Kishkumen wrote: ↑Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:45 am
It is all so bizarre. If someone had asked me in 1980 whether anything like this could happen in the GOP, I would have laughed in your face and thought you were a nut.
Basically, the Republican party has been suffering from prolonged brain drain since the Christian Right and the John Birch Society conspiracists were welcomed into the party by Reagan in 1980. The more rational, normal people in Republican politics came into contact with the crazed morons who populate what soon became the plurality faction of the party, the more the normal people left.
Trump rapidly accelerated this process. The woman who served as his last press secretary wrote a book entitled "For Such a Time as This," comparing herself to the mythical Queen Esther. Jenna Ellis, one of Trump's most prominent election attorneys, has a pinned tweet claiming that some imaginary "they" is going to "cancel Christianity."
I’m going on record now:
If they try to cancel Christianity, if they try to force me to apologize or recant my Faith, I will not bend, I will not waver, I will not break.
On Christ the solid Rock I stand.
And I’m proud to be an American.
Needless to say, her entire scenario is entirely nonsensical and contrived in her own twisted mind.
Alas, normal people outside of official Republican politics who merely favored the party generally rarely got to see that the Christian right actually has wanted Christofascism for many decades now.
It's not a new thing, these desires have been written about formally for many decades by (among others) the extremely influential theologian RJ Rushdoony, a neo-Confederate who burst onto the scene in 1973 and became sort of the evangelical equivalent to John Sorenson in Mormonism, a brilliant person who applied the tools of erudition in support of absurd delusions at a level that far surpassed his predecessors.
Another huge factor was that the evangelical imagination has become obsessed with violent death fantasies thanks to novels like "Left Behind" and "This Present Darkness." These extraordinarily disturbing books are enormously popular, even as they are virtually unknown to non-evangelicals. Christopher Douglas, a scholar of Christian literature is one of the best commentators on this literary and cultural phenomenon:
https://flux.community/matthew-sheffiel ... story-and/