• One thing that sometimes happens is this: A clueless but sincerely devout boss who has little experience with those outside of their particular sectarian community (even despite their having many employees, customers, and clients who do not share that specific faith) will use official work communications to express their sectarian faith. They will send all employees, customers, and clients an email on Easter weekend saying “He is risen!” not understanding, or bothering to care, that not all of their employees, customers, and clients are Christians. Or they will send an email on Friday wishing them all “A blessed time in church on Saturday,” not understanding or bothering to care that not all of the people they’re communicating with are Seventh Day Adventists.
Those bosses shouldn’t do that. It can be a violation of the religious liberty of their employees, creating potentially costly legal liabilities. It can harm their relationship with customers and clients. In some cases, depending on the context and the specifics of the sectarian message, it can be illegal. In all cases, it’s just rude and careless and un-neighborly, even though it comes from a motive that is, mostly, a sincere and devout expression of their personal faith.
Another thing that sometimes happens is this: A business CEO or a political appointee cynically expresses a particular sectarian message through official channels to deliberately blur the lines between their personal faith and official, institutional policy. This bullies every employee, customer, client, and constituent who does not share that particular sectarian faith into accepting that sectarian faith as dominant — with the implied threat of loss of employment or loss of services for those who do not comply. And if anyone objects or resorts to the obvious and legitimate legal responses of suing, the cynical boss can exploit those lawsuits for political gain as evidence that they are being “persecuted for their faith.”
If the boss’s disingenuous religious posturing aligns with a majority religion, this maneuver may win them a measure of support by appealing to the majority faith using religious minorities as a scapegoat. So the boss, who in this case doesn’t give a rip about religion, will do something like requiring all Jewish employees to attend a Christmas party to “celebrate the birth of Christ, the Messiah the Jews rejected and manipulated the innocent Romans into killing,” knowing that when those Jewish employees complain about such an egregious, deliberate offense it will give them the chance to complain about “anti-Christian persecution” and about how those evil Jews are trying to cancel Christmas.
These are two different things that sometimes happen due to vastly different motives. But they are also the same thing. The actions of the clueless, but sincerely devout boss in the first scenario are indistinguishable from the actions of the cynical, malicious, impious boss in the second scenario. For employees, clients, customers, and constituents, the experience of the first scenario is identical to the experience of the second.
I do not know Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. I have no special insight into her character or background, and thus I do not know if she is being an abusive religious bully and a big old jerk because she’s a clueless dimwit who doesn’t understand that people who do not share her precise sectarian views exist and matter, or if she is being an abusive religious bully and big old jerk because she’s a calculating, amoral demagogue who sees this behavior as a way of consolidating political power and the corrupt wealth MAGA bestows on those who wield it. But it’s one or the other, and neither one is good.
• Miguel Petrosky and Matthew Distefano both grew up in evangelical churches that emphasized Rapture folklore and dispensationalist “End Times” mythologies and both have written essays about realizing, years, later, that they were taking those lessons more seriously than the preachers who were giving them.
Distefano offers “An Evangelical Case for Trump as the Antichrist,” noting how the president checks off many more of the boxes on the checklist than even Nicolae Carpathia does. Petrosky discusses Carpathia — the Antichrist in the Left Behind series — as an example of how the idea of a “European Antichrist” reflects and instills “a historical evangelical fear and disdain towards Western Europe itself.”
On a related note, I haven’t listened to this podcast episode, but Tripp Fuller’s summary here of “the four stages of Antichrist theology” is spot-on:
Stage one, the generic concept in John’s letters — an amorphous spirit of the age. Stage two, you give it the definite article and a face. Stage three, you smash every bad guy in the entire Bible together like Play-Doh remnants — Daniel’s beasts, the man of lawlessness in Thessalonians, the beast from the sea in Revelation, Gog and Magog — into one Voltron-level super-villain. And stage four, which is where Peter Thiel lives … you take everything in stage three and invert it. The Roman Empire becomes good. Greta Thunberg becomes suspect. The Pope becomes suspect. The resistance to technological progress is the Antichrist.
I’d add a Stage 3.1 in there, in which pop-culture and mass media latch onto this constructed “Antichrist” mythology as a storytelling premise, after which the innovations, embellishments, and flourishes of their popular stories are absorbed into the official “doctrine.” So the “Antichrist” that End Times preachers talk about is not just a Voltron built from disparate, disconnected parts of the Bible (Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, 1 Thessalonians, etc.), but a figure based partly on the Bible and partly also on things like the screenplay for The Omen
• CharisMAGA pastor Mark Burns has said, over and over, that the gold-leaf statue of Donald Trump blessed and prayed over by a delegation of court evangelicals, is not a golden calf. It’s fun to watch Burns stumble his way into recreating both sides of the arguments from the iconoclastic controversy without realizing it. Burns basically winds up arguing that he and the other pastors there were not worshipping a false idol but were, instead, venerating the icon of a saint.
The veneration of a golden statue of a wanna-be tyrant seems almost like a deliberate attempt to confirm Distefano’s “Evangelical Case for Trump as the Antichrist.” The guy seems to be looking at what Tripp Fuller calls the “Voltron” mash-up of all the wicked tyrants of the Bible and using that as an instruction manual — like he’s going “What would Nebuchadnezzar or Antiochus or Caesar do?”
And if Trump ultimately goes full Nebuchadnezzar and winds up wild and feral, grazing like an ox until his fingernails grow into talons, we’ll have folks like Mark Burns out here saying that it confirms his status as God’s chosen leader. And Brooke Rollins will be retweeting all of that nonsense from the official Agriculture Department accounts.
• The goofy depravity of right-wing CharisMAGA televangelicalism is almost impossible to describe because any attempt to portray it accurately and truthfully will seem like hyperbolic mockery. See, for example, the sordid scandals, cynical money-grabbing, and sheer foolishness that is/was “Daystar” — the TV “ministry” hub founded and run by the late Marcus Lamb and his wife, Joni Lamb. Joni Lamb died last week at the age of 65 and her obituary/rap-sheet is something else.
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