One fall afternoon, back in the 1970's the small church in which I grew up was packed to the rafters on a Saturday afternoon for what was billed as an old fashioned "Gospel singing." There were three or four local quartets, some soloists and duets, one featured group that had a television program and a regional audience, and some congregational singing. It's a cultural thing, especially among Southern Baptists, among which this kind of gospel music was very popular in the 70's.
During the intermission, the pastor stood up and got people's attention for an announcement. Reading off a newspaper clipping from a publication called The Sword of the Lord, he told the gathering that atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair had filed a petition to have all religious broadcasting removed from the airwaves. If you're old enough to remember, O'Hair was an activist who, in the early 1960's, succeeded in having publicly recited prayer removed from the public schools. Her legal actions, aimed at the lax and sometimes non-existent enforcement of the "wall of separation" between church and state, a constitutional principle, were labelled as a war against Christianity by her opponents.
The problem with this particular announcement, like so many other straw man issues knocked down by facts, is that it was not true. O'Hair filed a lot of lawsuits, but never anything that fell outside the boundaries of protecting the constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience and religious liberty for those outside the Christian religion. However, news about that alleged petition had a much greater reach than a church full of gospel concert attendees on a Saturday afternoon. By the time we heard it, it was already making rounds all across the country.
One of the ten commandments is a prohibition against lying. So why do Christians engaged in politics feel compelled to tell lies, and to spread them, if it is to their advantage?
"Woe is Us! This Country is in Such a Bad Place, With Evil Everywhere!"
If you walk into just about any conservative church in America, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Evangelical or Fundamentalist, you are almost guaranteed to hear, from different people in different places, how bad the world has become, meaning the culture and society around them. In many of those churches, the blame for this will be directly assigned to the Obama Presidency, or perhaps even the Clinton administration as the time when it started rolling downhill. Some of them will say from the pulpit that politics isn't the answer, Jesus is. But there are others who will tell you that God is behind right wing politics in order to bring revival and clean up the mess.
And that's why he's picked a worldly criminal who denies he's done anything requiring God's forgiveness to lead the revival effort in the United States. See I John 4:1-3 to find out what one of the Apostles calls someone who makes that claim.
And that's the justification they claim for their desire to acquire political power and establish a "Christian nation," a dictatorship that equates Christian values with white racism. "Our rights are being taken away," they claim. "The left is 'trampling' all over our freedoms and flooding the world with evil," which, in their mind, justifies their taking over, by violent means if necessary, and making things the way they want them. And abortion rights and gay marriage is behind the chaos.
I see just two problems with that. One, liberals, the far left, LGBTQ persons, women, ethnic and racial minorities, atheists, agnostics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Hottentots are all entitled to equal rights under the U.S. Constitution, the same rights to which those on the far right are entitled. And two, a violent revolution to overturn the current government and constitution and establish a dictatorship under dominionist theology in order to bring about "revival," and as some believe, usher in the second coming of Jesus, would be a demonstration of evil worse than any perception of what is happening now, and completely the opposite of any and every value of the Christian gospel established by Jesus.
But, Here's What I Want to Know...
Where have the rights of any conservative, Evangelical, white, Christian person in the United States been "trampled on" by anyone from the far left? I can point to all kinds of examples where the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ persons have been trampled, and denied, and where they've been forced to accept choices that are not good for their own mental or physical health. I could point to hundreds of volumes written about discrimination against blacks, Latinos, Asians, Eastern Europeans, and just about any other ethnicity that exists in America, or against the practitioners of religious faiths or philosophies that are not Christian.
So if I'm going to be convinced that there is some kind of oppression against white, conservative, Evangelical Christians that justifies civil war and the destruction of the United States as we know it, I need to have that pointed out to me. If I'm to be subjected to violence beyond my control, then I should be informed of a legitimate cause for inciting it.
And I'll point out that I'm a white, male, past 50, raised in a conservative, Evangelical church (though I no longer claim that label), who, if all of these claims from the far right are true, should have experienced this oppressive trampling on my rights. I belong to the demographic that is supposed to have "suffered" the most. And frankly, I can't say I've ever noticed it at all.
That's because this is a deceptive, duplicitous, straw man argument.
Chaos and evil have always been in the world. It's no worse, or better, now than it ever has been. Christians, specifically conservative Christians, claim that conversion to Christ is the answer to the world's existential problems. In this country, we are now three generations into a very steep decline in membership, attendance and conversion experiences in conservative churches. The majority of Generation X, Millennials and Gen Z have not converted to Christianity, because the church has spent its time trying to enrich a few of its oligarchs and hasn't focused on evangelism or church growth. Those converted during the post-war period are now passing on. And the leadership that is gathering those who remain into megachurches to hunker down and insulate against decline are more focused on their own kingdom building efforts than on winning converts to Christ.
So they're turning to political power, and a combination of dominion theology and post-millennialism, the belief that a "Christian nation" will make the world a better place in order to usher in the second coming of Jesus, to resolve the problems.
They seem to be blind to the fact that they are often perpetrators of their own set of evil and chaos. Southern Baptists, for example, trying to overcome mountains of misogyny, and a view of women as inferior, dependent and incapable of leadership, have more or less given up trying to resolve an extensive sexual abuse crisis among its pastors, church and denominational leaders that was exposed in the Houston Chronicle in 2019. According to Baptist News Global, their leaders have more or less given up on any effective solution to the problem.
Where's the Tyranny?
The Gadsden flag, with its coiled rattlesnake and the slogan, "Don't tread on me!" was dragged out for use by the Tea Party movement, and it's been a right wing symbol of the imagined tyranny from the left, since then. But the irony of this usage of it lies in the fact that the far right, along with conservative Evangelicals, are guilty of a lot of treading, but cannot point to any examples of genuine tyranny from their own experience.
This is not a provocative question. Where is the tyranny we keep hearing the far right wing whine about?
Turning to a leader whose political perspective is based on oppressing a part of the population for the benefit of the prosperous parts of it, who has no respect for the law, and whose ego and temperament cannot handle anything not going his way without a catastrophic meltdown, will not only not resolve any of the perceived problems, it will make them far worse than they already are. We already had a four year taste of this incompetence and ignorance. Another term would be disastrous.
Fantastic! Thank you
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