She is a white evangelical. She used to attend Northpoint in Alpharetta. I don’t know if she still does. Probably not, since the pastor Andy Stanley has not gone full on political like other evangelical mega-church preachers.
She doesn’t HAVE to say she’s not any of those other branches of Christianity, because her audience understands and believes that they are “false” versions of the “one true religion” which is white evangelicalism, with strong influence from the Christian Identity movement (which believes, among other dumb shit, that only Anglo-saxons, Germanic, and celtic people are “real” descendants of Abraham). She’s already made some pretty obvious anti-Catholic comments, which since I have family who are catholic and live in her district, scares the shit out of me.
They are. The Black church has been pushing back against this shit for literally its entire existence (meaning all various branches of Black Christian churches). Plenty of liberal churches have been pushing back against this, such as the Quakers. And there is EVEN pushback coming from some white evangelicals, such as the guy who created veggie tales, who has a youtube channel where he sometimes discusses issues like race and racism:
It’s downright dangerous to lump all Christians in with people like MTG, because it gives them greater power in the conversation and leads to the erroneous conclusion that ALL Christians are YOUR enemy. If we do that shit, then this minority of fascists WILL win. We can’t let that happen or we’re all fucked.
I would argue that it’s not even just that, it’s the racist variant popular among too many White evangelicals. There is also a Black evangelical wing, which is not at all racist. They are steeped in white nationalist ideology and they use a twisted form of even evangelical doctrine to justify their hatred of POC, the LGBQT+ community, and anyone more liberal than Hitler.
Honestly, if they hadn’t been demonizing the word “socialist” so much, I’d be fully expecting them to next say, “We’re nationalists interested in saving the social fabric of our country - National Socialists, if you will…”
In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment does not preclude the existence of the Christian Nationalist party, because citizens can choose to stay home on election day rather than voting for them.
I’m sure you did not intend that, but the type of racist, nationalist thinking goes back more than century than groups like Taliban even existed. We did not import this way of thinking, we actually exported it and supported it. If ANYTHING, the Taliban is modeled on the kind of merging of hate and religiosity that has been common in America since Reconstruction.
This is lazy thinking about what’s actually happening here and it helps no one to understand what is happening.
You and I might see them as similar flavours of Abrahamic religion but the flavours are a matter of serious concern for their proponents, which in turn can translate to horrific consequences.
We can no longer afford to pretend that fundie authoritarianism is something that only affects the global periphery and use that as the reference point for a supposedly alien phenomenon in the West. Xtianist ideology is a very real danger to America in and of itself, no comparisons needed.
That - their Abrhamicness - was no part of my thinking. I merely treat them as two religiously fuckwitted theocratic fascists using whatever religion they have to hand in order to prosecute their autocratic repression of those they wish to subjugate (anyone who disagrees with them).
I’m certainly not pretending - the whole point of comparing it to other similarly theo-fascist phenomena is precisely to point out that “that stuff is also happening here!”
I am not the originator, but I like it a lot. I mean, I hate it, I hate that it’s useful and topical, that’s the absolute worst thing, but it does what I need it to.
I suspect if she got her way on this, she’d be sorely disappointed about who most Americans would see are the domestic terrorists. Changing the name from “Republican” might be the final straw that dissolves the wavering specter of past legitimacy that the party is clinging to.
