Thom Hartmann warns that the growing power of religious extremists threatens democracy. The Founders knew the danger of organized religion and inserted guardrails against its zealotry in the Constitution
He wrote:
Twenty-eight states, nearly all Republican-controlled, are now spending billions of taxpayer dollars to support indoctrinating children in religion through voucher programs that can be used for mostly Christian schools. Five Republican-controlled states are in the process of letting vouchers ghettoize their entire public-school systems.
As The Washington Post noted yesterday:
“Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades.”
Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, flies an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his official congressional office that, since 2013, has been the semi-official logo of a militant arm of charismatic Christianity involved with January 6th. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito flew a similar flag outside his summer home.
Another man flying that flag is outspoken Catholic evangelist Leonard Leo, who now controls over a billion dollars and helped run the process that selected Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court as well as hundreds of federal bench nominees. As ProPublica pointed out in a story about “the man that remade the American judicial system”:
“Leo is a major supporter of the [Catholic Information Center], and its unabashed projection of political power aligns with the central role of religion in Leo’s political project.”
Proselytizers for evangelical Christianity believe they are on the verge of taking over our country, from our schools to our courts to Congress itself. History warns us — as did the Founders and Framers of the Constitution — that, if successful, this will be deadly to American democracy.
Religious evangelism can be a deadly thought virus. It explicitly posits that, “There is only one right way to live and we know what it is” along with, “There is only one true god and he is the one we worship — and now you must, too….”
But now America finds itself under assault by a new, zealously evangelical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (among other names) that seeks to use the force of law and the power of billions in untaxable dollars to create a new, two-tiered society in America.
At the top of this new America are the Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Speaker Mike Johnson and his followers in Congress, and an army of televangelists who claim moral superiority by virtue of their religion. They’re backed up by a small army of fundamentalist billionaires and politicians like Donald Trump who are willing to give them power and wealth in exchange for support at the ballot box.
Under them are the rest of us Untermenschen, whose opinions are tolerated so long as we don’t take away their nonprofit tax status (ensuring we must continue subsidizing them), stop their takeover of our schools, or correctly point out that the Founders were horrified at the prospect of America ever becoming a “Christian nation.”
But that is exactly what the majority of this nation’s Founders feared. It’s why they wrote a Constitution that forbids a religious test to hold office and put into the First Amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
It’s why George Washington refused to say publicly whether he was a Christian or not, and authored the Treaty of Tripoli that begins with, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”
It’s why Ben Franklin fled Massachusetts as a teenager to avoid mandatory church attendance and wrote, “I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
It’s why James Madison, one of the few actual Christians among that core group of Founders and the “Father of the Constitution,” made his first veto as president in 1811 against a bill that would have given government money to a Washington, DC church to run a poorhouse. It would, he said, “be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”
Madison added, in a July 10, 1822 letter to his old friend Edward Livingston:
“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: that Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”
It’s why Jefferson took a razor blade to the Gospels and cut out all of the stories of miracles, producing The Jefferson Bible that presents Jesus as a wise philosopher instead of a god. The book is still in print and, to this day, a best-seller.
The cancer of evangelicalism now has its sights on literally every aspect of American society with its “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which argues that evangelical Christians must assert control over every other religion, every family in America, the US government itself, all public and private education, the arts and entertainment, all American media, and ultimately regulate all commercial business in our nation.
And they’re succeeding in every realm, even commerce. Recently, Southwest Airlines fired a flight attending for spamming their internal message boards with hostile anti-abortion messages and calling the company’s CEO “a murderer” because he supported women’s abortion rights. A Trump-appointed judge ruled in the flight attendant’s favor and required the company’s senior executives to take “religious liberty training” from an evangelical rightwing anti-abortion group.
Once today’s Christian Taliban made common cause with the 1980 Reagan campaign, the first great mission they undertook was seizing control of the rest of the Republican Party. Now that that has been accomplished, they’re coming for the rest of us.
As the tribal people who first occupied this land would tell you, this is the Great Sin. It turns religion from a spiritual exercise into a social, cultural, and political cancer that continually grows while devouring everything in its path.
Like biological cancer, it ultimately kills its host — as America’s founders knew well from the experience of Cromwell in England and seventeenth-century Salem here.
And now it’s made an unholy alliance with the billionaires behind Project 2025 and our rapist-in-chief, Donald Trump, the modern incarnations of the Roman empire and Prefect Pilate, who ordered Jesus crucified.
G-d help us all if they succeed.
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Religion and politics mix in toxic ways. This is not just true of Abrahamic religions, but due to the dominance of Islam and then Christianity, arguably a response to Islamic dominance, these two have been laboratory experiments in extremism.
I recently read Philbrick’s book Mayflower, which traces the landing of the Pilgrims through King Phillip’s War. One part of the tale was the mention that the heads of defeated foes would be displayed on poles for as long as a decade after their demise. That the pious pilgrims would display a severed head and simultaneously consider their native rivals uncivilized is an irony no creator of fiction would ever imagine.
There is little doubt that the ISIS beheading of several years ago was not underpinned by the belief that this behavior was sanctioned by an avenging God. I am sure that many a sniper prayed as he squeezed the trigger and destroyed life. The god I imagine weeps alone. The god mourns the failure of the creation.
Correction above: the word not should be removed before underpinned. Lest you think I am blithering.
“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: that Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”
note to Alito, Thomas, and Leo: James Madison was pretty original when we talk about the constitution.
Tonight, live from the Common Room at the Happy Valley Senior Center, the 2024 Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Each speaker will be allowed a maximum of 2 scoops of lime green jello during the debate. Resuscitation teams will be standing by in case of emergencies. Some critics are calling foul, arguing that Trump’s psychosis, lack of memory of any accurate facts about the world (if, that is, he ever knew any), and inability to string together coherent thought into anything beyond toddler-level English should disqualify him from the contest, but others are arguing that those very qualities will make this loads of fun for the entire family and sell lots and lots of advertising on news sites in the coming days. So, a boost for the economy. So, back brace, Depends, and Adderall at the ready, Trump is preparing for the BIG NIGHT by consuming cheeseburgers and farting.
We have a great deal of work to do to put additional guardrails that can protect democracy from bad actors, not simply religious zealots. We need to revisit our ethics laws for all government appointees including The Supreme Court. We need to revamp our campaign finance laws to protect democracy from vandals and crooks.
Here is a small example of what is wrong in our society. There is a man that does some handyman type jobs for us from time to time. He is a felon that went to jail for three years for selling drugs. He is a skilled carpenter, and he has been honest and reliable in every way in his dealings with us and admits he used poor judgment. He comes from a poor family and and has been out of jail for a year and a half. He seems like a decent, contrite guy. As a convicted felon in Florida, he cannot currently get a driver’s license, and he also has seven thousand dollars in fees from his three year sentence so he cannot vote. How can he get reintegrated into society when the state puts so many impediments in his path? In contrast Trump is an adjudicated rapist and fraud, but he can run for President. What kind of sham justice is this? We cannot assume people running for office are honest and forthright. We need more guardrails.
RT: You just keep making more and more sense. Your story reminds me of all the times I have met someone who falls into the general category of “a voter republicans would like to suppress.” There was the articulate young man I met in Atlanta. There was the nurse in Nashville. There are those guys I occasionally do carpenter jobs with.
Heather Cox Richardson writes today that the Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 that there is a difference between a bribe and a gift, throwing out a conviction that had landed an Indiana mayor in hot water. The gift in question was $13,000. We definitely need guardrails.
A powerful post, RT!!! The contrast is truly striking. And horrific.
Whether the founders are said to have known this or that, this much is certain: Reality is not confined to founders words or what anyone says the founders knew, meant, or intended. The founders said this. Jesus said that. Pass the Lord and praise the ammunition remains unchanged. A threat to “Democracy” requires a democracy existed in the first place. When a SUPREME court proves and shows dictatorial powers, like the rest of the appointed masters, play the democracy myth card. Add some founder ‘splainin for good measure. Dividing doctrines of belief (State vs Religious) doesn’t end indoctrination or promote objective faculties.
Surely you do not think the US is in post-democracy now.
Some would say that it was post democracy ever since some rich planters in the South and rich merchants in the North convinced a lot of ordinary yokels to fight and die to overthrow the government they didn’t want to pay taxes to AND THEN placed liens on those yokels’ farms and homes to collect taxes to pay for the war, leading to Shay’s Rebellion. And those same champions of democracy refused the franchise to women, blacks, and people too poor to own property.
I would describe post democratic conditions to be the total lack of civil liberties, including prison without trial broadly applied to society, suppressing the free press, and arbitrarily enforcing laws. I admit that was the case during slavery, the native genocide, and like situations.
Pass the Lord and praise the ammunition.
The Repugnican Party should adopt this as its new slogan.
I think this might be the outcome if the MAGA cult lunatics, with or without Traitor Trump, are not stopped.
One country with 50 states on the verge of possibly becoming two countries.
One with 28 of states that will end up with Trump in its name. Something like Great Trumpistan, or Fantastic Trumplandia or even Trump-Land of the Free.
The other 22 states will retain the name United States and continue to follow and defend the US Constuction.
There also might be a migrating exodus from those RED states to the BLUE states to escape the tyranny of the few. Still, I suspect the MAGA Cult will pass laws that it is illegal to leave without approval and throw in prison or shoot anyone caught attempting to “illegally” leave followed by all they own being confiscated. If Traitor Trump is the MAGA cult’s dear leader in those states, everything confiscated will end up his. If the MAGA Cult is in charge because the traitor isn’t their leader, then what’s consficasted will end up in the cult’s coffers.
Sooner or later those two countries will be at war with each other.