Why I Still Talk to Jesus -- In Spite of Everything
There will be a Trump-event related murder. It’s only a matter of time. That’s because Trump is following the 1930s fascist playbook. He is being successful because of the evangelicals craving for moral order.
Trump-incited violence is a recurring theme at Trump events. Protesters are beaten, shoved, kicked and verbally abused with racial slurs. Trump encourages supporters to attack protesters. Trump says they should “hit back” more often, and has offered to pay legal fees if they attack protesters.
Clashes between protesters and Trump supporters at a St. Louis rally on Friday led to at least one injury and 32 arrests. On Wednesday, a white cowboy-hat wearing Trump supporter at a North Carolina rally sucker-punched a young black protester and was charged with assault and battery.
Trump said later Friday on CNN he had “no regrets” about his tough talk, including a remark that protesters, in the old days, would be “carried out on stretchers.”
The black man sucker-punched at a that Trump rally could just as easily have been shot. Trump’s “supporters” are the “open-carry” sort of paranoids who shoot people when they feel “threatened.” And they feel threatened all the time. As the idiot who sucker-punched the black man said “He could have been ISSIS!”
A young black woman was surrounded and shoved around by Trump-goons at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky. A black protester was tackled, then punched and kicked by a group of white men as he curled up on the ground in Birmingham, Alabama. Immigration activists were shoved and stripped of their signs by a crowd in Richmond, Virginia. A Latino protester was knocked down and kicked by a Trump supporter in Miami.
Havoc rolled through a packed arena in Chicago after a Trump event was scuttled over threats of yet more violence.
Trump has encouraged violence pretending that he faces a threat. “We’ve had some violent people as protesters,” he said. “These are people that punch. These are violent people.” (No such videos have been found.)
Trump directs his followers paranoid anger against the Other. He will save them from the people who threaten to make them think. Trump promises a punch in the mouth to anyone who stands up to him and then says he’ll crack down on a free press by toughening libel laws. He’ll engage in the ethnic cleansing of 11 million people (“illegals”), stripping away citizenship of those seen as illegitimate members of the nation (children of the “illegals”). He promises his followers that he’ll commit war crimes to save them in the protection of the nation (killing the families of suspected terrorists). This has enhanced his stature among his supporters. They want blood. They want revenge on those who disagree with them.
White supremacist groups back Donald Trump. That the white power-types are drawn to Trump’s rise, and that he refused to disavow them speaks volumes.
Evangelicals who have lost the culture wars love Trump. The gun-carrying president of Liberty University endorsed Trump in the same news cycle as he asked his students to carry loaded weapons on campus to fight Muslims. Franklin Graham backs Trump.
Enter Fascism with the support of religious leaders who long for someone to impose morality. Under Trump the president of evangelical Gordon College won’t have to write to the president (as he did to President Obama) asking to be exempted from civil rights laws that protect gays. He can instead just ask the Trump goons to “take care” of “trouble makers.”
Under Trump, Wheaton College won’t have to worry about their image for suspending a black professor who stands for the civil rights of Muslims. Trump people will “take care of her” for them.
The Russian Orthodox Church backs Putin for the same reason Falwell Jr. and Graham back Trump: fundamentalist authoritarian religion is the natural enemy of democracy. Like Graham and Falwell, most Christians in Germany welcomed the rise of fascism in 1933. They had been persuaded by the statement on “positive Christianity” in Article 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, which read:
“We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not jeopardize the state’s existence or conflict with the manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The Party as such upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without tying itself confessionally to any one confession. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit at home and abroad and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only be achieved from within on the basis of the common good before individual good.”
Replace the words “Jewish-materialistic spirit” with “Muslim spirit” and you have a statement Graham would sign tomorrow.
This is the same language used by the Manhattan Declaration authors in their reaction against President Obama. Chuck Colson was a key author along with the far right theocrat Robert George.
Before Colson died, The Washington Post featured an article about Charles Colson, the Nixon-era hatchet-man turned Religious Right commanding general. Colson, the newspaper said, was training a cadre of fundamentalist true believers who will take their “biblical worldview” into every area of life, including American politics. “They are called Centurions, a name that conjures battle-hardened Roman soldiers,” the article reported. “They number 640, and their marching orders from their commander are clear — to expand Christ’s kingdom.”
Said Colson, speaking for millions of religious right fanatics: “What this country needs is a movement.” One of Colson’s colleagues explained the goal. Chip Mahon, a retired financial services executive who sat on the board of BreakPoint, the umbrella group for Colson’s various ministries, told The Post, “The point was to get more people to be like Chuck.”
It worked. There are a lot more people like Colson. They are at Trump rallies beating up protesters.
Back in 2007, Colson attacked Islam, calling the religion a “vicious evil.” Like Graham, Colson blasted Islam’s theocratic tendencies and insisted that Christianity, in contrast, promotes “free will.” Then Colson told the Southern Baptist pastors that their purpose should be “to take command and dominion over every aspect of life, whether it’s music, science, law, politics, communities, families, to bring Christianity to bear in every single area of life.”
Now they are trying to: their leader is Trump.
In June of 2009, Colson was the featured speaker at an Atlanta conference for the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, a group whose founder celebrated theocracy, defended slavery as biblical and expresses regret that the Confederacy lost the Civil War.
Then Colson joined forces with Roman Catholic, evangelical and Orthodox leaders to push a document called the “Manhattan Declaration,” which urged Americans to defer to conservative religious leaders to make all decisions for the United States.
Colson once criticized evangelical Christians for being inadequately militant, charging that too many of them “worship at the altar of the bitch goddess of tolerance.” He blasted the Girl Scouts for their sex education efforts, saying “we need to be on the lookout for radical, destructive worldviews everywhere – even behind the boxes of Girl Scout cookies.”
Like Colson, the German Evangelicals also viewed themselves as the pillar of German morality and culture and society, with a theologically grounded tradition. During the 1920s, a movement emerged within the German Evangelical Church called the Deutsche Christen, or “German Christians.”
Like Sarah Palin’s “Real Americans” the “German Christians” embraced many of the nationalistic and racial aspects of Nazi ideology. Once the Nazis came to power, this group sought the creation of a national “Reich Church” and supported a “nazified” version of Christianity, of the type introduced at Liberty University by Falwell asking students to carry loaded weapons to protect the campus against Muslims.
Fascism promised people deliverance from politics and immorality (can you imaging what Mussolini would have done with gay marriage?!) Violence was not just a means to an end, but the end in itself.
Trump did not invent this anti-politics mood, the evangelicals did when they decided that the government was their enemy, because of “allowing” gay marriage and abortion and the teaching of science.
But Trump has turned the evangelical “victimology” to his own needs. Ever since the election of Barack Obama the Republicans have refused to govern, in other words the GOP in Congress in fact did what the Manhattan Declaration called for: disregard elections in favor of a “Higher Law.” Mitch McConnell’s vow that his main purpose would be to deny the president a second term was only the first of many actions by which the Republicans have retreated from politics into revolution against democracy.
The Tea Party issued an absolute refusal to compromise on even the most essential issues, which were central to the economic survival of the government if not the entire country. The evangelicals who signed the Manhattan Deceleration vowed to not obey the law. Wheaton College went to court to protect “Christian rights” by denying women rights. Trump promises his followers to overturn democracy in favor of world order, imposed by violence and strength.
Certainty addicts have rejected the kind of religion that I advocate in my book WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace. They want strength and certainty, not nuance, paradox and the embrace of the “Other” that I write about. In my book I argue against the authoritarian approach to faith. Trump represents everything most evangelicals hate about such an approach.
Hitler always portrayed Germany and himself as a victim of the “Other” , as do the evangelicals today.
To present the invasion of Poland as a morally justifiable, defensive action, the German press played up “Polish atrocities,” referring to alleged discrimination and physical violence directed against ethnic Germans residing in Poland. Without Hitler’s “victimology” the Nazi rise would have not happened. Trump too portrays his followers as victims, of Hispanics, the Chinese, “Them” of all kinds and Muslims, and the US Government, now an enemy of the people against which we must fight. Why else do white supremacists horde guns?
Hitler would have understood Wheaton college’s fight against women, and Muslims, against anyone who dared to say Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Hitler could have only have succeeded in country that was thoroughly religiously behind him.
The first electoral breakthroughs enjoyed by the Nazis came in Protestant rural areas, such as Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, “…Subsequently the constituencies with the highest proportion of Nazi voters were in Protestant farming communities; and by 1932 the stream of peasant deserters to Hitler’s party had become a torrent.” (The “History Today” Magazine, October 1998, from the article entitled “WHO VOTED FOR THE NAZIS?)
Three of the most distinguished German Protestant theologians–Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanual Hirsch supported Hitler openly, as Falwell and Graham support Trump today. They deemed it the Christian thing to do.
Hirsch was a member of the Nazi party and of the SS. The Nazi state, he said, should be accepted and supported by Christians as a tool of God’s grace. To Althaus, Hitler’s coming to power was “a gift and miracle of God.” He taught that “we Christians know ourselves bound by God’s will to the promotion of National Socialism.”
This circle-the-wagons mood has most recently been evident again in the GOP’s refusal to even hold a hearing for a Scalia replacement on the Supreme Court. In other words, the Republican establishment, following the lead of the perennial “outsiders” of the evangelicals world, not Trump, broke politics as we know it. And they did it (as did the evangelicals) by delegitimizing the black president and the government in the style of the 1930s European fascists.
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| September 1933: German Protestant deacons meet in Hamburg to celebrate the centennial of their association. A Protestant pastor addresses his comrades in a speech entitled Deaconry as attack: “All this is Protestant deaconry: Service and fight. We greet you all as the SA of Jesus Christ and the SS of the Church, you brave … [fighters] of need, misery, despair and dereliction.” After the war the swastika was removed from most of the photographs of the meeting. Only a few survived unaltered, such as this one.Like the fascists the Trump supporters will blame the victim. When the first Trump-related killings happen, they will say it’s “self-defense” and use protest as “proof” that they must “get tough.” |
Evangelicals will applaud. They portray themselves as the “victims.” They will say that its time to “fight back.”
The evangelicals are already doing this when they strip rights from gays and women in the name of their “religious freedom.” They blame the victims(women and gays) for attacking them. The “attack” is the demand for civil rights by women and gays. This is the central issue Ted Cruz is using. This is what Wheaton College and Gordon College have “stood for” in their fight against women’s rights and gay rights.
Maybe the first Trump-related killing will be at Liberty University when a woman wearing a veil walks onto campus and is shot. “I thought she was a terrorist” might say the “open -carry” student or teacher who shoots her.
Trump sees himself as a victim. “You can’t even have a rally anymore in this country,” Trump complained on MSNBC shortly after the Chicago cancellation. He added: “There’s a lot of anger in the country, and it’s very sad to see.”
“I am a unifier,” he said.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace
Available now on Amazon
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