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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM. Sort by date Show all posts

Saturday, January 02, 2021

THEY ARE'NT CHRISTIANS THEY ARE WHITE NATIONALISTS
Toxic Christian ideology is infecting the Covid debate. And that's bad for everyone.

Despite the magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., where over 340,000 people have already died, recent news about the effectiveness of vaccines has provided some hope this holiday season. Videos of the first Americans receiving the vaccine were cause for celebration.
© Provided by NBC News

A consistent narrative among many political leaders who delayed an aggressive response to the virus, including President Donald Trump, is the expectation that Covid-19 vaccines will speed the return to life as we used to know it. Yet, epidemiologists and public health experts say vital herd immunity will be harder to achieve if a sizable number of Americans resist vaccination.

Americans have found all sorts of reasons to be suspicious of vaccines. One community that appears disproportionately opposed is Christian nationalists. In fact, we find in a new study that Americans who strongly embrace Christian nationalism — close to a quarter of the population — are much more likely to question the safety of vaccines and to be misinformed about them (e.g., believing that vaccines cause autism or don't work or that those who administer them are dishonest). If enough of these Americans resist a Covid-19 vaccine based on suspicions rooted in misinformation, the results would be disastrous for achieving herd immunity and reducing the spread of the virus.

VIDEO Covid vaccine's biggest obstacle turns out to be leadership, not science


We examined nationally representative data including 1,219 participants collected by researchers at Chapman University as part of the 2019 wave of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears.

Regarding vaccination attitudes, the survey instrument asked respondents to agree or disagree with various statements that we then combined into a single scale:
"Vaccines cause autism."
"Doctors and drug companies are not honest about the risks of vaccines."
"People have the right to decide whether or not to vaccinate their kids."
"Kids are given too many vaccines."
"Vaccines do not help protect children from dangerous diseases."

To measure Christian nationalism, we combined responses to these five questions into a single scale:
"The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation."
"The federal government should advocate Christian values."
"The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state."
"The federal government should allow prayer in public schools."
"The federal government should allow religious symbols in public spaces."

Christian nationalism is an ideology that seeks to have a particular expression of Christianity be privileged in the public sphere — in the national identity, public policies and sacred symbols of the U.S. It focuses on defining the boundaries of American citizenship, who is (and isn't) a "true" American.

Most often, a "Christian America" is one where white, native-born, politically and religiously conservative Christian Americans are at the center of the culture. In our recent book, we show that in order to understand various issues animating the culture wars, we must pay close attention to Christian nationalism.

Americans who agreed with the various measures of Christian nationalism were much more likely to espouse anti-vaccine attitudes, even after controlling for other influences, such as political party, political ideology, religiosity, race or even education.

While concerning, this information shouldn't be too surprising. First, Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are more skeptical of science. They are more likely to believe scientists are hostile to faith, that creationism should be taught in public schools and that our country relies too much on science over religion. Christian nationalists believe that authority in the public sphere should come from sources they trust are friendly to religion, not secular scientists.

In two other recent studies, we find that Christian nationalism is a leading predictor of ignoring precautionary behaviors regarding Covid-19. We show that these Americans prize individual liberty or economic prosperity rather than protection of the vulnerable. And while not measuring Christian nationalism directly, other researchers find that religious states disobeyed stay-at-home orders at a higher rate and that conservative Protestants are much more skeptical that scientists understand Covid-19.

Finally, Christian nationalism is strongly associated with support for politicians who promise to advance its values and oppose targets of suspicion. Trump and other conservative politicians have embraced anti-vaccination arguments in the past. Medical professionals have even raised the alarm about the effect of Trump's public skepticism, although as president he has acknowledged the importance of vaccinations.

So, just as with other common culture war issues, like gun control, same-sex marriage or policing, Christian nationalism appears closely intertwined with Americans' attitudes toward vaccines and the Covid-19 pandemic. One limit of these data is that the researchers at Chapman were unable to ask about a Covid-19 vaccine directly, given that they fielded the survey in the fall of 2019.

But we feel confident connecting Christian nationalism and Americans' likely responses to the Covid-19 vaccine.

In our public discourse and ethics surveys this year, we asked Americans, "Would you get vaccinated if/when a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available?" One of the possible answers was "I don't plan to get vaccinated at all." Even after controlling for important sociodemographic, religious and political characteristics, the more strongly respondents identified with Christian nationalism, the more likely they were to say they don't plan on taking the vaccine.

This is a significant concern. Christian nationalist ideology will almost certainly serve as a barrier for a sizable minority of Americans who need the vaccine. Policymakers and health care professionals will need to attend to this hurdle as they plan and then execute any broad-scale vaccination strategy.

CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM IS THE FINAL DEVOLUTION OF AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM

Tuesday, July 06, 2021

AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM
Trump's 'big lie' was enabled by years of Americans being 'force fed' ​lies from religion: columnist​
Matthew Chapman
July 06, 2021

www.rawstory.com
On Tuesday, writing for The Daily Beast, columnist David Rothkopf outlined how American culture, and in particular religion, primed Trump supporters from birth to embrace the former president's "big lie" that the election was stolen from them.

"One of the key reasons we buy into so many small lies is that we have been force fed so many big ones. I mean really big ones. I mean ones that make the current Big Lie look like one of those low-calorie snacks that is actually a high-calorie treat shrunk to a smaller size and repackaged," wrote Rothkopf. "Many of these lies were created out of necessity. Life is finite. (OK, I'm sorry. It is. Take a deep breath if you need to and then continue reading.) ... According to a 2011 poll from the Associated Press, nearly eight out of 10 Americans believe in the existence of angels and a 2015 poll showed 72 percent of Americans believe in Heaven and 58 percent believe in the existence of Hell."

Large swathes of the population appear to be abandoning organized religion, but it remains a highly influential force in American politics. At this point, even faith leaders are having a hard time trying to properly educate their congregants against falsehoods like QAnon and anti-vaccine propaganda.
Chris Matthews talks to Raw Story: Who would you bet on in 2024, Trump or Kamala?

Making the problem worse, noted Rothkopf, is that lies both religious and secular are enforced by social structures that make it difficult to push back on them.

"All these lies are aided and abetted by the fact that simply believing in what you are told to believe is much easier than actually figuring out the truth," wrote Rothkopf. "What is more, if your family and friends believe in a lie, challenging that lie might make you an outcast, might alienate those with whom you have or wish to have a bond. With the advent of social media, where like-minded friends become 'editors' and select the news their followers see, lies spread among audiences inclined to believe and thereby endorse them. We live in an age of media 'echo-systems', ecosystems that reinforce disinformation spreading it from dubious sources like QAnon to Facebook to TV propaganda networks to you."

You can read more here.
PAYWALL
AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM
Here's how religion played a role in the Jan. 6 insurrection: report

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
July 06, 2021

Protesters storm the Capitol and halt a joint session of the 117th Congress on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.. - Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/TNS

The Republican Party and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity have been joined at the hip since the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan openly embraced the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., the Rev. Pat Robertson and other Christian Right theocrats — much to the dismay of arch-conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater, who saw Falwell and Robertson as terrible for the GOP and terrible for the conservative movement. Former President Donald Trump has been a major ally of the Christian Right, and the Washington Post's Michelle Boorstein examines the connection between fundamentalist Christianity and the January 6 insurrection in an article published six months later.

The January 6 insurrection was primarily a political attack. But in her article, Boorstein stresses that some of the rioters had religious motivations as well.

"Pauline Bauer, Stephen Baker and Jenna Ryan were among the thousands who descended on the Capitol in protest of what they falsely called a stolen election, including some who saw themselves engaged in a spiritual war," Boorstein reports. "For many, their religious beliefs were not tied to any specific church or denomination — leaders of major denominations and megachurches, and even President Donald Trump's faith advisers, were absent that day. For such people, their faith is individualistic, largely free of structures, rules or the approval of clergy."

Boorstein continues, "Many forces contributed to the attack on the Capitol, including Trump's false claims of electoral victory and American anger with institutions. But part of the mix, say experts on American religion, is the fact that the country is in a period when institutional religion is breaking apart, becoming more individualized and more disconnected from denominations, theological credentials and oversight."

One of the most famous January 6 rioters was Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman. BuzzFeed's Zoe Tillman reports that Chansley's latest request to be released from pretrial detention has been rejected:




Although fundamentalist Protestants were part of the January 6 insurrection, some of Chansley's practices are more comparable to those of eastern religion.

"Many Christians at the Capitol on January 6 were part of more conventional, affiliated faith, including pastors, Catholic priests and bused-in church groups," Boorstein observes. "But what researchers studying January 6 find remarkable are the leaderless, idiosyncratic expressions of religion that day. Among them are those of Bauer, who wrote to a judge last month that she's a 'free living soul' and an 'ambassador of Christ,' and of Jake Chansley, the 'QAnon Shaman' who prayed to Christ at a dais in the Senate and calls himself a 'multidimensional being.'"

Robert Pape, who teaches political science at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Post that religious fanaticism doesn't necessarily come from being indoctrinated by a particular sect — and such fanatics, according to Pape, "tend to have a thin knowledge and understanding of their religion."

Pape explained, "Recruits tend to be making individual decisions about the ideologies they want to follow and even what it means. It's very much at the level of the individual."

Sunday, October 23, 2022

WHITE SUPREMACIST PROTESTANTISM
We read the Gab founder's how-to guide to Christian nationalism. The book is part of a new trend of conservatives openly embracing the ideology.
This Sept. 7, 2020 file photo shows the "Oregon for Trump 2020 Labor Day Cruise Rally" at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, Ore. 
Michael Arellano/Associated Press

Gab founder Andrew Torba's book was a best seller on Amazon a week after it was released.
The book outlines the authors' vision for a Christian nationalist society and how to get there.
Christian nationalism has been increasingly embraced by conservative figures and GOP lawmakers.

Gab founder Andrew Torba's new book serves as a guide to Christian nationalism, signaling a recent shift in which it's becoming more common for public figures to openly embrace the concept.

"Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations" was written by Torba and Andrew Isker, a pastor from Minnesota. The brief book, which was independently published, was listed as the number 12 best seller in the non-fiction category on Amazon the week after it was released last month. At the time of this writing, it had a 4.7-star rating with 745 reviews.

Christian nationalism can generally be boiled down to the belief that Christianity should have a privileged position in American society.

Though it is not a new concept, prominent conservative figures have increasingly embraced it in recent years. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has openly identified as a Christian nationalist, even selling merch with the descriptor, while Rep. Lauren Boebert has embraced its tenets, saying "the church is supposed to direct the government."

"Simply put, Christian nationalism is a cultural framework — a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems — that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life," sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry write in their 2020 book, "Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States." The book examines how Christian nationalism shapes Americans' views on society and politics.

However, embrace of the ideology is not black and white but rather a spectrum, with some Americans believing aspects of the concept while rejecting others. Torba's book demonstrates this, as his description of Christian nationalism differs in some ways from academic understandings of it.

But his central theme is consistent: American society and government should be guided by Christian principles and led by Christians.

Building a parallel Christian society

Torba's platform, Gab, was founded in 2016 and touts itself as a free-speech social network that does not moderate content like more mainstream sites. It's also been associated with the far-right, gaining notoriety in 2018 when the shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh posted antisemitic rhetoric on the site prior to carrying out the attack. Many conservatives also flocked to the site in 2021 when former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter.

"Christian nationalism is a spiritual, political, and cultural movement comprised of Christians who are working to build a Christian society grounded in a Biblical worldview," Torba and Isker write, adding that Christian nationalists today "seek to reestablish states that recognize Jesus Christ as King, the general Christian faith as the foundation of state government, and state laws that reflect (in every way possible and reasonable) Christian morality and charity."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, has said all Republicans should be Christian nationalists. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Such ideas are in step with common understandings of Christian nationalism. However, the book also states that Christian nationalists do not think the US has a special relationship with God, and instead emphasizes the Christian mandate to disciple, or convert, people of all nations to the religion.

The book describes modern American society as one of moral decay, where God has been rejected and agents of Satan have invaded "every facet of our country and culture." The book says ours is a society in which there has been "half a century of legal infanticide" and a yearly "celebration of sodomy for an entire month," rejecting abortion rights and gay pride. The authors also defend traditional gender roles and reject transgender people in extreme terms.

These themes resurface repeatedly throughout the book, which also instructs American Christians on how they should live, discuss their faith, and convert others. But rather than seek to transform society into a Christian one, the book advocates for forming a parallel Christian society that can take over when our current society fails, which the authors say is inevitable.

"Our primary goal is to build a parallel Christian society, economy, and infrastructure which will fill the vacuum of the secular state when it falls," the authors write. The concept is not new for Torba, who often discusses his plans for a parallel Christian economy.
Non-Christians are free to stay — but not serve in leadership roles

The ideal Christian nation described in the book may include some non-Christians, the authors write. But at another point they say "we are Christians and our worldview is in direct conflict and a threat to all other false worldviews. It's time to start acting like it."

They also write that leaders and influential figures must be Christian, just as Christian principles must guide every aspect of society, government, and domestic life.

Torba — who has been accused of antisemitism, including by the Anti-Defamation League — and his co-author devote an entire chapter to rejecting the idea of shared "Judeo-Christian" values, calling the term itself a problem. The chapter begins with a message to journalists who they anticipate will "CTRL+F" for "Jews" in order to find quotes to "take out of context," and is dedicated to ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who are both Jewish.

Torba has previously said that Shapiro — just like anyone who is not Christian, including Jewish people, atheists, or agnostics — is not welcome in the Christian movement.

The authors go on to describe Christianity and Judaism as "incompatible" and "irreconcilable" religions, but write that Jewish people must and will be converted to Christianity along with the rest of the world.

"Far from being 'antisemitic,' a proper understanding of this shows heartfelt concern for their souls!" they write, adding Christians "should pray often for the Jewish people to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior."

Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican of Colorado, has not openly identified with Christian nationalism but has advocated for some of its key tenets. 
Phelan M. Ebenhack, File/Associated Press

The public embrace of a somewhat taboo concept

Scholars of Christian nationalism, and Christian nationalists themselves, are quick to point out these ideas are not new. However, the separation of church and state has long been a widely accepted and mainstream viewpoint in the US.

Many ideals currently being espoused proudly by Christian nationalists were less common in mainstream politics than they have been in recent years, according to Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

"It was always present but the fact that they're openly embracing the label is different and troubling," Tyler, the lead organizer of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign, previously told Insider, adding: "Unfortunately I'm seeing this almost one-up game in some circles, who can be the bigger Christian nationalist."

Perry, one of the authors of "Taking America Back for God," also noted that shift in a tweet that featured Torba's book, as well as another recently released pro-Christian nationalism title.

"We're now definitely well past the 'Christian nationalism doesn't exist' and the 'Christian nationalism is fringe' arguments to full-on 'Christian nationalism is the only way forward.'"

Sunday, April 10, 2022

AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM
How Donald Trump became the most powerful religious leader on the right


President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrive at Joint Base Andrews Air Force Base Friday July 5, 2019, in Maryland, and depart on Air Force One en route New Jersey.
 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)


April 08, 2022


As Salon's Kathryn Joyce reported on Friday, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who fashions himself "the new master strategist of the right," is not a man afraid of the spotlight. On the contrary, he's surprisingly candid for a man whose policy ambitions, such as destroying public education as we know it, are deeply unpopular. He loves to brag, on social media and into any microphone you'll put in front of him, of how he cynically concocts baseless moral panics with repeated false claims about everything from "critical race theory" to conspiracy theories about Disney "grooming" children for pedophilia.

But there's one thing that Rufo is surprisingly mum about: Religious faith.

Rufo's agenda is obviously being set by the religious right. He works closely with Hillsdale College, a fundamentalist school that functions as the Christian right's war room. His goals are aligned directly with long-term religious right targets. Searching his Twitter account, however, one swiftly finds that he never talks about his religious beliefs. There's no real mention of God or Jesus or the Bible. When he does speak about Christianity, it's only in the context of pushing conspiracy theories about how white Christians are victims of ethnic oppression by "woke" forces. His conspiracy theories are clearly designed to get Christian conservatives in particular riled up. For instance, he heavily hyped ridiculous claims that children are being taught to pray to Aztec gods in public schools — but he carefully avoids getting theological with it.

It wasn't always this way with the religious right. During the George W. Bush years, Republicans tended to wear their Bible on their sleeves. The God talk was frequent and explicit. Bush himself spoke of being "born again," and frequently did evangelical events thick with fundamentalist jargon that was impenetrable to outsiders. The public school fights weren't over "critical race theory" and false claims that kids were being taught sex acts in kindergarten. Instead, it was over whether schools should replace science with creationism and replace sex ed with abstinence-only texts that had been written by religious organizations. This public piety from Republicans was more muted during the Barack Obama administration, but only slightly. Throughout those years, the difference between a church service and a Republican fundraiser was often undetectable.

Then Donald Trump became president. On paper, Trump appeared to be as much of a supplicant to the relentless Jesus talk on the right as every other Republican. He hit up the same evangelical schools for speeches, waved Bibles around in public, and even did photo-ops where a bunch of grifty ministers prayed over him. But, as far as I can tell, almost no one was actually fooled by this. Trump's ignorance of Christianity was absolute. He wasn't even aware that the central tenet of his supposed faith was a focus on penance and forgiveness. He called Christians "fools" and "schmucks" behind their backs. But no matter how often Trump's evangelical base was reminded that he is not one of them, they stuck by his side. They believed, correctly, that he could deliver them the policy outcomes they desired: A rollback of reproductive and LGBTQ rights, the destruction of public education, and an end to the separation of church and state.

Turns out that Trump is the most powerful religious right leader of all, precisely because he so obviously isn't a believer. He created a "secular" cover that allowed the Christian right to hide in plain sight. Now he's out of office, but the lesson was learned well: The best way to impose theocracy on Americans is to dress it up as a secular movement.

Nowadays, the main public discourse on the right about Christianity is focused on identity, not theology. Fox News pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity talk about Christianity mainly in demographic terms, as part of a larger conception of what it means to be a "real" American. It's less about what you believe, and more about what tribe you belong to. Across the country, Republicans are passing laws that are clearly designed to advance the Christian right agenda, from abortion bans to the "don't say gay" law in Florida. But the Jesus talk has taken a backseat to QAnon-inflected fantasies about pedophilia and litter boxes in schools.

That the QAnon-style conspiracy theories would work better than lots of public praying seems weird at first blush. But it works for one simple reason: The Christian right has terrible branding.

Church ladies waving crosses around are nobody's idea of a good time. A lot of Americans, even Republican-voting Americans, don't go to church very often, if at all. What Trump understood, and the GOP, in general, has glommed onto, is that people want to have fun or at least create the illusion of being fun people. Packaging misogyny and homophobia as religious faith may give it a moral justification, but it's also a drag. Putting those ideas into the mouth of someone like Joe Rogan or Carlson in his current "naughty boy" persona, however, makes it feel transgressive, cool, and exciting.

Trump gave the right permission to stop trying to dress up their ugly views in Christian piety. He pushed calorie-free bigotry. You get the pleasures of being a bully, but you don't have to pay the price of doing boring crap like going to church. Of course, it sells well.

The confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett is a perfect illustration of this shift. Barrett has a long history of public piety in the Bush mold. It's why Trump chose her so that the religious right would feel absolutely secure that she will be the vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But during her confirmation hearing, when Democrats tried to make hay over Barrett's lengthy record of super public religiosity, Republicans cried foul, pretending that Barrett's beliefs were an entirely private matter that had no impact on her jurisprudence. This bad faith was aided by the fact that Barrett happily stood by Trump's side in public, apparently indifferent to his long history of adultery and repeated divorce. That willingness to be in the same room with Trump, perversely, only helped bolster her image as a "reasonable" person who had no intention of forcing her fundamentalism on the American public. But, of course, that's exactly what she was hired to do.

Right now, the nation is being swept by a tidal wave of theocratic legislation, and the situation only looks like it's getting worse. So far, however, the public mostly doesn't seem to take much notice. The various abortion bans barely make a ripple in the public discourse and the threats to hard-won LGBTQ rights aren't really raising many alarms either. Part of that is due to Democratic complacency after President Joe Biden's 2020 win, of course. But part of it is that people respond, especially in our short-attention-span era, to aesthetics more than substance. The Christian right has stopped looking like the Christian right and instead embraced the secular-seeming vibe that Trump, because he's godless, embodies effortlessly. It's hard to convince the public that fundamentalists are coming for them when the fundamentalists have gotten so good at pretending to be someone else.


Top Florida faith adviser dismissed after sexual assault history revealed

April 05, 2022

A member of the Florida Governor’s Faith and Community-Based Initiative was recently dismissed from his role as a deacon of Clearwater’s Calvary Church after it was revealed he had a history of sexual misconduct when he was a teacher.

Rev. Willy Rice told his congregation in a video that the deacon was stepping down over a past that involved “sexual sin that could also be described as abusive,” Religion News Service reports.

“It did not involve criminal charges, and he has never been identified by law as a sexual offender,” Rice also said.

“Religion News Service has confirmed that the former deacon is Jeff Ford, the executive director of Man Up and Go, a Christian nonprofit in the U.S. and overseas whose Authentic Masculinity Program ‘teaches men how to be protectors of and providers for their families,’ according to the biography of Ford posted on the website of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. According to that website, Ford is a member of the state’s Faith-Based and Community-Based Advisory Council.”

In 2005, the Tampa Bay Times newspaper reported that Jeffrey Charles Ford, a 27-year-old coach and teacher at J.W. Mitchell High School, resigned after admitting to having sex with an 18-year-old student.

Ford’s bio on the Florida Governor’s website calls Man Up and Go “a global non-profit organization that inspires men to fight for the fatherless as Jesus commands. The organization aims to break the cycle of generational fatherlessness,” and operates “in Uganda, Ethiopia, and the Dominican Republic.”

DeSantis established the Governor’s Faith and Community-Based Initiative in 2019.

Evangelical minister: Christian nationalism is a bizarre, misogynist fantasy — and totally un-Christian


President Donald Trump joins Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, Louise Gorsuch, and others in prayer in the Green Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., following the President’s announcement of Judge Gorsuch as his nominee to the Supreme Court, Tuesday January 31, 2017. 
(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
February 20, 2022

During my time as a boy attending an evangelical church and then later, when I attended an evangelical seminary, it was hard not to notice an underlying misogyny that seemed consistently present. As a man, I would be the head of the household. I was like Christ to my future wife. In fact, I once heard a sermon by prominent evangelical minister Tony Evans where he declared that wives must refer to their husbands as "Lord." In my church youth groups, we were separated by sex and the boys had bizarre discussions on the type of men we should become. There was a strong emphasis on being what they considered to be manly and tough, whereas young girls, of course, were encouraged to be nurturing, submissive and, most important, sexually pure.

When contemporary evangelical leaders push a message around Christian nationalism, I can promise you it always refers back to a time when the "traditional" roles of American households held fast. Making America "great again" is truly about bringing back a time when women were subject to their husbands' wills and whims, and the husbands were lords of the house.

Someone recently wrote to me, in response to one of my previous articles, wondering why so many evangelicals chose Donald Trump, a vulgar misogynist who shows no understanding of any element of the Christian faith, over other candidates who were much closer to the evangelical movement. The difficult answer is that most evangelical men long for the days when misogyny was cool, when women were under the thumb of their husbands and sexual harassment was almost universally accepted. Trump exemplified that approach — and a great many evangelicals loved him for it. Trump remains the favorite of the evangelicals not because any commitment to Christ or the Christian way of life — since he has none — but because of the widespread desire among evangelicals to take back control over their lives, and their wives. One of the major ways this has been expressed lately is through the ideology known as Christian nationalism.

As I understand it, Christian nationalism is an idea now widely accepted within the evangelical church that the U.S. is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles — no matter what it may say in the Constitution. This commitment to the Christian faith, as a nation, is the reason God blessed the U.S. as the greatest nation that ever existed. God will only continue to bless this nation, however, as long as it remains a Christian nation. As America becomes more progressive and increasingly secular in terms of politics, culture and faith, then in this view God will remove his blessing and protection and great evils will befall our nation.

This remarkable theory has no connection to any of the teachings of Jesus Christ or his followers, and is completely irrelevant to the Christian faith. I will certainly admit that I have a heart for American idealism. I have officiated at numerous Veterans Day and Memorial Day services, and I have felt the love of country enormously, on those days and all the days in between. None of that, however, has anything to do with Christianity. God does not play favorites when it comes to nations, people or cultures. That entire idea is morally and theologically absurd.

In truth, Christian nationalism is based not in the Bible or the teachings of Jesus Christ, but on the idea of the traditional American family. As roles for women have changed, as divorce becomes more common, as same-sex marriage gains a firmer footing, and now with the movement for transgender rights and visibility becoming more public, the panic of the Christian nationalists becomes ever more desperate. This is where all that rage among evangelicals is coming from. Understand, most people are motivated politically based on how they perceive policy decisions affecting their day-to-day life. Nothing affects our lives more than what is happening to our families. When things fall apart at home, it can feel helpful — even if it's not healthy — to blame someone or something besides ourselves. For myself, I know that all my personal failures are mine alone. I can't blame MTV or Eminem or the LGBTQI population, the evangelical church, Trump, Biden, Obama, my mom, my dad or anyone else. The problem is in the mirror, as it is for everyone. Any effort to pass that blame along to others is quite human, and quite wrong.

My final point on Christian nationalism is around all the macho tough-guy stuff that seems to be on the lips of every right-wing leader. Being "tough" seems to be the only thing conservative commentators and evangelical leaders care about. Trump is supposedly the epitome of that and his little posse loves him for it. I won't pretend to understand it. After I graduated middle school, being tough just didn't seem that important. But for people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jerry Falwell Jr. (before his fall) and of course Trump himself, it's important to keep pretending that they are a bunch of tough guys, even though they also claim to stand with Jesus Christ, a humble, meek and homeless teacher.

I'm no tough guy but I am happy to offer a challenge to any of these fake tough guys. Debate me anywhere, anytime. I am truly blue-collar, a member of the American working class. I am a Bible-believing minister and a flaming liberal. I believe that the Christian nationalist message comes from the devil himself. I am trying to save the name of the Christian faith and to stand up for American idealism. I oppose every part of the hypocritical, fake-populist agenda of the Christian nationalists and their enablers. I double-dog dare any of them, here and now, to stand up and take me on in public debate. Odds are they never will. 


That 'freedom convoy' in Ottawa? It's inspired by an Old Testament account of divine massacre


Image via Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Lecaque 
February 19, 2022
AlterNet

When a church announces what’s called a Jericho March (or a Jericho Walk), you might picture congregants praying, walking around a building, trumpets blasting and an odd gospel song here and there.

You might forget, however, what comes next.

From Joshua 6:20-21:

When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Jericho Marches are organized by a group by the same name. They were created by a coalition of Christian nationalists in the US. They are co-led by a Catholic think-tank writer (Arina Grossu of the Family Research Council) and an evangelical businessman (Rob Weaver).

The Jericho Marches rose to prominence recently. Supporters have been marching around the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa for around 20 days. They are, for Americans, a gothic reminder of what had been brewing in the lead up to the J6 sacking and looting of the US Capitol.

The same toxic brew
Jericho March, the group, is one of the religious groups, movements and ideologies that were at play in the insurrection. The Uncivil Religion project has uncovered a bevy of beliefs. The Jericho Marches, however, were the principal symbol of J6 and the Christian nationalism at its heart, not only in DC but at state capitols around the country.

Christian nationalism is a religious idea that transcends borders. It attracts a lot of support from like-minded insurrectionists abroad.

Last year, when journalist Emma Green wrote “A Christian Insurrection” for The Atlantic, it was subtitled it, “Many of those who mobbed the Capitol on Wednesday claimed to be enacting God’s will.”

The CBC Investigates piece on the Ottawa convoy this week is titled, “For many inside the Freedom Convoy, faith fuels the resistance.”

The links are very clear between groupings. And now, organizing in small groups and marching around Parliament, is a new Jericho March.

Spiritual warfare
Filmed versions of Jericho Marches reveal a large group in the snow, bearing primarily Canadian flags and singing hymns, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and then blowing shofars before they began marching.

The hymns and prayers were occasionally punctuated by people yelling “Freedom!” and trucks honking. One woman spoke in tongues before engaging in rhetoric I’ve seen in spiritual warfare sermons.

They prayed for healing from vaccines and for summoning the “Lord of Heaven’s armies.” As the National Review reported, the Jericho March goes every day, once around Parliament, and seven full laps on Thursdays, carrying horns and trumpets. And they hope eventually more will show up, to the tune of thousands and thousands.

Benita Pedersen, an organizer from Alberta, was interviewed by a sympathetic Christian YouTube channel about what they are doing.

Pedersen said she felt a “call on her heart” to do this. She had been given a steer horn by a local farmer. She knew she had to bring it to Ottawa and to do a Jericho March. She’s using that as a shofar.

She said that the “freedom movement” was “100 percent hand in hand with Jesus.” They go together beautifully, she said, and nonbelieving supporters should think about Jesus and about how it goes together.

Divine massacre

But, of course, this isn’t her first time.


She led an anti-vaxx rally outside of the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton in September, received 10 Public Health Act tickets for organizing various anti-public health rallies in northern Alberta last year and revived her Twitter account, dormant since 2016, specifically in order to promote anti-public health events she organized and ran.

The story of Jericho is nothing to worry about.

It’s only about divine massacre.

Walls come crumbling down

They know what they are doing. One participant on TikTok recounted the biblical story before backpedaling that this was “not about crumbling walls or infrastructure,” but about softening hearts.

Previous Jericho Marches were not as benign. A year ago, in Edmonton, a Jericho March against pandemic restrictions was condemned by the conservative premier and questioned by anti-hate groups for their intention to march with tiki torches. It was joined by hate groups.

One of the organizers asked “what happened when they marched around seven times on the last day? The walls came crumbling down. Spiritually speaking, we need those corrupt walls that have been built up by the politicians to come smashing and crumbling down.”

“The Great Reset”

Back to Ottawa: Christian nationalist symbols are visible in the mob that has been marching and occupying space around Parliament for about 20 days, though in smaller numbers than in American rallies. It’s part of the broader effort to bring global attention to the “convoy.”

CBC has reported on the prayer circles and speeches and signs in the crowd. Christine Mitchell has written about the Christian nationalist imagery of 2 Chronicles in the crowd. More worrisome, though, is how much international presence, interference and support there is.

Fox News, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino influence groups around the world that spread Facebook propaganda. All of these have directed attention to Canada and fundraised for the occupation of the city.

Franklin Graham, a J6 defender, posted a supporting Instagram video, tagged with “I’d like you to meet who Prime Minister @JustinPJTrudeau called the ‘fringe minority.’ Tell me what you think of this video.” It featured the Jericho March, among others, and it was set to “Amazing Grace,” which was sung loudly by the mob on January 6.

The Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a noted QAnon-adjacent radical traditionalist Catholic, gave a talk that linked the convoy expressly to “a worldwide chorus that wants to oppose the establishment of the New World Order on the rubble of nation-states through the Great Reset desired by the World Economic Forum and by the United Nations under the name of ‘Agenda 2030.’” Viganò added:

"We know many heads of state have participated in Klaus Schwab's School for Young Leaders — the so-called Global Leaders for Tomorrow — beginning with Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, Jacinta Ardern and Boris Johnson and, before that, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Tony Blair.”

We should worry

“The Great Reset” is an explicitly anti-public health conspiracy theory. Viganò has promoted it relentlessly. It is also used by anti-vaxx, anti-mask and other anti-mandate groups as their way of drumming up support internationally and bringing in more conspiracy theorists.

Viganò’s message focused on Christian nationalism from a Catholic perspective. It was also permeated with QAnon tropes:

“But, even more, dear Canadian brothers, it is necessary to understand that this dystopia serves to establish the dictatorship of the New World Order and totally erase every trace of Our Lord Jesus Christ from society, from history and from the traditions of peoples.”

The elements of spiritual warfare – repeatedly deployed by Christian nationalist groups before in service of Trump and elsewhere – on the borderline of where it crosses over into physical violence, the Jericho Marchs, the violent commentary supporting it, the prayer, the shofars, the echoes of J6 expressed from abroad and divorced from the actual Canadian context – these are a symptom of a broader problem.

Illiberalism is growing. The variant around Trump – conspiracy-laden, seditionist, Christian nationalism – is getting strong by the minute.

Last year, it was in Washington.

This year, Ottawa.

Next year? We should worry.

Friday, March 27, 2020

CAN I GET AN AMEN
Nearly 3 dozen who attended church event test positive for coronavirus
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM

Janelle Griffith, NBC News•March 26, 2020

Nearly three dozen people who attended a recent children's event at a church in Arkansas have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to church officials.

Donald Shipp, a deacon at First Assembly of God church in Greers Ferry, about 75 miles north of Little Rock, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that 34 people who attended the event in early March at the Cleburne County church had tested positive for the coronavirus, and that an unknown number of others were awaiting test results.

Danyelle McNeill, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Health, said a number of coronavirus cases have been associated with a church in Cleburne County, which she did not identify.

"We are still investigating newly reported cases and can’t definitively say they are all connected to one church," McNeill told NBC News on Thursday. "This is a cluster within a larger outbreak in that area of the state."


There were at least 310 reported coronavirus cases and two deaths in Arkansas as of Thursday morning.


Mark Palenske, a pastor at the church, said in a lengthy Facebook post late last week that he and his wife, Dena, were among those to test positive for COVID-19.

He said that when such a virus spreads on the other side of the world, "your first inclination is to assume that time and distance are on your side."

But "that false assumption" recently caught up with him and his wife, he said.

The couple and dozens of others from their church initially could not get tested, according to Palenske.

"One local doctor had a very small number of commercial tests and the rest is history, I suppose," he wrote.

He said that before even receiving positive test results, the church had followed medical advice and canceled services.

The couple's symptoms began with headaches followed by intense body aches and lethargy, as well as waves of chills, sweating and nausea, Palenske wrote in his post.

"Dena had a very scary morning a few days ago, which included a seizure of sorts and required hospitalization," he said.

His wife's condition has since improved and they are both back home, he said. Palenske said he could not pinpoint "where the virus came from."

"Even though we were the original positives, there are people who have been sick longer than we have," he said. "It clearly made its way through a special weekend of children’s ministry at our church."

He requested that people pray for health care workers, and he advised that people "take this medical threat more seriously."

"Maybe you assumed that it couldn’t happen to you, just like I did," he wrote. "Please adhere to the social instructions that you are receiving locally and nationally."


Christian pastor who thought COVID-19 is just ‘mass hysteria’ among the first in Virginia to die from virus

March 26, 2020 By Sky Palma


One of the first deaths in Virginia from coronavirus was a 66-year-old Christian “musical evangelist” who fell ill while on a trip to New Orleans with his wife. As the Friendly Atheist’s Bo Gardiner points out, Landon Spradlin had previously shared opinions that the pandemic was the result of “mass hysteria” from the media.

On March 13, Spradlin shared a misleading meme that compared coronavirus deaths to swine flu deaths and suggested the media is using the pandemic to hurt Trump. In the comments, Spradlin acknowledged that the outbreak is a “real issue,” but added that he believes “the media is pumping out fear and doing more harm than good”

“It will come and it will go,” he wrote.
That same day, he shared a post from another pastor that told the story of a missionary in South Africa who “protected” himself from the bubonic plague with the “Spirit of God.”

“As long as I walk in the light of that law [of the Spirit of life], no germ will attach itself to me,” read a quote from the post.


---30---

Friday, October 09, 2020

Harris and Pence Represent Two Different Americas
By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz 

VISION 2020 OCT. 7, 2020

There’s no red America and blue America — only the disunited states of Pence America and Harris America. Photo-Illustration: Megan Paetzhold. Photos: Getty Images


Four years ago, Donald Trump chose Mike Pence as his running mate because the formerly pro-choice libertine needed an ambassador to the Evangelical right.

Two months ago, Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his would-be veep because the old white male moderate from Scranton wanted to energize the (comparatively) young, diverse, college-educated liberals who provide his party with an outsize share of its small-dollar donations and phone-banking volunteers.

Ticket-balancing is not a new practice. But the polarization of America’s parties, combined with the peculiar and antithetical balancing needs of Biden and Trump, have brought us the most ideologically and culturally disparate pair of major-party vice-presidential nominees in U.S. history.

Harris is the child of a pair of immigrant academics, one an Indian American biologist, the other a Jamaican American Marxist economist. Pence is the son of Roman Catholic gas-station owners. Harris’s childhood was divided between Berkeley and Montreal. She attended a French-speaking primary school and historically Black university. Pence grew up in an Indiana town of 20,000 people before leaving for Hanover College, less than 60 miles away.

Both became attorneys animated by a will to political power. But for a man of Pence’s social conservatism and geographical roots, the path to such power ran through a conversion to Evangelical Protestantism and the hosting of a local right-wing talk-radio show. For Harris, it meant balancing San Franciscans’ public-safety concerns with their bleeding-heart liberalism. As their careers progressed — and their nation’s politics steadily polarized — the two came to represent evermore disparate constituencies.

In CNN’s most recent national poll, Harris is 29 points more popular with college graduates than noncollege graduates, 65 points more popular with liberals than with moderates, 32 points more popular with women than men, and 27 points more popular with “people of color” than whites. Pence, meanwhile, is 24 points more popular with noncollege grads than college grads, 87 points more popular with conservatives than with moderates, 31 points more popular with men than with women, and 29 points more popular with whites than “people of color.” These splits make Pence and Harris an even more polarizing pair of figures than Trump and Biden, who both boast a bit more appeal among secular white working-class northerners than the median member of their parties.

The running mates’ respective die-hard fan bases are even more diametrically opposed than their sources of polling support. Pence’s place on the GOP ticket signals to white patriarchal Christians that the Trump administration will fight to preserve their embattled traditions and ethnocentric conception of American identity. Harris’s place on the Democratic ticket, by contrast, signals to liberal professionals and social-justice nonprofits that Biden will fight to erode traditional race- and gender-based hierarchies and fortify an ascendent, ecumenical, multiracial conception of Americanness. Beyond the culture war, as a California senator and presidential candidate, Harris paid tribute to the economic ambitions of various progressive groups and advocacy campaigns, while Pence’s fealty to the Koch Network has made him every bit as loyal a servant of Mammon as he is of (white right-wing) Christ.

In Salt Lake City Wednesday night, Harris and Pence will likely seek to spotlight the ways their disparate constituencies are out of sync with the median swing-state voter. Pence may needle Harris for supporting the decriminalization of illegal border-crossing, Hyde Amendment repeal, or the passage of the Green New Deal (defined, in this context, as a ban on fracking, beef, and airplanes). Harris will surely note Pence’s opposition to Roe v. Wade and universal health care, toxically unpopular stances that are newly salient amid the looming vote over Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The debate is certain to be more polite than last week’s meeting between Biden and Trump (whatever their differences, Pence and Harris are both disciplined professionals). But the division that these two figures represent (both politically and symbolically) in American life — between cosmopolitanism and provincialism, city and country, secularism and fundamentalism, feminist advance and patriarchal tradition, social justice and racial innocence — is starker than any their bosses collectively embody. Pence and Harris offer irreconcilable visions for America’s future. And that future will never be more than one actuarially plausible tragedy away.

Sunday, August 08, 2021

“God’s Business Men”: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War

Sarah Ruth Hammond

Yale University Ph.D., 2010

For decades, historians of the twentieth-century United States have treated evangelicals as politically apathetic and culturally marginal between the 1925 Scopes Trial and the Reagan revolution. To the contrary, evangelical businessmen during the Depression and World War II opposed the New Deal on theological and economic grounds, and claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the same visionary pragmatism they practiced in the boardroom. For example, industrialist R.G. LeTourneau and executive Herbert J. Taylor countered government centralization in the 1930s and 1940s with philanthropies that invested in a Protestant, capitalist, and democratic world.

Meanwhile, the Christian Business Men’s Committee International, the Business Men’s Evangelistic Clubs, and the Gideons infused spiritual fellowship with the elitism of advertising culture. They were confident that they could steer the masses to Christ and free enterprise from the top down. Indeed, for a few exhilarating years, World War II seemed to give America and its missionaries dominion over the globe. Piety, patriotism, and power drew LeTourneau, Taylor, and the new National Association of Evangelicals to the center of it all,Washington, D.C. The marriage of religious and economic conservatism since the 1970s, which surprised many historians, reflects historical continuity rather than evangelical retreat. 

https://philanthropy.iupui.edu/files/file/sarah_hammond_final_dissertation_april2010.pdf


Compounding the Sacred and the Profane: How Economic Theory Brings New Insight to the Growth and Decline of American Protestantism

Bretton Chad 

Claremont McKenna College

2016

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2296&context=cmc_theses


THE BLESSINGS OF BUSINESS: CORPORATE AMERICA AND CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALISM IN THE SUNBELT AGE, 1945-2000

by DARREN ELLIOTT GREM

ABSTRACT
Scholars and pundits have often cast postwar conservative evangelicalism as a kind of doppelganger of liberal activism, as a grassroots expression of populist will against the social revolutions of the 1960s. In contrast, this dissertation argues that the rise of culturally and politically-engaged, conservative evangelicals first began in the midst of the New Deal state in the 1940s and 1950s and depended heavily on another will—the will of corporations and corporate actors, especially those working out of the economic and social context of an emergent, postwar “Sunbelt.” There, in the midst of a burgeoning regional economy that stretched from Georgia to Texas to California, a postwar generation of business leaders worked with evangelical leaders to resurrect the cause of religious, economic, and political conservatism in the midst of the early Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the Culture Wars heated up, they brought their faith, free market policies, and “family values” to the forefront of American public life.

The blessings of business were everywhere—in the ministries of celebrity evangelists like Billy Graham and lay evangelists like R.G. LeTourneau; in corporate-funded missionary  groups like Young Life, Campus Crusade for Christ, The Navigators, and Wycliffe Bible

Translators; in independent evangelical colleges strung throughout the South and West; in everyday operations at thousands of small businesses and dozens of mass-market corporations; in evangelical-inspired “biblical success” books and in a cottage industry of evangelical-led entrepreneurial seminars; in evangelical culture industries and megachurches; and, most especially, in the careers of evangelical political leaders from Jerry Falwell to George W. Bush.

In documenting both the successes and failures of these corporate-evangelical alliances, this dissertation explains why conservative evangelicalism reemerged when and where it did. But it also shows how corporate power has shaped—and continues to shape—religious culture and politics in modern America.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Our country: its possible future and its present crisis





 
REVIEW
“IN 'OUR COUNTRY’ published by the American Home Missionary Society,
Rev. Josiah Strong has given us a book whose
value lies in its facts and in the rare ability with which the
author has gathered and verified them. In successive chapters
he has sketched the spirit of the times, the National resources
and Western supremacy. He has depicted the perils from im-
migration, from Romanism, Mormonism, intemperance, social-
ism and wealth; the dangers from urban population and the
exhaustion of the public lands. His final chapter on ' Money
and the Kingdom ' reveals the purpose of the book, which is to
point Christians of this country to the present time as a critical
period in Christ's Kingdom, and to urge upon them the conse-
cration of their wealth to the cause of the Redeemer. The
book ought to be in the hands of every patriot in the land as a
thesaurus of important material facts and as an incentive to
stand on higher grounds of civic and religious duty."
The  Advance.

OUR COUNTRY:  ITS POSSIBLE FUTURE AND ITS PRESENT CRISIS.
BY  REV. JOSIAH STRONG, D. D.,
GENEBAL SECRETARY OF THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE
FOR THE UNITED STATES, NEW YORK.
 
With an Introduction, by
PROF. AUSTIN PHELPS, D. D.


THIS Volume was prepared for the American Home
Missionary Society by REV. JOSIAH STRONG, D.D., then its
representative for the work of Home Missions in Ohio,.
As will be seen at a glance, its main purpose is to lay
before the intelligent Christian people of our country
facts and arguments showing the imperative need of
Home Missionary work for the evangelization of the
land, the encouragements to such effort, and the danger
of neglecting it.

Copies for perusal and distribution can be obtained
from the publishers, The Baker & Taylor Co., No. 9
Bond Street, New York. Fifty cents in cloth binding
or Twenty-five cents in paper.

Copyrighted by the
AMERICAN HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY,
1885.
 
SIXTY years ago the American Home Missionary Society was
organized to assist congregations that are unable to support the
Gospel ministry and TO SEND THE GOSPEL AND THE MEANS
OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION TO THE DESTITUTE WITHIN THE UNITED
STATES.
 
It began its work near the commencement of that great
“world-movement" described in this volume. In 1826, when
Western New York was a frontier region, two -thirds of its
missionaries were found in this State.
 
Now they are laboring in nearly every State and Territory of
the Union. Over 1,000 are in States south and west of New
York. Who can estimate the influence they are exerting in
building up the new communities on Christian foundations?
 
Some idea of the magnitude and scope of the Society's work
may be gained from the following facts.
 
In sixty -one year’s its missionaries have organized 4,951
churches and brought 2,430 to self-support. They have gathered
into these churches 345, 973 members. Cash receipts, $11,586,-
692,20,
 
During the sixty -first year 1,571 missionaries ministered to
3,063 congregations and 129,350 Sunday-school scholars;
organizing 135 new churches and 323 new Sunday-schools
and receiving into the churches 10,031 members.
Cash receipts, $482,979,60.
 
Never before were the calls for Home Missionary work so
loud. Never were the doors so wide open in all parts of the
land. Never were our institutions in greater peril. Head in
this book of these perils and their remedy. Then let every
patriot and Christian ask if he is not responsible for applying
this remedy. The average cost to this Society for each of its
missionaries is $471 per year.
 
Are there not many who will each contribute enough to sup-
port at least one such Christian worker ?
 
SAVE AMERICA TO SAVE THE WORLD !






EXCERPTS

PREFACE
It is worthy of note that almost all the thinking which think-
ing men have given to the subject for the last fifty years has
been in the line of the leading idea which this volume enforces
the idea of crisis in the destiny of this country, and through
it in the destiny, of the world. The common sense of men
puts into homely phrase the great principles which underlie
great enterprises. One such phrase lies under the Christian
civilization of our land. It is " the nick of time." The pres-
ent hour is, and always has been, " the nick of time" in our
history. The principle which underlies all probationary ex-
perience comes to view in organized society with more stu-
pendous import than in individual destiny. This book puts
the evidence of that in a form of cumulative force which is
overwhelming.

Fifty years ago our watchful fathers discerned it in their
forecast of the future of the Republic. The wisest among
them even then began to doubt how long the original stock of
American society could bear the interfusion of elements alien
to our history and to the faith of our ancestry. The conviction
was then often expressed that the case was hopeless


Success in the work of the world's conversion has, with
rare exceptions, followed the lines of human growth and pro-
spective greatness. But a single exception occurs to one's
memory that of the Hawaiian Islands. Seldom has a nation
been converted to Christ, only to die. The general law has
been that Christianity should seat itself in the great metropoli-
tan centers of population and of civilized progress. It has
allied itself with the most virile races. It has taken possession
of the most vigorous and enterprising nations. The coloniz-
ing races and nations have been its favorites. It has aban-
doned the dying for the nascent languages. Its affinities have
always been for the youthful, the forceful, the progressive,
the aspiring in human character, and for that stock of mind
from which such character springs. By natural sequence, tne
localities where those elements of powerful manhood are, or
are to be, in most vigorous development, have been the strategic
points of which our religion has taken possession as by a
masterly military genius.

SOME OF THE TABLE OF CONTENTS (TOC)
CHAPTER V
PERILS. ROMANISM.
I. Conflict of Romanism with the fundamental principles of our
government ; liberty of conscience ; free speech, and a free press ;
free schools ; loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to the Pope.
2. Attitude toward our free institutions. 3. Rapid growth of Roman-
ism in the United States, especially in the West. P. 46.

CHAPTER VI.
PERILS. MORMONISM.
Polygamy not an essential part of Mormonism; might be de-
stroyed without weakening the system. Strength lies in ecclesiastical
despotism. Mormon designs. The remedy. P. 59.

CHAPTER VII.
PERILS. INTEMPERANCE.
I. The progress of civilization renders men the easier victims of
intemperance. Civilization must destroy the liquor traffic, or be de-
stroyed by it. The problem serious enough in the East. What of
the West, where the relative power of the saloon is two-and-one-half
times greater?
II. The liquor power; wealth; organization; aims; methods.
Influence in Rocky Mountains and beyond. P. 68.

CHAPTER VIII.
PERILS. SOCIALISM.
The Socialistic Labor Party and the International Working-men's
Association. Teachings. Numbers. Conditions favorable to growth :
1. Immigration ; 2. Increasing Individualism;
3. Prevalence of skepticism ; 4. Development of classes
5. Growing discontent. Modern enginery of destruction.
Conditions at the West peculiarly favorable to the growth of Socialism. P. 85.

CHAPTER IX.
PERILS. WEALTH.
Comparative statement of wealth. Rate of increase. Advantages
over Europe. Dangers: 1. Mammonism; 2. Materialism;
3. Luxuriousness ; 4. Congestion of wealth. All these dangers
greater at the West than at the East. P. 1*2.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE ANGLO-SAXON AND THE WORLD'S FUTURE.
Reasons why the world's future is to be shaped by the Anglo-
Saxon. The United States to be the seat of his power. The most
marked characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race are here being empha-
sized, and the race schooled for the competition with other races,
which will begin as soon as the pressure of population on the means
of support is felt in the United States. The result of that competi-
tion. The responsibility of this generation. P. 159.


EXCERPTS
CHAPTER XIV MONEY AND THE KINGDOM
Christianize the immigrant and he will be easily
Americanized. Christianity is the solvent of all race
antipathies. Give the Romanist a pure gospel and he
will cease to be a Romanist. It has already been shown
that Christian education will solve the Mormon prob-
lem. The temperance reform, like all others which de-
pend on popular agitation, must have money, and i*
being retarded by the lack of it. Concerning the rem-
edy for socialism, accept the opinion of an economist
who has made it a subject of special study. Says Prof.
Ely : " It is an undoubted fact that modern socialism
of the worst type is spreading to an alarming extent
among our laboring classes, both foreign and native. I
think the danger is of such a character as should arouse
the Christian people of this country to most earnest
efforts for the evangelization of the poorer classes,
particularly in large cities. What is needed is Chris-
tianity, and the Christian church can do far more than
political economists toward a reconciliation of social
classes. The church's remedy for social discontent and
dynamite bombs is Christianity as taught in the New
Testament. Now in all this you will find nothing new.
It is only significant in this regard : others have come
to these conclusions from the study of the Bible ; from
a totally different starting point, from the study of
Political economy, I have come to the same goal."*

But the acceptance of the Christian doctrine con-
cerning property would have a direct, as well as indi-
rect, influence on socialism. Let us, therefore, dwell
a moment on the subject.

In the popular ferment, a hundred years ago, which
culminated in the French ^Revolution, the demand was
for equal rights and the watchword was Liberty. There
is a popular ferment throughout Europe to-day which
is more universal and extends to the United States.
The popular demand now is equality of condition, and
the watchword is Property a cry the meaning of
which the dullest and most earthly can understand.
This movement, which is steadily gathering force, re-
sults from the two most striking facts of the Nineteenth
century : first, the general diffusion of knowledge
through the press, which has wonderfully multiplied
wants up and down the entire social scale ; and, sec-
ond, the creation of immense wealth by means of the
steam engine. But this wealth, which is necessary to
the satisfaction of these wants, has been massed. In a
word, the difficulty is knowledge multiplied and popu-
larized, and wealth multiplied and centralized.

The right distribution of property, which is the ker-
nel of the social question, is the great problem of our
civilization ; and it may well be doubted whether the
true solution will be found until the church accepts,
both in doctrine and practice, the teaching of God's
"Word touching possessions. For the church is re-
sponsible for public opinion on all moral questions, and
no great question of rights can be settled for the world
until Christian men come into right relations with it.

The inexorable law of our present industrial system
is that the cost of subsistence determines the rate of
wages. This makes no provision for the higher wants
of increasing intelligence, and therefore insures an in-
creasing popular discontent. It would seem that the
solution of the great difficulties between capital and
labor must be found in some form of co-operation by
which the workman will be admitted to a just share in
the profits of his labor. Professor Cairns, who is con-
sidered one of the greatest economists England has
produced, believes that co-operative production affords
the laboring classes " the sole means of escape from a
harsh and hopeless destiny" (" Leading Principles," p.
338). Referring to several thousand co-operative so-
cieties in England, having some millions of capital,
Thomas Hughes says : " I still look to this movement
as the best hope for England and other lands." The
eminent statistician, Carroll D. Wright, the head of
the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, re-
ferring to the duty of the rich manufacturer to regard
himself as " an instrument of God for the upbuilding
of the race," and the promotion of the highest welfare
of those in his employ, says : " This may sound like
sentiment. I am willing to call it sentiment ; but I
know it means the best material prosperity, and that
every employer who has been guided by such senti-
ments has been rewarded two-fold ; first, in witnessing
the wonderful improvement of his people, and, second,
in seeing his dividends increase, and the wages of ins
operatives increase with his dividends. The factory
system of the future will be run on this basis. The
instances of such are multiplying rapidly now." Man-
ifestly, the acceptance on the part of Christian capital-
ists of the scriptural doctrine of possessions would
greatly facilitate the introduction of co-operation or
any other plan which promised justice to the work-
man.

The Christian man who is not willing to make the
largest profits which an honest regard for the laws of
trade permits is a rare man. But the laws of trade
permit much that the laws of God do not permit.
Many transactions are commercially honest which ax>
not righteous. If, now, a man accepts the truth that
his possessions are a trust to be administered for God's
glory, he will not consent to increase them by any un-
righteous means. And since justice and righteousness,
like honesty, will prove to be the best policy, the ac-
ceptance on the part of Christian men of a thoroughly
righteous plan of co-operation between capital and la-
bor would eventually compel its general acceptance.
Let Christian men gain a correct conception of their
relations to their possessions, let them accept the duty
of Christian stewardship, and it would command their
getting as well as their spending. There would be no
motive to drive a sharp bargain. It would purify
trade. It would mediate between capital and labor.
It would destroy the foundation on which the rising
structure of socialism rests. It would cut one of the
principal roots of popular unbelief ; for extended in-
quiry in Cincinnati elicited the almost unanimous re-
sponse that the reason workingmen neglect the
churches is that there are on the church rolls the
names of employers who wrong their employes.

The acceptance of the true principle of Christian
giving is urged upon us by the fact that money is
power, which is needed everywhere for elevating and
saving men. It is further urged upon us by the fact
that only such a view of possessions will save us from
the great and imminent perils of wealth. God might
have sent his angels to sing his gospel through the
world, or he might have written it on the sky, and
made the clouds his messengers ; but we need to bear
the responsibility of publishing that gospel. He might
mak^ the safe of every benevolent society a gold mine
as unfailing as the widow's cruse of oil ; but we need
to give that gold. The tendency of human nature, in-
tensified by our commercial activity, is to make the life
a whirlpool a great maelstrom which draws every-
thing into itself. "What is needed to-day is a grand re-
versal of the movement, a transformation of the life
into a fountain. And in an exceptional degree is this
the need of Anglo-Saxons. Their strong love of lib-
erty, and their acquisitiveness, afford a powerful temp-
tation to offer some substitute for self-abnegation.
We would call no man master. We must take Christ
as master. We would possess all things ; we must
surrender all things.

One of the grave problems before us is how to make
great material prosperity conduce to individual 
advancement. The severest poverty is unfavorable to
morality. Up to a certain point increase of property
serves to elevate man morally and intellectually, while
it improves him physically. But, as nations grow rich,
they are prone to become self-indulgent, effeminate,
immoral. The physical nature becomes less robust,
the intellectual nature less vigorous, the moral less
pure. The pampered civilizations of old had to be re-
invigorated, from time to time, with fresh infusions of
barbaric blood a remedy no longer available. If we
cannot find in Christianity a remedy or preventive, our
Christian civilization and the world itself is a failure;
and our rapidly increasing wealth, like the 
"cankered heaps of strange-achieved gold," 
will curse us unto destruction.

AN OUTRODUCTION 

COMMENTARY BY EUGENE PLAWIUK    


I came across this interesting text by an American Evangelical Alliance, while presumably Baptist, it was non sectarian in support of American Protestant Sects,including the Mormons if they were reformed.        

America is a self realization of two forces, those of the liberal enlightenment, Freemasonry and its bourgeois values were perfectly crafted for both colonial and post colonial America. 
It represents both the left and the right, the anarchist artisan, and the libertarian self employed owner, the artisan and the self employed both could become at anytime, a boss or a worker, until the rise of industrialization immediately before, during and after the Civil War then the artisanal nature of America changed.

The Knights of St. Crispin are an excellent example of how the first Capitalist Industrial War, the American Civil War, changed the nature of shoe making. The Knights were founded in the 18th century as a craft guild association and proto union, for shoemakers. At that time in North America, and into the middle of the 19th century, shoe making like many crafts were labour intensive, and involved the whole family.  

The Knights were an East Coast phenomena in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts,Maine, into the Maritimes, such as New Brunswick and Quebec in Canada. 

The Knights originated in the UK and their rites and rituals were brought to North America through New Brunswick. Guild Associations are an ancient tradition among artisans and craftsmen. Like a union they determine the piece work wages that they will make as well as the price set for the sale of the finished product. In other words they controlled the means of production directly. 

In this they were no different then their predecessors in the weaving trades, who were being transformed into mass workers in factories in Europe. Not all trades suffered mass industrialization as early and as totally as the Weavers did. And so various guild associations carried on like the Knights of St. Crispin who originated in the late medieval period. 

Shoemaking then was a family affair, and in America a family would also be a land owner and a sharer in the commonwealth of the community , such as grazing lands, since land was so freely available more so than in Europe. This allowed the family to produce their own food and shelter, and to practice their craft and trade as well. This required people to be living in towns, villages and cities.

In shoemaking the father did the heavy work with the hard leather, and hammering of soles,
the mother cut and fashioned the shoe and the children sewed with their small hands, a practice still conducted today in developing countries that used child labour. The father also sewed, especially the heavy awl work of stitching.  All this was done to Knights standards,
if a shoemaker was found to have sold cheap or below standards, fines would be applied as has been the guild tradition for thousands of years.

There were weavers in America too at this time but they too like the shoemakers would become extinct crafts as industrialization created mass workers for the war effort. A decline in active members of the Knights of St. Crispin can be seen as steady for a decade prior to the Civil War, by the end of the Civil War the Knights only existed in Quebec and New Brunswick. In the United States they were replaced with mass production of shoes for the metropoles, and for the war. The workers were women and children in these factories, leaving the men to find a different trade, or work elsewhere, or farm. 

In the North the Civil War produced a manufacturing industry and a new capitalist class,
it also required masses of workers, these came from immigration even more so than from the freed slaves of the South. Chicago is a good example of the integration that mass production created, in the ghettos around the packing plants were German, Polish and Ukrainian immigrants who arrived at the same time as many of the Black families coming to join their relatives in Chicago where they heard there were jobs to be had.  After the Civil War the abattoirs of Chicago fed the nation and its commodities exchange ruled the farmers of America. 

Chicago was America's mass industrialized city, it has long been the home to the commodity exchange, especially in Cattle, and it was connect to Canada via Winnipeg which was an equivalent boom town of banks, railroads, grains and beef. Americas farmers were beholding to Chicago in many ways, those folks who earlier had been self employed now moved off the land and into the city. That land became privatized, parceled out and bought by farmers. The farmers traded their cattle in Chicago, they got feed, fertilizer and most importantly farm implements 

Chicago had a booming farm equipment manufacturing industry, employing those former 
shoemakers, and other small craftsmen, as well as immigrants. working in these farm equipment plants.  One of those plants would become the focus of the International Workingmen's Association, the Knights of Labour, and members of the Socialist Labour Party. It was the McCormick Works and a year after the publication of this pamphlet, and the year was 1886, the fight was for the eight hour day, and the resulting strike and protest lead the famous Haymarket Riot. 

It is in this time of rapid capitalist growth in America that the Evangelical movement sees 
the need for another Home Missionary Movement to combat Catholicism brought in by the Immigrants from Europe. Conversion for heathen and papist was the cry. As it had been in 1826.

At that time America faced its first anti masonic purge and Baptist Revivalism which ended up in the Know Nothing Party. The Baptist revival was an evangelical mass movement 
to confirm America as a Protestant Nation, the first ever 'pure Aryan' Protestant nation.
Unlike Europe where all nations were Catholic and then converted to Protestantism.

Despite their roots in European culture, what had been the Anabaptist religious movement changed when it arrived in America, it dropped Ana, and simply became Baptist. And it was 
generic at that, anyone could call themselves Baptist, even Presbyterians. The Anabaptists that remained were the collectivist cults, like Mennonites, Hutterites, Amish, Dukhbour.

America created modern Protestant Evangelicalism and modern Protestantism as well as allowing for all kinds of cults and sects Christian or otherwise.  Why cults, because they believed in the end times, the rapture, what is now mainstream for the 700 Club was then
cultic beliefs which meant persecution.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is the largest of several Adventist groups which arose from the Millerite movement of the 1840s in upstate New York, a phase of the Second Great AwakeningWilliam Miller predicted on the basis of Daniel 8:14–16 and the "day-year principle" that Jesus Christ would return to Earth between the spring of 1843 and the spring of 1844. In the summer of 1844, Millerites came to believe that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844, understood to be the biblical Day of Atonement for that year. When this did not happen (an event known as the "Great Disappointment"), most of his followers disbanded and returned to their original churches.

New York State, was home to many of the early alternative sects, cults of Christianity and of Spiritualists and Soothsayers, Theosophists to Freemasons, Odd Fellows and other fraternal orders and to Nativist Sects.

The  communistic protestants the Shakers were there as was the town of Lilydale full of Spiritualist communing with dead It was in this spiritual milieu that Joseph Smith traveled in before his revelation and creation of the Mormon Church, with rites and rituals he 'borrowed' from Freemasonry.

One of the newest forms of Protestantism that caught in America more so than even in its native England, was Millenarism which has existed since the time of the Old Testament if not even earlier. But we can document these movements, and they occur as features of 
End Times, Apocalyptic cults believing in the end of the world. In America these cults became so called  Christian sects like the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah Witness movement. While they originate in Protestantism, they are not Christian, they are cultic interpretations of the bible to prove their predictions. It is still with us today and it calls itself the Moral Majority.

Ironically the author of this propaganda pamphlet would be considered a socialist heretic to today's Moral Majority and other End Times types of Evangelists. They would not even recognize his Aryan Anglo Saxon as being the same as their Nativist White Nationalism.

There are similarities in this work with today's White Nationalism, it reference to Aryan and Anglo Saxonism as Aryan. Aryan as Christian, and that means White people. There are no Negros in this book and there are no Red Men, not even the white fraternity by that name. 

This is the empty frontier of America, of FJ Turner, no Indians, and of course no freed or runaway slaves. There is lots of land, minerals, lumber, all free for the taking. It is the West that our author wants to fill with evangelical Aryan Christians. No others need apply especially not immigrants 

So along with missing people of Afro American descent or First Nations, also the with the immigrant, they must be the right kind of White People, not Catholic, not socialist or union trouble makers, nor rampant capitalists.

Our author would be astonished to learn that today his American counterpart scoffs at the idea socialism in America. And yet here it is, of course like today's Aryan Nationalist Nativist it is not natural or homegrown, it is again blamed on the immigrant, whether from Canada or Europe, just like Catholicism, is not considered native to America, despite the founding of North America by the French and Jesuits. 

Again like populist politicians who decry the rich and powerful, like Trump or the Kingfisher, even Teddy Roosevelt, there belief is in Aryan idealism, just as the author equates as did Roosevelt, Aryanism with Americanism with Manliness, Strength, and Moral Purity. Of course such a being, a person or a nation then is entitled to rule over the world.

But, as nations grow rich,they are prone to become self-indulgent, effeminate,immoral. The physical nature becomes less robust, the intellectual nature less vigorous, the moral less pure. The pampered civilizations of old had to be re-invigorated, from time to time, with fresh infusions of barbaric blood a remedy no longer available. If we cannot find in Christianity a remedy or preventive, ourChristian civilization and the world itself is a failure;and our rapidly increasing wealth, like the "cankered heaps of strange-achieved gold," will curse us unto destruction.

Teddy Roosevelt could have said this so could Steve Bannon. In fact you probably have read the same statements in any number of right wing commentaries published by such intellectual light weight pundits as Bannon and ilk.

Finally lets discuss the most obvious statement, the idea of Crisis. What crisis, the author in the end attests it is one of Aryan or Christian civilization the two being equivalent. A multicultural America is the bugaboo of the assimilationist, scratch the surface and you find a nativist Aryan. 

The real crisis as it is today, is the changing nature of bourgeois capitalist society. As it was then it is today, society is going through major changes at all levels, including the transformation of the means of production into robotics, cybernetics and AI. It means capitalism itself is transforming through technological change, not just to a gig economy but eventually a return to artisanal production at home using new technologies like 3D printing.

As well the collapsing nature of capitalism as well as its positivist transformations, it remains in permanent crisis, why in order to sell weapons, oil, etc. Since the turn of last century the Barbarism of capitalism that we first saw in the American Civil War created the First and Second World Wars, interrupted by two revolutions the Russian and Spanish.

Since then there has been no real post war peace, war continued on the Korean Peninsula,
unresolved it was the beginning of many failed missions by American Imperialism to dominate the Asia Pacific as well as Europe and the Middle East. Today North Korea is 
convenient scapegoat that loves the role and attention it merits 

After Korea it was Vietnam, picking up from the French who abandoned the struggle against
post war nationalism and anti-colonialism, something you would have thought America would champion, but this was the era of the Red Scare and the Cold War.

Cuba was subject to American Imperialism as well as Santa Domingo, whose general strike was viciously put down by American Troops. many of them black being asked to shoot 
unarmed protestors. 

As Michael Kidron wrote post modern Capitalism and its State are what Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex and what Kidron calls  the Permanent Arms Economy, as famed Canadian economist Kenneth Galbraith also discussed in his book and TV series
that came out at the same time in Seventies.

Kidron has been proven right by the continuous sale of weapons world wide, and it is these weapons that are the source of other crimes, in particular drug running, in order to pay for them. America  is the worlds largest gun runner, if its not creating wars, invasions it is selling weapons to those in conflict.

Its most recent sale to a client state, was over $100 million dollars to Saudi Arabia, for them to also gun run and to use against the Shia whom they are conducting an ethnic cleansing war in Yemen.

Wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all caused by the USA in its so called war on Terror, which is just another name for gun running.

Today we face once again the choice Socialism for survival and sustainability, vs Barbarism.
The Barbarians are Aryan Nationalist White Nationalists America, Brit, Russian, French,etc etc Nationalists. Nationalism is Fascism.