The Sickness of Christian Politics & Christian Nationalism

[LFC]

It really makes you wonder, did this guy ever believe in actual Christianity?

[LFC]

Pitch perfect and dead on accurate.

[LFC]

Welcome to Republican Christianity. It's about as toxic a combo as it gets.

[andydp]

Some person was arguing about weapons and how that would be the solution.  I answered "those that live by the sword shall die by the sword".

He said that was "Old Testament" and the New Testament was different.

I cited Matthew 26: The Betrayal of Jesus

…51 At this, one of Jesus’ companions drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. 52 “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him. “For all who draw the sword will die by the sword."

Never got a response.

[LFC]

Jan 12, 2023 17:55:09 GMT andydp said:

I cited Matthew 26: The Betrayal of Jesus

…51 At this, one of Jesus’ companions drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. 52 “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him. “For all who draw the sword will die by the sword."

Never got a response.

Maybe that verse isn't in their King Trump version of the Bible.

[LFC]

The Suckabeast, at it again.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 12, 2023 22:53:33 GMT LFC said:

The Suckabeast, at it again.

Yeah she's banned the use of Latinx/Latinae from state agency literature and banned CRT in schools.  I'm sure the people of Arkansas are relieved by all that.  In the meantime I wonder what the maternal death rate is there.  I know about half the counties in the state have no hospitals that offer maternity care. 

[LFC]

The Christian Nationalists are becoming emboldened enough to openly flash their gang signs, even in a congressional office.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman has a Christian nationalist flag connected to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol displayed outside his congressional office. 

On Friday morning, Grothman posted a picture of the flag — which shows an image of a pine tree and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” on a white background — to his Twitter account with a message inviting people to visit him in the Longworth House Office Building. 

“With the 118th Congress underway, the People’s House has finally reopened to visitors,” Grothman wrote. “If you’re in Washington DC, I encourage you to stop by my office and say hello!” A white flag with a pine tree and the phrase “Appeal to Heaven” is visible in the photo, placed closer to the door than the U.S. and Wisconsin state flags.

With the 118th Congress underway, the People’s House has finally reopened to visitors.

If you’re in Washington #DC, I encourage you to stop by my office and say hello! #WI06 pic.twitter.com/9ECLp4GXck

— Rep. Glenn Grothman (@repgrothman) January 13, 2023

Grothman’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the decision to display the flag, but experts say it has ties to a sect of Christian nationalism that was deeply connected to the planning of the Jan. 6 riot. Christian nationalism is a belief that Christians must fight to take back America from non-Christians. 

Matt Taylor, Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, tells the Wisconsin Examiner there were possibly hundreds of Appeal to Heaven flags flying on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 and at least two documented instances in which the flags were flown by rioters who breached the building that day. 

[LFC]

They really do just hate that gay people being treated as equals. That's really the entire basis of Pride Month.

[andydp]

 I wonder what would happen if they ever saw this:

[LFC]

Jan 19, 2023 12:38:11 GMT andydp said:

 I wonder what would happen if they ever saw this:

Simple. It's impossible to have a "just state" that isn't run by "Christians" unless it's bowing to their every religious demand. God(tm) told them so.

[LFC]

And Rod Dreher still can't accept that it's religion itself that is driving away younger generations.

[LFC]

The Atlantic has a piece from 2014 called The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity. It's a longish read but lays out the right-wing lies about government programs vs. charity. In short the former have actually often worked at scale. The latter has never scaled sufficiently and collapsed when needed the most.

Ideology is as much about understanding the past as shaping the future. And conservatives tell themselves a story, a fairy tale really, about the past, about the way the world was and can be again under Republican policies. This story is about the way people were able to insure themselves against the risks inherent in modern life. Back before the Great Society, before the New Deal, and even before the Progressive Era, things were better. Before government took on the role of providing social insurance, individuals and private charity did everything needed to insure people against the hardships of life; given the chance, they could do it again.

This vision has always been implicit in the conservative ascendancy. It existed in the 1980s, when President Reagan announced, “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern,” and called for voluntarism to fill in the yawning gaps in the social safety net. It was made explicit in the 1990s, notably through Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, a treatise hailed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and William Bennett, which argued that a purely private nineteenth-century system of charitable and voluntary organizations did a better job providing for the common good than the twentieth-century welfare state. This idea is also the basis of Paul Ryan’s budget, which seeks to devolve and shrink the federal government at a rapid pace, lest the safety net turn “into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” It’s what Utah Senator Mike Lee references when he says that the “alternative to big government is not small government” but instead “a voluntary civil society.” As conservatives face the possibility of a permanent Democratic majority fueled by changing demographics, they understand that time is running out on their cherished project to dismantle the federal welfare state.

But this conservative vision of social insurance is wrong. It’s incorrect as a matter of history; it ignores the complex interaction between public and private social insurance that has always existed in the United States. It completely misses why the old system collapsed and why a new one was put in its place. It fails to understand how the Great Recession displayed the welfare state at its most necessary and that a voluntary system would have failed under the same circumstances. Most importantly, it points us in the wrong direction. The last 30 years have seen effort after effort to try and push the policy agenda away from the state’s capabilities and toward private mechanisms for mitigating the risks we face in the world. This effort is exhausted, and future endeavors will require a greater, not lesser, role for the public.

[andydp]

Feb 1, 2023 21:32:08 GMT LFC said:

The Atlantic has a piece from 2014 called The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity. It's a longish read but lays out the right-wing lies about government programs vs. charity. In short the former have actually often worked at scale. The latter has never scaled sufficiently and collapsed when needed the most.

You can see the same attitude in the Italian American pages I go to.  "My parents/grandparents/ancestors/etc" never used the government etc."  What they don't realize is the extent of those church and ethnic societies towards helping the less fortunate group.  We also don't hear much about orphanages these days, but there's enough stories out there of kids going there because they couldn't be fed or taken care of. 

It took the Great Depression to make people realize these volunteer groups couldn't do it all.  As always, there's a tendency by some groups to harken back to the old days of purity and self sufficiency.  

[goldenvalley]

Feb 1, 2023 21:43:47 GMT andydp said:

Feb 1, 2023 21:32:08 GMT LFC said:

The Atlantic has a piece from 2014 called The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity. It's a longish read but lays out the right-wing lies about government programs vs. charity. In short the former have actually often worked at scale. The latter has never scaled sufficiently and collapsed when needed the most.

You can see the same attitude in the Italian American pages I go to.  "My parents/grandparents/ancestors/etc" never used the government etc."  What they don't realize is the extent of those church and ethnic societies towards helping the less fortunate group.  We also don't hear much about orphanages these days, but there's enough stories out there of kids going there because they couldn't be fed or taken care of. 

It took the Great Depression to make people realize these volunteer groups couldn't do it all.  As always, there's a tendency by some groups to harken back to the old days of purity and self sufficiency.  

I always wonder why private charity is supposed to be some sort of panacea for society's ills.  Why leave vulnerable people to the tender and not so tender mercies of a philanthropic group?  Did the Italian based charities help Southern Baptists of the dark color?  Some groups are all in on saving babies from abortion but then it turns out that Muslim babies...eh not so much...adoption of babies by a Jewish couple...eh not so much.  This is no way to build a society that is the size and diversity of the American one.  Having support left up to the whims and fads of philanthropists is simply not sustainable over the long run.

[LFC]

Oh, look! Trump found another black person to put on his grift train. And this one's a "pastor."

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦
@ronfilipkowski

Pastor Mark Burns says “God has chosen Donald Trump” to change American culture, and Trump is using the same methodology to do it that Jesus used.

There's more.

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦
@ronfilipkowski

Pastor Mark Burns loves Trump new education proposal: “Trump has an actual plan that is supporting the American agenda, but more importantly the christian agenda in our public schools.”

[goldenvalley]

Feb 1, 2023 22:57:04 GMT LFC said:

Oh, look! Trump found another black person to put on his grift train. And this one's a "pastor."

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦
@ronfilipkowski

Pastor Mark Burns says “God has chosen Donald Trump” to change American culture, and Trump is using the same methodology to do it that Jesus used.

There's more.

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦
@ronfilipkowski

Pastor Mark Burns loves Trump new education proposal: “Trump has an actual plan that is supporting the American agenda, but more importantly the christian agenda in our public schools.”

If Trump will give them what they want...public tax dollars to support their theocratic schools they will forgive him anything.  God picks imperfect vessels to do great things...I think that's also true of the clergy God picks?

[LFC]

At least they didn't hurt anybody else. This is an extreme example of what the toxic combination of religious poison and political lies can do to people.

A Pennsylvania family found shot dead in their backyard last week in what police say appears to be a suicide pact, included a mother and daughter who loved bowling and were devout Christian conservatives, people who knew them said.

Morgan Daub, 26, and her parents, James Daub, 62, and Deborah Daub, 59, were found dead on the ground in the backyard of their home in York County, Pennsylvania, on the morning of Jan. 25, after police responded to a request for a welfare check from a neighbor. 

The West Manchester Township Police Department has since said that notes left inside the house indicate that the family recently made a "joint decision" to end their lives. Police believe Deborah Daub shot and killed her husband and then was shot and killed by Morgan, who died by suicide. Police said there were no signs of forced entry or struggle and no evidence that anyone else had been present.

Stabley said the Christian, churchgoing family “was never shy about letting anybody know what their beliefs were” when it came to religion and politics. Morgan and Deborah “very, very huge” supporters of former President Donald Trump, Stabley said.

“They were just so hell-bent on Trump winning, like this could be in the end if he doesn’t,” Stabley said, referring to an instance when he saw them just before the 2020 election. He said he stopped seeing the two after that.

A neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of personal or professional retaliation in their town, said the family had a "preoccupation with religion, especially on the dad’s part." The family's front yard was also "littered" with Pro-Trump political signs during the elections, and anti-abortion signs when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the neighbor said.

[LFC]

A traitor and a scumbag and religions freak gets handed Planned Parenthood's nearly $1,000,000 legal bill. Pay up, asshole.

The Spokesman Review reports:

An anti-abortion group must pay about $960,000 to Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho to cover legal fees and a fine for protests that interfered with patient care. The Church at Planned Parenthood was ordered to pay $110,000 in civil damages to Planned Parenthood last month after a Spokane County judge ruled that the group interfered with patient care, violating state law.

The group was also required to pay Planned Parenthood’s attorney fees. Those attorney fees total $850,000. Litigation related to the civil case has been ongoing since 2020. The Church at Planned Parenthood was founded by Covenant Church, where former state Rep. Matt Shea [photo] was a pastor. Since then, Shea has split from co-founder Ken Peters, who now pastors Patriot Church.

So just who is Matt Shea? He's among the worst of the worst.

Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea last appeared on JMG in March 2022 when he was involved in a suspicious attempt to “rescue” Ukrainian children.

He first earned national headlines in 2019 when leaked chats showed his violent fantasies about executing non-Christians and when it was learned that he had participated in militia drills to train young men for “biblical warfare.”

Shea advocates for the creation of a 51st US state based on “biblical law.” He has also said that all American men who fail to avow allegiance to Jesus should be executed.

He was expelled by the Washington state Republican caucus but refused to resign even after the feds found that he had “participated in an act of domestic terrorism against the United States” by helping plan the armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016.

He did not seek reelection in 2020 and is now the pastor of Covenant Christian Church in Spokane.

[LFC]

If actual American Christians don't like their religion being looked down upon as a disease then they had better start standing up and defending it, not against those of us outside of it doing the criticism but against those inside providing endless actions and rhetoric that make all of the criticisms valid.

Sandi Bachom
@sandibachom

January 6th was a holy war. A Christofascist crusade. People like Bannon, Stone, Flynn and Thiel, Fitton are just getting started. I was there. All of them claimed to be Christians. It’s a perversion of the Christianity I was raised in

[video is of Alex Jones screeching about God(tm) and riling up the false Christians]

[LFC]

Another Christianist stooge who feels its their duty to disrespect other people's religious beliefs while jamming their own down everybody's throats.

Via email from hate group leader Tony Perkins:

Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, distributed Bibles and invited fellow committee members to read through it in 2023 at the committee’s first meeting on January 31.

McMorris Rodgers said the Bible “changed my life” when she read it through for the first time, so she encouraged “everyone to read this book in their lifetime.”

“Finally, I wanted to give you a book,” said McMorris Rodgers, and “invite all of us to read through it together in 2023. It’s an all-time best-seller. I read through it for the first time a few years ago, and it changed my life. My encouragement is for everyone to read this book in their lifetime. So, why not now, in 2023?”

The 52-member Energy and Commerce Committee features a moderate range of religious diversity, including members who espouse 12 flavors of Christian or Christian-adjacent beliefs, plus Judaism. There are also 14 Catholics and two Orthodox members of the committee.

Note that Catholics are not counted as among the Christian committee members. McMorris Rodgers, an evolution-denying creationist, last appeared on JMG in July 2022 when she declared that access to birth control leads to more abortions. As as Washington state rep, she authored the bill that would have outlawed same-sex marriage.

[indy]

I've read the bible a few times and whatever lessons these people learned from it aren't actually in it anywhere, but this is:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.

And so is this:

Be careful not to do your `acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

[LFC]

I read a quote that said the bible was the most lawyered book in human history.

[LFC]

Why does Jim Banks hate American democracy, the Constitution, and religious freedom?

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) is urging Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to take action regarding the reported covering of a piece of artwork depicting Jesus that is displayed at the Merchant Marine Academy.

Here's what the Academy did about a week or so ago.

The large painting of Jesus was impossible to miss. It hung in a key meeting room at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, watching over gatherings of students and faculty members who did not all hold Christian beliefs.

In January, 18 of these stakeholders sent a letter to the academy’s superintendent through the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to express their concerns.

They wondered if the painting, which shows Jesus coming to aid of lost sailors, could be moved somewhere that hosted religious, rather than secular, events.

“In a Jan. 10 letter, Mikey Weinstein, the (Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s) Jewish founder, said the role the Elliot M. See room played at the academy made the presence of the massive painting especially inappropriate. It has served as a classroom, a venue for advisory board meetings, the room where incoming classes have their IDs processed, and as a court for disciplinary hearings, among other uses,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.

To the surprise of Weinstein and others who are familiar with how slowly government actors typically move, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy responded quickly and decisively.

Joanna Nunan, the academy’s superintendent, announced that school leaders would hang a curtain rod over the painting so that it could be covered up during most school events.

“I have asked my staff to purchase a curtain to be placed in front of the painting,” she said, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This will completely block the painting from view, but also allow those who wish to view it the opportunity to do so.”

From the first link apparently Mr. Banks believes the government should make his religion ascendant above others.

Banks cited a Supreme Court ruling in 2019, saying that religious symbolism in historic displays does not violate the Constitution. He also added that more than 4,000 community members of the academy, including midshipmen and alumni, signed a petition demanding that the covering be removed and a plaque be added to demonstrate the historical significance, according to the letter.

Majority rule, a cornerstone of the Republican Constitution ... except when they aren't the majority, of course. As for "historic" it was historically hung in a f***ing chapel, not a primary meeting room. Bold mine.

“The 10-foot by 19-foot painting, entitled ‘Christ on the Water’ and also known as ‘Jesus and Lifeboat,’ was painted in 1944 by noted marine artist Lt. Hunter Wood, USMS, to hang in the chapel built at the USMMA Basic School in San Mateo, California. The painting depicts an image of Jesus and merchant seamen adrift in a lifeboat, presumably after being torpedoed in the Indian Ocean during World War II. When the San Mateo campus closed in 1947, the painting came to the Academy, and was installed in its current location, which served as the Academy’s interfaith chapel from 1942 to 1961,” the statement said.

 

[LFC]

Yes, they have weaponize Christianity. Where the f*** are all of non-crazy Christian leaders calling this out? There are a few but the overwhelming majority seem to be silent over bearing false witness and flat out blasphemy.