Who Is Republican Jesus? (American Revelation XI, Part One.)

Imam: Because you do not believe in God does not mean God does not believe in you.

Riddick: Think someone could spend half their life in a slam with a horse bit in their mouth and not believe? Think he could start out in some liquor store trash bin with an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and not believe? You got it all wrong, holy man. I absolutely do believe in God... And I absolutely hate the fucker. ~From the film Pitch Black.

22 years ago this week, my ex-wife and I split up.

Over that weekend, over the course of about 48 hours; She dove down a rabbit hole of Pentecostal woo woo and "Spiritual Warfare" crap that, so far as I know, has yet to abate even now.

Along the way, before I moved away and finally just stopped talking to the bitch, I was treated to all type of spectacle and stupidity. Not to mention all the times during the course of getting divorced that we were going to discuss "Serious business" and she ended up conning me into having sex with her instead. And, it was normal for me to pick her up from church for this type of shit.

So I'd get to stand there for 20 minutes and get treated to watching people act out and do dumb shit, and then try to one-up each other doing dumb shit. This isn't religion, it's Jackass meets the Old Time Gospel Hour.

The sober, serious old WASP-y shits of days gone by, like Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, etc. have been fully replaced by the caricature roadshow antics of Jim Bakker with his Prosperity Gospel lies, open-secret gay lovers and mass financial fuckery. Except that Jim Bakker has been replaced by Donald Trump who doesn't even believe in God.

Think about that for a second.

Trump appears to be morphing not so much into the 2024 Presidential candidate...but the demented, flabby, grievance-addled godhead of this fucking bullshit!

Spiritual Warfare, is fundamentally a belief in trying to bullshit God into being your Big Stick and shaping the Universe according to your will. It was a driving force behind the 1/6 insurrection. It's been a critical part of the Republican Party's abandoning of secular Trumpism that plays "Just the tip" with the Prosperity Gospel bullshitters and lurching into full-on fascism and Christian Nationalist horseshit.

And I'm here to tell you, it never stops. You can't please these fucking people and no matter how long you've been cultivating them as a constituency, giving them stuff, what the fuck ever...it doesn't matter. Literally one wrong move, do one goddamn thing for yourself, in your own interest, that doesn't tickle their ears or feed their hate and religiosity and absolutely nothing else you will ever do again matters.

The Way is, in effect, so "Straight And Narrow" that no one can stay on it, and there are endless paths to heresy and being cast into the Outer Darkness.

Witness the horseshit being said about Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis being christened "Meatball Ron" by Trump...and the fact that Trump himself has faded in the last couple of years. I keep trying to warn motherfuckers, these goddamned nuts aren't going to be happy until they find somebody way worse than Trump ever was.

And it will only, ever, get worse.

Unless the rest of us stop it, and make these fucking people stop doing this shit.

These fucking people don't want a leader, they want the Magic Mirror On The Wall to tell them how great they are and give them stuff, while taking it away from other people. They could give a damn about Christianity, or if you're a Christian. They see only potential victims and excuses they can make. These fucking people just want to kill you and take your stuff. Or, better yet, they want to get somebody else to do it for them.

Up to and including a belief that if they "pray" hard enough, they can manipulate God into reshaping America, the world and the Universe to their liking.

And this, they call "Godliness."

It's funny how, at the end of the day, any day...the animating forces of this "Christian" so-called "Movement" are always...literally always...bigotry and hate.

I've studied this stuff for years, mostly because I had to, for survival. I was an admin on a forum for survivors of it. I didn't know that John Hagee was an organizer for George Wallace in 1968. It tracks, though. 

And I'll note that George Wallace repented of, publicly apologized for and made amends for his racism by appointing record numbers of Black people to the Alabama state government in his later terms. I should also note that Wallace was effectively persona non grata in the national "Conservative" movement by the 1980's.

Note: George Wallace repented. John Hagee apparently has not. In point of fact he's only gotten worse, redirecting his public animus from Black people to Jews and LGBT people was only camouflage...well, it was until these fucking people discovered they could publicly hate all of the above and not lose any political influence or supporters. Bigotry is bigotry, pure and simple. You can bet if these sons of bitches abandon a proclaimed hatred without action to show they've changed, it's just a tactic.

And I'm here to tell you it works the same way every time you run this whole "Christian Nationalist" experiment. Apartheid South Africa was Christian Nationalist, the Segregated South was Christian Nationalist. The Confederacy...and the modern neo-Confederate wannabes who descend from it...are explicitly Christian Nationalist.

This crap never has one fucking thing to do with Christianity as outlined in the Word. It's never about making the world any better, or protecting life.

Never.

And in terms of government and social policy it's always about making rich white men richer, and everybody else poorer and having a worse quality of life.

But hey, here's some racism and empty religiosity and some feel-good hocus pocus tricks to make you feel good about yourself, and when that stopped working it became "Here's some alcohol and tobacco so you forget that we burned down your communities." When that stopped working the next step was Opioids and overdoses to the point where it became a national crisis that devastated the Christian Nationalist rednecks and their communities more than most...and all Republicans did was emphatically, enthusiastically, find ways to cash the fuck in.

And now between that, mass shootings and the mishandling of the COVID-19 epidemic these fucking people have circled back around to political authoritarianism, straight bigotry and increasingly empty religious hokum to see if they can hook in anybody they didn't get the first time.

And if they succeed at this, it will never stop.

We have to step up and stop it, before it starts.

By the mid-1990's the American religious right started making inroads into the former Soviet Union. They didn't always succeed in the same way they have in Russia proper and in some parts of America because of different cultural contexts (Evangelicals in the Baltic States and Ukraine are very anti-Russian Nationalism, for example.)

But it only took 30 or so years to go from Godless Communism to literally building Cathedrals to the Army and the State...and once that happened, Russia's version of These Fucking People was literally one crisis away from re-Sovietization. 

We're all lucky the Ukrainians have fought as hard and as well as they have and rallied the world against this bullshit.

But it's like I've said, these people are relentless. Like a ferret in a cage...they'll never stop raging and working away at finding a way out of their own trap. That's where Republicans are in America right now, and where Putin and Russia are vs. the state of affairs in Europe and economic access to the West. 

The only answer, both here and globally, is to strip Christianity and Whiteness of all of its social privilege...and then how many of these assholes would claim either after that, for how long?

I think, in the end, you'd find that the people who really believe in Christ and some form of political conservatism are African Americans, Black and Brown people in the Caribbean, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. This despite the fact that in the later 20th century, Communism invested vast amounts of resources in trying to create the exact opposite...and white folks there or in places like Ukraine who share their daily conditions or at least lack of worldly power...and historically downtrodden groups everywhere else.

Because that's what Christianity came from and was supposed to be about. Jesus wasn't rich and powerful, he was an itinerant carpenter and Rabbi from a then-economically depressed town. It was never intended to be the anchor of Empire.

Read the works of contemporary historians like Josephus, nobody gave a fuck about Jesus Christ at the time, He barely merits mention and there's a lot of debate about the authenticity of what mention there is. John The Baptist had a bigger following, and that is not a joke.

You will find that here in America, Christianity lacks the same resiliency as it has in other places, because here it's a Church of Power and Social Status and Wealth...not of Christ and love. 

People in places like Guatemala or Mozambique don't have that option.

Take away the money and power and racial superiority, and what's even left?

For all these other people, it's not about God, unless these motherfuckers can be bamboozled or deluded into thinking they are gods or gain the political status necessary to bold-faced make that claim in the face of what their own Scriptures say about doing such. 

And they will. 

I mean, what the hell do you think the conspiracy theories are for??

The day will come. These people are well on their way to Christ-less Christianity. My ex-wife hasn't talked about Jesus in years, it's all Anti-vax woo now.

And she's far from the only one like that. The only thing that makes her any different is she's not a Trump Supporter.

But they day will come when even she ends up on the wrong side of the line. 

What happens when some nut declares Vladimir Putin to be the reincarnated Christ and Trump to be his Right Hand and claims the "Old Prophets" are Lenin and Stalin and Mao?

What's to stop anyone from doing that, when Truth has been removed from the chat?

That's literally the kind of thing Revelation talks about!

And what's the damn difference if the political source code is Right instead of Left? For you and me, the result will be the same, Death.

These fucking people have kicked Jesus Christ out of his own religion.

Who, then, becomes their Redeemer?

Remember That.

Who prospers from the Prosperity Gospel?

Who Is Republican Jesus?

Prequel

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If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan