Chris
Hedges heeft op Information Clearing House een artikel
geschreven over ‘de politiek’ van de christelijke kerk, een politiek
die eerst was gericht op het toelaten van alle christenen, ook de
volgers van christelijk rechts die juist in tegenstelling tot die
politiek niet openstaan voor dialoog en tolerantie……. Christenen die niet openstaan
voor zaken genoemd in het nieuwe testament van de bijbel, zoals het liefhebben van de medemens en hulp bieden aan de mensen die
in ellende verkeren, bijvoorbeeld het afstaan van je bed aan vluchtelingen en mensen die worden vervolgd, waarmee uiteraard ook wordt bedoeld dat je je medemens
op alle mogelijke manieren moet helpen, zelfs het bezoeken van gevangenen valt onder die ‘noemer…..’
De
‘mainstream’ christelijke kerk, zeker in de VS, staat achter: -de
illegale oorlogen die de VS voert, -de doodstraf (wat een verschil met wat jezus volgens het nieuwe testament zou hebben gezegd >> je andere wang toekeren als je wordt geslagen), -het groot en doodmartelen van
dieren in de intensieve veehouderij (dieren zijn volgens christenen NB ‘gods schepping’), -het
leegplunderen bodemschatten en van de zeeën, -het verbranden
van fossiele brandstoffen ook al gaat de aarde (alweer ‘gods
schepping’) daardoor naar de gallemiezen en overlijden er grote aantallen mensen alleen al aan de langdurige inademing van auto-uitstoot, om nog maar te zwijgen over de grote aantalllen mensen die zijn omgekomen door de gevolgen van de klimaatverandering, die volgens veel christenen niet eens plaatsvindt…., -het uitbuiten van
werknemers in verre buitenlanden, enz. enz. Stuk voor stuk zaken die
zeker in het nieuwe testament worden beoordeeld als onchristelijk……
Lees het
uitstekende artikel van Chris Hedges en geeft het door, ook hier
denken christenen dat alles wat hun god hen heeft verboden tot de
taken van de moderne christelijke mens behoren:
Onward,
Christian Fascists
By
Chris Hedges
January
01, 2020 “Information
Clearing House” – The greatest moral failing of the liberal
Christian church was its refusal, justified in the name of tolerance
and dialogue, to denounce the followers of the Christian right as
heretics. By tolerating the intolerant it ceded religious legitimacy
to an array of con artists, charlatans and demagogues and their
cultish supporters. It stood by as the core Gospel message—concern
for the poor and the oppressed—was perverted into a magical world
where God and Jesus showered believers with material wealth and
power. The white race, especially in the United States, became God’s
chosen agent. Imperialism and war became divine instruments for
purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself.
Capitalism, because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power
and condemned the immoral to poverty and suffering, became shorn of
its inherent cruelty and exploitation. The iconography and symbols of
American nationalism became intertwined with the iconography and
symbols of the Christian faith. The mega-pastors, narcissists who
rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms, make millions of dollars by using
this heretical belief system to prey on the mounting despair and
desperation of their congregations, victims of neoliberalism
and deindustrialization.
These believers find in Donald Trump a reflection of themselves, a
champion of the unfettered greed, cult of masculinity, lust for
violence, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious
intolerance, anger, racism and conspiracy theories that define the
central beliefs of the Christian right. When I wrote “American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” I was
deadly serious about the term “fascists.”
The
evangelical magazine Christianity Today, by stating the obvious about
Trump, that he is immoral and should be removed from office, became
the latest recipient of the Christian right’s vicious and
hypocritical backlash. Nearly 200 evangelical leaders, including
former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Rep. Michele
Bachmann, Jerry
Falwell Jr. and Ralph
Reed, signed a
joint letter denouncing the Christianity
Today editorial, written by the magazine’s president, Timothy
Dalrymple, and outgoing Editor Mark Galli.
Evangelical
Christians who criticize Trump are as swiftly disappeared from the
ranks as Republican politicians who criticize Trump. Trump received
80% of the white evangelical vote in the 2016 presidential election,
and in a poll this month 90%
of Republicans said they opposed impeachment and ouster of the
president. Among Republicans who identify as white evangelical
Protestants, that
number rises to 99%.
Tens
of millions of Americans live hermetically sealed inside the vast
media and educational edifice controlled by Christian fascists. In
this world, miracles are real, Satan, allied with secular humanists
and Muslims, is seeking to destroy America, and Trump is God’s
anointed vessel to build the Christian nation and cement into place a
government that instills “biblical values.” These “biblical
values” include banning abortion, protecting the traditional
family, turning the Ten Commandments into secular law, crushing
“infidels,” especially Muslims, indoctrinating children in
schools with “biblical” teachings and thwarting sexual license,
which includes any sexual relationship other than in a marriage
between a man and a woman. Trump is routinely compared by evangelical
leaders to the biblical king Cyrus, who
rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem and restored the Jews to the city.
Trump has filled his
own ideological void with Christian fascism. He has elevated members
of the Christian right to prominent positions, including Mike Pence
to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy
DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of
housing and urban development, William
Barr to attorney general, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the
Supreme Court and the televangelist Paula
White to his Faith
and Opportunities Initiative. More importantly, Trump has handed
the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in
government, especially in the federal courts.
He has installed 133
district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out
of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices out of nine. Almost
all of these judges were, in effect, selected by the Federalist
Society and the Christian right. Many of the extremists who make
up the judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the
American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan
coalition of lawyers. Trump has moved to ban Muslim immigrants and
rolled back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive
rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He
has stripped away LGBTQ rights. He has ripped down the firewall
between church and state by revoking the Johnson
Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from
endorsing political candidates. His appointees throughout the
government routinely use biblical strictures to justify an array of
policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts
and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action
that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private
“Christian” schools.
I studied ethics at
Harvard Divinity School with James
Luther Adams, who had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. Adams
witnessed the rise there of the so-called
Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He warned us about the
disturbing parallels between the German Christian Church and the
Christian right. Adolf Hitler was in the eyes of the German Christian
Church a volk
messiah and an instrument of God—a view similar to the one held
today about Trump by many of his white evangelical supporters. Those
demonized for Germany’s economic collapse, especially Jews and
communists, were agents of Satan.
Fascism, Adams told us, always
cloaked itself in a nation’s most cherished symbols and rhetoric.
Fascism would come to America not in the guise of stiff-armed,
marching brownshirts and Nazi swastikas but in mass recitations of
the Pledge of Allegiance, the biblical sanctification of the state
and the sacralization
of American militarism. Adams was the first person I heard label the
extremists of the Christian right as fascists. Liberals, he warned,
as in Nazi Germany, were blind to the tragic dimension of history and
radical evil. They would not react until it was too late.
Trump’s legacy will
be the empowerment of the Christian fascists. They are what comes
next. For decades they have been organizing to take power. They have
built infrastructures and organizations, including lobbying groups,
schools and universities as well as media platforms, to prepare. They
have seeded their cadre into the political system. We on the left,
meanwhile, have seen our institutions and organizations destroyed or
corrupted by corporate power.
The Christian
fascists, as in all totalitarian movements, need a crisis,
manufactured or real, in order to seize power. This crisis may be
financial. It could be triggered by a catastrophic terrorist attack.
Or it could be the result of a societal breakdown from our climate
emergency. The Christian fascists are poised to take advantage of the
chaos, or perceived chaos. They have their own version of the
brownshirts, the for-hire mercenary armies and private contractors
amassed by Christian fascists such as Erik
Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos. The Christian fascists have
seized control of significant portions of the judiciary and
legislative branches of government. FRC
Action, the legislative affiliate of the Family
Research Council, gives 245 members of Congress a perfect 100%
for votes that support
the agenda of the Christian right. The Family Research Council,
which has called on its followers to pray that God will vanquish the
“demonic forces” behind Trump’s impeachment, is identified by
the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate
group because of its campaigns to discriminate against the LGBTQ
community.
The ideology of the
Christian fascists panders in our decline to the primitive yearnings
for the vengeance, new glory and moral renewal that are found among
those pushed aside by deindustrialization and austerity. Reason,
facts and verifiable truth are impotent weapons against this belief
system. The Christian right is a “crisis cult.” Crisis cults
arise in most collapsing societies. They promise, through magic, to
recover the lost grandeur and power of a mythologized past. This
magical thinking banishes doubt, anxiety and feelings of
disempowerment. Traditional social hierarchies and rules, including
an unapologetic white, male supremacy, will be restored. Rituals and
behaviors including an unquestioning submission to authority and acts
of violence to cleanse the society of evil will vanquish malevolent
forces.
The Christian fascists
propagate their magical thinking through a selective literalism in
addressing the Bible. They hold up as sacrosanct biblical passages
that buttress their ideology and ignore, or grossly misinterpret, the
ones that do not. They live in a binary universe. They see themselves
as eternal victims, oppressed by dark and sinister groups seeking
their annihilation. They alone know the will of God. They alone can
fulfill God’s will.
They seek total cultural and political
domination. The secular, reality-based world, one where Satan,
miracles, destiny, angels and magic do not exist, destroyed their
lives and communities. That world took away their jobs and their
futures. It ripped apart the social bonds that once gave them
purpose, dignity and hope. In their despair they often struggled with
alcohol, drug and gambling addictions. They endured familial
breakdown, divorce, evictions, unemployment and domestic and sexual
violence. The only thing that saved them was their conversion, the
realization that God had a plan for them and would protect them.
These believers were pushed by a callous, heartless corporate society
and rapacious oligarchy into the arms of charlatans. All who speak to
them in the calm, rational language of fact and evidence are hated
and ultimately feared, for they seek to force believers back into
“the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them.
We can blunt the rise
of this Christian fascism only by reintegrating exploited and abused
Americans into society, giving them jobs with stable, sustainable
incomes, relieving their crushing personal debts, rebuilding their
communities and transforming our failed democracy into one in which
everyone has agency and a voice. We must impart to them hope, not
only for themselves but for their children.
Christian fascism is
an emotional life raft for tens of millions. It is impervious to the
education, dialogue and discourse the liberal class naively believes
can blunt or domesticate the movement. The Christian fascists, by
choice, have severed themselves from rational thought. We will not
placate or disarm this movement, bent on our destruction, by
attempting to claim that we too have Christian “values.” This
appeal only strengthens the legitimacy of the Christian fascists and
weakens our own. We will transform American society to a socialist
system that provides meaning, dignity and hope to all citizens, that
cares and nurtures the most vulnerable among us, or we will become
the victims of the Christian fascists we created.
Chris Hedges, spent
nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the
Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than
50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York
Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
https://www.truthdig.com/author/chris_hedges/
Note
To ICH Community
We
ask that you assist us in dissemination of the article published by
ICH to your social media accounts and post links to the article from
other websites.
Thank
you for your support.
Peace
and joy
