Ferocitus
Deity
Qanon knows how.
Clown Car VI: Hello, Goodbye. On to 2024.
- Thread starter AmazonQueen
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Ferocitus
Deity
Mike Pompeo and The Jamestown Foundation have been hosting a variety of politicians and other "dignitaries"
over the last couple of years. Many of them are opposed to same-sex marriage.
The most notable recent visit was:
Matteo Salvini
Multiple news agencies have compared him and his views to those of Trump. In September 2018, Salvini
pledged his support for The Movement, a European populist group founded by Trump's former chief
strategist, Steve Bannon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matteo_Salvini
Another interesting visitor was:
Mamuka Bakhtadze
Haven't had time to hunt around for why he decided to hook up with Pompeo et al. Maybe our Russian friends
here have some information about him they'd like to share?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamuka_Bakhtadze
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Sure, I'm commenting more broadly. This example represents the cartoonish extreme, but there's been a more general shift from the rump of the Trump movement towards an Evangelical end-times cult. It had been widely-predicted that when Trump's attempts to contest the election outcome inevitably fell apart, there would be some radicalisation of his hardcore supporters, but this was usually imagined to be the radicalisation of his most visibly unsavoury supporters, the whole Proud Boy, Identity Europa, Richard Spencer crowd. Fascists, basically. Instead the most ardent holdouts seem to be comprised of Evangelical Christians, especially "born again" types, who are constructing a narrative which discards the grand notions of racial and civilisational struggle favoured by the hipster Nazis in favour of what you might call a more classically American cocktail of messianism, eschatology and conspiracy theory. We expected militia training camps, not bible study sessions.
The perception during Trump's previous run was that this was a reluctant alliance on the part of Evangelical Christians, something which they talked themselves into out of necessity. It was universally understood that Pence's nomination as his vice-president was a sop to evangelicals to fend off a repeat of 2012, when a great many of them sat out the election rather than vote for a ticket featuring a Mormon and a Catholic. This seems to be broadly true of most established Evangelical leaders; to the extent that Trump still has their allegiance, it's a reflection of the more general failure of the Republican Party to produce any alternative centres of leadership. While lots of individual MAGAs had some Evangelical affiliation, they seemed to keep their religious and political commitments compartmentalised. To the extent that they called upon religion to justify their politics, it was the general pig-headed conviction that whatever they wanted right at this moment is divinely ordained, because they, personally, are God's special little boy; Trump didn't carry any more spiritual significance than a sandwich or a new car, it's just a thing they wanted and which God therefore wanted them to have, there was no sense of a higher religious purpose.
What we're seeing in the emergence of this new religious movement around Trump and the Q-Anon conspiracy theory is something different: people who are not forced to reconcile their stringent religious doctrines with Trump's grotesquely pagan character by appealing to the mysterious hand of providence, but actively celebrate him as a messianic figure. Trump isn't a figure they have to awkwardly slot into their religious views, or to keep off to the side somewhere, he's a central pillar around which they have been able to construct a world-view. Trump is no longer a holy fool, dumbly carrying out a divine purpose which he cannot comprehend, he is God's active hand on earth, possessed of profound spiritual wisdom and authority.
Granted, none of this is coming out of the blue, there have been previous attempts by Evangelical preachers to frame Trump not as a necessary evil but as some sort of divine champion, but I don't think that any of the megachurch pastors expected things to get this far out of hand. They were trying to muscle their way to the front of the current political moment, as they had done under previous sympathetic leaders like Reagan and Bush, they weren't trying to start some new and by all appearances pretty blatantly heretical religious movement.
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Berzerker's ‘neutral’ position is that Biden is part of the swamp and Trump the only solution to him and all such evilness and injustice.
Ferocitus' equally neutral one is that everyone should bow down to the Chinese, as summed up by his recent response against Chinese colonialism being ‘suck it up’.
Once you wash off the patina of pseudo-ideological drivel you just see that the underlying ideology in both cases is simply ‘vae victis’.
Farm Boy
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Man, that's gotta be a solid "eh." It's well worded, and I enjoyed reading it. But this is American patriotism and politics, and as much as the old religions "are dead" in favor of the big data god money, God is still in The Pledge. It's not new new.
Lexicus
Deity
I have seen people do this since 2015 on Facebook and elsewhere, so I would question the point that this is something new.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Yes, I should clarify that I don't think every aspect of this is wholly novel or unprecedented. All of this draws on things that were floating around in the American psyche before 2016, and some people will have begin piecing parts of it together before it coalesced into a distinct religious movement- and I should add, I think it is still in the process of coalescing, that the boundaries between this emerging Q-Christianity and regular old conservative Evangelicals is still pretty vague and porous. I don't think we'll see the real shape of this thing until the 2020 election is far in the rear-view mirror, when it moves far enough out of current events to become thoroughly mythologised.
It's absolutely plausible all this stuff fizzles out and these people glumly return to conventional Evangelical Protestantism, but my impression is that enough people are deep enough into this stuff, and have started asserting themselves independent from existing Evangelical leadership, that something will persist in the future. It might be that it never really coalesces into a formal religious movement, it might just a disconnected network of prayer groups and websites on the fringe of the established Evangelical movement, but I think it's also plausible that their persisting fixation on the 2020 election and the person of Donald Trump renders them incompatible with the interests of the broader Evangelical movement (e.g. by supporting some Trump or Trump-backed third party campaign in 2024) and they slough off into an authentic new religious movement, with its own institutions and identity. It wouldn't be the first time that American Protestants have gone so far off the deep end that their theological relationship to conventional Christianity is one of genealogy more so than proximity.
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Lexicus
Deity
My impression is that what you're talking about sort of already occurred in 2016 but then Donald Trump won the Republican primary and since then the mainstream of US evangelicalism has been firmly behind Trump.
Farm Boy
run boy run
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I don't think anything other than some names have changed as the older ones have died and new ones have come up. It's not that it's unprecedented, it's that really, it looks like status quo.
Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses tho? I dunno, I wouldn't single them out in the 21st. They do their thing, seems pretty proximal in totality. Even Hutterites seem to mostly fit, and they're almost as different as the Amish. I guess the Mormons are a little more theologically varied, but compared to non-religious society?
Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses tho? I dunno, I wouldn't single them out in the 21st. They do their thing, seems pretty proximal in totality. Even Hutterites seem to mostly fit, and they're almost as different as the Amish. I guess the Mormons are a little more theologically varied, but compared to non-religious society?
Mormons, 7th Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses are a lot more like each other than they are like any of the other Christian denominations, Catholicism in particular. I don't know that I'd put any of them in the same bucket as what people typically think of when they talk about Murican "evangelicals". Jehovah's Witnesses in particular are, strictly speaking, supposed to refrain from politics, voting, military service, the Pledge of Allegiance, etc., entirely and many, if not most, are adamantly apolitical.
The irony of course, is that if we are talking dictionary definition of evangelical, as opposed to the conventional, vernacular use of the term "evangelical"... the Mormons, 7th Day Adventists and especially Jehovah's Witnesses are far and away the most truly evangelical of any denomination of any of the religions.
The irony of course, is that if we are talking dictionary definition of evangelical, as opposed to the conventional, vernacular use of the term "evangelical"... the Mormons, 7th Day Adventists and especially Jehovah's Witnesses are far and away the most truly evangelical of any denomination of any of the religions.
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Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I would tend to say that they have been behind the Republican Party, and with the sad, flatulent death of the Never Trump movement, Trump emerged as an absolutely dominant force within the party, so it followed that they would back Trump to the hilt. Evangelical leaders tend to be politically savvy; they know which side their bread is buttered on. Their continued nominal-allegiance to Trump after 2020 seems to be symptomatic of the Republican Party's broader failure to move on from the Trump years, rather than any particular loyalty to Trump personally. This is something which I expect to decline over time as the party adjusts to the post-Trump reality (even if it does so by assimilating his branding and ideology, less his every-more-toxic person), whereas the Trump hardcores are exhibiting ever-more intensified loyalty to Trump after the election, as his distance from political relevance comes ever more into alignment with their own sense of bewilderment and alienation.
I'd reiterate that it isn't particularly surprising that 2021 saw the emergence of a distinctive group of Trump hardcores; it was widely predicted, and if anything we all thought it would be more pronounced to the extent we had assumed that the Republican Party would more quickly distance itself from the Trump brand. What's come as a surprise is the intensely religious orientation of the diehards, that they seem to articulate themselves primarily in religious terms, where the assumption was that they would form some essentially fascist movement, probably still heavy on appeals to "Christian heritage", but fundamentally more similar in ideological orientation to Bill the Butcher than to Billy Graham. So it has been a little unexpected that the hardcores aren't as concerned with Blut und Boden and as they are with God and Satan.
I didn't mean to suggest that these groups are visibly distinct from mainstream American Christians in the same way as, say, the Hare Krishnas, but in terms of their doctrine, practice and organisation they're often pretty distant from what we tend to understand as conventional Christianity: that is, from Catholicism, mainline Protestant, and the major Evangelical denominations. The Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, in particular, have probably the most strikingly centralised and hierarchical organisational structure of any post-Reformation denomination, in sharp contrast to the congregationalist or presbyterian tendencies of most American Protestant denominations. At the very least, they represent as much of a departure from conventional Protestantism as Protestantism did from Catholicism. This is masked by the fact that culturally proximate to white conservative Protestants and tend to use a lot of the same language, both religiously and politically. I think that it's at least plausible that the new religious tendencies we're seeing form around the Trump movement and the Q-Anon conspiracies cold develop into something comparably distinct, if perhaps not quite so rigid or, well, coherent as Mormonism. The differences are not so much in how they appear and sound as in how they think and organise. Mormons are a far more potent political force than denominations of comparable size because they have the mentality and the means to organise, whether officially or unofficially, on denominational lines.
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Lexicus
Deity
I guess I, like other American posters here, just don't find it too surprising. I would actually also submit that you underestimate the degree to which racism and religion are intertwined in American politics to begin with (that is, the hardcores are for the most part just as concerned about Blut and Boden as they are with God and Satan - and some explicitly see the two as intertwined).
Berzerker
Deity
he isn't?
Thanks. I wasn't sure. I knew he got off with it though.
FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
Gaslight <---- we are here now
Guess which Party is against withdrawing from Afghanistan ?
Guess which Party is against withdrawing from Afghanistan ?
Would that be the party that invaded?
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
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Farm Boy
run boy run
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Forgetting the plural there is sort of gross.
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