Trump ushers in a Christian "deep state":
MAGA moves to gut the Constitution
Trump gave control of the budget to a Project 2025 henchman who calls this a "post-constitutional moment"But that doesn't bother the Christian nationalist leaders who back Trump, because the plan was always to reduce Congress to a ceremonial body and concentrate all the power in the hands of the president. During the campaign, much attention was paid to the disparate policy ideas in Project 2025. Less discussed was the overarching theme of the plan, which was to turn the presidency into something very much like a dictatorship. Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, is a Christian nationalist who believes the federal government's job is to impose a "biblical worldview" by fiat, which means sidestepping the House, whose members face biennial accountability with voters.Trump has now appointed Vought to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Don't be fooled by the boring name. The office holds unbelievable power because it's about controlling the purse strings for the whole government. As Thomas Zimmer explained at Democracy Americana, Vought argues that the law or separation of powers should not constrain him and the president, because this is a "post-constitutional moment." Vought has an elaborate and nonsensical rationale[1] blaming the left for this development, but what matters most is his conclusion: the right is now entitled to blow past legal constraints and enact their will however possible.
At the center of this scheme is an effort to replace the existing federal bureaucracy with "an army of people who have a biblical worldview" and a willingness to "lead with reckless abandon." Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are toothlessly threatening the jobs of federal employees on Twitter. Vought, however, will have real power at the OMB to "put them in trauma," as he threatened in a recent speech at the Center for Renewing America. The goal, he said, was to make their work lives so miserable that they are "traumatically affected" and forced to quit. Unlike Musk and Ramaswamy, however, Vought doesn't pretend this is about saving money. He plans to refill those jobs with Christian nationalists. In sum, the conspiracy theory of the "deep state" was concocted so the right could justify creating a real "deep state," one that is geared towards remaking America in its Christian fundamentalist worldview.[DJT's] current attorney general nominee, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, isn't raising as many hackles, despite her threats to arrest prosecutors for enforcing the law against those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election. But new reports show Bondi isn't just an election denier, though that's bad enough. People for the American Way discovered she's extensively tied to Christian nationalist leaders.
Two of the people Bondi has worked with — Wallnau and Trump's favorite minister, Paula White — are part of the New Apostolic Reformation. Matthew Taylor, a religious studies scholar who follows this movement closely, told Salon in September that these folks believe they're "this vanguard that God had placed on Earth to bring about the Kingdom of God. They want a global revival and to take over whole societies and turn them into Christian nations." When she was Florida's attorney general, Bondi backed a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to fund religious groups with taxpayer money, but Florida voters shot it down.
Recently, far-right preacher Eric Metaxas gloated that Donald Trump will "go scorched Earth on the satanic bureaucracy that is the Deep State." This moralizing language conceals, however poorly, a deeply immoral agenda: to replace respectable civil servants with bug-eyed fascist ideologues who oppose the most basic values of our country, such as religious freedom, equal justice, and democracy.
Theocracy wrapped in faux secularism: Catholic bishops submitted a brief in this lawsuit. A Catholic writer for the National Catholic Reporter, described deceptive dark free speech that Christian nationalism (CN) routinely relies on to con people. The goal is to lead people to falsely believe Christian intrusion into modern law is grounded in "principles of reason." By "reason" the bishops apply theocratic reasoning, not secular. But even in this case, the theocrat bishops could not quite bring themselves to flat out lie about the role of "divine revelation" being there too:
This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case United States v. Skrmetti in which the court is asked to answer the question: "Does a Tennessee law restricting certain medical treatments for transgender minors violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment?"
The Catholic Church has some compelling interests in this case, which will impact the legal parameters within which the culture wars are fought. The amicus curiae brief filed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, however, articulates a legal stance that undervalues the fact that ours is a pluralistic culture. In such a culture, the church's witness is best served when it overreaches in charity, not in legal grasping.
The brief does a reasonably good job explaining what the Catholic Church teaches about gender identity and why it opposes medical interventions of the kind the Tennessee law would prohibit. It repeatedly notes that the church's teachings do not rest exclusively on divine revelation but "on the basis of principles grounded in reason and revelation, long-held and universally applied by the Catholic Church."
.... Boston College law and theology professor Cathleen Kaveny wrote, "In a pluralistic society, the religious freedom of one party needs to be balanced against the rights and the legitimate expectations of others." This is what the U.S. bishops' lawyers never grasp or admit. [Oh, they obviously grasp it alright, but will never admit it] (emphases added)
There we have it, right out in the open:
Principles grounded in reason and revelation
That makes sense only if one injects CN God theocracy into the concept of "reason." My atheist, secular reasoning, sheds no light at all on what any God, Christian or not, would want the law about transgender medical treatments must be. Using "theological reasoning", anyone can argue that since God made transgendered people, he intended them to be treated respectfully just like everyone else and their wishes about their gender tolerated and accommodated.
But hell no! Absolutely not. Tolerance and accommodation is not in the CN God. The CN God[2] is full of hate, bigotry, intolerance and revenge lust. That is what the Catholic bishops are telling us our laws must reflect.
Footnotes:
1. I will do a separate post on Russell Vought's "reasoning" for why America is in an unconstitutional moment that necessitates authoritarian Christian theocracy.
2. No, I am NOT saying all Christians are CN adherents. Most Christians are NOT CN adherents or complicit by silence. I am NOT criticizing or disrespecting regular Christians who are content to keep their God and divine revelations out of the law and government.
I AM sharply criticizing the CN wealth and power (W&P) movement, its ghastly intolerance and its heavy reliance on theocratic irrationality and profoundly immoral lies, slanders and deceit. The CN W&P movement relies heavily on those tactics to try to push some American secular law related to civil liberties into bigoted Christian theocracy. And if CN elites get enough power, their arrogance and hubris could very well prompt them to move past merely crushing civil liberties. They could, probably would, choose to extend God's "righteous" iron fist into other areas of law, e.g., social spending laws, US military spending, tax laws, etc.
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