The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up.
For thus saith the Lord God; The city that went out by a thousand shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall leave ten, to the house of Israel.
For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:
But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to naught. Seek the Lord, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel. ~Amos 5:1-6
"Christianity Will Have Power." Thus said Donald Trump at on January 23rd, 2016 at Dordt University, a small Evangelical Christian college in Iowa.
Let me teach you the Truth, as the Baptists taught me;
If you need the President for your religion to have power, it doesn't have power and indeed it should not. If you need the power of the President or the State for your religion to survive, much less thrive, you probably need a better religion.
If you need the power of the State behind your belief systems to feel good about yourself, you probably need better beliefs, and some therapy.
And no, you can't really say you're "Strong" in those beliefs if you demand that every rock and tree and creature, that the world itself, shout your beliefs back at you.
Jesus Christ, when questioned by Pontius Pilate, said "My Kingdom is not of this world" and so it was not, and is not, and never shall be.
According to what I was taught, when you start mixing Christianity and the World, the World does not become more Christian, Christianity becomes more worldly, Christianity becomes more sinful. The ancestors of these Dutch Evangelicals in Iowa were Dutch Calvinists who fled the Kingdom of the Netherlands because the government at the time was putting the power of the State behind a different denomination, and demanding the people worship that way.
This against the backdrop of the fading of the Enlightenment, in a Europe in which the dust from the Reformation...the formation of Protestantism itself...had hardly settled. These people's ancestors fled a continent rife with theocratic states, or those that aspired to be. I would point out the hypocrisy of these people, but it'd be a waste of time. These people don't know they're being hypocrites. If they knew, they wouldn't care, any more than an old gray dog knows or cares that he's licking his balls in the middle of the front yard on a Sunday morning.
I find it funny, all things considered, that the actual Netherlands is and for a long time has been diverse and relatively secular and tolerant...in fact, it's that very tolerance that birthed the claque of hyper-religious ninnies that were these people's ancestors...and is a nation that throughout its history has lived and died by global engagement and trade, being a small country, it kind of has to.
Funny enough, Dutch tolerance sheltered the Pilgrims long before that, which spawned a number of Dutch copycat sects (although it's really more complicated than that, there's the short version) who became the ancestors of people who settled in places like Iowa and western Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and turned the politics of those places, more often than not, into a mess of reactionary stupidity.
Generally speaking, as both the American and European historical experience demonstrates, the reason that Christianity doesn't have power is precisely because once it gets power it immediately shows that it doesn't deserve it. Christianity, given power, immediately hands power to fools who cheat on their wives, who disrespect and lie to their followers, and who tow a pious-sounding line in public but are known as womanizing drunkards surrounded by scandal in private.
And the people in the pews, the people in the tiny farming towns, the people who claim to be the good and pure and true religious folk of the land...are by and large Okay with that, every single time...yet somehow it always manages to bring dishonor and lay low the entire nation later on. It's almost like the good and pure and true religious folk of the land are themselves, in reality, none of the above. Once they are given power or the social impetus to conduct themselves as they wish, the first thing to go out the window is always the desire or need to conduct themselves as their Savior commands.
It's almost like none of them believe in any of that stuff, anyway.
Usually, Evangelical piety lasts exactly as long as it takes for them to get around somebody who will let those "standards" slip, who will not call it out for whatever reason when they start looking for technicalities, and who will simply enjoy it right along with them when they crumple that list of rules up and throw it in the trash can.
And that fully includes Christians with different beliefs or standards, who then become both rationalizations if somebody calls it out and pawns for later use.
I'm here to tell you that from my own experience what such people really believe in is going to the bar on Friday and Saturday night, partying it up and singing drunkenly, to the point where in the morning they get sick...and then on Sunday morning at church their face is buried in their hands as they abase themselves before the Altar, begging God for "Forgiveness" for what they really wanted to do anyway and the fact that they care more about having a good time than they do about following His Commandments, or even those of their own local Baptist church, which strongly discourages the consumption of Alcohol.
And I'm here to tell you, a substantial part of these people's obsession with guns is their desire to be able to simply shoot anybody who points this out, which makes them not unlike the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan who American media paints as pious Muslims waging holy war...but who are often hated by observant Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan precisely because their actual habits lean towards buggering little boys and doing mass quantities of drugs, then shooting anybody who claims too loudly that their shouts of "Allah Akbar!" may be insincere.
In fact, these people's harsh Christian religiosity...just like the Islam of the Taliban...seems to exist for Three Reasons;
#1 It makes them feel good about themselves to have and live by a harsh tribal code. The more exclusive the tribe, the better it feels to be part of the "In Group."
#2 They can use that harsh tribal code as a club with which to beat their enemies, real and imagined. The more people they can use the rules to maneuver into the "Out Groups" the better.
#3 It feels really good when, either secretly or openly, they break that harsh tribal code. and they long to have the power to do so openly, because it feels good. Because then you can have all the sinfulness of the people you despise and you still get to claim how righteous you are!
And the fourth (Always Unwritten) rule which underlies all the others is that if it feels good, do it! (But don't get caught until you have the power to just laugh off the rules.)
Not to be crude, or anything, but I have to wonder just how many of the girls in the small Iowa towns around Dordt University are exactly the sort of Evangelical virgins whose claims of virginity enthusiastically ignore all the blowjobs they've given or the boys who've sodomized them, because that's not really sex, is it?
(I may know a thing or two about these kind of girls, going back decades, maybe.)
I can't even tell you how many Evangelicals I've known, down through the years, whose Evangelicalism only became known at the start of an argument about politics or religion or social issues, and which went immediately back under the bushel at the conclusion of said argument.
It's almost like nothing really matters to these people, past their desire to have something to beat others over the head with.
It's almost like their latent desire for fascism, more recently become an open and poignant longing, especially when people like the Iowa Evangelicals profiled in the article say they don't like or respect Trump, for someone who is like them who does observe their religion to be given the reigns of power.
And yet, watch exactly how these people talk about Mike Pence, that tells you everything you need to know and I'm not going to spoil it, you have to read the article.
It's almost like what they really want, all they really want, is somebody who will legitimize their desire to hurt other people, and make them feel righteous for doing it.
But I spent much of my life as a Christian. I know what the Bible says about such people, I know that when they stand before their God and are judged, they will answer "Why? Lord, did not we do all these things in Your name?"
And He will answer that they did no such things in His name.
Whose name they really did those things in, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
I'm not going to tell you what happens next. If you lack the intellectual curiosity to read it yourself or the knowledge to know what the answer is, that's on you.
But it doesn't end well for the fake Christians.
It turns out that in the end, God is not really Donald Trump.
And it's an indictment of us all, against our society, that people think their culture, their fear, their harsh conservatism, their homophobia, their racism, their self-soiling fears of the Other, their terrible social beliefs, or their Whiteness is Christianity.
Because I know what I was taught, and that ain't it.
It's a failure of generations that it's come to this.
We have to live with that. But it's on us to fix it.
Or at least show up in enough numbers to vote these people out of power so we can start fixing it.
Vote.
Unless you want these people running the world.
Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,
Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:
That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.
They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.
For as much therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.
For I know your manifold transgressions and I know your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.
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