Dominionists in the United States

[Icarus]

Trump has played the christian card to the hilt. He has lied to and conned ordinary people into completely believing that he is the Messiah. A frighteningly large number of US citizens have drunk the Kool Aid.

In general the Trumpers are the less educated, and more easily beguiled. Sad to say that they outnumber the more cerebral citizenry.  Worse still, the bible believer, gullible hillbillies, can and do, vote.

[Asmodean]

In general the Trumpers are the less educated, and more easily beguiled.

The first part is typical enough for a populist candidate - the second is typical enough for people. The likes of extinction rebellion, The Woke(tm), the academia and, of course, the faithful, drink their Kool Aid too.

Being intellectually (or otherwise) gifted does not bar entry to any Kool Aid society, as I see it.

[Icarus]

In general the Trumpers are the less educated, and more easily beguiled.

Being intellectually (or otherwise) gifted does not bar entry to any Kool Aid society, as I see it.

Quite so, however the educated are less likely to fall for the con jobs that the pols and the preachers put forth.

[Asmodean]

Mmmmh... It sounds as though it should be true, and yet... It may or may not be - depends on what the preacher in question is peddling.

The second one ventures beyond the exact sciences, educated people get about as full of shit as everyone else, at least in my opinion, though they tend to be more eloquent about it.

A polished turd is still a turd, unfortunately, and smells as turdy beneath that shiny surface.

[Icarus]

Part of being educated is the ability and propensity for weighing alternatives. Perhaps the term educated needs a finer definition.

Taking a flier here........... round number statistics suggest that the less educated are also less rational.  The US state of Alabama is among the less educated. They have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest divorce rate, the largest rate of incarceration,the highest rate of religiosity, and a few more highest rates of not doing well.

The state of New York has an upper division record for educating their citizenry. The murder rate in New York state is five per one hundred thousand. That is pretty serious but Alabama has a murder rate of 15 per hundred thousand. Do we dare entertain the notion that education, thus a higher degree of sophistication, or a better understanding of risk/gain ratio, has anything to do with those statistics?..........but wait a moment......New York is far less religious than Alabama, or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or Louisiana. Could that play into the murder rates too?

Disclaimer:  Alabama, perennially, has the the most successful college football teams in America. Mississippi and Louisiana are not far behind in college football power..........one must wonder about the priorities. 

   

 

[Dark Lightning]

All you need is to be big, strong and stupid (mostly) to play football. Remedial classes are provided for the culturally educationally deprived. I paraphrased that from a tune some of you guys may recognize...  Left some clues, though.

[Asmodean]

Part of being educated is the ability and propensity for weighing alternatives. Perhaps the term educated needs a finer definition.

Perhaps it does. Here, I'm speaking in terms of people generally having completed a level of education beyond 10 years of what is compulsory in Norway. Otherwise, we pretty much have "no" uneducated people, aside from some who come from abroad and the discussion turns "terminologically meaningless." "The uneducated are more likely to..." "-Who cares? 'nobody's' uneducated."

Taking a flier here........... round number statistics suggest that the less educated are also less rational.  The US state of Alabama is among the less educated. They have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest divorce rate, the largest rate of incarceration,the highest rate of religiosity, and a few more highest rates of not doing well.

Mmh... Very "round" (in the sense of sweepingly broad) numbers, as you put it, those. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's not a variable in a much larger consideration, but do let us examine the issue more closely because interesting.

In the case of Alabama, what is Huntsville contributing to their murder statistics? Now, what is Hillbillyville with its 100 stereotypically-related people who "can't even read" contributing? Because it may well be that the murder rate in comparatively well-educated Huntsville is orders of magnitude that of Hillbillyville, which last saw a murder in 1903. Of course, if we zoom in again, perhaps there are poor areas in Huntsville, dominated by gangs, and that's where the discrepancy comes from. In fact, perhaps the kids of Hillbillyvillians move to Huntsville, find gang-related work and drive the statistics up there, while Hillbillyville remains "quiet?"

Disclaimer: Alabama is a hugely diverse state - something that is not being reflected well in my illustrative example. I picked Huntsville because it's Alabama's "tech center," while Hillbillyville is a hypothetical "dying town" in the "middle of nowhere."

The state of New York has an upper division record for educating their citizenry. The murder rate in New York state is five per one hundred thousand. That is pretty serious but Alabama has a murder rate of 15 per hundred thousand. Do we dare entertain the notion that education, thus a higher degree of sophistication, or a better understanding of risk/gain ratio, has anything to do with those statistics?..........but wait a moment......New York is far less religious than Alabama, or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or Louisiana. Could that play into the murder rates too?

As rates go, 0,005 is reasonably comparable to 0,015.

Let us not get diverted by that observation too much though, because you do pose a very interesting question. I think that to say that religion specifically is a "deciding" (Or, significantly co-deciding) variable here would be "just off-center." ("Not-wrong," as I usually put it) I think it comes down to held values, rather than the professed/institutional(-ised) ones. Why is a life in Alabama statistically "cheaper" than one in New York, which is in turn statistically cheaper than one in Torsken, a fishing "middle of nowhere" here in Norway?

Disclaimer:  Alabama, perennially, has the the most successful college football teams in America. Mississippi and Louisiana are not far behind in college football power..........one must wonder about the priorities.

It's nice to not be the only one to disclaim.

[Recusant]

Correlation and perhaps some causation. 




First, get their Cyrus back into office, then on to the Seven Mountains . . .

For reference: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (PDF) | Heritage Foundation

"Decoding Project 2025's Christian Nationalist language" | Salon

In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, characters engage in doublespeak, a way of distorting language to obscure its true meaning. Christian Nationalists have mastered their own doublespeak. Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation's manifesto for transforming our government into a Christo-fascist regime.

Christian Nationalists are taught to be "in the world but not of it." This means they are called to live alongside the world's non-Christians, but they are called to remain separate and apart from secular behavior and influence. One way they attempt to remain apart is with language. They speak in a language I call Evangelicalese. I grew up in the world of Christian Nationalism. Evangelicalese was my second language.

By studying Project 2025 and the specific language Christian Nationalist politicians use, we can translate the words they say into what those words really mean to them. A Christian Nationalist's use of a word or phrase may mean something very different to someone outside their community. It is vital to grasp what Christian Nationalists mean when they say things. because they deploy Evangelicalese to hide extreme positions in plain sight.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading Project 2025.

On pornography

Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
- Project 2025, [page 5 of PDF]

To many media outlets, this was a throwaway paragraph. Why would anyone make more of it? The average American understands pornography generally includes mediums like adult websites, adult films, fetish sites and similar.

To a Christian Nationalist, pornography means those things, but it also means a lot more.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has called homosexuality pornography. Oklahoma state representative Tom Woods has deemed transgenderism to be filth, a stand-in word for pornography. A Florida school pulled images of Michelangelo's David because parents considered it to be pornographic.

Is an artist who paints a nude artwork a pornographer? What about a romance author who writes racy love scenes? Or a columnist like Dan Savage who pens sex advice? A Christian Nationalist's definition of pornography goes far beyond what the rest of the country considers to be porn. This difference matters because they intend to imprison creators and consumers of anything they consider to be pornography.

[. . .]

Orwell understood that the manipulation of language is an insidious tool of autocracies. Christian Nationalists have been working for decades to pollute the discourse as a means to power and control. The future of American democracy depends upon understanding what Christian Nationalists mean when they say things. It is vital to drill down into their doublespeak, or we may find ourselves living in a dystopian reality created in the image of their Christian Nationalist faith.

[Link to full article.]

[Dark Lightning]

^ Those people have issues, and I hope that they don't prevail.

[Tank]

Speechless.

[Icarus]

The orange one is at it again (still). I think that he may have a clever scam with his Trump bibles.

https://religiondispatches.org/trumps-god-bless-the-usa-bible-is-no-joke/?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=daily

[Recusant]

This thread is only four years old--I've been watching the progress of the Dominionists for at least a decade, but . . .

"It's a Good Time to Start Worrying About Christian Nationalism" | Mother Jones

In response to rising concern among liberals and others about the spread of Christian nationalism, conservative voices have been pressing a counterattack, claiming all this fretting is just lefty hysteria from secularists who are not willing to acknowledge the role of Christianity in American society and who want to brand all politically active Christians as extremists. Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation published an article declaring that Christian nationalism is a term "mostly used as a smear against conservative Christians who defend the role of religion in American public life" and that the "lack of standard definition allows critics to bundle evils like white supremacy and racism with standard conservative views on marriage, family, and politics." More recently, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, addressing liberal unease, wrote, "Today's religious conservatives are mostly just normal American Christians doing normal American Christian politics, not foot soldiers of incipient theocracy." He added, "It's not clear to me that secular liberals should really fear Christian nationalism more today than in 2000 or 1980."

Really?

By now, you've heard of Project 2025, the enterprise established by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing outfits to both set a radical-right agenda for a possible second Trump term and recruit Dear Leader loyalists for government posts in that administration. As I've noted, this venture has cooked up plans and measures with an authoritarian bent. It also has been preparing to inject Christian nationalist ideas into a Trump 2.0 presidency. One example from the Project 2025 handbook: "maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family." That does sounds a bit Gilead-ish.

The anti-anti-Christian nationalists' effort to cast libs as the-sky-is-falling worrywarts is either naive or a purposeful effort to deflect attention from this threat to civil society. And though it usually is best to avoid dependence on one data point, allow me to zero in on a single tweet that appeared recently to highlight the danger.

Following President Joe Biden's recent State of the Union speech, William E. Wolfe, a midlevel official at the Pentagon and the State Department during the Trump administration and a Christian nationalism advocate, tweeted out his response. Here it is in full:

My response to the #SOTU:

We need to see the deeper spiritual realities at play. This ain't just a political fight, it's a spiritual war. Heaven and Hell are real. Demons exist.

And there are two main demons being worshipped in America right now:

1) Molech, who demands child sacrifice (abortion)

2) Baphomet, whose demonic goat-like representation is gender-bending (LGBTQIA+) The "Equality Act" and "Reproductive Rights" aren't just "policies" that the radical Left/Democrats support

 They are sacraments, acts of worship to their demon gods

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12 

It's time for Christians to call on America to repent of our idol worship of demons and return to the One True Living God and His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ

Maybe God raise up more idol smashers for our days yet.

This tweet illustrates a basic component of Christian nationalism: spiritual warfare. That's the notion that all that transpires in our world is a manifestation of the mammoth and eternal clash between God and Satan. The tussle over abortion is not an argument between fellow citizens with conflicting views on bodily autonomy or the question of when life begins; it is a battle between Jesus and Lucifer. Consequently, those who support reproductive freedom are demons or, at the least, in league with or controlled by demons.

[. . .]

Now why should we care about the radical view of this one fellow? Wolfe is a close associate of Russell Vought, who was budget director for the Trump White House and now is president of the Center for Renewing America, one of the right-wing organizations behind Project 2025. As Politico recently reported, "Vought's beliefs over time have been informed by his relationship with Wolfe. The two spent time together at Heritage Action, a conservative policy advocacy group. And Vought has praised their yearslong partnership. 'I'm proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,' he posted on X, then Twitter, in January 2023."

Wolfe, who is now the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership (which battles liberalism within the Southern Baptist Convention) and who has advocated ending sex education in schools, surrogacy, and no-fault divorce, is far from a rando. He's intimately tied to the fellow who is the architect of the next possible Trump administration and who has been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff for Trump.

[Continues . . .]