White "Christian" Nationalists

Yesterday I read an article by CNN called “An ‘Imposter Christianity Is Threatening American Democracy.” https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/us/white-christian-nationalism-blake-cec/index.html I was very upset by it because white “Christian” Nationalists are hijacking and abusing what it means to be a Christian.  To be Christian, it means one follows the teachings of Jesus Christ. 

These white “Christian” Nationalists do NOT follow his teachings.  They are more obsessed with the Old Testament and Revelation.  The Old Testament is important in that it gives us a history of the Jewish people, the Ten Commandments, and points in many verses to the coming of Jesus.  People who are not Christian believe that a Savior will come someday.  Christians believe that Jesus will come again. Faux Christian Nationalists think Jesus will return as a general leading their violent army,

Meanwhile, what are Jesus’ teachings that we’re supposed to live by if we are really Christian?  To love God foremost but to also love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  There are no ifs, ands or buts when it comes to the color of our skins, our sexual preferences or gender identities, our poverty or homelessness, or physical/mental challenges.  So: by loving one another, we have empathy toward each other.  We care for each other.  Translate that to universal health care, adequate housing, feeding hungry people, looking after the sick/elderly and so on.

But these white “Christian” nationalists don’t believe in those things and actively campaign against anything that would provide assistance to anyone in need – who isn’t a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP).  There’s been a lot of admiration for one of the dictators they admire, Viktor Orban in Hungary that doesn’t want to “mix blood”.  These faux Christians in this country would like to get rid of anyone of color to make the US a white-only country.  After that, they’d probably work on getting rid of Catholics and Jewish people too.  The insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6^th were made up of a large number of these fake Christians and they almost succeeded in their coup attempt.

They’re suffering from some major incorrect beliefs.  Chief among them is that they believe America is a Christian nation.  They think the Founding Fathers were evangelicals and that God intended a special role for America.  Where did they get that idea?  Some who wrote the Constitution were Christian, it’s true, but they weren’t evangelicals.  Many of the Founding Fathers were NOT Christian.  There’s no mention of the Bible or the Ten Commandments in the Constitution.  Maybe these white nationalists need to sit down and read it.  Better yet, they need some real history lessons about America.

The article says that the Jesus white Christian nationalists follow is from Revelation.  I am not as familiar with Revelation because I don’t like it.  It has a violent, warrior Jesus, much like the bloodthirsty insurrectionists we saw at the Capitol.  If we get to the point where we have an angry Jesus striking out against people, I’ll bet it will be against everyone who hurt children, allowed people to starve or die from lack of health care.  Here’s another point: they believe it’s okay for them to commit mayhem and violence but God forbid if another minority group did it.

Some of these people believe God handed us the 2^nd Amendment.  I swear, these people need to take history lessons.  God did not hand down the 2^nd Amendment.  That was just to preserve a militia in case of attack.  The 2^nd Amendment was written when guns were muskets.  Now these people think it covers AR-15s and other mass killing weapons.  If SCOTUS wants to follow the Constitution as it was originally written, they’d better reconsider their pro-mass killing weapons stances.

Faux Christians think a “Real American” is a WASP and no one is entitled to the same rights.  I am totally shaking my head in disgust and shame.  It’s 2022 and there are actual people who believe that shit, that it’s “us” and “them” (non-WASPs).  No wonder Jesus will be pissed when he returns.  What a perversion of his teaching.

What made me angriest was reading that ministers are becoming afraid to redirect their congregations and rethink what Jesus’ teachings actually mean.  Ministers are afraid to speak the truth?  They worry how their congregants might react?  In these days of people’s lives being threatened and reputations vilified by the right-wing extremists, politicians, faux Christians and other white supremacist terrorist, it’s no wonder a minister might be afraid.  But then why have a church or a minister if not to be saying and doing the right thing?

I am a Christian and I am white but I am not a faux “white Christian” nationalist.  I don’t believe in that shit.  The article mentioned a book I am going to check out to read:  Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.  I would rather know what I’m dealing with than to have it sprung on me unawares.  Maybe everyone should read it.

Different Drummer

I am by nature an introvert.  I tend to be an observer and can relate to the feeling of being on the periphery of a group of friends or family.   Before I started school, I was surrounded by loving family and believed that all mommies and daddies were deaf inside the house and hearing outside.  The reason for that is sign language was still stigmatized when I was a child in the ‘50s-60s-70s.  My parents didn’t sign in public, only using their voices with my brother, family members and me.

When I was in first grade, we moved to a neighborhood about 10 miles from most other family members.  Our neighbors on either side had children and I wanted to be friends with them.  One morning, I woke to chanting out my bedroom window.  I went outside to see what was going on and found these “friends” dancing atop a mound of peat moss my parents had delivered to our back yard.  They were chanting, “Cassie’s mother is deaf and dumb.”  I wasn’t sure why they were calling my mom dumb because she wasn’t.  I was hurt and angry, charging up the mound to push them all off.

I ran inside and found Mom in the kitchen.  I mouthed and acted out what happened, and her eyes began flashing with anger.  I wanted to know what “deaf and dumb” was.  Mom said it was an insult because she couldn’t hear.  That was news to me.  For the first time, it crossed my mind that she couldn’t hear me speak.

“Can you hear me?” I asked, loudly, and she shook her head no.  Now I was really upset.  I shouted, “Can’t you hear me NOW?” She shook her head no over and over.  I was thunderstruck.  My parents weren’t like the neighbor kids’ parents at all.  Just as suddenly, I realized we were different.

I did eventually make friends with other kids in the neighborhood but I was more reserved than I ever had been.  I’d been burned and never played with those first friends again.  Sometimes the newer friends would invite me to their houses to play; I was reluctant to ask them to come to mine.  I didn’t want a repeat of those first new “friends”.

At 10, we moved to Baltimore.  People thought I was shy because I was very quiet.  My brother and I did play with kids in the neighborhood but we were always on tenterhooks because we were different.  Sometimes those kids would taunt us and say our parents were foreign spies because they “talked funny.”  It was a lonely feeling, not being a part of the group.

It wasn’t just my parents’ deafness that made me feel different.  It was as if being far from family removed my parents’ inhibitions.  They discovered a social club for the Deaf and that became their center.  The drinking and domestic violence began.  My brother and I didn’t want to have friends over.  I didn’t want anyone to learn the truth about what was happening in my family.  I already had co-dependent characteristics and they were aggravated and increased by the drinking and fighting.

As I maneuvered my way through school, I had a handful of friends.  We socialized by phone only after school.  I never fit in with a clique.  Fortunately, after a disastrous year in junior high, I managed to move up from the bullied loser caste level to a level where the mean kids just tolerated and left me alone.  I was just so relieved to be away from the cliques. 

I preferred to hang out in my bedroom with the door closed, reading or writing, and listening to Neil Diamond.  I enjoyed my privacy and definitely enjoyed being away from my battling parents.

As I got older, I learned about transcendentalism and was introduced, by a favorite English teacher, to writers like Emerson and Thoreau.  I found a quote that hit me where I lived and it became “mine”:

If a man does not
keep pace with
his companions,
perhaps it is
because he hears a
different drummer.
Let him step to
the music which
he hears, however
measured or
far away.  –Henry David Thoreau

This is me, I thought.  It was an early act of self-care that I took this quote and decided to wear it proudly as a shield against hurtful words and being left out. 

It wasn’t always easy to wear that shield, especially when it came to dealing with my parents and their issues.  All of my own were triggered often as I tried to be a “good girl” to control their drinking and stop them hitting each other.  Stress brought on panic attacks/depression and I would lose that shield I was wearing.  Sometimes I couldn’t find it again for long periods of time.  I told my parents I needed to see a psychiatrist, and they were horrified.  How embarrassing.

I got help once I got a full-time job with benefits.  Therapy was a little helpful in that I got medication to reduced my panic attacks and depression. It was 1974 and there wasn’t a lot of information about children growing up in dysfunctional homes.   It was in the early 1990s before I learned about 12 step meetings specifically about my experiences.  Later on, in the ‘90s, I found a therapist who had alcoholic parents.  I learned so much about why and how I felt such intense anger and anxiety.  Understanding why I felt as I did help me learn how to reshape my own responses to difficult situations.  It’s taken years but now I’m in a very comfortable place.

I know how to act like an extrovert and I can take that role if it’s necessary.  Most of the time, though, I am who I am and don’t feel a need to explain myself or feel left out of things or hurt.  I have a few good friends, my books, my music, my writing.  Most of all, I have a supportive and loving husband, and an awesome blended family, 3 of my own adult children, 2 of his, 8 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.  Life is good.  I am grateful.

I still march to that different beat.  I always will.

 

Plan F

I’ve done a little more reflecting after watching these first 8 hearings.  During Watergate, there was a comic strip I followed avidly called “Doonesbury”.  I see that it might still be running although I thought Gary Trudeau had stopped it some years back.  Anyway, he had a radical character named Mark who worked as a deejay.  One day, referring to Nixon’s complicit Attorney General John Mitchell, Mark cried into the radio mike: “Guilty, guilty, guilty!”

That’s all I can think about with tRump.  He knew he’d lost the election.  He was told over and over and over ad nauseam and repeatedly by his sane legal team (not the “Clown Car”), aides and family that he’d lost the election.  Either he is so deranged he actually didn’t believe it or he just didn’t care.  His goal was just to have his second term.  I think that’s what it is, especially in view of the new information I’m reading about the subversive plans he and his cult had for Term 2.

It's a chilling plan and, apparently, it’s not dead.   I read about this plan in my Axios newsletter the other day.  https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiospm&stream=top More about this plan in a minute.

TFG had a game plan he followed to overturn the election.  He started to spread the Big Lie amongst his cultish worshippers and had his various lawyers file over sixty lawsuits alleging fraud but without any proof.  As his court cases were thrown out by judges one by one, he was already starting on his Plan B:  pressure state officials in swing states to recount, review and throw the vote to tRump.  He smeared election workers just doing their jobs to amp up the pressure.  It didn’t look like B was working so before he gave up on it, he and his Clown Car was already work on C and D.

Plan C was pressuring Vice President Pence to thwart the official vote count in the Senate and throw the election to tRump.

And, when that failed, Plan D: set his bloodthirsty treasonous and violent followers on Pence and the Capital.

Then he maliciously sat his fat ass down in the Oval Dining Room to gleefully watch the coup attempt on Fox News.  Everyone begged him to DO something to stop the violence.  He refused.  He didn’t call for his mob to stop.  He didn’t call any agency to help stop the bloodshed and control the insurrectionists.  All he did was watch TV, probably licking his lips with anticipation at Mike Pence maybe getting hanged, calling his best Clown bud Rudy Giuliani, and, oh yeah, various senators hiding from the mob to urge them to continue delaying the counting of the votes.

He didn’t want to tell them to stop.  He LIKED what they were doing.  He thought they weren’t doing anything wrong because their violence was in order to force an illegal second (longer?) tRump term.  He had to be strong-armed into issuing two weak tweets to the insurrectionists to “keep peaceful.”  When he finally did ask them to go home, he nauseatingly added “We love you.  You’re special.”  Ugh.  I wanted to puke when I saw that video on January 6^th.  The hearing on Thursday showed raw footage of his reluctance to follow script, condemn the violence, or even admit the election was over.

Not only is he guilty, guilty, guilty, he is also evil, evil, evil.

He’s not sorry.  I believe his soul is defective or dead.  He has absolutely no remorse for the terror and destruction he set on the Capitol that day.  He has no sorrow or regret for the people who died (a protestor and several police officers, including those who later committed suicide).  He doesn’t care that he put so many lives in danger and that he encouraged our Capitol to be invaded and desecrated.

He only cares that he still and always will have lost the 2020 election.

I suppose there are a few “trusted” allies he hasn’t thrown under the bus yet and they’re involved with him in this new order they’re putting together.  It’s centered on one of his Executive Orders from 2020 called Plan F.  When President Biden took office, he reversed it and I’m glad he did because it’s evil.  If trump became President again, he could reinstate it.

Plan F would basically decimate federal employees who might influence policy by placing them in this category where they could be easily lose their protections by being transferred.  They could be fired easily too.  Who would replace them?  Well, TFG’s pals are creating databases of people considered “loyal” to tRumpism.  All those senior federal employees considered Plan F would be replaced by TFG’s supporters.  Not just in some agencies.  All of them.  This is very bone chilling when you think about it.

Quoting the article: “…Unions and Democrats would be expected to immediately fight a Schedule F order. But Trump’s advisers like their chances in a judicial system now dominated at its highest levels by conservatives.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the federal civil service, is among a small group of lawmakers who never stopped worrying about Schedule F, even after Biden rescinded the order. Connolly has been so alarmed that he attached an amendment to this year’s defense bill to prevent a future president from resurrecting Schedule F. The House passed Connolly’s amendment but Republicans hope to block it in the Senate. …”

Yeah.  Just in case any of us missed it.