Christians who resist Christian nationalism; About those nasty Unhumans

The WaPo writes about some Christians who are uneasy about Christian nationalism (CN):

A new movement aims to remake 

evangelicals’ relationship to politics

Fifty years after the rise of the religious right, some evangelicals want to rebrand and create a public presence that adheres to faith, not a party or person

Over the past decade, Clint Leavitt saw different models of how to mix his evangelical faith and politics, none of them — to his mind — good. His family’s dinner table was consumed with debate over whether Barack Obama was the Antichrist. [Seriously??] Even as his Phoenix church avoided political issues, he saw Christians around the country turn Donald Trump into a religious idol.

A drive to create a Christian political presence he calls “shaped by Jesus, not a partisan political ideology” led Leavitt, now 29, to seminary and then to pastoring a church filled with congregants who vote differently from one another but all share his goal. The people at Midtown Presbyterian Church in Phoenix say their political existence has been reduced to which party or candidate Christians must choose. They are “exhausted,” they tell him. Or “tired.”

So Leavitt, preparing for a bruising 2024 election season, joined a new national group of theologically conservative pastors who talk weekly about how to reject polarization and religious nationalism and to defend democracy. .... Called “The After Party,” the curriculum, which has been used by some 75,000 people since it was released in April, says Christians should focus less on partisanship and more on how to relate to others so that they “better reflect Jesus … in 2024 and beyond.”

The Midtown church’s “After Party” sessions have been made more intense recently by the attempted assassination of Trump and the response to it by many of his Christian supporters: that God intervened to protect the former president. But the politically diverse group was able to agree that, in their view, the God of the Bible doesn’t work that way — and to keep their focus.

“We can say current events will not stir disunity in our circles and we are going to focus on all the things Jesus talks about — the poor, marginalized, caring for people who have been hurt. How do we care for everyone, even in this [assassination attempt] scenario? That has been the rallying cry of our time together,” said Daniel Barth, a pastoral resident at Midtown.

Now that is the kind of Christianity I was brought up to believe was the real thing. I still believe that. It is tolerant, empathetic, non-threatening, pro-democracy and unifying, the opposite of the CN wealth and power political movement on all 5 traits.**

One other point: The extreme radicalism and ruthless aggressiveness of CN should never be underestimated. Obama was and still is not the Antichrist, and God did not intervene to protect DJT from the assassin. That exemplifies the reality and reasoning that animates the CN movement, including its rank and file.

** Note: CN is not a religious movement. It is a radical right political wealth and power movement of by and for radical elites.

Is Christian nationalism Christian?

No, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a form of nationalism, not a religion or a form of Christianity. It directly contradicts the Gospel in multiple ways, and is therefore considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy. While Jesus taught love, peace, and truth, Christian nationalism leads to hatred, political violence, and QAnon misinformation. While Jesus resisted the devil's temptations of authority in the wilderness, Christian nationalism seeks to seize power for its followers at all costs. And while Christianity is a 2,000-year-old global tradition that transcends all borders, Christian nationalism seeks to merge faith with a single, 247-year-old, pluralistic nation. .... However, as a political ideology, Christian nationalism is a spectrum of beliefs. Some individuals hold more of these beliefs -- or feel them more intensely -- than others.

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A NYT opinion (not paywalled) by Michelle Goldberg comments about a book written by a hate-filled, radical right authoritarian crackpot and commended in writing by JD Vance: 

JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing 

That Progressives Are Subhuman

In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.  

The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”  

Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

This kind of hate, filth, lies, slanders and fake/crackpot history is now central to the radicalized, authoritarian Republican Party and its radical authoritarian brand of wealth-and-power focused politics. JD Vance recommends a book that openly argues that (i) Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans (liberals?), and (ii) “great men of means”, i.e., rich and powerful elites, are required to crush this scourge of unhumans. 

How this cannot be seen as a major, existential threat to American democracy and social pluralism is, or should be, shocking. 

Nonetheless, tens of millions of average Americans openly support it.[1] Apparently, they see their salvation in authoritarianism. A few cynical authoritarian, rich and powerful elites with their unholy trinity of crackpot radical ideologies** are fomenting hate, false beliefs and directly attacking democracy as best they can. Their goal is more wealth and power for their elites at the expense of us and our environment.

** Corrupt autocracy with DJT as lead corrupt dictator, corrupt plutocracy with no taxes, regulations or social accountability, and corrupt, bigoted (intolerant) Christian nationalist theocracy.

Q1: One a scale of 1 (not a significant threat) to 5 (moderate threat but still manageable) to 9 (imminent lethal threat on the verge of victory, maybe already killed democracy), how much of a threat does America's authoritarian radical right unholy trinity of ideologies pose to pluralistic, secular democracy grounded in the rule of law and civil liberties?

(I'm at 7 or 8, but the Nov. elections might clarify the situation somewhat)

How important is the threat, assuming there is one?

Q2: Does the new book advocate for fascism as Goldberg asserts, or is it merely just rough and tumble, old-fashioned pro-democracy conservatism? 

Footnote:

1. From an interesting book about fascism:

Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia Italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.

A further problem with conventional images of fascism is that they focus on moments of high drama in the fascist itinerary—the March on Rome, the Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht—and omit the solid texture of everyday experience and the complicity of ordinary people in the establishment and functioning of fascist regimes. Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites—heads of state, party leaders, high government officials—many of whom felt a fastidious distaste for the crudities of fascist militants. The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment: magistrates, police officials, army officers, businessmen. To understand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily routines. Making such choices meant accepting an apparent lesser evil or averting the eyes from some excesses that seemed not too damaging in the short term, even acceptable piecemeal, but which cumulatively added up to monstrous end results. -- Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004

Hm, does any of that sound familiar?  Hmm . . . . . 🤨