"Conservative" Republican Fascists & Christo-Fascisism

[twocoach]

"Over 40% of self-described evangelicals go to church once a year or less. "

"Holiday Christians" go to church on Christmas and Easter , enough to let their religious parents know they still go to church but not enough for it to actually mean anything.

[jfish26]

But Joe is old....and he stutters.

Been meaning to get to this.

Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore

The “cheerful prudery” of Ned Flanders has given way to vulgarity, misogyny, and partisanship. What does this mean for our witness?

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/20 ... acter.html

I guess Ned Flanders goes to strip clubs now.

Until this week, I hadn’t thought about the caricatured born-again Christian neighbor on the animated series The Simpsons in a long time. New York Times religion reporter Ruth Graham mentioned him and his “cheerful prudery” as examples—along with Billy Graham and George W. Bush—of what were once the best-known evangelical Christian figures in the country. Indeed, a 2001 Christianity Today cover story dubbed the character “Saint Flanders.” Evangelical Christians knew that Ned’s “gosh darn it” moral demeanor was meant to lampoon us, and that his “traditional family values” were out of step with an American culture this side of the sexual revolution.

But Ned was no Elmer Gantry. He actually aspired to the sort of personal devotion to prayer, Bible reading, moral chastity, and neighbor-love evangelicals were supposed to want, even if he did so in a treacly, ultra-suburban, middle-class North American way. As Graham points out, were he to emerge today, Flanders would face withering mockery for his moral scruples—but more likely by his white evangelical co-religionists than by his beer-swilling secular cartoon neighbors.

As Graham says, a raunchy “boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.” (This article you are reading right now represents something of this shift, as I spent upward of 15 minutes pondering how to quote Graham’s article without using the word boobs.)

Graham’s analysis is important for American Christians precisely because the shift she describes is not something “out there” in the culture but is instead driven specifically by the very same white evangelical subculture that once insisted that personal character—virtue, to use a now distant-sounding word the American founders knew well—matters.

Yes, part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.

Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here but that almost no secular media outlet would quote—and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepily coarse novel about a sex robot.

Wilson, of course, cultivates a cartoonishly “Aren’t we naughty?” vibe not representative of most evangelical Christians. But the problem is the way many other Christians respond: “Well, I wouldn’t say things the way he says them, but …” In the same way, they characterize as just “mean tweets” Donald Trump attacking those claiming to be sexually assaulted by him for their looks or war heroes for being captured or disabled people for their disabilities or valorizing those who attack police officers and ransack the Capitol as “hostages.”

What’s worse is that evangelical Christians—including some I listened to pontificate endlessly about Bill Clinton’s sexual immorality (pontifications with which I agreed then and agree now)—ridicule as pearl-clutching moralists those who refuse to do exactly what they condemned Clinton’s defenders for doing, namely, weighting policy agreement over personal character.

In the midst of the late-1990s Clinton scandal, a group of scholars issued a “Declaration Concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency,” which stated:

We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, among which are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused so long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy.

Those words seem far more distant than a Tocqueville quote now.

Our situation today would be understandable in a world in which words that come out of a person don’t represent what’s present in the heart, or in a world in which external conduct can be severed from internal character. The problem is that such an imagined world is one in which there is no Word of God. Jesus, after all, taught us the exact opposite, explicitly and repeatedly (Matt. 15:10–20; Luke 6:43–45).

Ironically, some of the very people who advance the myth of a “Christian America,” in which the American founders are retrofitted as conservative evangelicals, now embrace a view that both the orthodox Christians and the deist Unitarians of the founding era would, in full agreement, denounce. From TheFederalist Papers to the debates around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, virtually every Founding Father—even with all their differences on the specifics of federalism—would argue that constitutional procedures and policies alone were not enough to conserve a republic: Moral norms and expectations of some level of personal character were necessary.

Do these norms keep people of bad character from ascending to high office? Not at all. Hypocrites and demagogues have always been with us. What every generation of Americans have recognized until now, though, is that there is a marked difference between some leaders not living up to the character expected of them and leaders operating in a space where there aren’t expectations of personal character. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only later to find that he’s a tax fraud and an embezzler. That’s quite different from hiring an open fraud because you’ve concluded that only chumps obey the tax laws.

That’s because no leader of any community, association, or nation is an abstract collection of policies. We select leaders to make decisions about matters that haven’t happened yet, or that might not even be contemplated. A dentist who screams profanities at opponents and promises a practice built around “revenge and retribution” and the tearing down of all the norms of modern dentistry is not someone you should trust with a drill in your mouth. How much more so when it comes to entrusting a person with nuclear codes.

Moreover, what conservatives in general, and Christians in particular, once knew is that what is normalized in a culture becomes an expected part of that culture. Defending a president using his power to have sex with his intern by saying, “Everybody lies about sex” isn’t just a political argument; it changes the way people think about what, in the fullness of time, they should expect for themselves. This is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called “defining deviancy down.”

Louisianans defending their support for a Nazi propagandist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan because he’s allegedly “pro-life” is not just a “lesser of two evils” political transaction. The words pro-life Nazi—like the words pro-life sexual abuser—change the meaning of pro-life in the minds of an entire generation.

No matter what short-term policy outcomes you then “win,” you’ve ended up with a situation in which some people believe authoritarianism and sexual assault can be offset by the right “policy platform,” while others believe that opposing abuse of power or sexual anarchy must necessitate being opposed to “pro-life.” Either way you look at that, you lose.

What happens long-term with your policies in a post-character culture is important. What happens to your country is even more important. But consider also what happens to you. “If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.”

The Bible not only warns us about what character degradation—from immorality to boastfulness to heartlessness and ruthlessness—can do to the souls of those practicing such things, but also about the ruinous effect on those who “approve of those who practice them” (Rom. 1:32).

Ned Flanders is not, and never was, the Christian ideal. Personal piety and upstanding morality are not enough. But we should ask the question—if The Simpsons were written today and wished to make fun of evangelical Christians, would the caricature be someone inordinately devoted to his family, to prayer, to churchgoing, to kindness to his neighbors, to the awkward purity of his speech? Or would Ned Flanders be a screaming partisan, a violent insurrectionist, a woman-ogling misogynist, or an abusive pervert?

Would that change be because the secular world has grown more hostile to Christians? Perhaps. Or would it be because, when the secular world looks at the public face of Christianity, they wouldn’t dream to think now of Ned Flanders but only of one more leering face at the strip club?

If we are hated for attempted Christlikeness, let’s count it all joy. But if we are hated for our cruelty, our sexual hypocrisy, our quarrelsomeness, our hatefulness, and our vulgarity, then maybe we should ask what happened to our witness.

Character matters. It is not the only thing that matters. But without character, nothing matters.

[japhy]

YES, YES, eXactTly, they project on everyone else.....this guy gets it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gtPIy_eJ_s

I love that he goes full throttle Nazi in such a rubetasticly unselfaware way! This may be the single best clip of Rubepublican blatherpandering ever.

[Shirley]

YES, YES, eXactTly, they project on everyone else.....this guy gets it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gtPIy_eJ_s

I love that he goes full throttle Nazi in such a rubetasticly unselfaware way! This may be the single best clip of Rubepublican blatherpandering ever.

Thanks japhy, I think you just outed, doxxed me.

[ousdahl]

I love that he goes full throttle Nazi in such a rubetasticly unselfaware way!

Considering our previous exchanges on this topic Japhy, the only thing I can say at this point is,







lulz

[Shirley]

More of this:


Pastor Loran Livingston preaching truth about politics in the Church & Trump Bible.

[Overlander]

More of this:


Pastor Loran Livingston preaching truth about politics in the Church & Trump Bible.

Man, when Trump has lost the “we will believe any stupid fairy tail we are told” group…..

[jhawks99]

More of this:


Pastor Loran Livingston preaching truth about politics in the Church & Trump Bible.

Love it, wish he would have said similar five years ago.

[jfish26]

Where’s this in the PragerU course catalog?

Prager: "There's no secular argument against adult incest. Brother and sister want to make love, what's your argument? That they're going to produce mentally retarded offspring? That's nonsense. It takes many generations of inbreeding to do that."

https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/17 ... q_-8Yt1KMA

[KUTradition]

jfc

that sounds like randi spouting on shit about which he understands very little

[Sparko]

Where’s this in the PragerU course catalog?

Prager: "There's no secular argument against adult incest. Brother and sister want to make love, what's your argument? That they're going to produce mentally retarded offspring? That's nonsense. It takes many generations of inbreeding to do that."

https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/17 ... q_-8Yt1KMA

Who will run Egypt if not the microcephalics gifted us by Amun Ra?

[jfish26]

jfc

that sounds like randi spouting on shit about which he understands very little

Expertise-by-sound-bite will be our entire goddamn undoing.

[ousdahl]

I wonder if “expertise-by-sound-bite” in itself will be our undoing, or if that’s just a symptom of the bigger issue of…shall we say, tribalistic thinking

[Shirley]

Today In: Definitely not cults!

(Hey japhy! In case that tax cut you've been counting on doesn't come through, I have an idea you might like...)

Richard Marx
@richardmarx
Jan 12, 2021

A pastor...praying for a curse from God to befall American citizens who voted for the candidate who wasn’t a racist, pussy-grabbing, pornstar-banging fascist and could actually recite Bible passages. I know this is how you Christians roll but I’ll stick with atheism, thanks.

[Sparko]

Frustrating when God seems too distracted to smite the cult's enemies.

[Shirley]

Wasn't sure where to post this, but figured adding it to the Chiefs thread in the "Football" forum would be frowned upon. IMO, this guy does an excellent job of deconstructing the advice Butker had for the women graduating from Benedictine College, using religion to do so.

NFL Kicker Harrison Butker just went viral on the right with a commencement speech telling female students to ignore the promise of a professional career and be a wife and mother instead — and it quickly blew up in his face!

NFL Player Goes Viral ATTACKING WOMEN — And It QUICKLY BACKFIRES!

[jhawks99]

I disagree with about everything HB said. Unlike some, I do not think he should be traded/cut. Rice actually hurt people and is still part of the team.

[Shirley]

I disagree with about everything HB said. Unlike some, I do not think he should be traded/cut. Rice actually hurt people and is still part of the team.

Yeah, it would seem logical to think that if Rice (and other players) can get away with being a danger to society and general assholes, what Butker did pales x 1,000 in comparison. However, ~ half the population of the country might not necessarily think so.

I think he has every right to say whatever he likes as long as he's willing to suffer the consequences, (At least he didn't take a knee!), and I haven't taken any position as far as whether he should stay or go. But I also think the Chiefs, as a privately held co., have every right, (within the constraints of their employment contracts), to do whatever they think they need to do to be successful and protect their product and brand, whether that involves Rice, Butker, or whoever.

[jfish26]

I disagree with about everything HB said. Unlike some, I do not think he should be traded/cut. Rice actually hurt people and is still part of the team.

Yeah, it would seem logical to think that if Rice (and other players) can get away with being a danger to society and general assholes, what Butker did pales x 1,000 in comparison. However, ~ half the population of the country might not necessarily think so.

I think he has every right to say whatever he likes as long as he's willing to suffer the consequences, (At least he didn't take a knee!), and I haven't taken any position as far as whether he should stay or go. But I also think the Chiefs, as a privately held co., have every right, (within the constraints of their employment contracts), to do whatever they think they need to do to be successful and protect their product and brand, whether that involves Rice, Butker, or whoever.

At some point, though, you can't have the Brady Morningstars of the world getting the DUIs.

The second (?) most famous guy on the team is dating the most famous woman (?) in the world. Who happens to be an outspoken lefty.

The fuck good does it do to have the kicker lighting brushfires that can very foreseeably turn into locker-room-melting conflagrations?

[Shirley]

I disagree with about everything HB said. Unlike some, I do not think he should be traded/cut. Rice actually hurt people and is still part of the team.

Yeah, it would seem logical to think that if Rice (and other players) can get away with being a danger to society and general assholes, what Butker did pales x 1,000 in comparison. However, ~ half the population of the country might not necessarily think so.

I think he has every right to say whatever he likes as long as he's willing to suffer the consequences, (At least he didn't take a knee!), and I haven't taken any position as far as whether he should stay or go. But I also think the Chiefs, as a privately held co., have every right, (within the constraints of their employment contracts), to do whatever they think they need to do to be successful and protect their product and brand, whether that involves Rice, Butker, or whoever.

At some point, though, you can't have the Brady Morningstars of the world getting the DUIs.

The second (?) most famous guy on the team is dating the most famous woman (?) in the world. Who happens to be an outspoken lefty.

The fuck good does it do to have the kicker lighting brushfires that can very foreseeably turn into locker-room-melting conflagrations?

Yeah, calling Taylor and Travis out by inference in the speech seems beyond tone deaf, and like an blatant attempt to take his notoriety to another level, well above his grade.