Joel Sassone

“A MORE INSIDIOUS RATIONALE underlies the Christian nationalist claim about the founders: the myth that only Christians are moral. The argument is that the United States was created by Christians for Christians because only they are moral,24 that Christianity is required for a moral society. There are two falsehoods tangled up in this claim. The first conflates religion with morality, and the second assumes that the founders did the same.”
― Andrew L Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

“From a scholarly standpoint, as noted in a 1992 Newsweek article, “the idea of a single ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is a made-in-America myth.”9 One Jewish theologian stated the problem plainly: “Judaism is Judaism because it rejects Christianity, and Christianity is Christianity because it rejects Judaism.”10 “Judeo-Christian” is slippery because it is more a political invention than a scholarly description. It originated at the close of World War II when Christian exclusivity was too threatening.”
― Andrew L Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

“Who will ever forget former attorney general Jeff Sessions’s biblical rationalization for Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents? Sessions turned to a passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Christianity’s first great proselytizer admonished every soul to be “subject to the governing authorities; because there is no authority except that which God has established.” (A federal judge thought otherwise, however, and ordered the government to reunite the families—thereby deciding that the Constitution, not a first-century evangelist, is a higher authority on the making of public policy.)”
― Andrew L Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

“Each of these people has an extreme version of what we call a high-conflict personality. Unlike most of us, who normally try to resolve or defuse conflicts, people with high-conflict personalities (HCPs) respond to conflicts by compulsively increasing them. They usually do this by focusing on Targets of Blame, whom they mercilessly attack—verbally, emotionally, financially, reputationally, litigiously, and sometimes violently—often for months or years, even if the initial conflict was minor. Their Targets of Blame are usually someone close (a coworker, neighbor, friend, partner, or family member) or someone in a position of authority (boss, department head, police, government agent). Sometimes, though, the Target of Blame can be completely random.”
― Bill Eddy, 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Identifying and Dealing with Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other High-Conflict Personalities