US Politics: A democratic election Prospect Theory and practice

[Phylum of Alexandria]

The decline and degradation of the Christian right is something I've been trying to understand for most of my life. A few years ago I watched the 1977 miniseries How Should We Then Live?, which was like the fundamentalist answer to Carl Sagan's Cosmos. (it was also a book that I saw on my parents' book shelf and always wondered about as a kid, due to its somewhat standout title).

To be fair to Schaeffer, he was much more thoughtful than other right wingers of his time. He outlined various problems of modernity well enough. And unlike so many movement leaders today, clearly denounced slavery as early America's greatest moral failing. 

But throughout it all, there was a terrible limitation to his reasoning: a complete absence of self-critique. Any failing he condemns among Christians of the past is framed as them not acting as "true" Christians. Which can sound righteous from time to time, but doesn't explain why or how his view is more authentically Christian than theirs. He just insists that he is right and they were wrong, and they weren't true Christians.

Over the course of the series, Schaeffer's uncritical approach allows him to present the problem of modernity as rather simple: communities lost their connection to the word of God, and they were led astray by secular humanism.

He never grapples with the problems of doubt or uncertainty that Kierkegaard outlined more than a century before. And he never turns his critique inward, to include well meaning fundamentalist Christians, to explore any possible ways that they might have gone astray in their reactions to the modern world.

Even back then, Schaeffer laments that young people are going to church less and less. He of course blames this on the temptations of the ungodly secular world. He never once asks church ministers to look inward and wonder if they need to do something different to win back the hearts of younger generations.

And it's not like no adaptation was going on among fundamentalists around this time. The late 70s was when the Contemporary Christian pop culture machine was just getting started. We would see a huge evolution in outreach, with an increasing willingness to embrace the styles of secular pop culture, without adopting the message to something more humane.

Anyway, I found that Schaeffer's series unwittingly summed up so much of what was wrong with right wing Christianity ever since the birth of fundamentalism.

Of course, as one of the more thoughtful fundamentalists, Schaeffer quickly grew disgusted with the cavalier commercialism and rank partisanship of Christian leadership in Reagan's Moral Majority. So he faded into the background, while ever uglier figures vied for power and influence. Nowadays, right wing Christianity looks more secular, materialistic, and nastier than ever. It hardly even pretends to care about scripture, so great is the role of secular grievance politics. But despite how much they've mutated, they still refuse to give others an inch on any disagreements, to look inward, or to learn from their mistakes. And so it goes.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

9 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Of course, as one of the more thoughtful fundamentalists, Schaeffer quickly grew disgusted with the cavalier commercialism and rank partisanship of Christian leadership in Reagan's Moral Majority. So he faded into the background, while ever uglier figures vied for power and influence. Nowadays, right wing Christianity looks more mundane, materialistic, and nastier than ever. It hardly even pretends to care about scripture, so great is the role of worldly grievance politics. But despite how much they've mutated, they still refuse to give others an inch on any disagreements, to look inward, or to learn from their mistakes. And so it goes.

For some reason I can't use the edit feature, so I am doing it via this comment. My use of "secular" was inaccurate and likely to be confusing.

[Maithanet]

I would argue that Christian leadership has grown more secular in my lifetime.  At the very least, they seem more concerned with worldly rewards and goals than spiritual ones. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Yeah, Christianity was more fun when, they cried out to a horsey named anna.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I continue to argue with a friend and fraternity Brother who appears to believe there is nothing wrong with using religious justifications for statutes passed on the State or Federal level.  He doesn’t see how a law using Christian justifications for its restrictions and criminal sanctions is a violation of non-Christians “Free Exercise” rights.  

I’m trying a different tact.  I’m asking him if he would object to an atheist legislator proposing to redefine child abuse to include religious education of people under the age of 18.  He hasn’t responded yet.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Hum, why didn't you just take the cheap route of asking him whether he was in favour of Sharia law, too.

If you argue about rle of religion in laws, you might as well invoke the sharia.

[Zorral]

The ancient, volatile Christian ideas behind Trump’s obsession with blood - the persistence of blood as metaphor from medieval times to the present

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2024/03/29/trump-blood-medieval-getty/

Quote

 

.... Inspiration for the exhibition, curator Larisa Grollemond says, came in part from the response to an online article she wrote about menstruation in the Middle Ages. But ideas about blood were fundamental to almost every aspect of medieval life, from the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, in which wine was transformed into the blood of Jesus, to medicine, in which blood (along with black and yellow bile and phlegm) was one of the four fundamental humors of the body. Political power was based on bloodlines, or consanguinity, and the definition of power was essentially the right to spill blood, or enlist others to spill it for you. ....

.... So, Christianity was a blood-soaked, even blood-obsessed, religion and may have become even more so during the late Middle Ages because of crises across Europe that made death terribly familiar, including plagues, religious and political strife, and even changes to the climate.

The resurgence of blood as political metaphor in the United States draws upon these deep wells of symbolic power, copiously though not consistently. When Trump in interviews and rallies last fall began saying that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, his remarks were compared to the frequent use of blood as a metaphor for race, nationality and disease in Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” But Trump, like Hitler before him, was animating toxic ideas far older than 20th-century fascism.

Elaborate tables of consanguinity, or bloodlines, were used in the Middle Ages to establish political power and the right to rule. (J. Paul Getty Museum/Ms. Ludwig XIV 2, fol. 227v)
And this wasn’t his first foray into blood discourse. During his 2015 run for president, he seemed to reference menstruation after being pointedly questioned by Megyn Kelly during the first debate of the Republican primaries: She had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In a 2017 tweet, he suggested that he was disgusted by Mika Brzezinski because “she was bleeding badly from a face-lift.” Women and blood were a recurring theme to his speeches during the 2020 campaign, when he mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren for claiming Native American ancestry — or blood — an idea he returned to obsessively, and usually without segue or logical connection to anything else in his speech.

Jean Pichore's “Ecce Homo” shows the wounds of Jesus, which were depicted prominently in the Middle Ages. (J. Paul Getty Museum/Ms. 109, fol. 194)
Trump is a rhetorical opportunist who uses imagery reflexively (patriots are always “red-blooded” and sacrifice “blood, sweat and tears”) and for its pure volatility rather than its cultural nuance or historic pedigree. And blood, as demonstrated by the explosive reaction to Lil Nas X’s Satan Shoes, remains one of the most potent ideas in the Western arsenal of meaning.

In a paper discussed at a symposium held at the Getty in early March, Heather Blurton, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, asked: “How did [blood] come to be … a metaphor for familiar, ethnic and racial affiliation?” And she turned to an idea by French historian Michel Foucault, who argued that the fundamental social organizing idea of the medieval period covered in this exhibition was “a symbolics of blood.”

Whether or not Trump intended to suggest a literal “bloodbath” when he threatened economic chaos if he isn’t reelected, the reference to blood was part of a more thoroughgoing effort to tap into the violent energies of the pre-scientific and pre-modern symbolics of blood that is evident throughout this show. He is disgusted by women’s blood; he has good genes or blood running through his veins; he is defending the “blood” of pure Americans against infection and immigration; and the power he seeks is deeply connected to blood and violence. His inaugural address is remembered for a particularly blood-soaked image, American carnage, which is etymologically derived from butchery, flesh and slaughter. All of this gives some of his Christian supporters permission to reembrace the darkest aspects of the symbolics of blood that saturated their religion for centuries.

These are old ideas. They are deeply and historically Christian ideas. And they are terrifying. To see them coursing again is even more surreal and bizarre than a pair of sneakers with a drop of blood in them.

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

16 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Hum, why didn't you just take the cheap route of asking him whether he was in favour of Sharia law, too.

If you argue about rle of religion in laws, you might as well invoke the sharia.

I thought he would be more likely to see my point if a law was passed restricting religious practice generally.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

12 minutes ago, Zorral said:

The ancient, volatile Christian ideas behind Trump’s obsession with blood - the persistence of blood as metaphor from medieval times to the present

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2024/03/29/trump-blood-medieval-getty/

 

It’s substitutionary attonment writ large.  I dislike “substitutionary attonement”

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

21 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Hum, why didn't you just take the cheap route of asking him whether he was in favour of Sharia law, too.

If you argue about rle of religion in laws, you might as well invoke the sharia.

Taught in all public schools no less if the teacher believes in it.  Ya know, bring prayer back! 

Edited March 29 by Mr. Chatywin et al.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

36 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I would argue that Christian leadership has grown more secular in my lifetime.  At the very least, they seem more concerned with worldly rewards and goals than spiritual ones. 

Yeah, that's basically the point I was making. I just think such wording is confusing because they themselves don't recognize the importance of dividing the personal sacred and the public mundane, which is the heart of secularism. But ironically, in their struggle, they became even more profane and materialistic than most secular folk. It was all for nothing, and deep down, they know it. And that's part of why they rage. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Taught in all public schools no less if the teacher believes in it.  Ya know, bring prayer back! 

That seems to be his view… as long as it is a Christian doctrine (that he agrees with).

[Kalbear]

6 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That seems to be his view… as long as it is a Christian doctrine (that he agrees with).

That is the conservative viewpoint entirely. Attacking them for hypocrisy is useless as there is no such thing. Anyone can practice their specific evangelical Christian patriarchy, and that's all the freedom they want.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

That is the conservative viewpoint entirely. Attacking them for hypocrisy is useless as there is no such thing. Anyone can practice their specific evangelical Christian patriarchy, and that's all the freedom they want.

This fellow is more thoughtful than most and we’ve had these discussions over the phone from time to time.  He’s sincere in his beliefs and sincere in how he interacts.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

14 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

This fellow is more thoughtful than most and we’ve had these discussions over the phone from time to time.  He’s sincere in his beliefs and sincere in how he interacts.  

He's sincerely dumb. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

He's sincerely dumb. 

No.  But sincerely holds his very conservative evangelical beliefs.  People can be, and are, incorrect without being “dumb”.

Edited March 29 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[The Big Stink]

Texas just banned some forms of speech.

[maarsen]

1 minute ago, The Big Stink said:

Texas just banned some forms of speech.

Was double posting included?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, The Big Stink said:

Texas just banned some forms of speech.

Link?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No.  But sincerely holds his very conservative evangelical beliefs.  People can be, and are, incorrect without being “dumb”.

He lacks basic critical thinking skills from what you described.