#christian dominionism

[hezigler]

Watch "Zappa on Pat Robertson, religion and the Right Wing" on YouTube

"I have a fear that the United States could be herded into a fascist theocracy." Frank Zappa

Some of the horrible things Pat Robertson said.

#Youtube #frank zappa #pat robertson #religious right #christian right #christian dominionism #civil rights

[churchofsatannews]

To a Vigilant New Year!

To a Vigilant New Year!

Tomorrow begins year LVIII, Anno Satanas. We live in a time of social upheaval. Global economies are in spasms, kept in drastic flux by an ongoing aggressive war which has again raised the specter of possible military nuclear detonations. This chaos has provided an open season for authoritarian power grabs. While Christianity had played the role of a domesticated belief system—their most…

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#anti-totalitarianism #autonomy #Beethoven #Christian Dominionism #Church of Satan #Egmont Overture #freedom #Goethe #Happy New Year #kurt masur #liberty #New Year #Satanism #self-determination #totalitarianism

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 29, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 30, 2023

On October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. It had been rocked five days before, when heavy trading early in the day drove it down, but leading bankers had seen the mounting crisis and moved in to stabilize the markets before the end of the day. October 24 left small investors broken but the system intact. On Monday, October 28, the market slid again, with a key industrial average dropping 49 points.

And then, on October 29, the crisis hit. When the gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange hit at ten o’clock, the market opened with heavy trading, all of it downward. When the ticker tape finally showed the day’s transactions, two and a half hours later, it documented that more than 16 million shares had changed hands and the industrial average had dropped another 43 points. 

Black Tuesday was the beginning of the end. The market continued to drop. By November the industrial average stood at half of what it had been two months before. By 1932, manufacturing output was less than it had been in 1913; foreign trade plummeted from $10 billion to $3 billion in the three years after 1929, and agricultural prices fell by more than half. By 1932 a million people in New York City were out of work; by 1933, thirteen million people—one person of every four in the labor force—were unemployed. Unable to pay rent or mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

While the administration of Republican president Herbert Hoover preached that Americans could combat the Depression with thrift, morality, and individualism, voters looked carefully at the businessmen who only years before had seemed to be pillars of society and saw they had plundered ordinary Americans. The business boom of the 1920s had increased worker productivity by about 43%, but wages did not rise. Those profits, along with tax cuts and stock market dividends, meant that wealth moved upward: in 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income.

In 1932, nearly 58% of voters turned to Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised them a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. New Deal policies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings. They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. 

When he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower built on this system, adding to the nation’s infrastructure with the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway across the country; adding the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the government and calling for a national healthcare system; and nominating former Republican governor of California Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court to protect civil rights. Eisenhower also insisted on the vital importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to stop the Soviet Union from spreading communism throughout Europe.

Eisenhower called his vision “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.” The system worked: between 1945 and 1960 the nation’s gross national product (GNP) jumped by 250%, from $200 billion to $500 billion. 

But while the vast majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system that had helped the nation to recover from the Depression and to equip the Allies to win World War II, a group of Republican businessmen and their libertarian allies at places like the National Association of Manufacturers insisted that the system proved both parties had been corrupted by communism. They inundated newspapers, radio, and magazines with the message that the government must stay out of the economy to return the nation to the policies of the 1920s. 

Their position got little traction until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. That decision enabled them to divide the American people by insisting that the popular new government simply redistributed tax dollars from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving minorities. 

A promise to cut the taxes that funded social services and the business regulations they insisted hampered business growth fueled the election of Ronald Reagan for president in 1980. But by 1986 administration officials recognized that tax cuts that were driving the deficit up despite dramatic cuts to social services were so unpopular that they needed footsoldiers to back businessmen. So, Reagan backed the creation of an organization that brought together big businessmen, evangelical Christians, and social conservatives behind his agenda. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” leader of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.” 

By 1989, Norquist’s friend Ralph Reed turned evangelical Christians into a permanent political pressure group. The Christian Coalition rallied evangelicals behind the Republican Party, calling for the dismantling of the post–World War II government services and protections for civil rights—including abortion—they disliked. 

As Republicans could reliably turn out religious voters over abortion, that evangelical base has become more and more important to the Republican Party. Now it has put one of its own in the House Speaker’s chair, just two places from the presidency. On October 25, after three weeks of being unable to unite behind a speaker after extremists tossed out Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republican conference coalesced behind Representative Mike Johnson (R-LA) in part because he was obscure enough to have avoided scrutiny.

Since then, his past has been unearthed, showing interviews in which he asserted that we do not live in a democracy but in a “Biblical republic.” He told a Fox News Channel interviewer that to discover his worldview, one simply had to “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” 

Johnson is staunchly against abortion rights and gay rights, including same-sex marriage, and says that immigration is “the true existential threat to the country.” In a 2016 sermon he warned that the 1960s and 1970s undermined “the foundations of religion and morality in the U.S.” and that attempts to address climate change, for example, are an attempt to destroy capitalism. 

Like other adherents of Christian nationalism, Johnson appears to reject the central premise of democracy: that we have a right to be treated equally before the law. And while his wife, Kelly, noted last year on a podcast that only about 4% of Americans “still adhere to a Biblical worldview,” they appear to reject the idea we have the right to a say in our government. In 2021, Johnson was a key player in the congressional attempt to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election. 

In his rejection of democracy, Johnson echoes authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, both of whom have the loyal support of America’s far right. Such leaders claim that the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy ruins nations. The welcoming of various races and ethnicities through immigration or affirmative action undermines national purity, they say, while the equality of LGBTQ+ individuals and women undermines morality. Johnson has direct ties to these regimes: his 2018 campaign accepted money from a group of Russian nationals, and he has said he does not support additional funding for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression. 

The rejection of democracy in favor of Christian authoritarianism at the highest levels of our government is an astonishing outcome of the attempt to prevent another Great Depression by creating a government that worked for ordinary Americans rather than a few wealthy men. 

But here we are. 

After Johnson’s election as speaker, extremist Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida spelled out what it meant for the party…and for the country: “MAGA is ascendant,” Gaetz told former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, “and if you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement, and where the power of the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #MAGA #history #racism #Christian Authoritarianism #Christian Dominionism #Christian Nationalism #Biblical Republic

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

Revivals

“And the dead will leave their graves and walk the earth once more. And there will be great lamentations. Every day it’s getting closer.”

Thinking about the running theme of revival in Good Omens 2.

Thinking about how the only dead who actually left their graves were the Nazis.

Thinking about how Aziraphale and Crowley got a few years of not being bothered by heaven and hell, but now the Second Coming is ramping up.

Thinking about the running theme of revival in Christian evangelicalism — a revived fervor that comes roaring back, cyclically, after periods of increased secularism, in the form of Great Awakenings and revival tents.

Thinking about the early 2000s, and how it was common knowledge then that conservative evangelicalism was dying out on its own.

Thinking about now, when ultra-conservative Christians are explicitly organizing around revival tents and Great Awakenings.

Thinking about how much easier it is to work miracles when you believe your every tiny action or inaction has consequences for eternity, leading to a wild mismatch in passion between evangelicals and non-evangelicals toward incremental progress like voter persuasion and school boards and controlling the levers of political power.

Thinking about how the biggest miracles (for good OR for evil) come from each person doing an incomplete fraction of a miracle, while trusting others to do the same.

Thinking about how easy it is to resonate with Crowley, with the idea that it’s not worth engaging with heaven or hell — might as well talk to a brick wall. Besides, their influence is dying out on its own. And when do the dead ever leave their graves?

#I guess what I’m saying is: go out and do your fraction of the miracle #even if it looks like nothing is happening #there’s movements out there that really *shouldn’t* have political power #but are very adept at getting it #because their followers don’t let the irrationality of faith stop them from doing half a miracle (while someone else does the other half) #christian dominionism #exvangelical #exvie #ex christian #good omens #good omens spoilers #good omens 2 #good omens 2 spoilers #good omens meta #good omens 2 meta #good omens 2x03 #good omens 2x04 #good omens 2x06 #25 lazurii

[probablyasocialecologist]

Some readers may think I am being pessimistic, but think about how, back in 2015, very few people would have predicted the relentless political backsliding that the past seven years have brought. Given how drastically the political situation has deteriorated so far, it only makes sense to predict that it will continue to deteriorate at the same rate in the future.

We all need to prepare for the likely imminent future in which right-wing Republicans continue their ongoing successful takeover of the federal government and enforce laws and policies so authoritarian and so unflinchingly cruel that they will make the past seven years of political backsliding seem like a daydream.

#usa #lgbt #fascism #republicans #Christian Dominionism

[asagi-asagiri]

#text #polls #2024 election #republicans #religious right #christian dominionism #conservative #donald trump #ron desantis #hoping for another 1/6 tbh

[rivage-seulm]

Christian Dominionism, White Supremacy, and Yeshua's Law of Love

Christian Dominionism, White Supremacy, and Yeshua’s Law of Love

Readings for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time: DT 30: 10-14; PS 69: 14, 17, 30-31, 33-34, 36, 37; COL 1:15-20; LK 10: 25-37 Recently, Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and current Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley published an article called “The Ideology of Christian Nationalism.” The piece reviewed the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to…

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#"Road to Majority" #Bible #Christian Dominionism #Christianity #Faith #God #Good Samaritan #Homiletic helps #Homilies #Jesus #religion #Robert Reich #Samaritans #Spirituality #Sunday Homilies

[chrysstevenson]

Christian Dominionism: Follow the Money

This is the text of the speech I gave last weekend at the Secularism Australia Conference. Many thanks to the organisers for asking me to speak on this important subject. I believe urgent action needs to be taken to head off the Americanisation of Australian politics at the pass. I have spent 11 years following Christian dominionism and Christian nationalism, and the last 3 months undertaking…

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#Atlas Network #Australian Christian Lobby #christian dominionism #christian nationalism #Clare Heath-McIvor #dominionism #Lyle Shelton #Mont Pelerin Society

[worldofwardcraft]

Planning the takeover of America.

November 23, 2023

For years, a little-known, but surprisingly influential, movement within the charismatic arm of the Christian church (especially Evangelicals and Pentecostals) has been working to conquer America — and eventually the world — in order to impose their version of the kingdom of God. Called the New Apostolic Reformation, it seeks to capture and dominate the sectors of society they refer to as the "Seven Mountains": business, government, family, religion, media, education and entertainment.

Concordia University professor André Gagné, who follows the movement closely, says, “the NAR is inherently political, it’s in their DNA.” One of its best-known proponents is failed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate and current US Senate aspirant Doug Mastriano. But others aligned with the movement include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson and dozens of other right-wing loonies.

A secretive offshoot of the NAR is the even lesser known City Elders. This is a shadowy Tulsa, Oklahoma-based bunch of Evangelicals hell-bent on taking over municipalities across the USA by developing a permanent infrastructure to select and elect candidates for local entities, such as school boards and county commissions. Writing in Salon magazine, Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a social justice think tank, describes City Elders as:

a national network of county level committees of Christian right activists who want to function as the de facto government in their local jurisdictions… They see their contemporary function as protecting their counties from ungodly government, and utilizing civil government to advance the Kingdom.

City Elders is already well entrenched in Tulsa's local governing bodies. And it has statewide organizations — comprising not only clergy but also conservative Christian business and civic leaders — in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Virginia, as well as start-ups in Arkansas and Texas.

Says Jesse Leon Rodgers, the founder and chairman of City Elders, “God has destined for us, the people of God, to be the leaders and the influencers and to have dominion.” And dominion is definitely what it's all about. In a promotional video, Rodgers declared that God had told him to be “prepared…to take possession” of what he called “our inheritance.”

But veteran investigative reporter Clarkson believes it's possible this is all just "smoke and mirrors." Says he,

While the lack of transparency may suggest a shadowy cabal bent on unearned political power, it might also signify that there’s not much there there.

Still, it's hard to ignore a clandestine, organized and well-funded group of religious fanatics dedicated to infiltrating local governments and subjugating our nation's towns and cities.

#new apostolic reformation #christian dominionism #city elders

[hezigler]

The Conservative Plan to Take Over the Country (you need to know about t...

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior justification for selfishness."

John Kenneth Galbraith

#conservative #conservatism #modern conservatives #republicans #heritage foundation #project 2025 #Youtube #Dominionests #christian dominionism #dominionism

[churchofsatannews]

INDEPENDENCE DAY: Ideals Worth Preserving

Today, we again mark the anniversary of The Declaration of Independence, that traitorous 1776 statement which lead to the foundation of the United States of America. Almost a quarter of a millennium ago, those brash colonials shed foreign rule with their territorial union wrought as a secular republic—a most unusual endeavor in the annals of human history. As a philosophy of individualism and…

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#aaron copland #Agnes de Mille #American Ideals #Christian Dominionism #Church of Satan #Declaration of Independence #fourth of july #independence day #john williams #Rodeo #Satanism #secularism

[golvio]

#gender roles #white supremacist tw #racism tw #internalized misogyny #ableism tw #fascism #christian dominionism #antisemitism tw

[whatisonthemoon]

Say NO to Revival

From Religion Dispatches: “Americans who lean toward supporting Christian nationalism are not, as some have theorized, Christian in name only. They are significantly more likely than other Americans to be connected to churches and to say religion is important in their lives.” If this is true, and there is currently a revival going on at Asbury University, an Evangelical institution, shouldn’t this be concerning? So many people are amazed by the joy and peace these students and other attendees are experiencing, including so-called progressives and liberals, like Nadia Bolz-Weber, a tattoo’ed ELCA pastor. But this revival, in which repentance plays a vital role, will surely push oppressive and even political agendas. Asbury University condemns LGBT marriage, relationships, sex, etc. For these young people who are discovering their identity, this call to repentance at an Evangelical school is likely to convict people of things that need no convicting of, including “same-sex attractions”. For those who are having sex outside of marriage, this will surely exacerbate the mental health issues produced by purity culture. In general, the sense of shame and control that will come out of this revival is a frightening thing. As is the fact that revivals are said to fuel evangelism, especially missions. This will prove itself as a “revival” in the minds of many when there are young missionaries going out into the world trying to “save” the lost pagans of the world. We all know what violence follows this. Look up the past couple of centuries. I don’t care if these kids need this “comfort” and “hope” following the alienation of the pandemic. This comfort and hope has a dead end. Let’s be honest about that, even if we are still people who are people of conscience and faith... I say, especially if we are people of conscience and faith. To support this revival and the “renewal” movement it is allegedly producing would be to support backward values that result in psychological, spiritual, emotional, and political terrorism.

This revival just so happened to have occurred after months of Francis Chan pumping up this event, following the documentary of the last 1970 Asbury Revival, and in a time when Hollywood has been pushing Christian films and movies again, such as The Chosen and the Jesus Revolution. The latter will of course promote and whitewash the Jesus Movement, which was an essential aspect of the forming Religious Right and the project to de-radicalize a generation of potential revolutionaries.

They are trying to make Christian extremism, especially the Dominionist form, to seem appropriate, kind, loving. This is why towns like Redding, California, are run by Dominionist megachurch Christians. This is dangerous and should not be taken lightly.

#asbury revival #christianity #religious right #psychological warfare #psyop #jesus movement #christian dominionism #religion #evangelicalism

[penguinlover27]

I have been looking forward to this day for decades now. The old guard of the Boomer generation is steadily dying off and with their depleted numbers comes the end of their domination of American politics.

Americans, by and large, are rejecting conservative, evangelical Christianity. Church membership and attendance have been declining for years, but it seems now we have reached a critical mass where evangelicals no longer have the numbers required to sway elections. With the loss of that ability, their hold on what is left of the Republican Party wanes as well.

Christians only have themselves to blame for this, of course. They have made every rational, thinking person their enemy. They have given no quarter to anyone who believes differently than they do, and in return they should receive none from us. This is not to say that we should discriminate against these Christians, but rather we have to keep challenging them on their beliefs, specifically their plan for "Dominion" over our entire society.

The tendency inherent to conservatism for authoritarianism is now reaching a fever pitch. This is why they latch on to those they see as "strongmen" like TFG, DeSantis, Putin, etc. They are now speaking openly of the need to seize power in order to inflict their rule and their agenda on all of us. They have no respect for democracy or a pluralistic society. If they can't be in charge, they will seek to burn this nation to the ground.

I am a strong believer in and an advocate for religious freedom. No one should dictate to another what they must believe. There is no freedom OF religion without freedom FROM religion. Many on the right find this laughable, but keep in mind that despite the fact that millions of people wear the label of "Christian", there is no real consensus within the myriad of Christian denominations. They fail to understand that if they were able to take power in the USA, they will almost immediately find themselves in a civil war between different factions.

Do you think that Southern Baptists would consent to be ruled by Catholic doctrine? Or vice versa? No, it would be a fight to the death between these sects. The history of the world has shown over and over again that theocracy breeds tyranny and every single example of theocratic systems has either failed or is on its way to failure.

Is Iran a prosperous nation? No, not in the way it could be were it not such a pariah. Saudi Arabia (a de facto theocracy) is prosperous, but only because of its oil and the fact that the modern world could not exist without it. What about Pakistan, another de facto theocracy? Is it seen as a bright light of freedom? No, it is rightly perceived as a hellhole.

We can look back in our own history to see how Christian fundamentalism has negatively affected us. They balk at every attempt at progress. When we are successful in breaking down barriers for minorities, they seek loopholes that will allow them to avoid compliance with the law. They ask for special privilege to discriminate and then use every tool at hand to reverse even meager steps towards full equality for everyone.

I am glad that younger people recognize the threat that Christian conservatism presents to our society. By voting our values we will succeed. So long as they continue on their retrograde course, they will fail. Only by embracing the future, the freedom for everyone to live as they choose and recognizing that they are merely one group out of many and not the true majority will they be able to salvage what is left of their institutions.

The battle continues and is far from over, but the indications are clear that Christian conservatism, dominionism, etc. are failed ideologies that will soon become as irrelevant as the horse and buggy are today.

And that day cannot come soon enough for me.

#politics #christian dominionism #conservatism #evangelicals #theocracy #democracy #authoritarianism

[lamajaoscura]

Lauren Boebert: Christians Should 'Rise up,' Humanity in 'Last Days'

#christian nationalism #christian dominionism #deconstructing christianity #lauren boebert #republican party #gop

[socialjusticeinamerica]

#never trump #republican assholes #republican hypocrisy #crooked donald #evangelical assholes #fake Christians #dominionism #Republican oligarchs #republican perverts