17] If the Trump Effect years later of giving permission to indulge your worse instincts is any indication, racism is still the issue in the Deep South, the home of the Christian right.
[18] “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.” Politico, footnote 14.
[19] So was Hillary Clinton at one time.
[20] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/#:~:text=When%20the%20school%E2%80%99s,the%20Supreme%20Court.
[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Leadership
[22] “CSFC “became active in eastern European politics after the Cold War. Figuring prominently in this effort was Weyrich’s right-hand man, Laszlo Pasztor,[13] a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, which had collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich. After serving two years in prison for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach arm of the Republican national Committee,” author Martin Lee wrote in 1997.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich#:~:text=CSFC%20%22became%20active,wrote%20in%201997
[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_for_National_Policy#:~:text=About%20the%20CNP,%5B8%5D
[24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_for_National_Policy
[25] This is why they caricature Democrats as “the left” (Marxists), obsessed with “wokism” and violent revolution, to make it appear the political spectrum has shifted so far to the left. But they are the ones with millions of people arming themselves to the teeth and forming militias, projecting onto others what they themselves are doing, the virtual definition of damnation. MAGA
