According to Chris Hedges’ latest book; “America: The Farewell Tour” there are two great evils which can destroy America: 1) global warming and, 2) Christianity.
Sure, Hedges hedges his disdain by specifying the “Christian right”. But, what he calls the Christian “right” seems awfully much like “regular” Christians to me! In fact, it sounds like quite a few folks right here on TBP!
And you SOBs are destroying America!!
And, so, I pray this morning to Almighty God; “Please put a lid on your people. Stop these fascist bastards from killing ‘Murica!“
Stucky Sunday Question To You Believers: WHY You Do This?????
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[NOTE! Everything that follows is from Chris Hedges.]
Federal Courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. The merger of the corporation with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
All of our systems of information, from self-help gurus and Hollywood to political monstrosities such as Trump, sell us this snake oil. Our retreat into self-delusion is a career opportunity for charlatans who tell us what we want to hear. The magical thinking they espouse is a form of infantilism. It discredits facts and realities that mock slogans such as “Make America Great Again”.
Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is filled with the proto-fascist forces of the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with its network of megachurches, schools, universities, and law schools and its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a beleaguered White House. The Christian right has been organizing and preparing to take power or decades. If the nation suffers another economic collapse, which is probably inevitable, another catastrophic terrorist attack, or a new war, Trump’s ability to force the Christian right’s agenda on the public and shut down dissent will be dramatically enhanced. In the presidential election, Trump had 81% of white evangelicals behind him. If he leaves or is remove from office, Mike Pence, a creature of the Christian right, will be worse.
Trump’s move to restrict abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, permit discrimination against LGBT people in the name of “religious liberty” and allow churches to become active in politics by gutting the Johnson Amendment, along with his nomination of judges championed by the Federalist Society and his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, have endeared him to the Christian right. He has rolled back civil rights legislation and business and environmental regulations.
He has elevated several stalwarts of the Christian right into power — Pence to the vice presidency, Jeff Sessions to the Just Dept., Neal Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Tom Price to Health and Human Services, and Ben Carson to Housing and Urban Development. He embraces the white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, greed, religious intolerance, anger, and racism that define the Christian right.
Trump’s disdain for facts and his penchant for magical thinking and conspiracy theories mesh well with the worldview of the Christian right, which sees itself under attack by the Satanic forces of secular humanism embodied in the media, academia, the liberal establishment, Hollywood, and the Democratic Party. In this worldview, climate change is not real, Obama is a Muslim, and millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 elections.
The followers of the Christian right are Manichaeans. They see the world in black and white, good and evil, them, and us. Trump’s call in his speech in Poland for a crusade against the godless hordes of Muslims fleeing from the wars and chaos we created replicates the view of the Christian right. Christian right leaders in a sign of support went to the White House on July 10, 2017, to pray over Trump. Two days later Pat Robertson showed up there to interview the president for his Christian Broadcasting Network.
On the surface it appears incongruous that the Christian right would rally behind a slick New York real estate developer who is a public serial philanderer and adulterer, has no regard for the truth, is consumed by greed, does not appear to read or know the Bible, routinely defrauds and cheats his investors and contractors, expresses a crude misogyny and an even cruder narcissism, and appears to yearn for despotism. In fact, these are the very characteristics that define many leaders of the Christian right.
Trump has preyed on desperate people through the thousands of slot machines in his casinos, his sham university, and his real estate deals. Megachurch pastors prey on their followers by extracting “seed offerings”, “love gifts”, tithes, and donations and by selling “miracle healings,” along with “prayer cloths,” self-help books, audio and video recordings, and even protein shakes. Pastors have established within their megachurches, as Trump did in his businesses, despotic fiefdoms.
They cannot be challenged or questioned any more than an omnipotent Trump could be challenged on the reality television show The Apprentice. And they seek to replicate their little tyrannies on a national scale, with white men in charge. These religious hucksters are some of the most sophisticated con artists in the country, a trait they share with the current occupant of the White House.
I did not use the word “fascist” lightly when I wrote about the Christian right. I spent several hours, at the end of two years of reporting, with two of the country’s foremost scholars on fascism – Fritz Stern and Robert O. Paxton. Did this Christian “ideology” fit the parameters of classic fascism? Was it virulent enough and organized enough to seize power? Would it go to the ruthless extremes of previous fascist movements to persecute and silence dissent? Has our deindustrialized society replicated the crippling despair, alienation, and rage that always feeds fascist movements?
The Christian right believes that the secular, humanist society must be eradicated. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of our legal system. Creationism or “intelligent design” will be taught in public schools. People they consider social deviants, including homosexuals, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals, and those dismissed as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace the Christian right’s perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible — will be silenced, imprisoned, or killed.
The role of the federal government will be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security, and waging war. Church organizations will be funded and empowered by the government to run social welfare agencies. The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence, and sinfulness, will be denied government assistance. The death penalty will be expanded to include “moral crimes”, including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder.
Women will be subordinate to men. Those who practice other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens or outcasts. The wars on the Middle East will be defined as religious crusades against Muslims. There will be no separation of church and state. The only legitimate voices will be “Christian”. America, they believe, will become an agent of God. Those who defy the Christian authorities will be agents of Satan.
Tens of millions of Americans are already hermetically sealed within this bizarre worldview. They are fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and lies on the Internet, in their churches, in Christian schools and colleges, and on Christian television and radio.
Those who remain in a reality-based universe often dismiss these malcontents as buffoons. They do not take seriously a huge segment of the public, mostly white and working-class, who because of economic distress have primal yearnings for vengeance, new glory, and moral renewal and are easily seduced by magical thinking. These are the yearnings and emotions Trump has exploited.
Those who embrace this movement feel they are being persecuted by dark and sinister groups bent on their destruction. They elevate themselves to the role of holy warriors with a noble calling and purpose. They sanctify the rage and hypermasculinity that are the very core of fascism. The rigidity and simplicity of their belief, which includes being anointed for a special purpose in life by God, are potent weapons in the fight against their own demons and desire for meaning.
These believers, like all fascists, condemn the reality based world as contaminated, decayed, and immoral. This world took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence, deprivation, and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair, they discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out his holy mission to the world and to be rich, powerful, and happy.
The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and reason, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that supports them.
If the alliance between these zealots and the government succeeds, it will snuff out the last vestiges of American democracy.
[Stucky end note: None of the above is available on-line. I had to manually type it. So, please excuse any errorrs … as I suck at typing.]
What load of BS claptrap. Intellectual vacuity is too polite a phrase.
Solution…..replace each word “Christian” with liberal. Then it’s factual.
“…..the Christian right, which sees itself under attack by the Satanic forces of secular humanism embodied in the media, academia, the liberal establishment, Hollywood, and the Democratic Party. In this worldview, climate change is not real, Obama is a Muslim, and millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 elections.”
Had this statement stood alone, it would have been true!
Chris who? Guy has EVERYTHING upside down and backwards. Who could even think this way unless they are a liberal, progressive, socialist with a severe mental disorder…. Chip
Uh, so much of what Hedges wrote could just as easily be applied to the Left, hence his and their myopia and hypocrisy. True, even for myself, a few aspects of Christian culture are laughable (protein shakes? really?) but again any rational creature on the Left could not swallow EVERY thing about being Liberal (if they really were honest with themselves). Beyond that, Hedges’ depiction of the Christian Right is a gross misrepresentation of the truth as well as an act of dishonesty. But that’s how dishonesty prevails, by the exploitation of the Straw Man tactic.
Granted, Trump is hardly a precise fit with Christian values, but are traditional, sensible Democrats honestly buying into the current hysteria which has nothing to do with being a Democrat? Or do they submit simply because they are something other than Republican? It begs the question, “Is Joe Manchin really a traitor or a voice in the Left’s ideological wilderness?”
Maybe an alternate explanation for the whole mess is that both sides are side- stepping the much larger issue of the ongoing and unfolding collapse of the American Empire and that they are doing so lest their own historic complicity in the mismanagement of the American experiment be exposed. Read Kunstler’s take on the whole matter for a more balanced perspective. Then the Emperor’s absent clothes will be seen for what they really are, neither Democrat nor Republican but oligarchy.
“…..the Christian right, which sees itself under attack by the Satanic forces of secular humanism embodied in the media, academia, the liberal establishment, Hollywood, and the Democratic Party. In this worldview, climate change is not real, Obama is a Muslim, and millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 elections.”
Had this statement stood on it’s own, he would actually have said something truthful!
Replace every word “Christian” with Liberal.
There’s a lot to be said in favor of the civilizing influence of the early Catholic church’s Holy Office of the Inquisition .The tradition and culture Catholic Church nurtured and defended with treasure and blood over a period of 1500 years, divisive Protestant heretics like Hedges have in only five centuries surrendered without a fight.
Some history here:
Characters Of The Inquisition William Walsh Catholic
https://archive.org/details/CharactersOfTheInquisitionWalshWilliamThomas5967/page/n0
Alexander Solzhenitsyn defined the modus operandi anti-Christian churchian church with one simple sentence. ” To destroy a people you must first sever their roots.” And this is exactly what Protestant churchians with their 20,000 self-inspired interpretations of the Holy Scriptures have done.
Churchians over the last few centuries have undermined the authority of the Christian faith, first by destroying the unity of the one church ; then by turning the authority of the state against the church and ending with the state becoming the church.
The State has now usurped the former role of the church in all matters of charity and faith .It even has conversos like creepy Hedges to preach it’s heretical based dogma. Religious dogma which was once sole function of the church, now must seek state approval or be condemned as heresy by churchians who believe that good Christians should prostate themselves before barbarians that adhere to no religious doctrine commanding the same and in fact will see Christians and any others outside their cult either dead or subjugated if ever they have the majority to make it happen.
A quote attributed GK Chesterton warns not to ever take down a fence until you know the reason why it was put up. America has been led to systematically take down all our fences. And, here we now stand. Defenseless , bowed and unworthy of the fruits of our ancestors hard labor. We get what we allow and deservedly so.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
What a crock of slop!
Evangelical Christians are Christian Zionists who believe in some false doctrine nonsense “Rapture” that was written in the 1800’s.
A little reminder for Chickenhawk Hedges
https://www.thescinewsreporter.com/2018/09/scientists-created-first-successful_24.html?fbclid=IwAR3gzRaczuqvFoKBepFAMrBAdteSCZsn3h_IAG0Q5i2DAjeddMBJeQIc8DY
HERE’S A HEDGES SPEECH FROM A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO IN EUGENE,OR–
at times he makes sense,at times he’s barely lucid–
You say: “what Chris Hedges calls the Christian ‘right’ seems awfully much like ‘regular’ Christians to you. Well, here’s my reply: Opinions are like assholes – everybody has them. Your ignorance & fundamentalist atheism is rearing its ugly head. Chris Hedges is an ordained Presbyterian minister – a liberal Christian – who is totally for the Separation of Church & State, & is disgusted with fake evangelical “Christian” fascists. I’m also a liberal Christian – Episcopalian. The U.S. Episcopal Church was the first denomination to ordain an African-American female as a bishop. Our denomination was also the first to ordain the first openly gay bishop. I’m not proselytizing; I’m merely calling out what seems to be a biased opinion on a subject where you are extremely wrong. I also call out Christian fascists online. I despise fundamentalists of all ilk, whether it be Christian, Jews, Muslims, & even fundamentalist atheists like you. So, you can take your preconceived notions & stick them where the sun doesn’t shine.