What's Wrong????!? (part1)
Welcome, fellow travelers.
These are dark times. As that darkness increases, and the Sun sets, the chill of evening bears the welcome promise of stars.
Perhaps we cannot see them quite yet, but we can expect them to glint, shine, and guide.
For this to happen, we must both welcome the darkness, and focus on the light.
1. I’ve been thinking about this for some time….
If you’re here, you’ve likely read the same pundits I have. People like these: Heather Cox Richardson. Ezra Klein. David Brooks. Ross Douthat. David French. Nicholas Kristoff. This is nowhere near that. But I am seeing something that they only see peripherally.
2. I’m wondering if you’re seeing something similar….
..and if you are, and especially if you disagree with what I’m seeing, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. This is going to unfold in episodes, so hit the button. I’m going all free (and on the cheap) subscribing means that you get email alerts on the next post, and most important: you get to dialogue with the any rag tag crowd it attracts.
3. I know that I am not alone.
I know that, like me, you watched during the first 100 days, as the second Trump Presidency proceeded to move fast and break laws. We watched as that regime's various nominated secretaries assured the members of the United States Senate that they would never do the exact deeds they proceeded to do with dispatch as soon as they were confirmed. We watched as personal information we entrusted to our government was techno-mined by employees of the richest man in the world, with the explicit encouragement of the President of the United States. WE watched an oligarch brazenly attempt to buy a State Supreme Court judge. it's a daily, rapid escalation of lawlessness, incompetence, and assault.
And then there are the Nationalist Christians. The people who are now likely to receive immunity from the Department of Justice if they happen to commit violence against women seeking medical care, because harming someone who might kill a fetus is justifiable homicide. The people who are celebrating the reign of Jesus by buying Trump Bibles. The people --like JD Vance-- who think the parable of the Good Samaritan is about loving your family first and your neighbor second. The people who have G*d on their side. Or in their hearts. Or somewhere nearby, anyway.
Before and during the Reagan administration, I spent over ten years of quality time with those people. My wife and I raised our family in intentional Christian community. Discipleship was a high value. Then my community got into expressing "the kingdom of God," and seeking to define a "biblical worldview." As a theatre artist, I accepted a request from my leaders to spend three years working with other like-minded Christians around the US on a white paper about how the arts could/should express a biblical worldview. The chair of our working group was Ted Baehr, a film critic and the publisher of Movieguide, whose goal was to provide a "biblical perspective" on film. Our keynote speaker at the signing ceremony was a man named Rousas J. Rushdoony, who is posthumously recognized as one of the great guiding lights of Dominion Theology, the basis of what is now known as Christian nationalism, whose ultimate goal is to ensure that G*d's law becomes the law of the USofA. When I saw the final draft for our white paper "Media and the Arts", I refused to sign it or the plenary document that introduced the work.
You see, even before the Heritage Foundation posted Project 2025 online, I knew all of this might happen. I am not one of those people who is astonished that some of my fellow Christians are behaving this way. The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of unholy flirtations and alliances with autocracy in the name of theocracy.
That same flirtation with theocracy exists in other religious traditions as well. In Hinduism, Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party. In Islam, the Caliphate movement (Sunni or Shiite) seeks to establish sharia law in many nation states. In the Catholic Church, the Opus Dei movement is a worldwide effort to influence nation states to harmonize their legal systems with Roman Catholic doctrine. While these movements are independent of one another, they span the developed world. Something is going on.
In these movements, all civil law proceeds from religious law and religious law is supreme law. These movements seek to establish uniformity movement of doctrine, practice, and worship. They seek to create or remake nation-states based on religion, and alliances of nation-states based on religion--- that idea usually assumes that if everyone in the country and/or the world follows divinely-inspired law, the blessing of material prosperity and peace would follow.
The rise of these movements is not accidental. There is a common, human, and internationally-felt impulse that is causing people to want their civil law to proceed from what they consider to be a more traditionally stable values platform. These movements are cultural; they are happening around the globe and across religious traditions. Many (but not all) of them begin with theocracy and lead to autocracy. I have read authors who attribute the autocracy movement to economic and control motivations, and on the surface that seems true. But how is it that the move to autocracy in democratic countries is able to feed on populism?
To explain how these movements begin and why these movements exist, I am going to start with Christian Nationalism. And I'll explain it using its primary text, the Christian Bible. Since my spiritual tradition is Judeo-Christian, it's one of my books as well. Later on, we'll consider a broader perspective. You won't need to know the Bible well to follow along. especially if you remember the pictures.
We'll begin with the Garden.
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