Yves here. Are Americans being indoctrinated to all become Zionists of a sort, that anyone who is not one of us deserves oppression? This seems to be the intent of the further perversion of the prosperity gospel version of Christianity, as recounted by theologian and minister Liz Theoharis below.
The US got a dose of this church of hatred school of Christianity after 9/11. I recall being shocked at what I read about the warmongering in the speech George Bush gave at the National Cathedral on the Friday after 9/11. This section was very close to the top:
To the children and parents and spouses and families and friends of the lost, we offer the deepest sympathy of the nation. And I assure you, you are not alone. Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history, but our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.
War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.
Tellingly, when I went to the Unitarian Universalist church around the corner from me that Sunday, the pastor, to my shock, also worked the need for a belligerent response into his sermon. I would have left but the church was packed and I was trapped in front, sitting in front of the pews.
So the turning of Christianity on its head, at least in American, has been in the making for some time.
By Liz Theoharis, a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the co-author of the new book You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty and author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. Originally published at TomDispatch
It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached “good news” to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.
Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’s name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Department of Homeland Security, using the “Here I am, Lord. Send me” quotation from Isaiah — commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression — to recruit new agents for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?… The answer is yes.” He then added: “The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.”
A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): “And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from life-saving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and providing free health care to lepers.)
The Antichrist
And if that weren’t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic “religious” beliefs that go with it.
In Vanity Fair this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told her, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”
Indeed, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief,” he said, “you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.” Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive “progress” — a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn’t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.
More recently, Thiel has positioned himself “right” in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin, the fellow who “jokingly” claimed that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn’t be more incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)
Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s right, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to move out immediately… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an executive order facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don’t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and “blue cities”; they also bear responsibility for faith leaders being arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.
On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series on the “antichrist” through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.
For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Michelle Stephens describes how “we are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”
In an article at the Denison Forum, she’s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, “Those who see Christ’s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society’s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.” Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.
A Battle for the Bible
Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.
Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.” And in his first speech as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”
Over the past several years, Republican politicians and religious leaders have continued to use biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify cutting people off from healthcare and food assistance. A galling example came when Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify increasing work requirements for people qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And that was just one of many Republican attacks on the low-income food assistance program amid myriad attempts to shred the social welfare system in the lead-up to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Project 2025. Arrington said: “But there’s also, you know, in the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: if a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ And then he goes on to say ‘We hear that some among you are idle’… I think it’s a reasonable expectation that we have work requirements.”
And Arrington has been anything but alone. The same passage, in fact, had already been used by Representatives Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-TN) to justify cutting food stamps during a debate over an earlier farm bill. And Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) used similarly religious language, categorizing people as deserving and undeserving, to argue against a healthcare plan that protects those of us with pre-existing conditions. He insisted that only “people who lead good lives” and “have done the things to keep their bodies healthy” should receive reduced costs for health care.
Such “Christian” politicians regularly misuse Biblical passages to blame the impoverished for their poverty. There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.
A Theology of Liberation for a Time Like This
Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everyone’s lives (except, of course, the superrich), but especially the poor. And — though you wouldn’t know it from such Republicans — they are counter to the main themes of the Bible’s texts. The whole of the Christian Bible, starting with Genesis and ending with the Book of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historical equivalents of anti-poverty programs run through it all.
That arc starts in the Book of Exodus with manna (bread) that shows up day after day, so no one has too much or too little. This is a likely response to the Egyptian Pharaoh setting up a system where a few religious and political leaders amassed great wealth at the expense of the people. God’s plan, on the other hand, was for society to be organized around meeting the needs of all people, including describing how political and religious leaders are supposed to release slaves, forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues through the prophets who insist that the way to love and honor God is to promote programs that uplift the poor and marginalized, while decrying those with power who cloak oppression in religious terms and heretical versions of Christian theology.
My own political and moral roots are in the welfare rights and homeless union survival movements, efforts led by poor and dispossessed people organizing a “new underground railroad” and challenging Christianity to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk at the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, including the church, must move to the position that “poor people are not sinners, but poverty is a sin against God that could and should be ended.”
Delk’s words echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest organization of poor people in the 1960s and 1970s, spoke to the National Council of Churches. “I represent all of those poor people who are on welfare and many who are not,” she said, “people who believe in the Christian way of life… people whose nickels and dimes and quarters have built the Christian churches of America. Because we believe in Christianity, we have continued to support the Christian churches… We call upon you… to join with us in the National Welfare Rights Organization. We ask for your moral, personal, and financial support in this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our people. If we fail in our struggle, Christianity will have failed.”
In a Trumpian world, where Christian extremism is becoming the norm, we must not let the words of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of countless prophets and freedom fighters come true. Rather, we must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so. Now is the time. May we make it so.
Copyright 2025 Liz Theoharis
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Peter Thiel seems to make a habit of deliberately misreading books. You wonder if he thinks that LoTR’s Sauron, the sentient all-seeing Watchtower who seeks panopticon-like control of all Middle Earth, is the protagonist. I suppose those pesky Ents, gullible Humans, Hobbits and Elves should have just tossed him the Ring of Power.
Christianity arises with, shapes and is shaped by an emerging capitalism. The wives of the new factory owners build and maintain and discipline poor women and others through charity and lying-in hospitals; you want to beware any analysis that suggests that Trump is abusing or misusing some virtuous construct. Religion is more ideology, always.
Being new to the study of the bible when I was in my 20s, due to a partner’s interest, I was amazed at how people in bible study groups would turn themselves inside out to explain the complete contradictions in what was written. Kill people. Don’t kill people. etc etc.
I came to the conclusion that the bible has endured for two millenia because it doesn’t matter what you believe and what you do, you can find passages in the bible to tell you that you are right. Slavery is ok. Slavery is not ok. Pick a pov.
Meanwhile some of us had parents who wanted us to be raised in a religious environment. My main reaction to Sunday School was that these aren’t very interesting stories. And historically speaking there’s considerable evidence that many of them–Exodus for example–aren’t even true stories.
So my reaction to the battle of religions which, let us be clear, also includes Jewish versus Christian and not just vice versa, is include me out. To those who think America is on the cusp of Handmaid’s Tale I say prove it and not just anecdote it. Here in religious country I see zero evidence of same.
Here’s suggesting all the Trumpie religious talk is yet another attempt to roll back the clock to the 1950s when the battle against godless Communism was riding high, not a reflection of contemporary reality. Meanwhile Netanyahu is hypocritically using religion to murder people in Gaza. Perhaps this is in the tradition of Ben Gurion who said he didn’t believe in God but did believe God gave Palestine to the Jews.
Of course there are grifters who are going to use religion to justify selfishness and “sin.” But I think ordinary people are far more likely to turn to religion for comfort and support. To me this isn’t very scary because I grew up in it.
Your perception was accurate. The Hebrew bible is a document that collects writings from many different people over a period of more than a thousand years, and these writers didn’t agree with each other on a number of points. Moreover, there are wildly different views about priorities.
Here’s an example. In Exodus 21, part of what scholars call the Book of the Covenant, one of the oldest sections of the Hebrew bible with many allusions to the even older Code of Hammurabi, here’s how slavery is supposed to work:
Exodus 21:1
This verse refers to debt slavery, one of two types practiced in the Ancient Near East. When one was broke and had to borrow to eat, one first sold one’s children into slavery (like what’s called indentured servitude), and finally one’s self. The other kind of slavery began with the capture of foreigners in war. That slavery was for the remainder of the slave’s life.
Now check out the very different treatment accorded in Deuteronomy (from the Latin for “second law” because much of the legal material from Exodus appears with a twist):
Deuteronomy 15
On top of that, there’s new language directing the Israelites to care for the less fortunate among them to avoid the problem of debt slavery:
Deuteronomy 15
Another debate with modern relevance is the one between Ezra and Third Isaiah. Ezra, who’s widely regarded as the person who put the Torah and histories into roughly their current form, demanded that the returned exiles who had intermarried with the “people of the land” must divorce them. The language used by the Israelite officials sounds sadly modern:
Ezra 9
In opposition to this view, Third Isaiah proclaims the rebuilt temple to be a a house of prayer for all nations:
Isaiah 56
In Matthew and Mark, Jesus is portrayed as quoting the last verse of this Isaiah passage when he cleanses the temple:
There are many other arguments between biblical writers in both the Hebrew and Greek bibles (the passage that is quoted in DJG’s comment below, taken from what Luther called the “straw epistle” of James, is part of an argument with Paul about justification by faith alone that takes place in the Greek bible.
Many thanks for this. I’ve been looking for this
Welcome to Sharia America, though this will be a Christian type rather than a Muslim type. Their central ethos?
‘Blessed be the wealthy, for that is how God shows whom he favours.’
It is a theme that goes way back in the US but this mutation is premised on punishing the poor and rewarding the wealthy. Who says so? Why the wealthy of course. You wonder if they will get around to creating their own version of the bible with “mistaken” passages edited out.
It’s been a consistent theme throughout Christian history. It has always been used to justify what ever the powerful want to do.
The world is ripe for another charlatan
Not even exclusive to Christianity. This exact sentiment was central to the theology of the Umayyad court, and is one of the major points of contention between Sunna and Shi’a (some Sunna are pro-, most Shi’a are vociferously anti-) down to this day, and is being used by everyone from the Saudis (where it is called “Madkhaliyya“) to none other than the new death-squad regime in Damascus. The chief druid/priest/wizard of Madkhaliyya, Rabie’ al-Madkhali, died recently, which reignited the debate all over Arabic social media.
Re: The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right?
The Bible does not require wealthy Christians! And if this heathen recalls correctly said book contains a pithy line on that subject.
Twisted minds turn love to hate.
The irony here – yeh, lady, you need some old fashioned Jesus. Humble yourself! He will exalt you!
Saying that outloud, in public. Amazing.
He might be correct that the Bible doesn’t require wealthy Xtian nations, or individuals, which is likely where Hegseth’s concern really lies, to do this. But it does say they’re going to hell.
I was lucky enough to see Frank Zappa’s last tour in the late 80s where he really took the piss out of the Xtian hypocrites of the time. This song was originally aimed at Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson and Jim and Tammy Bakker but it works just as well for the likes of Peter Thiel too – Jesus Thinks You’re a Jerk
gotta say, one of the best concerts…. 1988 nassau coliseum, li ny… even with a 104 degree temp…. that was still a blast… lucy in the sky with diamonds was done as lucy was a hooker with herpes….. . they registered people to vote during the show…
but look at f zappa’s interview with charlie rose on feb 10, 1988… how can people say they didn’t see this coming. when some yippie could spell out the fear about our fascist theocracy in the making… in 1988…. putting charlie rose to shame…. where he belongs.
Religious extremism is the gateway drug to moral hubris. All these people in the land that “separates church and state” intentionally quoting the bible to cloak themselves in moral legitimacy as they wield the power of the state against the poor and the downtrodden.
This is the Gospel for the Catholic Mass today:
Gospel Luke 6:20-26
Raising his eyes toward his disciples Jesus said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for the Kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.
Clear enough and I can get behind it except idk what is “the Son of Man.” Is Jesus referring to himself? If so, what meaning does this have over and above saying “myself.”?
Christian socialism and the present Left
Spencer Jones Platypus Review 168 | July – August 2024
…and things really went downhill when Constantine got his hands on Christianity and turned it into Christendom.[4]Once the forces of empire, in particular the Roman Empire, took a hold of Christianity, they twisted and mutilated it into a ruined and wicked form that resembled nothing that Christ would have wanted. And the worst part about it was that through political machinations, the Emperor of Rome, the seat that had massacred Christians en masse for years, now sat as the arbitrator between various bickering theological factions. Christians had given themselves over to empire for the sake of gaining power and settling petty squabbles through the force of the police state of Rome. As such, we see that Christian power centers in the “Church,” not in the Christian, and that what is being practiced is not “Christianity,” the teachings of a poor carpenter from Bethlehem, but “Christendom,” the teachings of a power-hungry organization that will desecrate anything it touches to gain more power and glory.
Here is a link, because I am curious.
https://platypus1917.org/2024/07/01/christian-socialism-and-the-present-left/
Here’s a really great book on why Constantine adopted Christianity – Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance .
The 3rd century AD had been a disaster for the fraying Roman Empire. Constantine took over in the early 4th century and needed an administrative structure to keep the empire together. The historical Roman institution, the Senate, was corrupt, sclerotic, and ineffectual. By this time the Christians weren’t just poor slobs being fed to the lions – Christianity had gotten organized with a network of bishops throughout the empire. Christianity had become the religion of wealthy, sophisticated urbanites, the PMC of their day, who looked down their noses at those rural dwellers still clinging to their pagan customs, drenched in blood as they still tried to divine intent from bestial innards. Yuk! (Sound familiar? – history may not repeat, but it does rhyme, and today’s it’s those rural Xtians who are often looked down on as unsophisticated hicks). The author argues that Constantine was not particularly religious at all, but he did realize the Senate was mostly useless so he cooperated with the bishops and co-opted their administrative network to reinvigorate the Roman state.
“Though shall not steal.”
So these people are full of shit.
“Thou”…haven’t had coffee yet.
I find evangs to be odd history majors, everything happens in a very narrow time frame over 2,000 years ago, and its as if nothing happened since.
As long as dogma behaves itself, i’m ok with whatever you want to believe in, but hopefully we don’t regress to the point where if you don’t believe in the approved faith, they’ll kill you-which was a common occurrence not so long ago.
Many are lost and blindly follow the hucksters of religion, this is not new.
Many will be surprised when, according to Matt 7:23, they hear “I knew you not”.
I have been a Christian for almost 50 years and a former ‘evangelical’, I ‘left’ sometime in the 90s due to this radicalism and the prosperity gospel teachings. These are cults by any standard.
I measure my own actions against the 2 commandments given by Jesus.
1) Love the Creator with all your heart, mind and spirit.
2) Love others (His created beings) as you love yourself.
These are high standards and I fail regularly. I find it difficult to pass judgement on others, because I know I am far from perfect. However, I know this is a PROCESS. Each day, I am thankful to be alive and hope to exercise wisdom (my freedom of choice) and remove myself from associating with ANYONE who exhibits behaviors contrary to this basic teaching. Am I ever wrong? You bet I am.
American Christianity has devolved into a deceptive religion, filled with materialism and a false identity of exceptionalism (like the Hebrews). It is very sad.
One thing the comments do not reflect: we all have a free will and can have compassion on those who choose unwisely. Our choices (actions) are our own and we always have the opportunity to change the way we think and do better. There is no perfect human and those that attempt to find and practice these two commandments have my respect, not my criticism.
Final note: the Bible is intended to be a mirror. When you see evil, it is you. When you see good, it is also you. You get to decide who you will be.
As a bad Catholic and a bad Buddhist, I have been skeptical of the deterioration of U.S. Protestantism into a Calvinist cargo cult. The list of crabbed and craven personages in the article is informative indeed.
I hesitate to post links to the Flowers of Saint Francis, the Poverello (“that poor guy”) of Assisi. It would cause some people to melt down into a smoking puddle like Margaret Hamilton. We wouldn’t want anyone taking care of lepers!
So (much to the consternation of Luther), the Epistle of James, chapter 2, relevant verses:
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18 But someone will say, ‘You have faith; I have deeds.’
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. 19 You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder. 20 You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless?
Can we turn the uber-rich into biofuel? It would be much better for the environment.
Note that these “Christians” are also hard-core believers in a radical interpretation of the Book of Revelation – in which Jesus returns and turns the earth into a lake of fire, burning all the unbelievers, while they, the “elect”, are whisked off to heaven. Jesus the Destroyer of Worlds! Who else can this be but the Anti Christ? These malicious morons are worshipping the Anti Christ. Try telling one of them this and see them immediately burst into a rage of cognitive dissonance……
I’m often reminded that there are many facets and offshoot entities under the banner of Protestantism, and for a reality check on what I suggest below I grew up underneath a very strict understanding of the Bible and Christian principles. Loosely that a fundamental independent Baptist congregation in eastern NC is a much different congregation than today’s modern First Baptist Church located near downtown Dallas, Texas. Same Bible but decidedly different flavor in the beliefs and as well who delivers the weekly sermon.
If power corrupts then power conferred to a religious authority, in this scenario my small town old time religion example, power may also corrupt or rather be utilized to wield a near unchecked authority. Not always good since the man as pastor is still well a human like the rest of us. I came around to how fallible both people and organizations, acting as a Biblical authority, can have their blind spots. Now combined these aforementioned blind spots with countless billions of dollars at ready disposal and we reach the real examples cited above. The homeless and the poor are a nuisance let’s just sweep them out of view, if acceptable ( just unreal, but hey America in 2025 ).
“it is simpler for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…”. Just one of many examples to cite, from the original teachings of JC. If these billionaire endorsers of a prosperity gospel for some but not all have figured a different angle on core Bible principles I can believe it when I see it.
I’ll turn blue while I’m holding my breath.
There is an interesting symmetry between this essay and KLG’s piece on ‘Liberalism’ posted today. The latter compares the *ideal* of “liberalism” as a system of *values* required of citizens for a just and equitable society, with its perverted reality – neoliberalism as an amoral legitimating ideology (if you can even call it that) for today’s predatory capitalism. This essay does the same with “Christianity,” going over well-trod ground to show how Christian values are perverted into their opposite – legitimating ideology for today’s predatory capitalism. Both have of course been used to justify our own imperial extension of predatory capitalism throughout the world. And they make a nice “good cop/bad cop” type of tag team. Today’s pseudo-liberals can be sheep herded through appeals to liberal “values” (the neoliberal “rules-based” order), while our pseudo-Christian “conservatives” can be rallied by appeals to God and Christian “values.”
For me, though, there seems to be a strangely transparent and performative aspect in this appeal to Christianity today, even more so than back in the obviously hypocritical days of Falwell and the “Moral Majority,” I mean does anybody *really* believe Trump cares about “Christian values”? Or Peter Thiel, for god’s sake (I see Thiel’s take on Christianity as that of the Grand Inquisitor). We like to use the WWE analogy a lot, and it really seems appropriate here. I know there are still “true believers” like Mike Johnson, but I think most people watch this crap like they would a WWE wrestling match. They know it’s not real, but they root for their favorite politico anyway while going along with the show. They shut off their brains, like they do when they define their “Christianity” as a Gospel of Abundance. Oh wait, that’s the “liberals” motto. Hard to keep track these days.
The religious scammers are as old as Elmer Gantry. Older!
Maybe I have a view skewed by memories of a time when the country seemed far more religious than it is today. Some of us might even assert that the country is no longer religious enough given all the open lying which is a thing that used to be less socially acceptable. We need something to quell the current ethical swamp.
The Baptist bashers reach for the smelling salts even as they promote their own highly irrational faith based ideas. Small town religion has always been a mixture of idealism with cold eyed business networking. On this level it may be hypocritical but as a threat to the republic it’s a stretch.
It’s obvious to me that Christianity is a polytheistic religion, with different so-called Christian groups worshiping different single gods. Sometimes the god says “Love your neighbors, and help ’em the Hell out.”, and then another one says “Would you mind killing everyone in the town next door? It’s for the best.”
Wow! Before I posted, the date showed as September 10, 1181??? For real!
Cheeze Whiz, I can still sign up for the Crusades!
The best thing about monotheistic religions is that there are so many gods to chose from.
All of those mighty deities forgotten to time, some of them rebranded into luxury goods names, Hermes comes to mind.
“Christianity is a polytheistic religion”
Well there is the Trinity – which is a recapitulation of the Celtic Triune God – actually, it goes back to the original Indo-European god-system, which is preserved best in Hinduism. They have Triune gods at the top – Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
And the Catholics preserved massive amounts of paganism in their system – consider the Saints in all their glory – each Saint recapitulates characteristics of the pagan god-system. I have a small shrine to St. Sylvan – who is a recapitulation if Sylvanus, patron god of the wild fields and woods and those who work therein, guardian of the boundaries, protector of the living forests and fields.
I’m a long-ago lapsed Catholic, but this summer I took my 80-Something mother on a 2 week road trip. I attended mass (first time in decades for me) with her in deep-red Missouri on consecutive Sundays, at 2 different parishes, and was astounded by what the priests said in their respective Homilies.
Both priests admonished the congregation for not doing enough to support the poor, the immigrants, etc., and reminded the congregations that this is the core tenet of the faith. One of the priests called out the Big Beautifull Bill directly, explaining how it will crush the poor and was explicitly un-Christian. The congregation was a mixed audience for that message, an even split between nods and head shakes, but the priest scolded the naysayers. I’m still an atheist but what I heard gave me hope. It was not anything like what I expected to hear.
I spent way too much time in a Protestant church as a kid (we were once warned we might go to hell for mowing the lawn on a Sunday) and refuse to go any longer, much to my bible-thumping 80 year old mother’s chagrin. But the church does make her happy and we’re both originally baptized Orthodox, so this spring I took her to Meteora in Greece, the 2nd most holy Greek Orthodox site (women are still not allowed at #1 Mt. Athos), and we went to the Orthodox Easter Sunday service.
I couldn’t understand a word they were saying – it was the best church service I’d ever been to ;)
You get the best and worst of humanity in churches just like anywhere else.
“Anywhere else” people don’t claim to have the authority of higher power. “Anywhere else” people don’t pretend to enact the will of some omnipotent being, but only their own.
The brand of Christianity ascendant in the US today is mostly a mishmash of heretical beliefs like the Darbyite “dispensationalism” doctrine. I don’t think the Christianity practiced in the rest of the world had much resemblance to this stuff until American multimillionaires and billionaires started funding its spread abroad. Development of many of the foundation documents of the heresy (like The Fundamentals and the Scofield Bible) was also funded from the start by wealthy patrons. But even in the US, this version of Christianity didn’t pick up huge numbers of new believers outside the South until after 1970. Before that the “mainstream” churches (Episcopals, Congregationalists, Anglicans, Lutherans, and the more sedate Presbyterians and Methodists) had far more members than the more outré evangelical churches, and the American ruling class were far more likely to come from those mainstream churches. When “born again” Jimmy Carter got elected President, that normalized a lot of the new excitement about the evangelical churches. Jimmy put a friendly face on the public’s image of the new version of Christianity, and it eclipsed the former mainstream churches in a surprisingly short timeframe.
I find it odd that authority seems to be derived from the ‘Bible’ when in fact it took nearly four centuries for an agreement to form over what constituted New Testament canon. See
https://yalebiblestudy.org/courses/formation-of-the-biblical-canon/lessons/new-testament-study-guide/
Further, the Old Testament texts with which early believers were familiar were not Hebrew texts, but rather the Septuagint in Greek.
As this article illustrates, theology cannot be derived from Scripture in isolation. Rather Scripture is in interpreted in light of received Tradition and Tradition must be interpreted in light of Scripture.
This becomes even more important as Scriptural texts are translated into the vernacular. If translated outside of received Tradition, it’s likely that mistranslation takes place.
As for Tradition it is the life of the Church handed down from those who came before us to the time of the original apolostles.
That is very Eastern Orthodox thinking. And the primary reason they can’t accept one man (the Pope) being able to interpret the scriptures correctly, when it can take decades or even centuries from the whole church itself.
During Anglican confirmation I was taught the ‘three-legged stool’ – scripture, tradition, and reason.
Not sure whether other branches do that. I guess Catholics don’t, given the whole Papal infallibility thing.
My favorite observation about religion which sums it up pretty well for me is by the late Christopher Hitchens:
“Religion poisons everything.”
Margaret Attwood was prescient in her MaddAddam trilogy:
“One of Atwood’s neater ideas here is the Church of PetrOleum, based scripturally on Matthew 16:18 (“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”) via some splendidly mendacious theology: “Peter is the Latin word for rock, and therefore the real, true meaning of ‘Peter’ refers to petroleum, or oil that comes from rock . . . my friends, for we all know oleum is the Latin word for oil, and indeed oil is holy throughout the Bible! What else is used for the anointing of priests and prophets and kings?” (p. 112). This is the Rev, an (of course) deeply unpleasant fellow who parlays this anti-Green theology into much money, and who happens to be the father of Maddaddam’s two main characters, Adam and Zeb. The strongest portions of this novel are those that detail the childhood and youth of these two, through Zeb’s street-smart, cynical, impulsive perspective. His childhood is spoiled by his ghastly mother and malign father; he lights out for the territories only to discover that the territories have all been poisoned. He works, whores, and escapes several times by the skin of his teeth until he pitches up with the God’s Gardener’s cult, which is where we first encountered him in Flood.”
http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/reviews/maddaddam-by-margaret-atwood/
Whatever in the bible is most unprovable, to me foretelling the future with Daniel and Revelations is pretty dagone errant. Here, though, is an issue lots of people…even outside Xianity….interpret one way without looking at the other. Block universe or no block universe? There’s reason to think it is in a block modality, but maybe due to an irrational inclination I go with my strong hunch that it isn’t. So, I go along with Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow’s position they stated a while back on the matter.