End Times Christians keep looking for signs and portents

By Diane Roberts | –

( Florida Phoenix ) – Remember when a quarter of Americans thought Barack Obama might be the Antichrist?

They feared he’d impose a One World Government — as Dr. Peter Venkman says in Ghostbusters, “a disaster of biblical proportions, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together” — and trigger the apocalypse.

That didn’t happen, but End Times Christians keep looking for signs and portents, wars and rumors of wars, and, by God, the Israel-Hamas horror is right up their millenarianist alley.

Where many of us see the vicious killings by Hamas and the indiscriminate bombing by the Netanyahu government as atrocities fueled by 75 years of resentment, fear, rage, and oppression, as well as a radical Islamic refusal to accept the existence of Israel, evangelicals and the politicians beholden to them see the first quarter of the Second Coming.

Evangelicals subscribe to a self-serving vision of Israel, one in which Jews demonstrate the inerrant truth of the Bible just by living there. They believe they have to go through Jews, who must have a nation state with Jerusalem as its capital, to spark the return of Jesus.

“Last Judgment Fresco Cycle by Frederico Zuccaro and Giorgio Vasari.” Public Domain.

When he was in office, Donald Trump and his MAGA maniacs were glad to play along, upending 70 years of U.S. policy, declaring Jerusalem Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy there and boasting that he did it for the evangelicals who voted for him in huge numbers.

Getting to the End of Days requires Jews to rebuild Solomon’s temple on the ruins of the first two — the original, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC, and the second version, wrecked by the Romans in 70 AD.

Holy offering

But before the bulldozers toll in, they need a red cow.

No cow, no temple; no temple, no Second Coming.

The End Times can’t kick off ’till a perfectly red heifer with not one white (or black or any other color in her fur) is brought to Jerusalem.

Then the poor critter will be slain by a priest, burned on a pyre made of cedar and hyssop with a piece of scarlet thread. Her ashes will be mixed with water and used to purify the Children of Israel.

It’s unclear how many American politicians accept the literal truth of this, but waiting for, even trying to jump start, Armageddon has animated the history of Protestant white folks ever since they landed on Plymouth Rock.

Doomsday is ironed into our culture.

The Puritans colonized the northeast corner of what became the United States expressly to build themselves a New Jerusalem and welcome the Second Coming, a catastrophe they felt certain would happen any minute now.

Doomsday sects have flourished throughout American history, from the Millerites of the 19th Century to the Branch Davidians to James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s notoriously pro-pollution, anti-environment Interior secretary.

Watt figured there was no reason to save the planet when the Lord was going to show up soon and deliver a new heaven and a new earth.

So why not drive that big car and crank up that AC?

Jonesing for the End Times

According to the Pew Center, 60 percent of evangelicals think we are living in the End Times. A Texas preacher, one of Donald Trump’s pet pastors, responded to the Hamas assault on Israel by praying, “The last days are coming and are here, when you will come again, for your church and for your people.”

This kind of thinking, plus Americans’ perennial Islamophobia, gives cover to the rightwing politicians hollering themselves hoarse about reducing Gaza to rubble and never mind the dead children.

The excitable senior senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, told CNN, “I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages.”

Hamas must be “eradicated,” and if there are thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties, well, it’s their own fault for living in Gaza — not that Israel lets people leave Gaza.

Republican and Democratic politicians are all trying to outdo each other in assuring their voters that they stand with Israel and condemning anyone who suggests that the Netanyahu government — bellicose at the best of times — should share a least a little of the blame for the death toll.

Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib admittedly jumped the gun in blaming Israel for bombing the hospital in Gaza, and practically everybody in Washington demanded she apologize.

Tlaib is a Palestinian American: Her take on Israeli’s treatment of Palestinians is bound to be different from her Christian and Jewish colleagues.

Right now, nobody’s inclined to accept alternate points of view. When Tlaib called for a ceasefire to allow food, water, and medical supplies into Gaza, and perhaps help get the hostages out, the reaction was, if anything, worse.

Along with Ilhan Omar, the only other Muslim woman in Congress, she and her family are now regularly being threatened with violence.

Outdoing each other

Trump, Republican presidential frontrunner and cult leader, is gleefully throwing gasoline on the fire. To make up for calling Hamas “smart,” he’s now promising that when he’s reelected he’ll restore his ridiculous Muslim ban, institute “ideological screening” for immigrants, and refuse to admit refugees from Gaza.

Attempting to revive a campaign on life-support, Ron DeSantis is jumping up and down squawking “Me, too!”

Sen. Rick Scott, another towering intellect, is pitching a hissy fit over the administration’s $106 billion omnibus bill funding U.S. border security, Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza.

Scott, Trump, Rubio, and DeSantis all claim to love Jesus.

Non-wingnut Christians frown on collective punishment, guilt by association, and indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants, but End Times folks are OK with all of that, interpreting the horrific conflict between Israel and Hamas as fulfilment of biblical prophecy about a last battle on the plain of Megiddo — the site of the coming Apocalypse and also a nice national park in northern Israel.

Wholesale destruction, vicious battles, lots of dead people — that’s all part of the End Times package. Prominent Baptist minister Robert Jeffress assures Evangelicals the war in Israel is “not a human struggle; it is a spiritual struggle against the forces of darkness.”

According to Jeffress, “Satan set his sights set on Israel from the very beginning.”

You might not hear quite such theological disaster-mongering from MAGA Republicans, though Marco Rubio keeps tweeting dire Old Testament verses, like this gem from the Prophet Joel: “The day of the LORD is coming! Yes, it approaches, a day of darkness & gloom, a day of thick clouds! Like dawn spreading over the mountains, a vast & mighty army!”

Clearly the New Testament is just a little too kumbaya for him.

One problem

But there’s a problem — if you’re Jewish, that is.

Evangelicals and other Republicans proclaim their love of Israel and Judaism and “God’s Chosen People,” but they don’t like to talk the end game of the End Times.

Once the fake messiah ruling the world from the rebuilt temple gets whipped by Jesus and his angel army, the Jews are going have to convert to Christianity.

If they don’t, it’s the Lake of Fire for them. Forever.

But for now, it looks like Israel’s authoritarian-leaning, strife-ridden governing coalition — not people likely to start haunting their local Methodist church — will accept their deal with the devil.

Make nice with the Christians, reap political benefits.

There’s no way most Democratic politicians will alienate the American Jewish vote: They need it.

There’s no way most Republicans want to piss off either the Jews who support them or, more importantly, the Evangelicals who own them.

If the apocalypse comes before Benjamin Netanyahu either gets voted out or convicted of corruption, well, he can probably try and cut a deal with Jehovah and move to a nice little suburb in Gehenna.

Diane Roberts

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.

 

 Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Via Florida Phoenix

( Michigan Advance ) – You may be among the 35% of Americans who have never heard the term “white Christian nationalism.” But of those citizens who are knowledgeable of the concept, it carries a decidedly negative view. The belief is becoming more and more important to understand as cultural diversity, racism, immigration issues, political divisiveness and political candidate pandering is before us.

What is white Christian nationalism? Generally – according to the Southern Poverty Law Center – it “refers to a political ideology and identity that fuses white supremacy, Christianity and American nationalism, and whose proponents claim that the United States is a `Christian Nation.’”

Research conducted by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute  with the nonpartisan Brookings Institution as well as a poll sponsored by Southern Poverty Law Center/Tulchin have the same conclusion: The white Christian nationalism movement is a growing threat to America’s democracy.

The far-right antigovernment and religious rights movement of the 1990s is getting stronger and stronger and will play a major role in the 2024 local, county, state and federal elections.

During the Nov. 21-Dec. 14, 2022 time period, 6,212 Americans were asked by PRRI/BI for their reply to these five statements: 1) the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation, 2) U.S. laws should be based on Christian values, 3) if the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore, 4) being Christian is an important part of being truly American and 5) God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

Answers across all five questions were found to be highly correlated (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.92) with a margin of error of +/- 1.6% at the 95% level of confidence.  This is a take-it-to-the-bank research endeavor.

Fifty-four percent of the GOP faithful are adherents of Christian nationalism vs. 23% of independents and 15% of Democrats.

Thom Hartmann: “The Hidden Roots Of White Supremacy Revealed w/ Robert P. Jones”

The PRRI/BI research notes five core attitudes are often associated with Christian nationalist beliefs: anti-Black, anti-Semitic (Jewish), anti-Muslim, anti-immigration and patriarchal adherence of traditional gender roles (for example, the husband is head of the household).”

Furthermore, research revealed “Christian nationalism beliefs are strongly correlated with support for QAnon, an extremist movement of the political right,” whose tenets include:

The Southern Poverty Law Center offers a summary of the movement that should be a wake-up call to Americans: “White Christian nationalism is a key ideology that inspired the failed Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and fueled multiple failed political campaigns in 2022 . . . however, white Christian nationalism remains a persistent and growing threat to U.S. democracy.”

Any person with a modicum of intelligence knows European colonists immigrated to America to escape religious persecution, expand their economic opportunities and live in a country where there was separation of church and state. Followers of the white Christian nationalism movement want to contradict the principles and norms of democracy and make America an authoritarian country.

Adherents of white Christian nationalism are the drivers of antidemocratic conspiracy theories and election denialism and possibly book banning, LGBTQIA denigration, “sanitized” black history curriculum, anti-female reproductive rights, gerrymandering and attacking diversity, equity and inclusion.

Currently, there are 14 Republicans and three Democrats wanting to win the Nov. 5, 2024, presidential election. Hundreds of candidates will be seeking local, county, state and federal offices of power. Citizens must be vigilant.

This column first appeared in the Advance‘s sister outlet, the Daily Montanan.

 

Steve Corbin

Steve Corbin is Professor Emeritus of Marketing at University of Northern Iowa.

Michigan Advance

Republished under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

(The Conversation) – When they entered the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, a group of insurgents stopped and bowed their heads in prayer to consecrate the building and their cause to Jesus. When the Senate reconvened later, its chaplain, retired Navy Adm. Barry Black, also prayed, but called the insurgents’ actions a “desecration of the United States Capitol building.”

Both sides appealed to the Christian God as the authority for their actions and values.

Outside, at the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, there was a similar focus on God, in the form of Christian nationalism, which frames the U.S. as a Christian country whose politics and institutions should be guided by Christian principles.

As cultural anthropologists who study politics and religion, we attended the Jan. 6 rally, which some called “Save America” and others called “Stop the Steal,” because we were interested in observing the symbols on display and in talking with the people there. Having studied political demonstrations before, we wanted to document this event and what it meant for its participants.

Most of the people we encountered were peacefully expressing their own political views and were not part of the insurrection. But they nevertheless expressed longstanding ideas that were ultimately echoed and amplified in their most extreme form by those who did engage in violence at the Capitol.

Focus on violence

Maintaining social order and a functioning democracy requires holding people responsible for their actions. That’s why much of the public focus on the insurrection has – rightly – been on the violence and the political conspiracy behind it, through which then-President Donald Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The congressional hearings on the insurrection, including the violent minority and the conspiracy of which they may have been a part, have concluded, and the committee’s report is out. However, the committee’s goal had never been to understand the tens of thousands of people who attended the rally to express their collective identity and their solidarity with what they saw as a just cause: maintaining America’s political and religious heritage. Its focus has been on Trump, as Jesus fades into the background.

Research on the events of that day reveals that most of the attendees at the rally – even those who were later arrested for their actions – were ordinary Americans, people committed to what they believed were the true results of the election. Most of them were not members of organized groups such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers or the Three Percenters.

Ordinary citizens

What we observed at the rally was an optimistic occasion where the people gathered expressed pride in their collective identity. The atmosphere was celebratory, even carnivalesque, perhaps like a tailgate party preceding an American football game. When we arrived we were greeted by a woman who called out, “Welcome to the party!”

The people we saw there were expressing their concern for American democracy and the ideals of law and order. We saw them answering the call of a president and seeking to protect the integrity of the American political system. Most strikingly, we saw proud Americans standing up for Christian values.

Expressions of identity

Anthropologists have long known that public displays are a common way of crafting identities. In the U.S. this is evident in ethnic and holiday parades, museum exhibits, popular demonstrations and highly orchestrated conferences.

On Jan. 6, the images and slogans deployed by the crowd included a wide variety of American flags and recycled Trump 2020 campaign gear, as well as pointed insults toward his opponents. Gun rights were a major theme; flags with images of assault rifles read “Come and Take Them!” Other signs focused on individual freedom by refusing COVID-19 restrictions. American flags with a central blue stripe indicated support for law enforcement.

Christian symbols were pervasive throughout the rally. People took pride in Christian identity and often conflated Jesus and President Trump as figures of national salvation, “Chosen Ones.”

There were flags and T-shirts proclaiming, “Jesus is my Savior and Trump is my President”; posters showing a white, blond, blue-eyed Jesus wearing the Trumpian MAGA hat; and a wide variety of other flags and banners bearing Christian themes.

Some of the Christian displays were starkly militant, such as a flag depicting a raging fire with both a bald eagle and a lion roaring – symbolizing both the United States and a militant Christ. Significantly, such militant themes in broader Christian culture are not restricted to evangelical Protestants, who are often perceived as primary drivers of religious participation in U.S. politics.

God and nation

Despite their professed devotion to God and nation, from the very beginning the Capitol insurrectionists and those at the earlier rallies on Jan. 6 were labeled “extremists.” That term suggests a moral flaw causing people to act in unacceptable ways, such as attacking members of the Capitol police or calling for the vice president to be hanged.

But “extremism” can also be understood as a more intense or committed version of what is otherwise ordinary. As scholars of the cultural politics of religion, we suggest this ordinariness is actually more alarming than its extreme expressions, because it’s harder to notice. Political theorist Hannah Arendt called this “the banality of evil.” Arendt and her generation of scholars were concerned about how totalitarianism could emerge from the very principles we think make us free.

People don’t need to break windows or bones to erode human rights, endanger democracy or form a basis for authoritarianism. Instead, they can ignore what had been expected social behavior because they find a personal or political advantage or formulate or assent to unjust laws. In Arendt’s view, these people are avoiding the human responsibility “to think” from others’ perspectives and to interrogate commonly held ideas.

It was precisely the ordinariness of most of the rallygoers that day that caught our attention. We met people who were real estate agents, firemen and retired construction workers, as well as grandmothers with their children and grandchildren. They seemed familiar to us, as though they could be our Christian neighbors.

People arrived in Washington in carpools or buses with friends or family members. They wanted to take personal responsibility for the political health of the republic and the country’s Christian European heritage and freedoms. They came to uphold the country’s founding myth that injustice can be met by the popular unity of mass rebellion. As one handmade sign read, “Let’s 1776 this place.”

They were relentlessly deceived by their leaders through media owned by wealthy corporations that reaped huge profits from those lies. But that does not change their motivations. Instead it raises questions about the manipulation of democratic and Christian values and highlights the problem of whether people can think for themselves in the face of such an overwhelming barrage of lies.

Editor’s note: This story is an update of an article previously published on Sept. 26, 2022.

Joyce Dalsheim, Professor, Department of Global Studies, University of North Carolina – Charlotte and Gregory Starrett, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina – Charlotte

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Shirts for sale on Jan. 6, 2021, combined loyalty to Jesus and to Donald Trump.
Joyce Dalsheim, CC BY-ND

Sama al-Akhbariyya says that the Jerusalem chief rabbi, Schlomo Amar, formerly the chief rabbi for all of Israel, on Sunday called Ohana’s selection “unbearable” and an “abomination,” insisting that gays should not be allowed to occupy “important positions.” “Woe unto the ears that hear of it,” he lamented. Amar also lambasted the religious Zionists in the coalition of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for betraying their principles in this way, saying that “they have lost the ability to blush.” He argued that at least the Ultra-Orthodox or Haredim in the Knesset should have stopped Ohana from becoming speaker. He said that in the past this was a huge source of shame. He warned that “Sins are attracting evil to the Israeli people.” In the past Amar has called gay pride parades “processions of wild animals.”

Amar was piling on. Already on Saturday, al-Hadath reports, Rabbi Meir Mazuz had attacked Ohana and his selection of speaker in a sermon at the Throne of Mercy synagogue, in the suburb of Bnei Brak, east of Tel Aviv, He told his followers to stay away from gay pride parades and to shutter their windows so that their children would not see them. The rabbi is close to the Shas Party, a fundamentalist Jewish religious party that is key to the current coalition government, and is also close the fascist Jewish Power bloc and to its leader, cabinet minister and extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Mazuz blamed the stampede in April 2021 on Mount Meron, where tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox pilgrims to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai had gathered, and where 45 died and 150 were injured, on LGBTQ practices among Israelis, and specifically on Amir Ohana. The Ultra-Orthodox blame the police for the stampede, whereas everyone else in Israel blames the chaotic arrangements made by the Ultra-Orthodox. Ohana, as minister of internal security at that time, was in charge of the police. Mazuz said that the minister in charge was “infected with the disease . . . such that there happened to us what happened to us.” In the past, Mazuz has blamed the COVID pandemic on gay pride parades and called centrist Israeli politicians “Nazis” and hoped for their deaths. He has also dismissed women as “washing machines.”

Ohana is an old-time Likudnik close to Netanyahu. He is married with adopted children. The Speaker is finding out what it means to be a man of the far right and also a member of a minority. And the relatively secular, far-right Likud Party is finding out what happens when you make fundamentalist religious parties your swing vote.

Netanyahu has allegedly agreed with the extremist Religious Zionism and Jewish Power blocs to change anti-discrimination laws in Israel to allow Jewish fundamentalist businesses and professionals not to serve gay people or groups of women and men who are not practicing gender segregation. Netanyahu denies that he will permit such discrimination, but then he is known to lie and is on trial for corruption.

Netanyahu defended Ohana by citing the Bible, which says that man was made in God’s image [Genesis 1:26-28], which he apparently takes as a warrant for basic rights for all human beings. Too bad he doesn’t seem able to apply the same theological point of view to his treatment of Palestinians. Also too bad he made a deal with religious bigots to give away the right of gays not to be discriminated against.

Unlike President Obama, who saw the future of the United States as being in the Pacific Rim, Biden has pivoted instead to familiar territory, Russia and Eastern Europe. Obama’s vision was related to trade and innovation. Only a minor part of U.S. trade is with eastern Europe and now virtually none is with Russia. Biden’s pivot was not part of a long-term, thought-out grand stategy. It was reactive, addressing a lesser power’s attempt to alter the status quo by asserting itself as a regional hegemon.

In some ways, Putin’s play for grabbing some or all of Ukraine resembles Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait. George H. W. Bush likewise drew a line in the sand and put together an international coalition to push Saddam back into Iraq. Both the Gulf War and the current Ukraine effort by the U.S. and allies must be seen as attempts to restore a status quo. Bush senior had the advantage of fighting a non-nuclear state and so could simply deploy 500,000 U.S. troops and 250,000 allied troops, and overwhelm the Iraqi tank corps in Kuwait. Biden, in contrast, has had to resort to economic sanctions and the provision of weaponry to Ukrainians, who unlike Kuwaitis managed to survive the initial invasion and retain their independence.

Because Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads, more than any other country in the world, the outcome of the Ukraine struggle is very difficult to predict. The war could grind on for a very long time. Russia’s gross domestic product fell at least 3.5% in 2022, and is predicted to fall similarly in 2023. It is not a body blow, but it can’t be making most Russians very happy. Still, authoritarian governments have levers of power that can help them survive such pressures. Iraq was thrown down to the level of a fourth-world country by the U.N. and U.S. sanctions in the 1990s, but the ruling Baath Party insulated itself from the oil embargo and had some $30 billion squirreled away to bribe key leaders into remaining loyal. Plus the Baath was brutal and would as soon kill you as look at you. If Russia’s elite hunkers down as the Iraqi did, we could be looking at a decade-long struggle.

Russia has picked up an important asset in the form of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which had made advances in unconventional drone warfare that the tank-and-jet- oriented Russian military had not. Iran’s provision of drones to Russia helped preserve Moscow’s momentum in the war when its own munitions stores ran low.

Israeli sources are saying that, based on Western intelligence assessments, Russia may reward Iran by allowing the ayatollahs to purchase 24 Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets. Because of the harsh U.S. sanctions on Iran, which from 2007 to 2016 were reinforced by United Nations sanctions, Iran’s air force has an old dilapidated fleet. So too, worryingly, do the Iranian civilian airlines. If the Israeli press reports are not just propaganda, the Russian fighter-jets would be a game-changer for Iranian air power. The Sukhoi jets helped win the Syrian civil war for dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was backed by Iran, as well. Some observers have even suggested that one reason for the Russian intervention in Syria was to advertise the virtues of the new generation of fighter jets in what Moscow calls its “Aerospace Forces,” so as to sell them in more global markets.

That Iran is becoming so close to Russia is entirely the fault of the U.S. Republican Party in general and Donald J. Trump in particular. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal could have integrated Iran into the Western, capitalist economy. Iran mothballed 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program in return for sanctions being lifted. The Republican-dominated Congress, however, refused to lift U.S. sanctions on Iran. The U.S. goes around threatening unrelated third parties if they don’t uphold American sanctions. So France’s Total couldn’t invest in Iran because the Treasury Department would have fined it billions of dollars. Hence, no sanctions relief for Iran, at all. The country was screwed over by the nuclear deal, giving up any deterrence that might have come from its enrichment program, and receiving nothing in return. Less than nothing.

Then in May 2018, Trump breached the treaty entirely and tried to crush the Iranian economy, even attempting to stop Iran from selling its petroleum. He did this even though Iran had scrupulously adhered to its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal. Only China successfully bucked these “maximum sanctions,” which were really a form of financial and trade blockade.

Now the same techniques of financial and trade blockade are being imposed on Russia by the Biden administration. Russia is interested in learning from Iran how to subvert them successfully, and interested in using Iran and China to jailbreak the U.S. sanctions.

The Republican Party and Trump, in other words, drove Iran into the arms of Russia, and thereby complicated the current Biden administration’s attempt to isolate Russia. Iran’s drones and purchase of Russian arms and other goods are helpful to Moscow’s war effort and attempt to tough out the U.S. efforts to put it in a box.

One of Iran’s obsessions is supporting the Lebanese party-militia, Hezbollah, against Israel. Iran’s ability to play among the Palestinians, as well, has been hampered by the preference of Hamas for a Muslim Brotherhood, Sunni alliance. The Egyptian and Syrian Muslim Brotherhood organizations, however, have been crushed by the officer corps’ vigorous counter-revolutions against the Arab Spring.

The new Netanyahu government in Israel has brought on board Religious Zionism and Jewish Power, which are the Israeli equivalents of the Iranian ayatollahs, only more aggressive. The Israeli fundamentalists are dedicated to expanding Israeli squatter-settlements and to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. They could well provoke a new wave of radicalism, what Palestinians call an Intifada or uprising. If it materializes, it will give Iran an opening to make itself central to Levantine politics in general.

The street protests in Iran this past fall, led by young women, have revealed a profound generational and gender divide in that country. That divide, however, is unlikely to pull down the government in the short to medium term. It is an element in Iranians’ making of Iran in the long term.

With Biden’s foreign policy team bogged down in Ukraine, such new challenges in the Middle East will be difficult to address. Not only could Iran cast an even larger shadow over the region but the extremist Israeli government could make all sorts of mischief for American interests. The Netanyahu government is already talking about reneging on a U.S.-brokered deal on dividing Mediterranean gas fields between Israel and Lebanon, which Mr. Netanyahu characterizes as a surrender to Hezbollah. Netanyahu also keeps talking about bombing Iran, which his military and intelligence officers have so far stopped him from doing, but such an action would spark a major Mideast conflict.

As Mr. Obama discovered, it is really hard for the U.S. to pivot away from the Middle East, given the emotional investment Americans have in Israel and in the gasoline that fuels their cars. Maybe if we do switch to EVs in this decade, some future government really will be able to pivot.

Book excerpt: A pastor comes to terms with the Church’s idols of Trump, money and power

Red State Christians:  A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage it leaves behind,” available everywhere books are sold.

( Minnesota Reformer ) – On Sunday, January 10, 2021, I woke up early, stepped out my back door into frigid, biting air, and drove from one America into another.

I drove from leafy, liberal southwest Minneapolis, west from metro Highway 62 onto US Route 212, which runs from Minnesota into South Dakota, dead-ending in Yellowstone National Park in wild, ultra-conservative Wyoming.

I wasn’t going that far today. Just fifty-five miles or so through purple Carver County, which flipped in 2020 to Biden from Trump in 2016, helping ensure that Minnesota stayed blue, into further west and rural McLeod County, where Donald Trump won 67 percent of the vote two months earlier.

I drove into red America to lead a tiny rural church in worship that Sunday morning, but before I did so, I took a deep breath and  told my church members about the time that I was a victim of right-wing white Christian terrorism.

Maybe terrorism is too strong a word, but I was terrified when Breitbart News took a screenshot of my interview on CNN in December 2019 and blasted it across their front page. They initially called me a “liberal pastor” who said American Christians had “lost the gospel of Jesus Christ” and instead embraced a gospel of wealth, power, and Christian nationalism.

Breitbart didn’t misquote me, but their framing of the interview led to a barrage of online harassment and threats, from the bizarre (a message suggesting my “swollen, lumpy throat” indicated cancer) to the scary (bleak and violent threats).

I combed my online presence and made sure my home address wasn’t visible anywhere. I ensured Facebook posts with pictures of my kids were no longer public for the most part. But Breitbart’s goal wasn’t actually to harm me or my family. 

It was to silence me. 

My clear analysis of the distortion of the gospel in American Christianity posed a threat to the right-wing white Christian empire of wealth and power, an empire encompassing publishing houses, TV networks, churches, colleges, universities, and schools. It shakes hands with corporate America to ensure that no one upsets the apple cart of an agreement first made in imperial Rome some 1,700 years ago, when Emperor Constantine first attempted to colonize Christianity under the guise of empire.

For all these years since, biblical Christianity — forged in the cross, humility, and poverty — has been at war with a co-opted Christianity that forgets Jesus’s gospel of liberation and instead seeks to use his story to entrench wealth and power in the hands of a few white men.

Click Here.

This battle has ebbed and flowed over the years through the Reformation in Europe and the colonization and subjugation of Africa by so-called Christian missionaries. It has continued through the rise of the Black Church in America, abolitionism and the Civil Rights Movement, the reckoning of clergy abuse crises in the Catholic church, to America in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with a white American Church that blatantly sold itself out on the altar of power and money, culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

My rural church members weren’t really thinking about any of this when they jammed their Trump flags into the ground next to their cornfields in September 2016. For them, mostly farmers, factory workers, medical workers, teachers, and police officers, voting for Trump was axiomatic. To be a rural, white American Christian obviously meant being a Republican. And Trump gave them permission to have a little fun, to stick their thumb in the eye of those annoying liberal elites in Minneapolis and Washington, DC, who had no idea how hard it really was to work for a living. 

For them, Trump wasn’t like that. He said the quiet parts out loud, cursed, and laughed. But also, they earnestly hoped, he prayed and really did care for the “rights of the unborn.”

With a halting voice, I told my congregation anyway how it felt when I watched would-be insurrectionists carry Bibles and Christian flags into the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, suggesting that their violent overthrow of a democratic election was God-ordained. 

I felt vulnerable saying these things, but I also trusted that my congregation would listen. We had a shared bond, a shared trust, a shared relationship. I baptized their babies and stood vigil in my clergy collar at the local cemetery as a military band played taps and a veteran’s ashes were laid to rest. I led prayer at the local Memorial Day picnic after rounds were fired into the air, the names of lives lost were read, and children scattered into the street to grab the spent bullets.

They knew that I’d marched with clergy for racial justice after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin just six miles from my home. They hadn’t all liked it very much that their pastor was out there supporting “the Blacks,” as some people put it. But others sent me messages about their Black family members and the racism they’d faced in rural Minnesota. They were glad I was bearing witness on behalf of a Savior who did not come to redeem only white Americans.

We’d settled into an uneasy truce, my church and I. They tolerated my NPR and CNN appearances, but they preferred it when I quoted country songs in my sermons and we could joke together about my former career as a sportswriter. Gingerly, we trusted each other, forgave each other, and listened to each other.

Even though I knew better — that the roots of rot in American Christianity went far deeper than Trump — I briefly retreated into my white, middle-class privilege and imagined that an election could make it all go away. 

When Joe Biden was finally declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election on November 7, 2020, four days after Election Day, I naively thought the raging battle could finally end. The big orange albatross around the neck of the American church could be sloughed off, and we could return to debates around liturgy and music. 

I knew deep down that what had been revealed in the past four years meant we could never return to what was, but nostalgia tempted me to believe that maybe the hatred and division and racism wrought into white American Christianity weren’t as bad as I had thought. The trouble in the church and in our country was somewhere else, some other Christians — but not most of us, or not the people and churches I knew. Surely, I could insulate myself from feeling further pain or distress, maybe pretend it had all been a bad dream.

On Sunday, January 10, I couldn’t believe that anymore. I’d known deep down that Trump was a symptom, not a cause. I’d known the idolatry of wealth and power had deep, deep roots in American Christianity, and that our worship of whiteness was just conveniently claimed by Trump, revealed by him, and that his absence from the Oval Office would not absolve our sins.

A part of me thought the very good Christians of my church’s little rural Midwestern town would take down their Trump flags on their own after the attempted insurrection. I thought they’d see the lives lost at the Capitol, the willful assault on American democracy, the shouts of the n-word at the Capitol police officers from the Trump-supporting rioters, and decide that simply wasn’t the association they wanted to claim any longer.

Like I said, I was naive. For many of the good white Christians I knew — not only in my church’s little town but across America, whom I’d interviewed for this book throughout 2018 — and for my dear friends and family members, January 6 was nothing to be ashamed of. Violence had always been necessary to sustain wealth and power for the white ruling class, and violence was also required to sustain the support of the rural white Christians who’d tied their fate to their economic overlords in New York City, California, and DC, with Rs behind their names.

As I concluded my story about the threats I’d received for simply suggesting that Jesus would not condone the violent and racist Christianity lifted by Trump and the Republican Party, I made a request of the Christians I loved in this little Midwestern church.

I asked them if now, two months post-election, maybe they’d consider taking down those Trump flags. I asked them if maybe they could see now what those flags had come to represent: much, much more than merely conservative politics. I asked them to see that by continuing to fly those flags, they were condoning violence and hatred.

They were saying to me, to Black people, to immigrants, to LGBTQ people, to anyone who didn’t fit into their desired white Christian box, that we did not belong and were not welcome in their town. I honestly didn’t think it was that much to ask. The election was long past. I’d spent a lot of time now not just in this little town but in red states and counties across America, and I’d trusted that the Christians and Christian leaders I’d met really didn’t want to send a message of violent exclusion and hatred. So, I thought if I could just explain it in the right way, show them how much it hurt ordinary people like me, for example, maybe the insanity could end. We could rebuild the American church again on the foundation of civil rights, and children’s rights, and the dignity of the human soul.

No one said much to me that Sunday. Most of the church was watching online due to the raging pandemic of COVID-19 that had hit our county hard. When it was time to go back home, I realized I was almost out of gas. There was a little double-sided pump just a block away from church, across from the Congregational church that no longer had a pastor, next to a vending machine that sold cans of pop to schoolkids who drove up on four-wheelers after class.

I pulled up to the pump and opened my door, aware of a prickly sensation running up and down my arms as I stepped out of the car. I shivered as the icy air hit my cheeks, but this feeling was not limited to the Minnesota winter weather. Here, in this little town where I knew almost everyone and almost everyone was related, across the street from the police station where I had the chief’s cell phone number, I tasted the bleak metallic tang of fear.

I’d just had the audacity — me, a woman pastor of all things — to suggest to these people that they needed to smash their idols, to tear down the objects in which they’d placed their faith. They wouldn’t like it. They’d be mad. They had guns.

Reading this now and thinking about the kindly elderly folks who attend my Bible study, I feel a little embarrassed that I was afraid. No one was going to do anything to me. Right? Right?

Probably not. But like Breitbart News, the intention of the still-flying Trump flags in this little town was not really to hurt me. It was to make me be quiet. To question my words. To refrain from telling the truth about what happened to the gospel in white Christian America.

I began writing the first version of this book almost four years ago, a year after leaving my Southern California megachurch, when it became clear that my writing critical of Trump would not be tolerated by my church’s biggest financial backers. I had approached my travels across red, conservative Christian America with an open heart and a desire for empathy, hoping that I would somehow find reason and understanding, common ground and forgiveness. I found those things in pieces: in a dying congregation while receiving the Eucharist in Appalachia; at a youth group worship service in tony Newport Coast; and finally, while praying with my own Trump-supporting family members in rural Missouri. 

Four years later, my earnest and open heart has been torn in two.

Bright red “Make America Great Again, Again!” signs are popping up all over my church’s little town. Two families, whose homes I’d visited earlier that year, left the church without telling me. They left for male pastors and a more conservative denomination, saying they just didn’t “connect” with me and the “politics” were always an undertone of discontent. 

No matter how many times I prayed for military members and law enforcement officers and veterans, it didn’t matter. I prayed “too much” for racial justice. I’d had the audacity to talk about the Trump signs two months after the election. I’d stepped out of my prescribed place, so there was no longer room for mutual understanding or shared peace.

Sunday after Sunday, I’ve come back anyway to bow at the altar and lead the confession and forgiveness, even on the Sunday after I presided over my unvaccinated forty-three-year-old brother-in-law’s funeral, after his death to COVID-19. In these years of white Christian denialism and betrayal, the smell of death hangs in the air of all white American churches.

At the front of the church, behind the simple wooden altar, is the simple wooden cross. A condemned and dying Jesus watches us worship and listens to our economic anxieties and fears for our children and our planet. He judges our anger and violence, even while he is righteously angry at a church that has bought and sold his image for fame, power, money, influence, and Twitter followers.

With this Jesus in mind, this Jesus who is decisively not American and wholly not white, I invite you to read the rest of this book with his instructions in mind: “See, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

When I first wrote this book, I asked liberal readers to open their hearts to understand conservative Christians. I also held out hope that conservative Christians would read this book, appreciate its empathy towards them, and consider its conviction that the white American church’s idolatry of money and power and white supremacy was taking it further away from Jesus.

Four years later, I no longer hold much of that hope. How can I think my writing will do what nearly one million American deaths due to COVID-19 have failed to do? How can I imagine that people unmoved by a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and an attempted assassination of the vice president will somehow read this book and rethink their entire belief system?

No, I am resigned that many have become irredeemably lost, left only to the work of the Holy Spirit. My hope is for the rest of you. The ones who aren’t yet convinced that Christianity is a fairy tale devised only for the wealthy and powerful, who worship white Jesus on Sunday and steal from the poor on Monday. My hope is for those of you who have abandoned hope that your salvation lies in the American church, but who still believe that somehow, somewhere, love, hope, faith, and — ultimately — truth really do exist. 

Rev. Angela Denker is a Lutheran pastor and journalist based in Minneapolis. She has written for Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, and FORTUNE magazine. Denker has appeared on CNN, BBC, SkyNews, and NPR to share her research on politics and Christian Nationalism. Her book, “Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump,” was the 2019 Silver Foreword Indies award-winner for political and social sciences. Subscribe to Angela’s Substack, I’m Listening, at angeladenker.substack.com.

Minnesota Reformer

The protests in Iran are not only about compulsory veiling but about compulsory everything. Veiling has become a symbol for the government’s determination to control the bodies and private lives of citizens. That determination is behind a Draconian law passed last fall that severely restricts access to abortion. If you can’t tell whether I’m talking about Iran or Texas, it is because both are in the grip of theocracies.

The theocratic government of Iran wants to control the bodies and personal lives of women, just as Republican lawmakers in the United States do, with their anti-abortion stance. The Republican Party has come to be so tightly intertwined with the evangelical Christian community of the Bible Belt that it is a theocratic party itself, similar in some ways to the Principalists or hard liners in Iran. Just as Iranian hard liners are hostile to democracy, fearful that the people cannot be trusted to vote for the theologically correct position, so US Republicans have increasingly turned against democracy. Evangelicals are only 17% of the US population now, and are rapidly shrinking, so the only way they can impose their religious precepts on the rest of the population is through minority rule– enabled by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the legalization of dark money politics. The US wealthy for the most part have thrown in with the evangelicals to get tax breaks, since they can fly their wives to blue states or abroad for unwanted pregnancies and do not care what happens to the little people.

Just as Mahsa Amini was arrested by morals police in Iran, Brittney Poolaw and 1200 other women over the past fifteen years have been arrested in the United States for having a miscarriage, even where fetal failure to develop has been noted by medical examiners as a possible cause for the miscarriage.

Once the state legislates intervention in your body, you are not allowed to clothe it with tight jeans or to terminate an ectopic pregnancy without the state’s permission, even if that puts your life in danger. Once a political party becomes an instrument of theocracy, it feels a compulsion to impose its theology on everyone. In liberal (with a small ‘l’) political thought, which includes parliamentary conservatism, law is an expression of the majority of the elected representatives of the people. One can dislike a law, but a classic liberal must admit the validity of the law if it derived from that majority.

Theocracy is profoundly anti-liberal. Theocrats believe society must be governed in accordance with God’s will as they interpret it. Many theocrats are not clerics. Many of them wear tailored business suits. From a theocratic point of view, Roe v. Wade was illegitimate even though it was the ruling of a majority of a Supreme Court that had been appointed and voted in by the elected president and Senate. Roe was illegitimate despite being the law of the land because it violated God’s law, the theocrats said. They like to substitute themselves for “God.” Moreover, it had been rooted in a legal theory of the constitutional right to individual privacy, a theory that had itself to be razed to the ground if illiberal theocracy were going to prevail. Theocracy does not recognize a right to privacy, i.e., to individuals’ control over their bodies.

The office of Iran’s clerical leader operates under the theory of the “Guardianship of the Jurisprudent” (Velayat-e faqih). The origins of this ideology, adumbrated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989), lay in Shiite Muslim canon law concerning widows, orphans and other individuals in society who needed a male guardian but had no family member to serve in that capacity.

Earlier religious jurists had stipulated that a qualified cleric should step in to fill this role of guardian. Khomeini expanded this conception, arguing that the cleric is the guardian of all the state’s subjects. All of them, including free adult males, are by this theory wards of the state where clerics control the state. Ideally, the guardian would be a vicar of the Prophet Muhammad, but Twelver Shiites believe that the Prophet’s line ended with the Twelfth Imam, who went into occultation and would one day emerge to restore the world to justice. The return of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, for Shiites is analogous to the Christian belief in the return of Christ.

Until that time, Khomeini argued, clerics should rule in the stead of the Twelfth Imam, since their study of the Qur’an and of the sayings and doings of the twelve Imams made it likely that they would do best at approximating the decisions he would take if he were present.

Likewise, more that 3/4s of Republican evangelicals want to declare the United States a “Christian” state, essentially repealing the First Amendment with its Establishment Cause. They want to control people’s bodies in the U.S., even if they have to do it undemocratically, just as the ayatollahs have the same goal in Iran. Iran has the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent. America’s Red States have the Guardianship of the Pastor and Priest. In neither case are we autonomous adults. We are wards of the state, reduced to being juveniles in custody.

Because of evangelical Republican rule of some US states, we already have elements of the Christian Republic of America, to mirror the Islamic Republic of Iran.