It’s distressing to feel that I must write about such things, but why else would I blog? There are plenty of softer types to handle the easier stuff.
Throughout America, there’s a near-overpowering awareness that things are going to Hell. Indeed, the bottom of the national handbasket has started to smolder. The sense arises from several sources, but today’s focus is on the promotion of fear and hatred through “othering.”
By “othering” is meant the division of our populace into groups that are – supposedly – hostile to one another. Such groups can be based on race, ethnicity, creed, sexual orientation, or views on one or more “wedge issues.” A simple Google search will turn up any desired amount of hectoring in those veins.
Now, some groups genuinely are hostile to others. We’ve seen enough undisguised promotion of racism by blacks against whites to have a sense for the racial divide. Not all Negroes subscribe to the “white devil” creed, but there are enough who do to constitute a pseudo-community dangerous to whites. Also, Muslims in the U.S. are getting ever bolder about their hostility to…well, to everyone and everything that isn’t Muslim. Their mouthpieces were once more careful about expressing such antipathy, but then, this is the era of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
The Left has an interest in promoting every such division. A divided populace is the easiest sort to conquer; the infighting among its mutually antagonistic groups will sap the energies required to resist an “outside” enemy. And make no mistake: the Left is an “outside” enemy. Outside, that is, of the ethics and customs that once provided the foundation of the freest, most prosperous, highest-trust society in world history.
Just recently, the Left has mounted a big fear campaign against a chimera that has a tenuous basis in reality: “Christian nationalism.” Its propagandists have attributed every imaginable sort of evil intention onto American Christian patriots. A YouTube search provides a great many examples of their craft. Mike Miles’s Mystery Box has an assortment today. Hard-Left actor-director Rob Reiner apparently has a “documentary” on the subject in the works.
But Christians who are also American nationalists are among the warmest, most accommodating, most generous people on Earth. I know rather a lot of them. If I were forced to pick a “worst of breed,” in the sense of an arguably un-Christian attitude toward others whether named or unnamed, I’d have to pick myself. If “Christian nationalism” means something other than American Christians who are also American nationalists, no one has been terribly specific about it.
Yes, I’ve dueled this windmill before. But it’s important enough to repeat myself a trifle.
If “Christian nationalism” has import as a political force, it would be in the ethical sense: that is, that Christian ethics, as Jesus expressed them to the “rich young man” of Matthew Chapter 19 and to the Pharisees in Matthew Chapter 22, are the basis of American law – and well they should be! But very few Christians, and none that I know personally, insist that all Americans must subscribe to Christian theology. Conform to the ethic, and you’ll be okay. We won’t probe your convictions with hot lamps, waterboards, or bobby pins under the fingernails. Violate the ethic – i.e., commit murder, theft, fraud, false witness, or adultery in the proper sense – and we’ll have words, and we won’t give a damn what beliefs you claim to hold.
I could go on about this – I have in the past – but I’ll spare you. Have a nice day.
1 comment
I’ve been doing some on-line slumming, including on the so-called Dark Web, ending up on several watch lists in the process, I’m sure, trying to get a little understanding of what it is that TPTB keep harping about. From what I’m seeing, the Christian nationalists you are talking about are far and away the most common, and, so far as I can see, are about as much of a problem as you say. They do often strike me as more nationalist than Christian, at least in the “What Did Jesus Do?” sense.
But there is a darker side to it, too, and way beyond a simple, “Africa for Africans” and “South America for South Americans” sense. Making conditions sufficient to incentivize self-deportation is not sufficient. Avoiding contact with “Samaritans” is not sufficient; “Samaritans” must be wiped out, those who do not agree that “Samaritans” must be wiped out must themselves be wiped out. The typical leftist/Bolshevik revolutionary sentiment, in other words.
On the positive side, across all those sites, it appears to me these people could hold their annual conventions in one of those drive-through photo kiosks of yesteryear and still have space to rent out. Of course that’s enough to make a hash out of things if they act in accordance with their words, but I doubt it would compare to just the weekly body count in Chicago.