Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

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Tag Archives: Theocracy

An Enduring Question: What Do They See In Him?

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There are answers, of course. He gives them license to be their worst selves. They actually believe he can turn back the clock to an era they’d find more comfortable. He attacks and angers their perceived enemies. He promises tax cuts (for people who don’t need them) and less government regulation (for businesses that do). Against all evidence, they think he’d do a better job on the economy than a Democrat and make other countries respect us more.

One answer that doesn’t get enough attention, perhaps because it’s especially hard to believe, is offered by New York Times columnist David French:

The more I consider the challenge posed by Christian nationalism, the more I think most observers and critics are paying too much attention to the wrong group of Christian nationalists. We mainly think of Christian nationalism as a theology or at least as a philosophy. In reality, the Christian nationalist movement that actually matters is rooted in emotion and ostensibly divine revelation, and it’s that emotional and spiritual movement that so stubbornly clings to [T]…

We should not forget the astounding finding of a HarrisX poll for The Deseret News, showing that more Republicans see [T] as a “person of faith” than see openly religious figures like Mitt Romney, Tim Scott and Mike Pence, [his] own (very evangelical) vice president, that way. It’s an utterly inexplicable result, until you understand the nature of the connection between so many Christian voters and [him]….

Arguments … are helpless in the face of prophecies, like the declarations from Christian “apostles” that [T] is God’s appointed leader, destined to save the nation from destruction. Sometimes there’s no need for a prophet to deliver the message. Instead, Christians will claim that the Holy Spirit spoke to them directly. As one longtime friend told me, “David, I was with you on opposing [T] until the Holy Spirit told me that God had appointed him to lead.”

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the “rage and joy” of MAGA America. Outsiders see the rage and hatred directed at them and miss that a key part of [T’s] appeal is the joy and fellowship that [his] supporters feel with each other. But there’s one last element that cements that bond with [T]: faith, including a burning sense of certainty that by supporting him, they are instruments of God’s divine plan.

For this reason, I’ve started answering questions about Christian nationalism by saying it’s not serious, but it’s very dangerous. It’s not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it’s exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States.

That’s why the … fever won’t break. That’s why even the most biblically based arguments against [him] fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to [T] is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself. In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won’t be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the “prophecies” change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.

On a brighter note, there is a certain factor that is under our control. Kate Cohen, a columnist for The Washington Post, explains. I recommend the whole article, “America Doesn’t Need More God. It Needs More Atheists”. Here are excerpts:

Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.

Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!

But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth….

We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.

Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think….

Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.

“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,”“you really might get the largest denomination in the world”….

Atheists can do one thing about the country’s drift into theocracy that our religious neighbors won’t: We can tell people we don’t believe in God. The more people who do that, the more we normalize atheism in America, the easier it will be — for both politicians and the general public — to usher religion back out of our laws.

Okay, but should you say you’re an atheist even if you believe in “God” as the power of nature or something like that?

Yes. It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in God metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that God is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell.

In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)

So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?

If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist….

Consider that your honesty will allow others to be honest, and that your reticence encourages others to keep quiet. Consider that the longer everyone keeps quiet, the longer religion has political and cultural license to hurt people. Consider that the United States — to survive as a secular democracy — needs you now more than ever.

Sure, I can say I’m technically an agnostic since nobody can really know if a god or gods exist. Isn’t an atheist someone who explicitly believes there is no god? Merriam-Webster disagrees. According to the experts, an atheist is “a person who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods”. Not believing makes me a non-believer. If “atheist” is good enough for Merriam-Webster, it’s good enough for me.

God Help Us

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There’s a big, big difference between being a true follower of Jesus of Nazareth and calling yourself a “Christian”. Putting that aside, the percentage of Americans who say they’re Christians has been going down, while those who claim to be have become more more fervid in their political beliefs.

[According to the Pew Research Center,] since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” This accelerating trend is reshaping the U.S. religious landscape….

The Center estimates that in 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%.

Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.

Brynn Tannehill, writing for The New Republic, considers what that may mean for our politics:

As American youths leave home, they leave the faiths of their parents and never return. This is in great part because the teachings of most churches in the U.S. are fundamentally at odds with what young people believe: particularly on topics like abortion, marriage equality, birth control, and premarital sex. They simply fail to see how such out-of-touch institutions are relevant….

The most crucial factor is how Christianity has slowly become primarily a political identity for many (overwhelmingly conservative) people. Over the past 40 years, membership in nice, bland, mainline Protestantism has plummeted, from 30 percent of the public down to 10 percent. Conversely, evangelical membership (and the number of white evangelicals) boomed in the 1970s and ’80s and then slowly declined. But evangelical groups are still much larger than the mainline Protestant denominations, constituting about 23 percent of adults and up to 37 percent of Americans claiming to be “born again.” Because white evangelicals are one of the most consistently conservative groups in the country, the result is that people who identify as Christian or attend church frequently are far more likely also to identify as Republican.

Black churches have held steady for decades at about 8 percent of the population. They are still associated with social justice goals, but they can also tend toward social conservatism, which can produce tension….Latinos were traditionally part of the Catholic Church. However, traditionally white evangelical denominations have had some luck luring Latinos away with social conservatism and the false machismo projected by Republicans, which explains some of the electoral shift seen in 2020.

Just as those who attend church frequently tend to be Republican, the converse is also true: Those with no religion are far more likely to be Democrats. Data analysis by Ryan Burge shows that white evangelicals have had a stranglehold on the [Republican Party] for over two decades and form a clear majority, alongside conservative Catholics. However, by 2018, the “nones” represented a plurality (28 percent) of Democrats, whose gains have come at the expense of evangelicals, mainlines, and Catholics within the party. Today, almost half of Gen Z has no religion….

A 2017 survey of 2,002 U.S. adults age 23 to 30 who attended a Protestant church … in high school found that 66 percent had stopped attending church. Seventy percent of those cited religious, ethical, or political beliefs for dropping out. Other major reasons cited included hypocrisy, churches being judgmental, and a lack of anything in common with other people at the church.

The danger of this widening schism is not a lack of shared sense of community, or people not doing enough charitable work. The danger lies in this creating the conditions for a future that looks more like present-day Russia or Iran.

Conservative Christians have a deep sense of victimhood and fear about a secular America and are willing to end democracy to prevent it. As David Frum noted, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy.”

It has not gone unnoticed that Republicans are increasingly claiming the mantle of being Christian Nationalists. A recent poll found that although 57 percent of Republicans recognize that declaring the U.S. a “Christian nation” is unconstitutional, over 60 percent would support it….

Tannehill then cites two current instances of conservative (or reactionary) religion being combined with political power. They’re worst case scenarios for America:

First there is the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by Patriarch Kirill. He’s been one of Vladimir Putin’s most loyal allies and has been willing to put the church’s blessing on virtually anything Putin does. This includes supporting Russian actions in Ukraine in the name of stamping out the corrupting Western influence of homosexuality and protecting the Russky mir (Russian world). More recently, he has declared that dying in battle washes away all of one’s sins…. On top of the fascism, Russian Orthodox church leaders have made themselves obscenely wealthy by supporting Putin’s kleptocracy.

What we’re seeing in Iran is what happens when a sclerotic, gerontocratic, authoritarian theocracy tries to impose its will on a younger population that no longer accepts the legitimacy of the government and also rejects some of its core religious teachings. Protests erupted over 22-year-old Mahsa Amini being tortured and killed by “morality police” for wearing her hijab the “wrong” way. Women have responded by tearing off their head scarves and burning them. Men have attacked police, and riots have racked the country for weeks. The internet has been shut down, and at least 75 people have been killed so far. The Iranian regime has reportedly lost control of a predominantly Kurdish town on the border as well.

Unquote.

For millions of Americans, Christianity has become a political identity that favors the creation of a single-party, single-religion theocracy. Russia and Iran demonstrate where that can lead, either to becoming “a corrupted tool of fascism (as in Russia) or an oppressive, omnipresent force (as in Iran) against which the population can achieve change only through revolution”.

Onward Christian Soldiers, Supreme Court Edition

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The first words of the Bill of Rights are: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. In recent decades, that’s meant people are free to practice their religion (the Free Exercise Clause) but not promote it as part of their government jobs (the Establishment Clause).

Charles Pierce of Esquire discusses today’s right-wing reinterpretation of what constitutes free exercise and the establishment of religion:

… It was a pretty good day for theocracy. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, by the 6-3 vote that was so carefully purchased with dark money and so carefully engineered by Mitch McConnell, the Court sided with a football coach named Joseph Kennedy who used to have his team meet at midfield for a postgame exercise in what the Court said Monday was “quiet personal prayer.”

The history of the case is a perfect example of a small-town controversy that was fairly clear-cut until the conservative movement managed to get it through a carefully engineered conservative-heavy judicial system until it finally landed on the doorstep of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. In 2015, the school district told Kennedy to knock it off. Kennedy refused and was placed on administrative leave. Instead of reapplying for his job when his leave ended, Kennedy decided to sue the school district. He lost in court. Then he lost his appeal. Then an earlier Supreme Court declined to take his case.

But the longer you can keep going in the courts, the better chance you have of running into a conservative Christian who will find room for white-people Jesus in the Bill of Rights…. Kennedy tried again and, this time he finally found Gorsuch and the rest of the Papal States on the Supreme Court.

Once again, that crew threw aside a sensible, durable framework in favor of some sort of weird, literalist invocation of American history. Much of the previous Establishment Clause law had rested on a 1971 case called Lemon v. Kurtzman—decided, it should be noted, by an 8-0 vote under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger …

Leaving Coach Kennedy’s triumph for a moment, we should be wary of the blithe way the Court’s majority dismisses Lemon as irrelevant to Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Lemon was not purely about prayer. It has also been central to keeping the bunco scheme that is Creationism—as well as its gussied-up cousin, Intelligent Design—out of the public schools … [Lemon] was used to squash attempts at bootlegging Creationist bushwah into science classes in Arkansas and Louisiana … in 2005, when it helped decide a famous case in Pennsylvania. …

In this particular political moment, you’d have to be considerably naive to think that the reactionary right isn’t coming for the public schools, largely because they never stopped coming for the public schools. They will use radicalized Christian religion as their primary artillery. Last week, the Supreme Court opened up the wallets of Maine taxpayers and invited religious schools to dive right in. Would you like to guess what might happen if another Intelligent Design case makes it in front of the current Supreme Court majority?

… Public education is unconstitutional because it is insufficiently theocratic. An interesting legal theory that is coming soon to a Supreme Court near you.