Baptist News Global: The False Prophets Hall of Fame
"All of us--especially those of us who seek to follow Jesus--face a critical decision this year: Will we choose kindness, joy and justice for all? Or will we choose the Religious Right's path of violence toward dismantling democracy? It is imperative that Christians across the country proclaim that these pro-Trump false prophets named to our hall of fame do not speak for Jesus and ask our friends and family to do the same." Nathan Empsall, Executive Director of Faithful America
Faithful America is a group of American Christians who are calling out Christian nationalism as it has become an intruder in the conservative, Evangelical branch of the American church, including fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Charismatics and the Restoration branch known as the churches of Christ. They caught my attention when they added the name of the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Al Mohler, to their list of false prophets.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and attended a university and a theological seminary that were both affiliated with the denomination. There was always quite a contrast between what was preached and taught from church pulpits as opposed to what was taught in the classrooms. There has always been a strong, anti-educational bias among Southern Baptists, a denomination which separated from the larger fellowship of Baptists in the United States, known as the "Triennial Convention," headquartered in Philadelphia, in 1845 over the issue of whether or not slaveowners could be appointed as Baptist missionaries.
The abolitionist Baptists in the northern states said "NO!" So, fifteen years before the Civil War broke out, many of the Baptist churches in the states where slavery was legal sent delegations to Augusta, Georgia and broke fellowship with their northern brethren. Most of the churches in the south were small, and the pastors who served them, sometimes serving more than one at a time because of scarcity, tended to be uneducated, and preached what I call a "populist gospel," in spite of claims that they believed the Bible to be the sole authority for Christian faith and practice. They had no real idea how to interpret the Bible, knew almost nothing about the context in which it had been written, its history or that of the church, and some of them couldn't even read it.
The end result of all of that is a Christian faith, codified in doctrinal statements like the Baptist Faith and Message, leading to theological doctrine that incorporates a lot of Southern culture and superstition, a very literal interpretation of the Bible separated from its historical and cultural context, and looking at it as if it is a step by step, verse by verse, "holy rulebook" instead of a historical record of the early church and the core teachings of the Christian gospel. They use their claim that "the Bible is inerrant and infallible," and "God is the same today, yesterday and forever" to support this religious populism that frequently contradicts those very words of Jesus, and his Apostles who also wrote parts of the New Testament.
At the university I attended, however, the professors cut through the superstition, the literalist interpretation and the Southern populism to the words of scripture in their original language and context. Four years of college that included a minor in Biblical studies soon separated me permanently from the religious superstition of Southern Baptist doctrine and practice. Three years in one of their theological seminaries, prior to a purge that was completed in 1989, permanently separated me from the false prophets.
That university escaped the purge of "liberals" which started in 1979, along with several other universities and colleges whose trustee boards were once elected by state Baptist groups affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, by declaring its trustee board "self perpetuating." It is no longer a Baptist affiliated school, and as a result, the theology school there has been able to escape the consequences of teaching Christian fundamentalism, and is able to expose the white supremacist foundation and the mysticism and religious superstition which now forms the foundation of Southern Baptist theology. The theological seminary, unfortunately, belonged to the denomination itself, and endured a cruel purge of its teaching staff, replacing good professors with fundamentalist false prophets.
Some Form of Christian Nationalism is a Long Running Theme Among Conservative Evangelicals
The combination of a declared belief that the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible are, as Southern Baptists declare in their doctrinal statement, "a perfect treasure of divine instruction," and a literal, "verse by verse" interpretation of the Bible without consideration of the historical context in which it was written, or the nuances of the ancient languages in which it was written, has produced the various versions of Christian nationalism that have worked their way into far right wing politics via the religious right wing of the GOP. In the vernacular of Evangelical church culture, the Bible is "The word of God," without error, and infallible. Little consideration is given to the vast historical context of sixty-six different books, written by 40 different authors over the course of 1,500 years of middle eastern history.
In spite of what is evidence of fairly accurate preservation of the text of the Bible, there are widespread differences of interpretation when it comes to the relationship between ancient Judaism of the Old Testament and the Christian gospel of the new one. Most Christian nationalism is based on passages from the Old Testament that recorded words of prophets sent to keep theocratic Israel faithful to its covenant relationship it believed it had with God. But that same covenant was not offered to any other nation, and in fact, Jesus, in a very definitive statement about the Christian gospel, recorded in Matthew 5:17, claims Messiahship as the fulfillment of that covenant, and is the last heir to the throne of David.
No political government is offered a theocratic covenant relationship with God. Jesus did not establish any such thing as a "Christian nation" along the same lines as the Jewish theocracy, initially under a series of Judges, and later, after they demanded one, a monarchy. The attempts to create "Christian nations" that have followed this very bad interpretation of scripture, have never produced any of the attributes of the Christian faith, evidenced by any values or virtues of the Christian gospel, most notably the grace that is a core characteristic of Christian faith. What they have produced is centuries of the bloodiest warfare the world has ever seen.
Starting with Constantine and the Edict of Milan in 313, Christians went from being the persecuted to being the persecutors. The very first clue that a licentious intruder was invading the Christian church should have been Constantine's claim that he saw a cross in the sky, and the words, "By this sign, conquer!" That was the start of the worst single perversion of the Christian church that the devil ever achieved.
And the Christian nationalism that is being pushed and promoted in the United States in this twenty-first century is exactly the same perversion and intrusion into the Christian church that happened when Constantine used it to hold on to his political power. It shows none of the attributes, character and virtue that is at the very core of Christian teaching, because it is not Christian.
The Designation of "False Prophets" is a Correct One
The connection between the Trump Republican party, Project 2025 and Christian nationalism is well established, in spite of his denial of knowledge of anything having to do with it. That's just an attempt to keep from losing votes and keeping some of his ignorant followers from seeing this for what it is and knowing that this is a danger to the United States. Virtually all of the far right Evangelical groups that have let Trumpism intrude into their churches are conservative in their theology in exactly the manner in which I have described here.
It's a very powerful delusion, when one thinks they belong to a group of people that are "chosen" by God, privileged over all of the other people, and that he has called them to the very special task of running the rest of the world. What that means is that the core values and principles of the Christian gospel can be set aside by this privileged group in order to brutally eliminate opposition of those who were not chosen.
So the False Prophets Hall of Fame is just calling out those who are developing this mindset and spreading it around in the church. It is calling attention to those pseudo-Christians who have observed that they get more for themselves out of the worldly power they support than they get when they practice the values and virtues of Christianity, like turning the other cheek or loving their enemies, and they seem to be more satisfied by what they call "worldly power" than they are with some kind of abstract dependence on a God they can't see and seemed to have missed connecting with.
I challenge readers to do some digging into the Bible, go to Matthew 5:1-11, and then to Galatians 5:22-23, and tell me how many of the virtues and characteristics they see there are observable in Trump, or in any part of his campaign or the Republican party. They don't seem to notice that the Democrats are beating them in this category hands down and running away.
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