More on This Week in Religion and Politics
Pete's prayer and Franklin Graham weighs in.
Back to the Hegseth reading I noted yesterday, kudos to Morning Joe for putting this video package together:
For the record, here is Ezekiel 25:17:
17 And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.
Can we also note that in Pulp Fiction, the “verse” is quoted as part of an execution? Granted, there is a bit of a miracle as well. But the whole thing kind of fits the Pastor Bro + Warrior Dude image that Hegseth likes to project (with more emphasis on Bro and Dude than anything else).
Meanwhile, Franklin Graham took to Twitter to help provide cover for Trump’s Jesus meme.
I would remind the Reverend that you should not bear false witness! I guess this is what happens when we can’t post the Ten Commandments in schools!
In all seriousness, this would be simply laughable if it weren’t someone using a position of spiritual authority to cover for what were clearly lies (or, at best, delusions) of the president. To be clear: I am no fan of Graham, but there is little doubt that he is of influence in the Evangelical community, if not broadly nationally, and it is unfortunate, to put it mildly, to have someone whose position is allegedly built on moral authority to behave immorally.
And Graham’s paean to Trump on the subject of “religious liberty” is more than ridiculous or, at least, just more willful dishonesty. Trump has not been a champion of religious liberty, but has allowed Evangelicalism a more privileged place in government. Tell people who are banned from coming to the US because they are from Muslim countries that Donald Trump is a champion of religious liberty.
As a general matter, I have long found the whole Nepo Pastor thing to be distasteful, but more to the point, it has been obvious for some time that Graham has some extreme views. Note this WaPo headline from 2014, Franklin Graham: Putin is better than Obama on gay rights. Graham was, in my view, a leading-edge figure in our current wave of American illiberalism. His kind words for Putin (while, of course, not fully endorsing him) because of anti-gay policies and his manipulative (in my view) promotion of the Russian Orthodox Church as part of obvious Russian nationalism were a red flag to me at the time. But it certainly explains Graham’s willingness to carry water for Trump’s Christian Nationalist project.
Does this, for example, sound like promoting religious liberty? Hegseth Holds Protestant-Only Religious Service at Pentagon. No, it is a reminder that, for all the talk of promoting Christianity, when people in power get to choose to promote religion, they end up favoring their flavor thereof.
For more on that, see this clip from Doug Wilson. It should be noted that Wilson has been invited to speak at Hegseth’s Pentagon and that the church Hegseth attends is linked to Wilson’s movement.
All of this sums together to create a, dare I say, unholy nexus of religion and politics that should underscore why we should want a clear separation of church and state.
We should not be looking to the SecDef for Bible (or any religious) lessons, because that’s not his job, nor is he equipped to provide such lessons. (Of course, he isn’t equipped to be SecDef, either, but that’s its own problem.)
We should not want a president who sends out images that are blasphemous in nature.
We should not want a prominent pastor to lie/rationalize about said president’s actions because such behavior is necessary for that pastor to maintain influence with the administration. When a pastor cannot call out bad behavior, especially of a religious nature, of a politician, that pastor has been compromised by politics.
We should not want illiberal reactionaries like Doug Wilson to be speaking in the halls of government in a privileged position.
We should not want a vision of “religious liberty” that is really about promoting one religion over others.
We should pay heed to people like Wilson, who are overt about their authoritarian goals and understand that all of this taken to its logical conclusion is not even simply “Christianity” winning (which would be a violation of principles we allegedly hold dear), but it would end up being some Christians being more equal than others.
Quite frankly, any Christian who listens to Doug Wilson talk about his goals should immediately understand why they are all better off not establishing a religion and allowing free exercise. And watching Hegseth should make us all understand why the best way to ensure no establishment and allow free exercise is to have a solid wall between church and state.
Of course, I understand that that is not the reaction that many have, and that is a sobering fact.
You forget the 11th commandment: all the above is void if there’s profit in it.
For evangelicals, religious freedom means evangelical supremacy.
BTW, a god that created a universe billions of light years across, with an incredibly big number of galaxies, an even larger number of stars, and an even bigger number of planets, not to mention black holes, quasars, comets, asteroids, etc., for the sole purpose that a great ape with light skin color spouting the right belief could lord it over the great apes with other skin colors and beliefs, is not a deity worth worshipping.
Because of a recent conversation, I decided to look around for some examples of the people I came up with – Mennonites – and how they were responding to Trump. I found this:
This embodies my own take on what I absorbed about the people I worshipped with. They were very conservative, yes. More than me on several points. AND, they were focused on humility and living in peace. Loving one’s neighbor, making things better. Healing.
Thing is, being focused on humility and peace doesn’t get you millions of followers on X.
In my studies of the history of the world, and Christendom, when Church and State are combined, it is always bad for the Church. Maybe not financially, but it’s message is diluted or even completely altered (Prosperity Gospel, anyone?). And movements to break away one’s worship from state rule always result in a renewal. The disestablishment of churches that the US went through in the early 1800’s led to the Second Great Awakening.
Funnily enough, the Tao te Ching mentions this, as it advocates for time spent serving the government to be punctuated by time spent as a hermit living apart.
I once read a book by Malcom Muggeridge called Christ and the Media. Overall, I didn’t think it was that good, but it did present an opportunity to think about how contrary to the over all message of Jesus, and of the Christianity I had absorbed from Mennonites modern media was.
It is anti-humility, anti-modesty, anti-non-violent.
Muggeridge did one thing that I liked. He imagined a Fourth Temptation: Satan offered Jesus a media empire (at the time he wrote it that was tv, radio, newspapers. Now it’s different/not different). He imagined Jesus rejecting that one, too, preferring to work directly with people. Hands-on, so to speak.
So I am deeply, deeply suspicious of spiritual types who put themselves on blast on social media. Deeply. Suspicious.