“He has a warrior spirit for restoring America in the eyes of the world and he has a warrior’s heart,”
I’m laughing my ass off over here!
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Robert Reich —The Death of the Republican Party
I’m writing to you today to announce the death of the Republican Party. It is no longer a living, vital, animate organization.
It died in 2016. RIP.
It has been replaced by warring tribes:
Evangelicals opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and science.
Libertarians opposed to any government constraint on private behavior.
Market fundamentalists convinced the “free market” can do no wrong.
Corporate and Wall Street titans seeking bailouts, subsidies, special tax loopholes, and other forms of crony capitalism.
Billionaires craving even more of the nation’s wealth than they already own.
And white working-class Trumpoids who love Donald. and are becoming convinced the greatest threats to their wellbeing are Muslims, blacks, and Mexicans.
Each of these tribes has its own separate political organization, its own distinct sources of campaign funding, its own unique ideology – and its own candidate.
What’s left is a lifeless shell called the Republican Party. But the Grand Old Party inside the shell is no more.
I, for one, regret its passing. Our nation needs political parties to connect up different groups of Americans, sift through prospective candidates, deliberate over priorities, identify common principles, and forge a platform.
The Republican Party used to do these things. Sometimes it did them easily, as when it came together behind William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt in 1900, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Sometimes it did them with difficulty, as when it strained to choose Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Mitt Romney in 2012.
But there was always enough of a Republican Party to do these important tasks – to span the divides, give force and expression to a set of core beliefs, and come up with a candidate around whom Party regulars could enthusiastically rally.
No longer. And that’s a huge problem for the rest of us.
Without a Republican Party, nothing stands between us and a veritable Star Wars barroom of self-proclaimed wanna-be’s.
Without a Party, anyone runs who’s able to raise (or already possesses) the requisite money – even if he happens to be a pathological narcissist who has never before held public office, even if he’s a knave detested by all his Republican colleagues.
Without a Republican Party, it’s just us and them. And one of them could even become the next President of the United States.
Robert Reich
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This guy is the Kenny Powers of televangelists.
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Maybe he meant conTEMPT FOR God AND the Bible? That would almost make sense…
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Come again? There are prohibitions against being secluded with an unrelated person of the opposite sex, but in public? The purpose of the public sphere is precisely to enable such conversations.
That line, which has been misinterpreted so many times, was actually telling the early Christians that they still had to pay their taxes and take care of their civic responsibilities, whether they agreed with the Roman rule of the time or not. Hence Caeser’s things to Caeser. The second part refers to their faith, which was supposed to be beyond the reach of the secular authorities.
Interestingly enough, this command to actually pay your fair share of taxes, regardless of how you feel about the government, stands directly against how many Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians see things today. Oh, the irony.
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To be fair, it started in the 16th century, in Switzerland…
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There is plenty of other context to suggest that, in this case, the literal explanation is the right one. Now Scalia’s dead, perhaps we can have less attempts at casuistry in interpreting the law and the prophets - whichever law and whichever prophets we happen to be thinking of.
Again I think anything other than a literal interpretation is praeter necessitatem. Jesus makes a clear separation between doing what he sees as God’s will - dispensing charity and kindness - and paying taxes. This, incidentally, would argue against the exemption of churches from various taxes.
[edit - I see that while I composed this @LeopardSeal made the same point.]
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I am Mike Murdock and I endorse Donald Trump’s nomination for next President of the United States.
(Thanks to @L_Mariachi for finding this. Pieces of Shit for Trump is what you get after Tapeworm Trump has sucked out the nutrition.)
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I see why it’s traced back to Calvanism (and I know people call themselves Calvinist to this day which is beyond weird to me). But i think this goes beyond predestination and just-world theory and deep into the outright worship of money itself. Did you watch John Oliver’s bit of prosperity gospel and his communications with one church? They were instructing him to treat dollar bills as magic talismans. Kings are kings because god made them so, and it’s modern incarnation that the rich are rich because god made them so is one thing. Praying to a dollar is something I don’t think Calvin would have approve of.
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No, but I do think the whole concept of a protestant work ethic stems from Calvinist thinking and is far more mainstream than this sort of prosperity doctrine, no? The worship of the dollar in this way probably goes back to the first big mass media preachers like Sister Aimee Semple McPherson:
It would be interesting to get a full sort of background for the rise of this kind of televangelist, though.
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See, I thought protestant work ethic was more about work for work’s sake, though, not about work for the rewards of work. Like work is service to God, but the wikipedia article “protestant work ethic” has put me right:
Since it was impossible to know who was predestined, the notion developed that it might be possible to discern that a person was elect (predestined) by observing their way of life.[citation needed] Hard work and frugality, as well as social success and wealth, were thought to be two important consequences of being one of the elect;[citation needed] Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them.[citation needed]
(citation needed)
The whole thing is so philosophically fucked I can see how it could result in nearly anything, prosperity doctrine obviously included.
My knowledge of christianity - like my knowledge of most things - is pretty limited (isn’t it about an egg-laying rabbit who is best friends with a man in a red suit?).
It seems like it might have just been the logical collision of mass media with travelling revivals - why travel up and down the road when you can sit in LA and send your message out? I’m interested in how little worship of cash (not as a concept but individual bills or coins) came in and how it ended up being reconciled with, say, the words of Jesus, but recently I just try to remind myself that people largely compartmentalize their thinking and it makes sense of nearly everything.
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Like much of the evolution of the capitalist world, the reality preceeded the philosophical underpinning, I think. I’ve long seen the PWE as a means of justifying behavior demanded by capitalism.
It’s not just you - we all live in the thrall of imperfect knowledge. We’re all only touching parts of the elephant, and have a hard time guessing what the whole is… now the trick is getting more people to admit that! 
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I think the rise of prosperity gospel coincides with the rise of radio and television. The Pentecostals discovered that they could get filthy stinking rich from preaching on mass media, and those ministers have been showcasing their wealth as proof that god approves of what they’re doing. It naturally has become part of the theology.
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If a few Franciscans were to read your post, I think they might want to have a polite word with you.
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I think you mean “delusional” rather than “liberal”, though if you can cite a few names I’ll look them out.
Protestant work ethic has more to do with Martin Luther. During his time, the priesthood was seen as the godliest of vocations and everything else was less esteemed. One of Luther’s radical arguments was that no job was more godly than the other:
The prince should think: Christ has served me and made everything to follow
him; therefore, I should also serve my neighbor, protect him and everything that
belongs to him. That is why God has given me this office, and I have it that I
might serve him. That would be a good prince and ruler. When a prince sees his
neighbor oppressed, he should think: That concerns me! I must protect and
shield my neighbor…The same is true for shoemaker, tailor, scribe, or reader. If
he is a Christian tailor, he will say: I make these clothes because God has bidden
me do so, so that I can earn a living, so that I can help and serve my neighbor.
When a Christian does not serve the other, God is not present; that is not Christian
living.
In Luther’s view, being a Christian shoemaker doesn’t have anything to do with making “Christian” shoes with Bible verses, but it has everything to do with making quality shoes to benefit your neighbor, charging a fair price, and running an ethical business. In those ways, a shoemaker can actually be far more godly than a bad priest who is taking advantage of people and abusing their power.
The indirect implication of this is “work hard and do the best you can be at your job”. Max Weber saw the rise of capitalism in northern Europe, saw that those nations were protestant (whereas southern Europe was generally Catholic), then linked it to Martin Luther’s teachings on labor.
This theory is obviously suspect since countries that had no significant exposure to Europe nor Christianity independently developed capitalist concepts prior to the Age of Imperialism. Max Weber was a German guy working at the turn of the century though, so he deserves a little slack. More likely, it was the rising amount of literacy that led to capitalism.
I think in America, capitalism became such a massive cultural facet that it essentially rewrote the mythos of the Puritans. Puritans were the hardest of the hardcore Protestants who believed that salvation was utterly through grace. No amount of “work” could get you into Heaven, and even in the total absence of work, your salvation could never be revoked. Based on this and the belief in the Second Coming, Puritans worked super hard and generally lived austere lives because idleness and fun was seen as being ungrateful of God’s grace.
Later on, this perception was changed to portray the Puritans as people who worked hard because they believed it got them into Heaven. “God helps those who help themselves”. Again, lots of irony in this statement because it’s oft-repeated by American Christians who claim to be fervent believers but this statement is not found anywhere in the Bible. In fact, the Bible and Puritan theology state the exact opposite: God helps everyone unconditionally because no one is actually capable of helping themselves.
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I was being charitable but yes, you’re closer on the mark.
Some names that come to mind: Tim Keller, Michael Horton, Matt Chandler, John Piper, Al Mohler, etc. Even guys like NT Wright have been extremely critical of health and wealth. Anyone who champions the Westminster Catechism, which is the gold standard of conservative theology, would emphatically reject health and wealth and most would probably denounce it was straight up heresy.
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It is quite interesting to me, as a non-USA person, that “conservative theology” could even exist. There are many axes along which theologies can be placed, but “conservative theology” makes as much sense as “conservative physics”, and the same goes for “liberal theology”. If you replace the word “theology” with “religion”, equivalent to replacing “physics” with “engineering”, then it starts to make sense.
I think the majority of actual theologians would cheerfully consign “prosperity gospel” to the same bin as the Scientologists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the like, and leave them to be examined by the people most competent to do so - the sociologists of religion.
It is (to me at least) an interesting fact that when the Dutch Reformed Church actually started to do some serious theology, as distinct from Bible-bashing, they concluded that Apartheid was contrary to the will of God.
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