Engaging the cult
Like it or not, religion will never be off the table
Eight and a half months into the Felon’s second administration, America has become subject to a weird mixture of genuine danger and grotesque unseriousness.
The danger isn’t lost on anyone paying attention. Even among those who aren’t, I suspect it will become clear when the White House announces a declaration of martial law.
In this environment, the president’s unseriousness itself becomes a danger. With the government shut down, he posts racist deep-fake videos of the Democratic leadership, and others featuring his pretentious, pseudo-intellectual bean counter as the Grim Reaper. Later, he pulls himself away from the golf course long enough to tell the U.S. Navy on its 250th anniversary that, like the Department of Justice, it now serves him, not the country.
Such nonsense is silly because it’s juvenile, repulsive because lives are at stake.
For precisely the same reason, actions of the Felon and his henchmen are evil – something MAGA loves to call the opposition. So many shrink from the extremism of white Christian nationalism when it comes into relief, whether in a preening defense secretary or child-molesting religious adviser. That, too, is dangerous.
An extremist movement one might normally write off as childish superstition is propping up a presidency.
For this contingent of the Felon’s supporters, the nightmare of his first 259 days has been heavenly, and all about religion. (As a religious person, I assure you that’s false.) For these folks, the cruelty is central, not coincidental, to what is happening. The Christian right, with the opposite of anything resembling reverence, dons the full armor of God and cheers on the secret police.
They don’t revere anything. They revel instead in the dear leader’s rapid-fire success in banishing “the other,” as well as his constant reminders that American-born people of color need to remember their place – a place that appears to be located somewhere back in the mid-1950s. (You can bet they won’t be taking CEO-to-worker salary ratios back to that period.)
Our felonious president is reportedly losing the voters who were so worried about egg prices, although one wonders if they give a damn about his talk of a “war within” or the lives already turned upside-down by its viciousness.
Of course, while his abject incompetence may break the MAGA spell with some Americans, the religious extremists will not be reasoned with.
I think we should try anyway. If we do, the question becomes: How does one engage with a sizable group of fellow Americans who believe you represent … wait for it, The Devil? Including, one assumes, the U.S. secretary of defense/war, whose church is affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation.
Dispensing with efforts to reason with the zealots doesn’t mean disengagement. One doesn’t abandon a commitment to separation of church and state by encouraging our side’s religious leaders, including (God bless him) Pope Leo, to keep speaking out against authoritarian lawlessness in spiritual terms.
“The state of emergency is in America, not Chicago. It’s birthed from this president and his administration’s reign of terror.” — Father Michael Pfleger, Chicago
And not just clerics but also public intellectuals who are women and men of faith. For me, Peter Wehner (a favorite) comes to mind immediately. And let’s not forget Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who asked the felonious president on his second Inauguration Day to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”
Alas, mercy has not been in the mix, and washing one’s hands of anyone who could celebrate that is understandable. I’m still hopeful their hatred can be exorcised.
My source of hope is my faith, and that actually stands to reason: In addition to the Gospels’ spiritual good news, not one of the books requires disavowal of truth or facts. Nor is there any reason a person of faith would doubt that our brains, too, are God-given.