What’s Wrong With Today’s Evangelicals?
by Don Clasen
Feb. 22, 2021
Throughout the last four demoralizing years wherein Donald Trump ceaselessly attacked and undermined even the most cherished of American values, traditions and heroes, I kept wondering how the public could so quickly get over the initial shock of the things he said and did, and so easily accommodate his agenda of “defining deviancy down.” And with no group was I more mystified by this than with my fellow Evangelicals, a group that took great pride in coining that very phrase.
I remember well my formative years (1970s-90s) when all I would hear was their smug complacency about being the world’s experts on discerning character, voting their “values” (as if no one else did), and how we needed “men and women of integrity” running for office (i.e., Republicans). I remembered how delighted they were when Ken Starr raked the Clintons over the coals like Jonathan Edward’s spider over the flames of hell.
After six years and nearly $30 million dollars investigating a $35,000 land deal, all Starr could come up with was a blue dress. But it did play to another area Evangelicals considered themselves experts in—sex. All the code language about “degrading the office of the Presidency” and the like fit perfectly into this GOP brand of soap opera and served to reinforce what they cherish so much, their smug sense of moral superiority.
My Own Long Journey
I myself “came to the Lord” on May 22, 1974 while reading a Hal Lindsey book about a coming short apocalypse followed by a thousand year time of true peace and brotherhood with the Millennial reign of Jesus Christ. At the time I was a professional astrologer and all the rage of the day was over the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius” and the coming of a blissful New Age. The Fifth Dimension even had a song about it.
Yet in the back of my mind I had this embarrassing misgiving. Is “Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding,” really our destiny, or is it “the annihilation of mankind?” I was concerned the acceleration of knowledge and technology would outpace human morality, the record of which has been dismal. It was for example, the middle of the insane US/Soviet arms race wherein they had between themselves some 25,000 nukes, enough to destroy life on the planet several times over. The book I was reading put forth the claim that both views were right, and it was enough to convert me on the spot, despite the fact that I didn’t come from a religious background at all. I didn’t even find out that our father was a lifelong atheist until after he died, the subject of religion came up that rarely in our family.
I almost immediately enrolled in a little Bible school in my first church and soaked up all this new information like a sponge, wondering why none of it had been in my education. The school had a second year program for people who felt called to the ministry, so I thought I’d apply and see what the staff thought. When I walked into that little conference room, the presence of God was so thick you could cut it with a knife. They noted it and I did too, and from that point on I have never doubted what my life purpose was supposed to be.
Within weeks I got the sense I was not called to be a pastor though but a teacher on a clergy level (Eph 4:11). This usually meant getting advanced degrees and teaching in a seminary, or writing books and becoming a traveling speaker. I threw my heart and soul into the second path and determined to give it the best shot I could. In later years I tried three times to go to seminary and felt distinctly blocked each time, God telling me He had a “school of My Spirit” he wanted to enroll me in. (Boy, did He ever!) But I had the blessing of some very gifted and deep-thinking mentors to get me off to a good start, supplemented by a lot of enthusiastic research on my own.
That’s When Murphy’s Law Kicked In
But the more I learned, the more trouble I got into. What I saw going on around me was not what I was reading in the Bible, in spite of people’s professed commitment to being “Bible believing.” And the situation was getting worse by the year as more and more charlatanism, theatrics, rank heresies, mind science, metaphysics and prosperity obsession crept into the “hottest” sectors of the faith.
By this time I had gone from groovy California where it was not cool in the 70s to be a Christian to the Midwest where “going to church” was just part of “what you do.” This wasn’t even the deepest of the Bible belt but I was still shocked at how little people understood what the New Testament taught about what the Church is, its mission in the world, and what God expects from it. For decades it caused a lot of psychological and social conflict in my mind. I wondered if there was something wrong with me, and I didn’t like being more and more marginalized from what was not just fellowship but what little social life I had as well. But the more I was rejected, the harder I studied and tried to figure out where I was not getting it.
In this article I want to share with you just a few thoughts on what is wrong with American Evangelicalism as I’ve found it, how it could go from constant moralizing in the 1990s to idolizing one of the most vile men in the world in just 20 years. It’s a situation even more pressing since the shocking attempt to overthrow the Constitution on January 6, with Evangelicals hardly budging in their commitment to right wing extremism.
Almost all these insights I had to come up with on my own. Very few understood them enough to teach them to me, a process that constantly challenged me to question my sanity let alone my humility. I present them for what they’re worth.
How The Church Defines Itself
One of the first things to understand is how un-Biblically the Church defines itself. Most churches view themselves as if they were a club. You could call it “The Club of the Morally Superior” or if you’re feeling more charitable, “The Club of the Moral Majority.”
How you join this club is easy. You knock on the door, give the secret password (the sinner’s prayer) and they welcome you in. They give you a Bible, tell you to go home, read it, pray, and come back for fellowship. And when you do, be sure to pay your tithes and vote Republican.
This is actually how I think the vast majority of people view the Kingdom of God. Is it any surprise they see themselves in an “us vs. them” battle for the earth? Instead of the challenge being first and foremost temptations in our own souls, they look upon “the fish” as an enemy, with no restraints on the self-righteousness of their attitudes toward them.
The New Testament paints a very different picture. It presents “the Church” as both an invisible and visible phenomenon, with the latter being a far inferior representation of “the Church.” The real Church exists in the Spirit and consists of the totality of those believers who actually have an intimate, personal, interactive relationship with God. Obviously then, this Church is only known to God, and just because you “go to church” doesn’t mean that you’re part of it. As the Apostle Paul put it, the question is not whether you say you know God, but does God know you (Gal 4:9)?
Likewise, Jesus never told anybody to repeat a prayer to accept Him. He just said, “Follow me” (with some of them literally doing so), and you either did or you didn’t. And God knew the difference.
Paul further likens this true Church to a mystical “Body” with Christ as its head and the believers as members according to their various gifts and functions within it. It’s a consciousness similar to what Jesus meant when He said “the Kingdom is within you,” (i.e., it’s in your heart and soul). Only when the King comes back will he set up a literal, external political kingdom over the earth. Until then, history has proven that democracies are the best system for stability and establishing empirical facts and the truth in the earth. Autocracies always bury their people in an avalanche of lies to manipulate them and maintain a false sense of reality in their consciousness.
Two Different Mandates
Furthermore, the mandates for this Kingdom are very simple. They are first, to complete “The Great Commission,” to preach the good news that Jesus Christ has taken the national covenant once given to Israel and now made it available to everyone on a personal, faith basis. Once that mission has been largely completed (such as here in America where knowledge of the message is widespread), the emphasis turns to living out what you preach before the world.
What’s killing today’s Evangelicals is their underestimation of the importance of this second mandate. The New Testament is packed full of exhortations and instructions on how to be the best witnesses, the best ambassadors of the Kingdom we can be. The targets are the government itself and all those outside our little moral clubs, (which I sometimes liken to “Protestant monasteries”). Yet today’s Christians are infatuated with a rebellious, self-righteous spirit that turns the world off. Why, we can’t even be bothered to wear masks to protect others from infection; it’s an attack on our “religious liberties”!
Everywhere and always the government is seen to be eager to pounce on the slightest excuse to close down churches, partly through the agitprop of people like Jay Sekulow who seems to me to be a conscious Israeli asset posing as a Christian. The fact that the Democratic Party is composed of thousands of churches itself plus other religions, atheists and the like doesn’t seem to register with them. Nor the fact that they are far more committed to the spirit of religious freedom than Christian nationalists living in a fantasy world of a white, Antebellum “heritage” that is unjustifiable. They scream they’re being persecuted but again, the New Testament has plenty of warnings about making sure you’re being persecuted for righteousness’ sake, not your own folly (I Pet 2:20).
More On Protestant Monasteries
All this paranoia about the outside world has been exacerbated by at least two things, home schooling and the apocalyptic mindset. Being convinced everyone outside their club is a complete barbarian (partly due to a long-distorted understanding of “the sin nature”), Christians are loath to send their kids to public school lest they get contaminated by kids from the wrong side of the tracks and “secularist” foot soldiers out to rob them of their faith.
The fact that some leftists do want access to teenagers and college students to use them as guinea pigs for their social experiments doesn’t help either. But that’s the challenge for your kids, to be able to defend their faith and plain common sense in the face of people who are as lost as the Donner party in a blizzard. It’s always the extremists in a democracy that threaten its normal stability.
Thus have Christians turned their backs on one of America’s greatest institutions, the public school. They forget that academics is only one goal of public schools. The other is they serve as a great socialization process for American citizens wherein kids get to meet kids from other religions and backgrounds they might not normally run across. In this way they find out they’re not really barbarians after all, just human beings with the same dreams they have. The ascension of a regressive like Betsy DeVos to head the Education Department only accelerates this process of balkanization and isolation. Yet Evangelicals couldn’t get enough of her.
All this has been greatly aggravated by the popularity of home schooling. Now the nation is stuck with kids who have grown up thinking everyone outside their front door is out to get them. Is it any wonder millions of right wingers are motivated by fear, paranoia and rage? It’s a great American tragedy.
More On Apocalyptic Consciousness
The other factor that adds to the siege mentality is the Biblical warnings about a coming apocalypse. There is so much wrong here that it warrants a whole study by itself (which is of course, the purpose of this website). The possibility of a time of chaos coming to the earth is not a far-fetched idea. Even Hollywood has its stable of dystopian future movies. But Evangelicals assume this situation is brought about by evil secular and leftist forces at work in our world. This will culminate in a world dictator (they assume) called the Antichrist, coming out of Europe or the UN (they assume) who will palm himself off as a “man of peace” (they assume) who turns out to be a monster.
It’s misguided interpretations of such possible characters and situations that have driven Christians to such conservative extremes. This is why they’ve always had a knee-jerk bias against the United Nations, because they assume this highly divided world will someday produce a world government! This is why they’re leery of anyone proposing any kind of a peace plan, because they assume it’s the first step to a massive deception. Better to arm yourself to the teeth, be cynical about everybody else’s motives, and always go for shock ‘n awe, “tough love” and the jugular. Where’s the Prince of Peace in any of this, one of the official titles of the Messiah (Isa 9:6)? Where is meeting people half way with political compromises everyone can live with?
About the last thing they can conceive of is the irony that maybe, just maybe, such an apocalypse might be brought about by them! It’s an irony compounded by their confused philosophy about what to do about it. This is not something to seek after! This is not something to “help God out” in! It’s not even a plan by God if you will; just a prediction, a warning. Indeed, the job of the Church is to warn the world not to go there. After all, that’s “doing the right thing” and thus being “a good witness to the world.”
The Church’s Pitiful Appreciation of Democracy
One of the few things that has actually made America great in its otherwise dismal history is its commitment to democracy. Not white power, not white privilege, not predatory capitalism, but democracy—government of, by and for the people as Republican President Abraham Lincoln put it. Yet Christians nowadays have little understanding of why it’s so valuable. Instead they seem to be on the verge of chucking it all for the sake of backing a “strong” man and bringing in fascism. This they do while doing all in their power to rig future elections (gerrymandering, nuisance lawsuits, threatening election officials, ignoring the will of the majority, etc.), in the name of saving free and fair elections! The dishonesty and self-delusion is just breathtaking.
They also indulge cynical sentiments like, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.” OK, fine. It’s true like Lincoln said that you can fool all the people some of the time. Sometimes the majority is wrong, even though our system has evolved refinements that blunt even these rare events.
But the real power of democracies is in the way they force people to grow up and take responsibility for self-government, because in a democracy, if you don’t get the government you want, whose fault is it? Did you vote? Are you paying attention? Are you fully informed on the issues? Or do you let other people do your thinking for you?
The resurrection of democracy from its grave during the days of the ancient Greeks was a great leap forward for mankind because as flawed as it is, it’s light years ahead of any other system. All this was made possible by the Reformation and its secular offshoot, the Enlightenment. Under feudalism the commoners were subjects to the king, and just as under other autocracies like Communism, fascism, dictators, tribal chiefs, warlords and the like, the people are seen as subjects and not citizens. Often they were called children, and meant to be kept that way as in the fever dreams of megalomaniacs like Trump.
We Used To Glory In Being Protestants
Under feudalistic Christianity (Roman Catholicism), people had to endure religious rituals and mediating priests and popes to get the favor of God. In the Reformation, the Bible and the Holy Spirit, the only two infallible representatives of God on the earth, replace the authority of the Church. Access to God is instantaneous through the one ordained mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus (I Tim 2:5).
Similarly, in politics the authority of the king or men in general is replaced by a rule of law with a lot of benefits the peasants never had. Under a rule of law you can now even sue the government and maybe get a favorable court ruling, something you never could under a monarchy.
Thus democracy is not only a system but a process, a process of continually refining the rule of law and seeking to enfranchise more and more citizens. Citizens are able to grow up and act like mature men and women. It’s very similar to what the early churches were—fellowships of believers who could act like adults, ask questions and actively participate in a faith community.
In contrast, many modern churches, especially the big mega ones function like cults where the atmosphere is one of expected submission and conformism. All cults including personality cults are marked by authoritarian leadership, ridiculous dogma instead of plausible doctrine, and a paranoia toward the outside world. Fellowships in contrast, like democracies, allow people to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives.
In doing this of course they betray the fact that they don’t understand what really “made America great”—our commitment to democracy, human rights and the democratic process, because every society needs a conservative and a liberal party. They are not enemies, they’re not even opponents. They’re partners in a process. Like the two sides of your brain, they are meant to work together. Yet because of ignorance of these things, church people being so ill-taught now, are stuck being known as a divisive force in a pluralistic society.
And What In The World Do They See in the Republicans?
In spite of the fact that there’s no mandate to politically save any nation in the Bible, American Christians can’t seem to let go of the idea that America, God’s supposed redeemer nation, is constantly on the knife edge of godless infidels taking over, immigrants overrunning the borders, and other paranoid fantasies. Thus they naturally had to “go into politics” to “save America,” even if it means another bloody civil war as recent polls are now showing.
It’s enough to make your skin crawl.
Yet if they’re so insistent on doing this, why didn’t they ask the obvious question—Why not infiltrate both parties then? Instead, due to the manipulation of ambitious right wing extremists like Paul Weyrich, they chose only one party, and that the worst by far, the Republicans.
This is something Evangelicals still can’t figure out either—just how damaging the Republicans’ agenda has been for the country, our reputation and even our own people. In spite of our insistence on making an idol out of abortion and other sex-based issues, Christians to this hour do not understand that Republicans started out as the progressive party of their day, were bought up by the Robber Barons in the late 19th Century, and have remained in that position of enabling billionaires and millionaires to this day.
Truth be told, Republicans have never been a true conservative party! They are not an American conservative party, looking after the interests of “We, the people” and the American Revolution. Ever since the days of the robber barons, they have been conserving the interests of America’s Tories or what’s left of them. [2]
I can give you example after example of this in just a few short highlights here, of how even before Trump they were a disaster. Now they’ve gone from stupid to absurd with each successive step downward.
–Abortion. By the verge of Jimmy Carter gaining re-election in 1980, Jerry Falwell with his new “Moral Majority” organization along with Catholic Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson’s conservative religious empire and other forces, finally came up with a strategy they could use as a lightning rod/wedge issue and something of a litmus test for political candidates—abortion. What is not understood is that when Roe v. Wade came down in 1973, not only was it greeted by a lot of indifference by Evangelical groups, but many such as the Southern Baptists approved of it! What brought about such a change within six years?
The ugly truth is that “abortion” became a front for what was really eating up southern Evangelicals at the time, which was de-segregation. A 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Green vs. Connally ruled that private Christian schools where white students had fled since Brown v. Board of Education (1956) could not claim tax-exempt status as long as they shut out minority students. This was a great threat to Evangelicals like Falwell whose Liberty University was thoroughly segregated.
President Jimmy Carter however, an outspoken Evangelical, insisted on enforcing the law that private Christian schools needed to comply. Thus it was determined he had to lose to Ronald Reagan who was opposed to de-segregation no matter how much he tried to gloss it over. As if to make sure this dog whistle blew at gale force, he kicked off his Presidential run with a speech in Philadelphia. But no, not Philadelphia, PA, the cradle of liberty but Philadelphia, Mississippi, the obscure home of a notorious murder of three voter registration workers in 1964. Real brotherly love here, and certainly no subtlety.
So much for Republican commitment to democracy, and now finally it’s starting to show. Reagan said he wanted to “restore states’ rights again.” Boy, these people just love to have it both ways, all the time. Slippery as eels.
Thus, in latching onto abortion, a truly complex but perfect wedge issue to mask their real aims, they created a litmus test herding their flocks into the Republican camp that prevails to this hour. You can read all about it in this short article here.
–Republican resentment of Democratic popularity. During the Cold War, violent persecutions of Christians around the world drove our faith away from a firm commitment to FDR’s New Deal and into the arms of more conservative circles. During these years, Republicans resented the Democrats’ “tax and spend” policies because the people seemed to like how their money was being spent on them, not just corporate welfare queens, and because it at least balanced the budget.
All this was thrown out the window with the innovation of Jude Wanniski’s cynical “Borrow and Spend”/ “Two Santa Clauses” scheme. His idea was if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. But in his version, Santa Claus 1 throws conservative frugality out the window and spends money like a drunken sailor. Then Santa Claus 2 comes along giving out tax cuts. The stunning irresponsibility of dumping mountains of debt on their children and grandchildren didn’t seem to bother him, nor the entire party which lined up in lock step behind him. Besides, we can blame it all on the Democrats when you know what hits the fan.
–Ronald Reagan again, who has to be the most overrated President in US history, deployed this strategy to great effect with his “Reaganomics,” which George Bush Sr. at the time rightly called Voodoo economics. After eight years of tripling the national debt, raising taxes 11 times, taxing Social Security income twice over, making a handful of people filthy rich, refusing to enforce anti-trust laws on the books leading to the mergers and acquisition mania consolidating Wall Street wealth, destroying the delicate social contract between management and labor, and defying Congressional law in the Iran-Contra Scandal, he rode off into the sunset as a great hero. Such is the apparent power of Republican PR voodoo now too.
The winner-take-all economy chart, 1979-2007. The red line is the top 1%, the yellow, the top 20%. All the rest of us have lost ground.
-When Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar and Oxford-trained economist ascended to the Presidency, he announced he was going to levy a 10% tax on millionaires. This modest repeal of the wholesale looting of the American economy after 12 years of Reaganism was greeted with scorn by Newt Gingrich at this stunning blasphemy towards Republican holy writ. “It will result in the worst economic crash since the Great Depression,” he confidently predicted. Eight years later, 22 million new jobs and a $200 billion budget surplus, he was forced to eat his words. But nobody on the right learned anything from it.
The Republicans in Congress in those days claimed it was their forcing Clinton to “balance the budget” that made that success possible, but all they really did was force him to join them in slashing the social safety net. Between that and the ongoing re-distribution of wealth to the top, the actual lives of working people (the bottom 80% including the Evangelicals) only got worse.
Most of the jobs created were not like those in the 60s and 70s with all the New Deal benefits people enjoyed. Today all I ever hear advertised on Christian radio is debt reduction and mortgage consolidation services. Hitting you where you, and all of Trump’s crazies, really live. All that’s left is training you to hate and blame the Democrats for it all.
–That budget surplus was on schedule to retire the national debt by 2010 when five conservative justices on the Supreme Court overthrew Florida’s “state right” to do a careful recount, throwing the election to Jeb Bush’s frat boy brother George W. For decades George W. bragged to all that would listen that “his daddy” was going to make him President some day.
So, how did he prepare for this? Did he major in political science? Did he study world history? Travel the globe to get a sense of foreign policy? Of course not, he partied till he dropped.
“W” and the Republicans passed $1.5 trillion dollars in tax cuts and deregulated Wall Street banks, thus guaranteeing the collapse of the mortgage market in 2008. He further put two wars on the national credit card, ballooning it to $6 trillion dollars. When Obama took over, magically the Tea Party arose out of nowhere, crabbing about the national debt at a time when Obama had to do something to stop the economy from its free fall.
–Obama wasted the rest of his first year extending a hand of bi-partisanship to the Republicans who spat on it, rope-a-doped him, and subverted his health care project which was intended to reduce federal debt. They successfully enraged their ignorant base by blaming it all on him and took over Congress in 2010, a census year, allowing them to pretzel-twist gerrymandered districts even more. This coupled with the infamous 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United allowed unlimited money to come into politics, putting them in the driver’s seat for the rest of the decade. This included “dark money” from foreign governments, private cabals (like the Mega Group), and mobsters laundering cash, buying politicians and the like.
After this cruel debacle, Barak Obama had to endure for the next six years some of the most vile race baiting and “framing” a President has ever had to endure. This included Donald Trump’s phony birther scandal (as he himself later admitted). Obama was portrayed as a secret Muslim, Communist, Nazi, dictator/monster by Israeli, CIA, or God knows what other professional psy-op teams were behind it all. It’s amazing what they can get away with in broad daylight before the Church, the “pillar and ground of the truth” (I Tim 3:15), who is not supposed to be ignorant of Satan’s devices (II Cor 2:11).
Speaking of Psy Ops
-In the late 1970s with Democratic Senator Frank Church’s committee investigations, the CIA, as JFK wished, was nearly dismantled. To survive, they knew they needed to get the Republicans a base. Thus was born the idea of developing an archipelago of right wing AM radio shows throughout the land, to brainwash as many people into voting conservative as they could with as many absurd arguments as they could conjure up. I’ve had first hand experience with this, having outed a local talk show host in Kansas City as being a military, probably DIA agent, tasked with spreading this kind of propaganda under the model of the old Operation Mockingbird project. He didn’t last on the radio for long after that.
-Nevertheless, the efforts of these people pale in comparison to the ascendancy of the Godzilla of talk radio, Rush Limbaugh around 1990. In those days I too was caught up in right wing politics, mostly due to the influence of my mentor in theology who was a rock-ribbed conservative. Throughout the 1990s I was a faithful ditto head and remained that way until the end of the decade when I began to realize how much people like Limbaugh were promoting stereotypes and avoiding policy discussions. I found his cheap shots at the Clintons to be entertaining at first but with time, mostly irrelevant.
What was so damaging about Limbaugh was what a philosophical bigot he was. He couldn’t see value in liberalism if his life depended on it. This was due to his bottomless narcissism, his self-righteousness and his endless list of opinions, loves and hates. His lack of toleration or civility toward people who didn’t think like him brought out the worst in people. His scoffing and belittlement of public officials paved the way for Donald Trump’s outsized performance here.
Limbaugh reminded me of the bully who walks into the men’s locker room and immediately puts everyone on the defensive. He will start “talking tough” and elbowing everyone along the lines of, “Well, you’re not one of those sissy guys who blah, blah, blah, are you?”
Well, of course not. Everyone now feels obligated to lumber around and talk tough just because some jerk, a fool according to David’s descriptions of the wicked, drags the atmosphere down to a cave man level. Yet in spite of being such a scoffer and a mocker (yet making $60,000 an hour while on air), Limbaugh gave birth to hundreds of wannabe clones, all wanting to cash in on this incredibly-lucrative new level of cultural degradation.
-Before Limbaugh came around one of the most insidious and damaging “cultural change agents” ever descended upon the American scene, but he wasn’t a leftist. Rupert Murdoch had made a fortune out of denigrating true journalism by introducing a lot of tabloid-like features into respectable papers he bought up. This included lots of distracting sex and cheese cake, lurid stories about weird people and weird things, and demoralizing pieces about how all your neighbors are ax murderers, etc. [1]
But the worst of his innovations was the deceitful “fair and balanced” drivel he introduced through his propaganda vehicle, Fox “News.” Previously journalism was tasked with a lot of fact checking, to make sure the government was being honest and that the public was well-informed. With Murdoch all this went out the window and Republicans could make up any wild allegations they wanted with little push back. By running to the Democrats to get their exasperated responses, they gave the illusion that they were being “fair and balanced.”
Murdoch and Ailes, cynical Republican dirty tricksters in the lineage of Roger Stone, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, were careful to hire beautiful women and dress them in alluring evening gowns to guarantee the titillation of the old men in the audience. Above all else manipulation must prevail. As Kate McKinnon put it in the movie Bombshell, “If it scares Grandma and enrages Grandpa, it’s a Fox story.”
Murdoch was introduced to Reagan and his circle in 1983 by Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor in evil. These two Zionist Jews were drawn to each other because they both shared “a deep commitment to Israel” as they put it. (I always felt Murdoch/Fox News et. al were at least an unofficial or de facto propaganda front for Israel in their efforts to demoralize the nations).
Reagan arranged to have Murdoch illegally enter the US media market at a time when you couldn’t have foreign ownership. This they did by fast tracking triple citizenship for Murdoch (Australian-Israeli-US). Since then the Republicans have done away with the barrier altogether, opening the way for open foreign subversion (such as Russia). These are America’s greatest patriots?
Cohn leans over to bellow out something to Reagan, Murdoch in between them. The famous 1983 meeting.
-When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994, he brought with him a whole new level of cultural homicide. If you have unpopular policies, if the demographic trends are against you, simply transform yourself into a new oppositional party dedicated to gridlock, politicizing everything and guilt-mongering the Democrats for it all.
Before Gingrich there was still some sense of comity in Congress. Members of both parties would spend vacations together and maintain friendships. Now the atmosphere is so poisoned that some members of Congress are openly wanting to kill their Democratic colleagues. This follows the pattern of the slaughter in Rwanda started there by nothing other than hate radio.
What’s listed above is but a sample of the ways this party has degraded and divided our nation. Slavery to their policies has produced deleterious effects in direct contradiction to stated Evangelical ideals. So much money has been redistributed to the top 1% that most couples can hardly afford to get married, let alone have children.
After 40 years of Republican “family values” (40 being a symbol of Divine Judgment), the United States is ranked 34th out of 35 developed nations in terms of favorable conditions for raising a family! Similarly, ex-pats place America in a mediocre 35th among 67 nations to work in abroad. So much for the myth of the Exceptional Nation the unwashed can’t wait to immigrate to. And yet they still come here because it’s so much worse in much of the rest of the world. And still Americans grouse about everything and “bellow like bulls” on talk radio everyday (Jer 50:11).
Anyone See Any Divine Judgment Going On Here?
All I’ve said above just scratches the surface of the problems inherent in getting Church people to take a long hard look into the mirror. I hardly mentioned any of the ubiquitous self-righteousness and resentment of “elites,” with little appreciation of what is meant by the term. Elites under feudalism were an entitled group, but in the modern context it usually refers to people who through hard work, study and discipline become experts in their field. Fundamentalists and conservatives in general react to them with little more than rank jealousy and a “I know a few things too” attitude. It’s this kind of culture of grievance and pride that people like Limbaugh (and Trump) are so expert at exploiting.
Thus it was that on Valentine’s Day, 2021, the state of Texas entered into the sub-zero phase of that winter blast that hit the nation’s red states. Texas is a state so red that it refused to join the national power grid lest they come under “federal regulations.” That’s quite a price to pay just to justify another Republican sacred cow talking point.
Everyone saw the suffering that resulted. This was about five weeks after the Capitol assault which I assume would give right wingers lots of time to respond to the shock of where they had sunk to. Is it just me, or do you too see Divine Judgment speaking to them through the sarcasm of this starting on Valentine’s Day?
The De-Programming Doesn’t Look Good
When the crisis first hit, Texas Governor Greg Abbott went on Fox TV to blame it all on AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), a New York Congresswoman, and the Green New Deal which was never implemented. AOC is something of a poster child for “radical Democratic politics” to these people.
So what does this godless leftist do? That’s right, she activates her large social media following and raises $5 million dollars to help alleviate the suffering of the people of Texas. Likewise Joe Biden granted full FEMA disaster declaration for this ungrateful state in spite of the fact that (unlike the last occupant), “Texas didn’t vote for me.”
Gee whiz, it sounds like these socialist infidels are practicing what the New Testament advocates, “Put to silence the ignorance of foolish men” by your good deeds (I Pet 2:15), kill them with kindness, etc. (Ro 12:20).
The Republican Party has a lot of soul searching to do. They are not a conservative party, forty years of their policies have brought the country to the point of disaster, and their propagandists are slanderers perverting all judgment. The events of January 6 have brought their professed innocence to a new low, their contradictions so glaring, the company they keep so barbaric they are being forced to face themselves now.
Likewise the Evangelicals are tethered to a party that is so rankly stupid and spitefully oppositional that they turned down the opportunity to convict Trump of what he did. If they had done so he would have been banned from ever holding office again, purged out of the party, and no longer able to siphon money off for whatever he wants to spend it on. (Some say the problem is that if they cross their base, their families will be targeted with death threats, it’s gotten that bad).
If Trump wants to start a media empire now that Rush is dead, he may play along, tease his clueless followers about running again, then say, “Thanks for the money suckers,” and there you are left holding the bag again. Personally I think he just can’t wait to get back in the saddle in 2024.
That Evangelicals can’t see through such a lifelong swindler, scoundrel and con man just leaves me mystified. Some character experts. But welcome to my world. After all these years I still hardly have an audience. I guess people just want to be lied to and be part of the prophesied “strong delusion” of the last days leading to world chaos (II Tim 4:3; II Thess 2:10-12). All I can say is how thankful I am for at least some breathing room again. I truly hope this beast of a man doesn’t come roaring back and the only way to prevent that is a clear manifestation of the truth followed by a repentance revival.
Notes:
[1] “Murdoch entered the British newspaper market in 1968 when he acquired the News of the World, followed by the purchase of The Sun a year later. Albert ‘Larry’ Lamb, whom Murdoch appointed as editor of The Sun, recalled that Murdoch told him, ‘I want a newspaper written by cunts for cunts and with lots of tits in it’. In 1997 The Sun attracted 10 million daily cunts.” The company you keep Church, and your witness to those outside the household of faith (Col 4:5). https://arseholepremierleague.com/player/rupert-murdoch/
[2] The only exception to this was a short period of Republican progressives during the days of Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th Century. “Fighting Bob” La Follette of Wisconsin (1855-1925) was one of the last of this line.
