Charles Foster Johnson is a pastor, a supporter of public education, and a great advocate for separation of church and state. He founded Pastors for Texas Children to marshall support for public school students and their teachers and schools. PTC has been a major force in blocking vouchers every year in the Texas Legislature. He has worked with pastors in other states to encourage them to speak out against vouchers and privatization. He has reminded his colleagues that the best way to protect religious liberty is to avoid any funding by the government for religious activities or schools. He has attended national meetings of NPE and was a keynote speaker at our meeting in Oakland, CA. It was a rare treat to watch 500 educators prepare to listen to a Baptist preacher, tense up, then break into smiles when they realized that he is on our side and wants to make public schools better for all children.
He writes:
The evangelical support for President Trump is alarming for Christian ministers like me, who do not share their views and values. But, it is my sense, possibly born of my inveterate optimism, that the Evangelical coalition supporting Trump is breaking down.
It’s an arcane nuance, but Trump only has the continued support of a certain subset of evangelicals, those of a triumphalist mentality, who feel that it is God’s will that their particular brand of Christianity has a divine right to succeed. These people have been at war with the culture for decades. They have advanced their apocalyptic brand through the peculiar grievance that the world is awful, that America is lost, and that it all should be blown up. Thus, their disdain for our American institutions, including public education.
They are found largely in middle class, suburban, megachurch demographic and religious categories. There is a detached gnosticism that marks their theology. The emphasis is not on love of neighbor, but rather one’s own prosperity and alleviation of anxiety. It bears little resemblance to the faith outlined in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, nailed this curious gnosticism twenty years or so ago in a book called “The American Religion.”
But, here is some good news: real, organic, embodied faith communities across the theological spectrum – conservative, moderate, liberal– are not falling for Trump’s toxic mythology. These are smaller, more connected congregations in rural communities, small towns, and urban neighborhoods that are highly contextualized. They are not the disembodied entertainment circuses of the megachurches. We see these congregations thoroughly involved in their neighborhoods, particularly their public schools, and internalizing the pressing human need found in the children. Yes, some of these folks voted for Trump, but they are beginning to rethink the entire program. Providentially, Donald Trump is waking up the church!
This is why you see a growing communalism generating in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Candidates like Beto O’Rourke are tapping in to this communalism, and the message is simple: love your neighbor as yourself. Accordingly, there is an astonishing reaffirmation of public education nationwide. Evidence of this is the defeat of vouchers in Texas the three past legislative sessions, the remarkable repudiation of anti-public education candidates in Oklahoma this past week, and the teacher uprisings in Kentucky and West Virginia. These states are gaining sufficient strength to shift the conversation to charter schools, the privatization measure of choice for corporate profiteers. We will have some kind of policy in the upcoming legislative session, however modest, that draws the line on further charter expansion. This would not have been possible in these states even a couple of years ago.
So, why the paradox of so-called “evangelical” support for President Trump in the heartland at the same time we are seeing a recovery of progressive faith and politics in the same southern and midwestern Bible belt localities?
When sociologists of religion drill down deep in examining what I’m calling this “evangelical subset,” and inquire as to the exact nature of their religious observances and practices, they find that many of them do not attend religious services, are not active in any religious community, do not hold church membership, do not engage in formal prayer, do not read Scripture, do not participate in good works or service. In other words, do not have any embodied or communal behaviors that constitute what C.S. Lewis artfully called “mere Christianity.”
Rather, they have a hyper-rationalistic and strictly conceptual notion of what constitutes “faith.” It is a mix of doctrinal purity (literal view of Scripture, creationism, etc.), a hermeneutic of suspicion about culture (academia, media, Hollywood are evil), and a reactionary view of history and politics (if we could only “go back” to when gays stayed in the closet, women stayed in the kitchen, and Christianity occupied the public square.).
Perhaps a church history lesson is instructive. A perfectly good word, “evangelical” has been stripped of its theological and historical roots, and assigned to this weirdly gnostic and apocalyptic political worldview. The word comes from the Gk. euanggelion meaning “gospel” or “good news.” It was a political term used by Caesar to announce his arrival into the gates of a Roman Empire city. The writers of the New Testament, subversives that they were, co-opted Caesar’s terminology to describe the announcement of what they considered to be the New Rule of God in the world expressed in the teachings of Jesus.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled mightily with the application of the word in his day when so many so-called “evangelical” Lutherans threw in with Hitler. So, Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth called their group the “confessing” church instead.
The very term “Christian” has taken on a similar bad reputation in the culture at large. The term literally means “little Christ” and was a term of derision when first applied by the Romans who understandably thought the Jesus cult was the strangest of all the exotic religions they encountered in their conquests.
The term has fallen into disrepute again, especially among Fredrich Schleiermacher’s “cultured despisers of religion.”
I had a fascinating experience not long ago that brought this home to me in a chilling way. A young TCU student who had recently arrived at the university from New York City overheard me visiting with a friend in a Fort Worth coffee shop, approached our table, interrupted us courteously, and said:
“I’m sorry, forgive me, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. You say that you are a Christian, but you sure don’t talk like one.”
Thinking instinctively that she was an “evangelical” of the variety described above, I groaned inside and said, “Excuse me?”
“Well, I’ve been listening to you for the better part of the last hour. You speak of justice, full equal rights for all people, acceptance and affirmation for LGBTQ folks, social responsibility, and the Common Good. You sure don’t sound like a Christian.”
She went on to say that the only Christians she knew of were intolerant, bigoted, hateful, and militant, which is why my speech confused her. Honest to God, this young woman, without a shred of irony, equated Christianity with a cult of meanness, and understood that fear, hate and shame were requirements.
Needless to say, that’s a conversation I won’t soon forget.
I certainly hope that the good Pastor is correct. Problem is that if Trump is impeached, we get the real, “cult of meanness” evangelical Pence. Catch 22!
I suggest that it won’t be a catch 22.
If we end up with Pence as the president, we will be trapped within Beast 666.
“Let the one with understanding reckon the meaning of the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is 666.”
Chapter 13 of The Book of Revelation
No matter how egregious his sins, Trump will not be impeached. It takes a 2/3 vote of the Senate to impeach. That means at least 18 Republicans in the Senate must vote to impeach. I don’t see that happening.
The Christian Church grew up mired like a fly in treacle in the utter darkness that was Platonism–the sick, world-and-life-denying doctrine of Plato, who split the universe down the middle, into an airy-fairy spirit world “up there” and a contemptible physical world “down here.” New lovers and indigenous peoples have always known this bifurcation of things to be utter bullshit and have been cognizant of the divine manifest and showing forth in them and all around them.
The authors of the Chandogya Upanishad knew. “Tat tvam asi,” they said. “That thou art,” a chip off the Divine block. So did the early and more recent practitioners of Shinto, before and after its corruption into an Emperor cult during the Shogunate. So did Yeshua of Nazareth. We have some 250 surviving gospels, acts, and what-not, most not included in the Greatest Hits compilation cobbled together by the official church, and I’ve read most of these. Having done that, I can tell you that he was a pretty awesome fellow, Yeshua, my brother and yours, who quoted God as saying, “Verily I say unto you, in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”; Yeshua, who said, “The kingdom is not in heaven or in the sea; it is within you, and all around you,” that Yeshua who reminded us, “Did not the Psalmist say, ‘Ye are Gods’?” He was talking about you, Dear Reader, and me.
The Church had to leave rivers of blood throughout history to kill off the indigenous who could call bullshit on their bifurcation of creation. That Church would have a lot to answer to if Jesus actually came back. Dostoevsky nailed this in The Brothers Karamazov when he said that the Church, to continue existing at all in its current metastasis, would have to kill him all over again.
Unlearning that poisoning of our thought–that separation of the spirit and the world, that contemptus mundi–is for us very, very hard. Unlearning is the hardest kind of learning there is, for these are the categories of thought that are HABITUAL FOR US and have been so for millennia, after the Great Poisoning. (As the late novelist David Foster Wallace reminded us, Ask the fish, “How’s the water?” and he will say, “What water?”) But we need to unlearn this “world-down-here-spirit-up-there” nonsense that has become so habitual, so familiar, that we are not even aware of it, though it informs almost every act by which we put a thought together. It’s poison. We need to spit it out. Purge it. Most evils–the objectification and instrumentalization of almost everything, of nature, of other people (of workers, foreigners, women, those of other races, and so on)–stem from this contempt for and instrumentalization of the world. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” says Lear, “to have a thankless child.” Our heedless, reckless, unthinking but ever-present rejection of the world, our inability to see the divine in it, is that thanklessness.
Indigenous peoples knew better. Read The Spirit of the Indian, by Charles Eastman (Ohíye S’a). He grew up to young manhood among the Santee Dakota but then went to school and became a physician on the European model. He treated survivors of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Few indigenous in the “New World” had written languages, and the Church gathered up and destroyed the books of those who did, so Ohíye S’a’s book, written in 1903 and published seven years later, is one of the very, very few authentic accounts, by an indigenous person, of pre-conquest indigenous religion and life here on Turtle Island–one of the few accounts not filtered through twisted preconceptions and misunderstandings of European anthropologists and poetasters who gathered and then breathtakingly distorted and miscommunicated “savage” indigenous ways and beliefs. As Ohíye S’a puts this in his Foreward: “I have attempted to paint the religious life of the typical American Indian as it was before he knew the white man. I have long wished to do this, because I cannot find that it has ever been seriously, adequately, and sincerely done.”
Treat yourself to a drink from an unpolluted spring. Read his book. There may be no other that I would recommend so highly.
cx: The Soul of the Indian
Excellent Bob, really. And thank you.
Thank you for taking the time to read it. Much appreciated!
Bob: Indigenous people know a lot that most people don’t. Their shamans are holy people who know a lot about the spiritual world. Would that we were as knowledgeable and cared about others.
Chief Joseph didn’t know Trump but said, ‘There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. It does not require many words to speak the truth.”
Here are some good quotes from Chief Joseph.
If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The Earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself, and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.
Chief Joseph
We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that.
Chief Joseph
I do not believe that the Great Spirit Chief gave one kind of men the right to tell another kind of men what they must do.
Chief Joseph
I am tired of talk that comes to nothing It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. It does not require many words to speak the truth.
Chief Joseph
Wonderful, Carol. Yes yes yes. Thank you for sharing this wisdom!!!
A link to the text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/340/340-h/340-h.htm
Bob Shephard:
Actually, each person is free to believe what they believe, and they’re free to express those beliefs and to live in their own way. And to change those beliefs and actions, as they live and learn. At least, that’s supposed to be one of the founding principles of our nation. As one of the founders, James Madison, wrote, “The mind is free.”
What you’re doing in your comment is undercutting the pastor’s argument for freedom of thought, inclusion, and consideration of the views of others. This isn’t to disagree with the spiritual understanding you espouse in your comment. It’s just to say, Every single person is entitled to a belief system and a personal path of their own.
That includes the freedom to side with Plato or Aristotle, any of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Taoists, Sufis, Lakota, or any other individual or group that holds a personal belief. Your dismissal of Plato as a bullshit artist rather than a representative of a major strain in Western thought says a lot about your methods of argumentation.
Here’s a reading recommendation for you: “Motto,” by Langston Hughes.
I don’t think I said that Plato was a bullshit artist, icompleat. I said that he was wrong, that his view was, in my view, bs–emphatically false. And ofc people are free to think as they please, as I am free to disagree with them.
As one of the legatees of the Western tradition, a disagreement with Plato, on my part, is like an argument with one’s father. LOL. I respect, very much, his achievement. But I emphatically disagree with his stances on a great many matters.
Aie yie yie, a dangling modifier in that previous comment. Oh for a corrections feature on WordPress!
And, of course, people don’t have the right to believe anything that they want to believe. I don’t have a right to believe that Sri Lanka is larger than Russia or that women are less smart than are men. The former is demonstrably, objectively false, and the latter is both demonstrably, objectively false and morally repugnant. I think that Plato’s bifurcation of creation, and its consequences for our history are false and morally repugnant. It simply isn’t the case that one has no right to oppose what one believes to be false and repugnant views.
Yes, people DO have the right to believe whatever they want to believe. That right is implicit in the First Amendment. Put another way, NO ONE has the right to force people to believe what they don’t want to believe. At least not in our system of government. Likewise, the right to disagree with others is implicit within this fundamental right.
LOL. There is no “right to believe anything” in the Constitution, implicit or explicit. The Son of Sam believed that a dog was speaking to him and telling him to kill people and that he had a right and obligation to do this. He had no Constitutional right to believe that. Aie yie yie. Yes, we have a sacred right to religious liberty. But there is no such thing as “a right to believe (and act upon) anything.” When people believe that they are Jeanne D’Arc, they are forcibly incarcerated. There are limitations, even on belief. But I never argued, did I, that people didn’t have the right to be Platonists. I argued that Plato was wrong. There’s an important difference.
Sorry, Bob. Baselesss ridicule is a weak form of argumentation. So is putting words in another person’s mouth (“and act upon”). So is using specious examples to try to make a point. So is changing the subject.
As a matter of fact, the Constitution is open to interpretation. For me, freedom of belief is part and parcel of the Bill of Rights. Along the same lines, is the right to privacy implicit in the Constitution? I think it is. Not everyone agrees with me, though, and that is their perfect right.
Incarcerated for treatment, for their own good.
Sorry again. I’m going to have to bow out of this conversation. Blog commentary isn’t always good for a person’s health.
I just want to repeat my endorsement of the spirit behind the pastor’s commentary. In a secular sense, that is. He seems to be on the side of thoughtful public discussion and reasoned persuasion rather than religious or anti-religious invective. I think that’s all to the good.
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Agreed entirely. It was a beautiful commentary.
Just to be clear, I’m not endorsing the particulars of his commentary. I’m saying that his open and reasoned approach to the issues is more helpful than sweeping inflammatory claims that denigrate and demean the heartfelt personal beliefs of masses of people, people who have every right to believe what they believe. We’re not required to respect the beliefs of others, but I don’t think it’s necessary to trash the beliefs of others in order to promote one’s own.
icompleat, I was speaking for the many, many millions who are now voiceless because they were murdered by people who thought they were operating under the banner of a “higher” truth. The seal adopted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony depicted a native person with a banner coming from his mouth saying, “Come over and help us.” Wow. And the Spanish would go into villages and read them, in Latin, The Requirement (that they accept the Church and their king), and show this by moving from one place to the other. The theory was that if the Lord would open their ears if He wanted them to be saved. And when they didn’t move, they slaughtered them. All to their “higher purpose.” But that’s not even the beginning, as horrific as it was, of the unspeakably ugly legacy of this very, very bad idea. I have not only the right but the duty to speak of these matters. I do not respect this idea. And I will speak against it. Forcefully.
Bob Shepherd:
Now you’ve gone too far. You’re insinuating that I’m against your speaking out against past crimes. And you’re faintly insinuating that I might even approve of that criminal legacy. Or even that I may be in step with the toxic religious leaders that have worked their way into our civil discourse. No on all counts.
What I am against is your error-prone and wrongful means of argumentation. And that includes the irrelevant emotional pleading your doing in the previous comment. Irrelevant in the sense that my objections to your erratic line of argument have nothing to do with the sad history of religious conquest and conflict over the centuries.
And also I’m against your broad-brush tarring of current believers in Christianity with the crimes of religious leaders and despots of the ancient world (and even the presumed guilt of an ancient philosopher who had no actual hand in founding the religion), as well as despots, church leaders, conquistadors, and other bad actors from the couple of millennia since.
No, I am not on the side of the transgressors. There are plenty of believers of every religion who are up to no good. That’s not who I’m sticking up for. I simply don’t think the mass of believers of any faith are transgressors.
And that’s where personal beliefs and personal convictions come in. It’s up those believers, not you, to examine their own beliefs and convictions. My thinking: to attack and dismiss with a broad brush the foundational beliefs of an organized religion is to attack and dismiss the individual believers. To me, that’s not a worthy enterprise.
I’m not defending the beliefs of the religion. I’m defending the right of the believers to believe in it. If you feel it’s your duty to speak out against the religion, you should. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. But as a believer in religious tolerance, I’m not doing to do the same.
But apparently I am going to speak up when I suspect somebody’s trying to hijack a discussion initiated by a well meaning, difference-making preacher of that religion. I don’t expect you to change your ways, so it’ll probably be pointless to comment any further.
I’m done with this conversation. Every reply is full of nonsequiturs and false attributions. Enough. Really. I am not going to respond to any more of this.
Non sequiturs? False attributions? I didn’t notice any.
I think my comments are apt, and I they make a fair amount of sense. (Do you think they need editing?) I’m also of the mind that not all that many people feel like disagreeing with you on here. I certainly don’t. But sometimes it’s just gotta be done.
I’m happy not to engage further on this. Like I’ve said before, I’ve become a reluctant commenter who still reads the blog daily.
OK. One more attempt at clarification of my intent. I heartily endorse what I believe to be Yeshua of Nazareth’s message. As the great new Testament scholar Bart Ehrman has argued, I think, conclusively, Yeshua looked forward to the establishment, right here, on Earth, of the New Jerusalem, where his message of love and tolerance would be practiced. And that message is precisely what the original post from Reverend Johnson was about. I found Reverend Johnson’s post, as I have commented here, if you read the comments below, extraordinarily moving and beautiful. Bless him. My argument was that under the influence of a really bad notion from Plato, the early institutional church adopted a position of Contemptus mundi–contempt for the world–that played itself out in really horrific ways throughout history. So, my post was in dialogue with Rev. Johnson’s, for it, too, was about tolerance and love toward the peoples of the world. Specifically, mine was about how the practices of the institutional Church violated the very principles taught by Yeshua of Nazareth, which I quote with approval in my original piece. Peace.
Bob Shepherd:
Apologies in advance (mainly to myself) for prolonging this, but here goes. I understood your original comment and responded accordingly. I took exception to the manner of it (not the substance) not only as an unfortunate and possibly unconscious attempt to steal the pastor’s thunder, but also as a not-so-subtle dig at the organized church of which he is a minister (and which espouses a belief that you proclaimed “utter” BS). Your comment contains a harsh denunciation of a commonly held religious belief and comes across as an indictment of something most Christians profess, whereas the pastor’s writing is optimistic, respectful, and reasonable in tone. You found fault with my response to that, and it was off to the races.
As for the rhetoric, I’ve been sampling your essays and blog comments since about 2011. I’m familiar with the way you present your ideas, and the ways you react when someone disagrees. I’ll repeat a statement I heard a few years back: people who are good with words can justify anything. (That’s an example of insinuation, and, yes, I sort of mean you.)
I appreciate your attempt at clarification, but the bottom line is that people deserve respect, not harsh denunciation. If you’re going to scoff when another member of a community makes a valid contribution, or, let’s say, refer to a concerned parent as “some fundy,” you deserve to be corrected. Ditto for when your reasoning doesn’t hold water.
[sighs deeply]
Well, there’s another dismissive gesture. Like I said, I don’t think you’re going to change your ways.
That [sigh] is the blog comment equivalent of a middle school eye roll. Now that is a really low form of argumentation.
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That [sigh] is the blog comment equivalent of a middle school eye roll. Now that’s a really low form of argumentation.
Look, I am not the one of us who has engaged, now, in pages and pages of personal attack. Really. Enough. Please stop this.
Bob, I already stopped commenting. But I’m gonna have to defend myself here. No, I have not written pages of personal attack. I tried to question your original and subsequent comments and offer a few ideas of my own. I also tried to critique your methods of argument. And I questioned your dismissive approach to those who disagree with you. If that last one is personal, so be it–it’s something to think about. All these attempts were foolish of me, because you’re not really interested in a straightforward back-and-forth, and you know how to inoculate yourself from criticism. Also, I violated a new rule I made for myself around May 5th of this year: Don’t comment on blogs–nothing good can come of it. I would never have replied to your comment had you not used a harsh attack on Platonism to throw shade at the religious beliefs of hundreds of millions of people. (You can deny you intended that, but that’s what happened.) I decided to stick up for those people, even though I may not share all their beliefs. Rather, the idea was to stick up for a principle, which I expressed in my comments. I wish you well, and I’m still going to read the blog, but I intend renew that rule.
Let me say, if I might, very seriously, that it would grieve me if you felt it necessary to silence yourself because of the back-and-forth and opposing ideas that one encounters in public fora. Really, now, I am going to bow out of this. Best.
Please stop harassing Bob Shepherd, who has been a valued voice of reason on this blog since it began.
Sorry, Diane. I’m not trying to harrass anyone. And I have not written “pages and pages of personal attack,” as he claims. I simply tried to counter some of his statements and habits of argument. I should have realized that would backfire. I’ve learned plenty from Bob, as I’ve been reading your blog since right after it started. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with him or accept all his claims. When he says that a basic tenet of the Christian church is “utter bull____,” he’s not being a voice of reason, he’s being inflammatory. I intended not to comment at all, but i guess that annoyed me enough to get me started. For me, personal religious beliefs are sacrosanct, whether I hold them or not. Dismissing people who hold a differing point of view without engaging the substance of their argument is another thing I’m not very fond of, as you can tell from my comments.
My thought was, If you’re going to make a reckless claim, you should own up to it. And if somebody questions that claim, be ready to defend it rather than obfuscate. I didn’t think that was unreasonable. But of course I was wrong. Better to not get into a contest over it. I’m deeply grateful for your blog and all your efforts on behalf of kids, parents, and teachers. I’m not going to thank you for chastising me, but I do thank you for everything else!
Just a footnote… You didn’t mention me? You replied directly to me, in a way that cast a negative light on my previous comments, and without even engaging the substance of those comments.
That’s what insinuation is. And that’s one of your rhetorical gambits. You can deny that you said it.
Ditto for your denial that you mentioned Christians. You just mentioned a “bad idea” that took hold as the Christian church was being founded. Hey, you never denounced any Christian beliefs. You’re completely off the hook.
That’s the way I see it anyway. Now that’s gotta be the last one.
Ah, he of the gambits. LOL. Aie yie yie. Have a nice evening.
I’m done with this conversation. Every reply is full of nonsequiturs and false attributions. Enough. Really. I am not going to respond to any more of this. I said NOTHING in the previous post about you and what you might or might not think. I simply clarified MY reasons for writing the post. And if you will reread my original post, you will see that my beef was not with Christ or with Christians but with the institution of the Church in its early instantiation.
But without force. For that was what Yeshua taught us to do.
What is there to say? The Orange Buffoon is increasingly becoming unhinged. He tells more lies each day now than he did a year ago.
I’ve read that young Evangelicals are increasingly leaving the church. There is hope if people realize just how off balance he is. He has no compassion for others and lies. This is not a man to worship.
…………………………..
Trump Is ‘Unable to Tolerate Reality’: Yale Psychiatrist Makes the Case That the President’s Mental State Is Getting Worse @alternet
The author of bestseller “Dangerous Case” says an urgent intervention “was indicated long ago.”
By Chauncey DeVega / SalonSeptember 21, 2018,
…Trump has shown a detachment from reality, and of being someone who has shown a severely impaired ability to be empathetic. Trump also has shown a level of cruelty and pleasure in inflicting pain on others. Everything is going in the direction of something very harmful and devastating. It’s only a matter of the stress rising to the level where Trump would make such a decision, to start a war or use nuclear weapons. This is a very dangerous situation.
But ordinary people will tend to think that “Well, he won’t go that far, he won’t do this.” In other words, he wouldn’t destroy himself and human civilization. That’s an assumption on our part based on normal behavior. What mental health professionals can perhaps do for society is to educate the public on how serious the signs Trump is manifesting really are.
Mental health professionals routinely assess, treat and contain individuals like Donald Trump on a daily basis. It’s routine. There are medical standards of response, even if it is not happening at the political level where it should. Usually, with an individual like Donald Trump you need an urgent mental health evaluation. This has not happened yet, even though the need for one was indicated long ago.
https://www.alternet.org/trump-unable-tolerate-reality-yale-psychiatrist-makes-case-presidents-mental-state-getting-worse#.W6UAnep3cTo.gmail
If this guy is not sick, no one is. He actually seems to believe his lies, even as he is spinning, all at once, several versions of them. Gross distortion of reality is what distinguishes psychosis from garden-variety issues–neuroticism, narcissistic tendencies, etc.
BEAUTIFULLY STATED!. i could not agree more. I have stated much the same thing countless times. Am I a Christian? If that means loving your neighbor, my neighbor sometimes being the despised “Samaritan”, Do unto others etc etc, the BASIC message of the founder of Christianity, then consider me a Christian. If I am forced to believe what some churches believe, count me out. Too many major on the minors as one of my former students put it.
Let us fervently hope and pray that the author of this is correct.
I might mention that this morning on Democracy Now, Michael Moore was interviewed for an hour concerning his new film which comes out today, Fahrenheit 9/11. He was one of the very few who predicted that Trump would win the presidency. He has great insight. Even if you watch only Democracy Now, it is on the internet, and see what he has to say I would urge you to do so. Our democracy is in peril as he so rightly points out. He shows how Trump came to the presidency etc etc. There are books out which are excellent too written by people who have studied Trump for some time. If only more people would take the time and effort to see what is really going on in our country, how far we have strayed from the idealism which we have often proclaimed but too often never put into practice.
agreed
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
They are Christian in name only, a cult of meanness. Many of Trump’s so-called evangelical supporters do not attend religious services, are not active in any religious community, do not hold church membership, do not engage in formal prayer, do not read Scripture, and do not participate in good works or service. These FAKE Christians that support Donald Trump are intolerant, bigoted, hateful, and militant.
This is exactly what I have been thinking for some time.
To paraphrase from this post:
They are Christian in name only, a cult of meanness.
Many of Trump’s so-called evangelical supporters do not attend religious services, are not active in any religious community, do not hold church membership, do not engage in formal prayer, do not read Scripture, and do not participate in good works or service. These FAKE Christians that support Donald Trump are intolerant, bigoted, hateful, and militant.
These mean evangelicals have hijacked the term “Christianity” just like Trump hijacks everything he talks about and/or tweets and turns his lies into alternative facts while the truth as the news reports it is all fake.
I don’t know if evangelicals are of a single mind. A recent story on Vice News showed evangelicals going door to door urging people to vote for conservatives. They were also outside of swearing in ceremonies registering newly minted citizens in the Republican Party. PBS still sees lots of evangelicals actively engaged in backing conservatives. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-quiet-evangelical-campaign-to-help-republicans-hold-onto-the-house-and-senate
Not all evangelicals think the same. Some actually go the local churches and read the Bible. Most of Trump’s hard core supporters that call themselves evangelicals fit the description mentioned in this post and are mean to the bone.
Psychology Today published a piece that supports that description of Trump evangelicals, the fake Christians, without mentioning relgion:
“An Analysis of Trump Supporters Has Identified 5 Key traits.”
Authoritarian Personality Syndrome
Social dominance orientation
Prejudice
Intergroup contact
Relative deprivation
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201712/analysis-trump-supporters-has-identified-5-key-traits
And yet, what did Christ teach with regard to authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, and intergroup contacts? How are we to behave, according to him, toward the Samaritan, the stranger in our midst, the prostitute, the poor? The rich young man comes to Christ and says that he wants to follow him. Great, says Yeshua. Go sell all you have and give it to the poor. Then come back. We have work to do.
That beautiful man, Charles Foster Johnson, quoted above, understands this. May his message spread far and wide. Thank you, Diane Ravitch, for posting this remarkable and moving piece, and thank you, Reverend Johnson, for teaching tolerance and inclusion, in imitation of Yeshua.
What a nice essay and what a good discussion. Oppenheimer was right. The world changes when we sit down at the coffee house. Maybe he was talking about that specific meeting of Wren, Hooke, and Halley (or maybe not), but I look at all the informal discussions that have changed the world. We need more coffee houses. Bring back the Salon!
“The world changes when we sit down at the coffee house.” What a wonderful line! Thanks, Roy, for posting this!
Sobering information for people who are not aware of the political and legal activism of the evangelical “vales voters” on display here. I watched a lot of the militancy on C-Span this afternoon.
http://www.valuesvotersummit.org/archive-2018
I wonder if Charles Foster Johnson even read Professor Bloom’s book, “The American Religion?” The main point of the book is not Evangelicalism; in fact, Dr. Bloom’s principle interest seems to be Mormonism. To be sure he does have chapters on several other denominations and sects, but to imply that the book spends a lot of time discussing the contemporary evangelical prosperity gospel, so-called, is misleading.
I assume that Mr. Johnson has had ties with the Southern Baptist Convention. Professor Bloom spends several chapters discussing the roots of Johnson’s own faith and designates them as at least partially gnostic. Accordingly, is Mr. Johnson also a gnostic?
By the way, Dr. Bloom also states that he is gnostic, albeit with a Jewish rather than a Christian background. Yet Mr. Johnson’s passing and obliquely perjorative reference to Gnosticism ignores this point. Again, did Mr. Johnson even read the book and if he did read it, did he even understand it? Dr. Bloom’s fascinating book seems to be either misunderstood or misused by Mr. Johnson in his discussion on evangelical support for President Trump.
My reading of Reverend Johnson’s beautiful piece is a) that he has certainly read Bloom’s book, which he specifically mentions, and b) that in the rest of the piece, he denounces what Bloom characterizes as the peculiarly Gnostic version “American religion.” As a little background for those who aren’t familiar with the Gnosticism to which the piece refers, here’s a description from Bloom’s book:
“[T]he Gnostics . . . were a proto-Christian sect of the second century of the Common Era, whose broad beliefs centered in two absolute convictions: the Creation, of the world and of mankind in its present form, was the same event as the Fall of the world and of man, but humankind had in it a spark or breath of the uncreated, of God, and that spark can find its way back to the uncreated, unfallen world, in a solitary act of knowledge.”
So, extreme contempt for the world was characteristic of Gnosticism. Many Gnostic sects went so far as to claim that the world was made not by God but by a separate evil demiurge.
Bloom was wrong to refer to Gnosticism as “a . . . sect,” for there were many Gnostic sects with differing beliefs and practices, but his characterization of the core principles that these sects shared is, I think, spot on. Bloom’s point in his analysis of various American religious groups is that they share with the Gnostics a) extreme contempt for the world as fallen and evil, and b) the radically individualist notion that it is in solitary, separate practice (on one’s knees in prayer, for example), that one attains salvation.
As I read Rev. Johnson’s piece, he is emphatically arguing against this American Gnosticism–asking us to work in the world AND to embrace community–contra Gnosticism. That’s the thesis, as I see it, of Rev. Johnson’s magnificent essay.
For an excellent scholarly overview of the views and practices of a great many Gnostic sects, see Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon P., 1963.
Please note that I am not ascribing to Rev. Johnson any criticism of going to God in solitary prayer. He doesn’t do that. What he does say, however, very clearly and movingly, is that faith communities and loving your neighbor are important, too. Working in the world and not rejecting it and everyone in it who is not like you. Sounds like the message of the gospels to me.