So sometime last night, Glen Reynolds:
BABIES ARE BEING BEHEADED AND BURNED ALIVE, but the real threat is “Republican ‘Christianism.’”
To which one of his commenters pipes up and says:
But enough about the abortion industry…
At the risk of being obvious, that too, is outside the realm of “Republican christianism”,
And there seems to me there should be a rather embarrassing equivalency there. But that’s going to be the topic for another post.
Fair warning, the link leads to an Andrew Sullivan column. I gave up on the excitable boy (with apologies to Warren Zevon) several years ago, and I don’t think I’ve linked anything he’s posted since.
Not that there was anything official about that, just my perception that the guy had lost his mind. At the very least a couple of his mental connections were less than solid. Apparently that hasn’t changed.What Sullivan refers to here as “Republican christianism” , he’s referred to as ‘christo fascism” in the past… And it’s something he certainly comes close to in the linked article.
I’ll give you an example:
The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preachers.
A few years ago I wrote an article suggesting that culture is what overrode communism in the former Soviet union. Cultural pulls are stronger and longer lasting than any political movements. Indeed political movements are in my view subsets of cultures. A reflection of them.
I also wrote a few years ago,:
When Jefferson wrote that “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT” he was not speaking a universal truth at all. The operative word in that phrase is “WE”.
Rather than talking about a universal point of view, a universal truth, if you will, he was instead talking about the point of view of WE, the new American culture. With this angle, many of the long-held myths about rights tend to disappear.
Consider; if it was in fact a universal truth that all men were created equal, it wouldn’t have been such a radical idea, for the time, much less then to now. Last I checked, it is quite true that a vast majority still do not consider these as any kind of truth, universal or otherwise; they consider them to be anything BUT self-evident. Royalty still exists, as do class structures, and slavery, as well.
Take communism, as an example. Communism attempts to over-ride the culture and basically outlaw many facets of it.
But, (and this is important) everywhere you saw Communism.. Russia, Cuba, Korea, East Germany you saw the same treacherous *political* ideology, not the cultural values of those societies. And in those places where communism has been overthrown, the former USSR for example, the original culture invariably springs back to life.
That said, Sullivan has never understood that both Trumpism, as well as Christianity, tend to rise above the political. Indeed, i suggest that labeling what Sullivan calls “Republican christianism” as a political movement is exactly the kind of fundamental misunderstanding you would expect from somebody that considers government to be the center of all things.
Their origins never have never been political. They are instead cultural in nature as Americanism itself is, and therefore more powerful than any political movement within America.
That cultural point is what Donald Trump tapped into. It isn’t something he created, it was a value structure that was already there and was being ignored by both the Republican establishment who really doesn’t care about American culture so long as they get to rule over the ashes of it, and the Democrat party who actively seeks to overthrow it.
Parting shot: why would Sullivan attack Republican christianism? Because without it America would have never been founded. Can you imagine an America being founded with Islam as its philosophical center? Any of the pantheistic religions? Socialism?
The answer is that attacking republicanism and Christianity has a goal… Removing the foundation from the building.
