Status Updates From The Power Worshippers: Insi...

Last sentence of epilogue: In some ways CN is the fruit of a society that has not yet lived up to the promise of the Am idea. There is work to be done & for now we are free to do it…Religious nationalists are using the tools of democratic political culture to end democracy. I continue to believe those same resources can be used to restore it.

Many leaders of Christian right like to dress up in red white & blue as true patriots. But they are the same who seek to pervert our institutions, betray intl alliances & make friends w/despots, degrade public discourse, make constitution a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the pop…& celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who has made sport of violating dem laws & norms

52: For Drollinger & others, T’s king-like behavior isn’t troublesome. On the contrary it may satisfy their craving for a certain type of pol leadership. When God sends a ruler to save a nation, he doesn’t mess around; he sends a kingly king. And kings don’t have to follow rules.

Lincoln Brewster, Steve Perry’s band; keyboardist Jonathan Cain is married to Paula White

Brewster: I have so much gratitude about the ppl who are leading our country, to know that if you look at a dollar bill & it says ‘in god we trust’ that we are so firmly getting back to that.

Ralph Drollinger- 7’2”, bball @ UCLA, Athletes in Action & briefly w/Dallas Mavericks; first wife left him for another woman

Capitol Ministries in CA, controversy

Weekly White House Bible study, 2018, incl Alex Azar, Pompeo, Jeff sessions, De Vos, Ben Carson…

“Scripture is replete w/ex & commands to underscore the importance of winning govt authorities for Christ.”

9: CN have put particular emphasis on intersection of money & education. The Christian Right has been hostile to pub educ at least since Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority called for an end to public schools in 1979. This hostility has its roots in a combination of racial animus & fears of secularism…CN now see in school vouchers…a potentially vast source of public funding.

8: The rejection of democratic & constitutional norms by GOP under T “would not have been possible w/o the prior success of CN training millions of supporters to embrace identity-based authoritarian rule over pluralistic democratic processes. The roots of the present crisis in Am political party system lie at the juncture of money & religion.”

Increasingly members of the religious right & alt-right are making contact & working together. In the figure of Steve Bannon who has called on the “church militant” to “fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity” they may well have found a uniter.

Under T the U.S. has become a flashing red beacon of hope for a new global religious right-wing populist movement. It calls itself a “global conservative mvmt” & claims it seeks to “defend the natural family.” But it’s really about taking down modern democracy & replacing it w/authoritarian faith-based ethno-states. You could call it a kind of global holy war.

“The Bible is inherently political in that it routinely speaks against people who abuse their power in order to oppress other people.” (Chris Liles, p.29)