Trumpism’s most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it. Then, after nationwide protests against his rule, he posted on social media an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump”, which proceeded to bomb American cities and Americans with a graphically vivid load of human poop.
As disorienting as it is to watch the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from “the meek shall inherit the Earth” to “the meek shall die of cholera.” This has happened more slowly, over decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
What particularly hurts is the fact that at no point did we manage to fight back, not effectively anyway. Without intending to, we surrendered control of the idea of Jesus. It is a story that may provide some insights into how to fight the attack on democracy.
Exactly! Fuck if this hasn’t been one of the biggest reasons I have been so obnoxious this time around. I’m triggered as fuck all the time, but not just because I’m a Libshit.
My family moved from a city to a very rural area when I was a kid, and I grew up attending very conservative (and extremely hypocritical) southern Baptist and “non-denominational” evangelical Churches and schools in the deep south during the 90s and early aughts.
I got way too comfortable thinking I had left all that shit behind me. Then suddenly one day it just showed up on my doorstep like it was back to finish the job.
This is why I always warn people when they say they’ll just leave the country. Be prepared to start settling into a new chapter of your life all zen and breathing a sigh of relief, only for it to find you wherever you go. That is just the ugly truth of friendly fascism/Christian Nationalism.
I had no idea of the amount of corruption and shadowy money behind this movement when I was growing up. I didn’t even know that it was part of a broader movement. I just learned in the past year that before Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell teamed up to create the “moral majority” in the 70s, most southern Baptists didn’t consider abortion an important political topic, and that the southern Baptist church is on record as actually leaning more towards pro choice before then! Da fuq!?
My mind was blown because that is completely counter to the entire reality I experienced growing up in the southern Baptist church. There were definitely people in the church who were old enough to remember the church before the moral majority, but it’s like they drank the Kool aid or had their memories completely wiped clean.
That’s just fascism, especially when you start mixing it in with religion. It’s like a zombie apocalypse. You can’t just run away, and assume you escaped. You have to cut it off, and cauterize the wound or it will just keep spreading.