Not long ago, I viewed a commencement speech from Jay Pritzker who is the Governor of Illinois. His entire message was how we identify intelligent people and how we identify those who are not. The central theme was kindness versus cruelty. According to Pritzker, those who are the most kind are typically the most intelligent where the “idiots” are typically the cruel people.
As a person who has spent her life in Christian ministry, service, and the Church, I can undoubtedly say that compassionate and kind atheists behave more in alignment with the teachings of Christ than cruel Christians. I know many good and kind conservative Christians, but the ones who use the name of God to weaponize cruelty for political gain are behaving less like Christians than kind atheists.
The Religious Right started to meld with the right wing of the Republican party in the Reagan era. After that, they grew into a dangerous and unholy union which has led to a dangerous political weapon. When this union started marching in a blatantly- cruel direction, I had to take a step back starting in 2016, admit I was wrong about some things, and join the progressives to defeat the hatred and injustice we are experiencing all around us. How can Christians completely ignore the Gospel and “get behind a strongman” to seek retribution on the vulnerable and the marginalized, ie, the libs? A group has been trying to usher in fascism for five decades, and now they have millions of followers.
Philosopher Noam Chomsky sums up this movement well. During Nazi Germany, millions of ordinary Germans helped to “seek strongman” by electing Adolf Hitler, a direct parallel to what we are experiencing now. Right-winged media has convinced a certain demographic of conservatives (not all conservatives) for decades that Democrats are evil and anyone who is not white, heteronormative, able-bodied, and “Christian” is a threat to the social order of society. Only a small percentage of Americans fit into all of those categories. But right-winged skewed media has a way of deeply infiltrating a person’s thinking and acting. I believe that Fox News has played a tremendous role in the distribution of lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, and anti-intellectualism we are experiencing in American society right now.
The question is, when will Christians who still believe in the Gospel and Jesus’ central message of love wake up to the current events which are stripping American democracy? I have no doubt in my mind that we are in a fascist state right now. We may be on the far end of center, but we are at a great risk of a variation of the Holocaust unless we can vote out the fascist leaders in power.
.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In