by GaryDenton on Sat Dec 30, 2023 7:49 pm
Too many lies. Too many crazy people.
"Merry Christmas to the world’s 2.5 billion Christians. And to the remaining 5 billion people, including Muslims, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, and Jews." ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
Do you have relatives who believe one day a trumpet will sound and they will join true believers flying into the sky?
Have you told them "I love you, but that seems silly?"
A godless man, Donald Trump, may now possess more devoted support from white evangelical Christians than any other president in the history of the United States. And most worrisome of all, that support is now disproportionately concentrated among the most churchgoing segment of the Republican electorate.
How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.
I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.
Why do so many fundamentalists love Trump? Because in his certainty, ferocity and demands of loyalty, he’s a far more culturally familiar figure than a person of restraint and rectitude such as the departing senator Mitt Romney, who has the piety of a true believer but does not possess the ferocity of the fundamentalist. Thus Romney was culturally out of step with the millions of Christians who wanted, in the words of Jeffress, “the meanest, toughest son of a gun” they could find.
That’s why Trumpism, too, is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s engineered to destroy, not to build. The very characteristics that give it life also plant the seeds of its destruction. And so as we watch the continued marriage between Trumpism and fundamentalism dominate the right, the proper question isn’t whether fundamentalism will permanently remake American culture in its own image. Rather, it’s how much damage it will do before it collapses under the weight of its own rage and sin.
- - - David French
My opinion -
The more progressives win in society with acceptance and support of gays and alternate sexualities, with actually following the teachings of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself, with supporting the international strangers moving in, and the tolerance of other beliefs, the more Evangelicals are maddened and consider them Satanic and gravitate to the angriest opponent of the evil ones - the Democrats. Trump is the most angry and taps into their resentment and hate. Even if they don't love Trump they hate Democrats now who show up their ignoring the words and lessons of the Son of God. By misreading the Bible they also think Democrats are baby killers.
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{--- <<<< Vote Blue
Republicans are puppy killers.
