With thanks to my buddy Dave, who is able to put it into words we can all understand. (Without the actual NYT article…..)

RE: The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’ (NYT - 4/6/22)

 

FYI, the article below from today’s Times – profiling the increasingly volatile mix of reactionary, far-right Christianity with the virulent ethno-nationalism of Trumpism.

 

As tens of millions of Trumpists fervently believe in QAnon (a phantasmagorical hate-cult which was concocted literally out of thin air by a handful of anonymous provocateurs just a few years ago), it’s a no-brainer for Trump and his fascistic cabal to hijack the hearts and minds of the majority of the much larger population of evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic and other fundamentalist Christians (who worship blind Faith over facts) to serve as his Red Guards in spearheading his Manichaean war to “Make America Great Again”.  (Yes, the Venn diagram of QAnon believers and so-called “Christians” has a substantial overlap, but the cross-pollination between them is inflammably synergistic).

 

We’re on the road to Margaret Atwood’s fictional Gilead (a theocratic glove cloaking the brutal fist of fascism*) – unless the majority of relatively sane and rational Americans rise up en masse to vigorously defend the Enlightenment values of tolerance, reason, scientific inquiry, cultural diversity, representative democracy, individual rights (aka Civil Rights) and the strict separation of state and church – which are all fundamental to our modern, secular, Western civilization, as well as being at the core of our Constitution.  

 

The alternative is atavistic, tribal Christo-fascism.  And its rabid, brainwashed stormtroopers are already massed on the doorstep of our pluralistic and tolerant society, smashing against the gates with battering rams of Medieval-levels of ignorance, intolerance, bigotry, hatred and fear.  The frightening dimensions of this profoundly illiberal contagion metastasizing within our Body Politic makes the short-lived Red Scare of McCarthyism seventy years ago look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison.

 

*Fascism: n.  A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocraticgovernment headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

 

-       Merriam-Webster online dictionary

 

Dave Hardy

________________________

The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’

Rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger over vaccines and the 2020 election.