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Javier E

Opinion | The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...god-evangelicals-anointed.html

deification trump evangelical populism Christianist crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:
  • Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?
  • “Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Some of Trump’s Christian followers do appear to have grown to see him as a kind of religious figure. He is a savior. I think it began with the sense that he was uniquely committed to saving them from their foes (liberals, Democrats, elites, seculars, illegal immigrants, etc.) and saving America from all that threatens it.
  • In this sense, Gushee continued, “a savior does not have to be a good person but just needs to fulfill his divinely appointed role. Trump is seen by many as actually having done so while president.”
  • This view of Trump is especially strong “in the Pentecostal wing of the conservative Christian world,” Gushee wrote, wherehe is sometimes also viewed as an anointed leader sent by God. “Anointed” here means set apart and especially equipped by God for a holy task. Sometimes the most unlikely people got anointed by God in the Bible. So Trump’s unlikeliness for this role is actually evidence in favor.
  • The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, “They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you.” The idea that he is unjustly suffering and, in so doing, vicariously absorbing the suffering that his followers would be enduring is a powerful way for Trump to be identified with Jesus.
  • Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of P.R.R.I. (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute), contends that Trump’s religious claims are an outright fraud:Trump has given us adequate evidence that he has little religious sensibility or theological acuity. He has scant knowledge of the Bible, he has said that he has never sought forgiveness for his sins, and he has no substantive connection to a church or denomination. He’s not only one of the least religious but also likely one of the most theologically ignorant presidents the country has ever had.
  • If people wanted to make him out to be savior, anointed one and agent of God, he would not object
  • Lacking any inner spiritual or moral compass that would seek to deflect overinflated or even idolatrous claims about himself, he instead reposted their artwork and videos and so on. Anyone truly serious about the Christian faith would deflect claims to being a savior or anointed one, but he did not have such brakes operating.
  • there are evangelicals of the charismatic and Pentecostal variety — the so-called New Apostolic Reformation or Independent Network Charismatics — who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God to rescue the United States from the atheistic, even demonic, secularists and progressives who want to destroy the country by advancing abortion, gay marriage, wokeness, transgenderism, etc.
  • “This whole movement,” Fea wrote,is rooted in prophecy. The prophets speak directly to God and receive direct messages from him about politics. They think that politics is a form of spiritual warfare and believe that God is using Donald Trump to help wage this war. (God can even use sinners to accomplish his will — there are a lot of biblical examples of this, they say.)
  • As far as Trump goes, Fea continued, “he probably thinks these charismatics and Pentecostals are crazy. But if they are going to tell him he is God’s anointed one, he will gladly accept the title and use it if it wins him votes. He will happily accept their prayers because it is politically expedient.”
  • The more interesting case, Gushee wrote,is Trump himself. I accept as given that he entered politics as the amoral, worldly, narcissistic New York businessman that he appeared to be. Like all G.O.P. politicians, he knew he would have to win over the conservative Christian voting bloc so central to the party.
  • Trump, Jones added in an email, “almost certainly lacks the kind of religious sensibility or theological framework necessary to personally grasp what it would even mean to be a Jesus-like, messianic figure.”
  • According to Jones, in order to rationalize this quasi-deification of Trump — despite “his crassness and vulgarity, divorces, mocking of disabled people, his overt racism and a determination by a court that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” — white evangelicals refer not to Jesus but the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible.”
  • Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterization of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse.
  • According to Jones, “White evangelicals’ stalwart, enduring support for Trump tells us much more about who they see themselves to be than who they think Trump is. As I argued in my most recent book, ‘The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,’” Jones continued in his email, “the primary force animating white evangelical Protestant politics — one that has been with us since before the founding of the Republic — is the vision of America as a nation primarily of, by and for white Christians.”
  • “a majority (56 percent) of white evangelical Protestants, compared to only one-third of all Americans, believed that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.’”
  • Jones argued that Trump’s declaration on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021 — “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — was a direct appeal “to this sense of divine entitlement of those who believed this mythology strongly enough to engage in a violent insurrection.”
  • “White evangelicals,” Guth found, “are invariably the most populist: more likely to favor strong leadership (even when that means breaking the rules), to distrust government, to see the country on the wrong track and to think that the majority should always rule (and minorities adapt).”
  • Guth also found thatanother salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a “rough politics” score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of rotten apples and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and progressives tend to demur.
  • Guth wrote that his “findings help us understand what many have struggled to comprehend: How can white evangelical Protestants continue to provide strong support for President Donald Trump, whose personal values and behavior trample on the biblical and ethical standards professed by that community?”
  • The most common explanation, according to Guth,is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: As long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.
  • “The evidence here,” he wrote, “suggests a more problematic answer”:White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism and nativism, as well as his political style, with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.
  • The pervasive populism of white evangelical laity not only helps explain their support for President Trump but suggests powerful barriers to influence by cosmopolitan internationalist evangelical elites, who want to turn the community in a different direction. As hostile responses to efforts of antipopulist evangelicals like Michael Gerson, Russell Moore, David Platt and many others indicate, there is currently a very limited market for such alternative perspectives among the rank and file.
  • Nor does cosmopolitan or cooperative internationalism find much purchase among local evangelical clergy. Analysis of the 2017 Cooperative Clergy Survey shows that ministers from several evangelical denominations, especially the large Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God, exhibit exactly the same populist traits seen here in white evangelical laity, but in more pronounced form: strong Islamophobia, Christian nationalism, extreme moral traditionalism, opposition to trade pacts, militaristic attitudes, resistance to political compromise and climate change denial, among others.
  • In other words, conservative populism, with all its antidemocratic implications, has taken root in America. What we don’t know is for how long — or how much damage it will do.
Javier E

The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast S... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385246

racism history obama Civil War religion justification deification infantilization

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
  • The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification
  • Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."
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  • That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, "the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics.
  • Christianity did not "cause" slavery, anymore than Christianity "caused" the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.
  • related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct.
carolinehayter

'Set the standard': Cuomo allegations test Democrats' commitment to #MeToo | Andrew Cuo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...omo-allegation-democrats-metoo

politics US culture policy

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • New York Democrats have called for the governor to resign over sexual harassment allegations, but no national figures have joined the chorus
  • But no other national Democrats have joined the chorus. The Axios website branded it the party’s “hypocrisy moment”, arguing: “Governor Andrew Cuomo should be facing explicit calls to resign from President Biden on down, if you apply the standard that Democrats set for similar allegations against Republicans. And it’s not a close call.”
  • But in 2017, as the #MeToo movement held powerful men accountable, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator who holds Hillary Clinton’s former seat in New York, argued that the former president should have resigned over the affair.
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  • The charge of double standards points to a steep learning curve for a party that has struggled to keep pace with shifting public attitudes towards gender roles, power dynamics and sexual boundaries.
  • That same year, Gillibrand became the first Democratic senator to call for her Minnesota colleague Al Franken to quit over allegations of sexual misconduct. She was joined by others including Kamala Harris, who tweeted: “Sexual harassment and misconduct should not be allowed by anyone and should not occur anywhere. I believe the best thing for Senator Franken to do is step down.”Franken did just that, but some critics now believe that he was the victim of a rush to judgment and should have been allowed to wait for the results of an investigation.
  • This time, although Gillibrand said Cuomo’s alleged conduct was “completely unacceptable”, she stopped short of demanding he resign before the investigation is done
  • “The vice-president’s view is that she believes all women should be treated with respect. Their voices should be heard. They should tell their story. There’s an independent investigation that is happening now, being overseen by the New York attorney general, and she certainly supports that.”
  • But this puts Democratic leaders out of step with groups such as Women’s March, which was born out of the January 2017 protests against Donald Trump, who faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment
  • “We share the view that there should be an independent investigation but Cuomo himself has not even denied many of the harassment allegations and, for us, it’s about behaviour that is disqualifying. It could be illegal, but it also could not be illegal.”
  • Just as the instant deification then instant demonisation of Cuomo has left many crying out for nuance and complexity, so it can be said that no two cases of sexual harassment in politics are quite the same.
  • In 2018 Eric Schneiderman, an attorney general of New York lauded as a liberal advocate of women’s rights, resigned after being accused of physically abusing four women. Cuomo was among those who were quick to call for him to step down.
  • Trump’s nominee to the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, was nearly derailed by allegations from Dr Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her
  • In 2019 several women accused Biden of making unwanted physical contact.
  • Last year Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. He vehemently denied the claim, which remained unsubstantiated and faded from the election race. Biden picked a woman – Harris – as his running mate and often highlighted his work as lead sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act.
  • Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “In hindsight, a number of the Democrats in the Senate who had pushed him to step down later expressed regret. They realised they moved too quickly, they didn’t know enough and the punishment didn’t really fit what they later learnt to be the misbehaviour.”
  • sexual
  • “I don’t think the Republican party is in any position to be lecturing anyone about how to handle sexual harassment. They seem to have actually gotten real expertise on how to evade it.”
  • “Just because we fire Andrew Cuomo and Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, that doesn’t alone solve the problem. The bigger problem is still there, which is that harassment is seen as an acceptable part of our culture. That’s why so many of these people in power are doing it. So yes, we need to respond and uproot harassment wherever it lies but we also need to keep our eye on the ball.”
jaxredd10

rome - 0 views

www.history.com/...ancient-rome

shared by jaxredd10 on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Beginning in the eighth century B.C., Ancient Rome grew from a small town on central Italy’s Tiber River into an empire that at its peak encompassed most of continental Europe, Britain, much of western Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean islands
  • After 450 years as a republic, Rome became an empire in the wake of Julius Caesar
  • s rise and fall in the first century B.C.
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  • The long and triumphant reign of its first emperor, Augustus, began a golden age of peace and prosperity;
  • As legend has it, Rome was founded in 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus,
  • twin sons
  • Romulus became the first king of Rome,
  • Rome’s era as a monarchy ended in 509 B.C.
  • The power of the monarch passed to two annually elected magistrates called consuls. They also served as commanders in chief of the army.
  • Politics in the early republic was marked by the long struggle between patricians and plebeians (the common people), who eventually attained some political power through years of concessions from patricians
  • In 450 B.C., the first Roman law code was inscribed on 12 bronze tablets–known as the Twelve Tables–and publicly displayed in the Roman Forum.
  • By around 300 B.C., real political power in Rome was centered in the Senate, which at the time included only members of patrician and wealthy plebeian families.
  • During the early republic, the Roman state grew exponentially in both size and power
  • Rome then fought a series of wars known as the Punic Wars with Carthage, a powerful city-state in northern Africa. The first two Punic Wars ended with Rome in full control of Sicily, the western Mediterranean and much of Spain. In the Third Punic War (149–146 B.C.), the Romans captured and destroyed the city of Carthage and sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery, making a section of northern Africa a Roman province.
  • Rome’s military conquests led directly to its cultural growth as a society, as the Romans benefited greatly from contact with such advanced cultures as the Greeks.
  • The first Roman literature appeared around 240 B.C., with translations of Greek classics into Latin; Romans would eventually adopt much of Greek art, philosophy and religion.
  • Rome’s complex political institutions began to crumble under the weight of the growing empire, ushering in an era of internal turmoil and violence.
  • The gap between rich and poor widened as wealthy landowners drove small farmers from public land,
  • When the victorious Pompey returned to Rome, he formed an uneasy alliance known as the First Triumvirate
  • After earning military glory in Spain, Caesar returned to Rome to vie for the consulship in 59 B.C.
  • Caesar received the governorship of three wealthy provinces in Gaul beginning in 58 B.C.
  • In 49 B.C., Caesar and one of his legions crossed the Rubicon, a river on the border between Italy from Cisalpine Gaul
  • Consul Mark Antony and Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted heir, Octavian, joined forces to crush Brutus and Cassius and divided power in Rome with ex-consul Lepidus in what was known as the Second Triumvirate. With Octavian leading the western provinces, Antony the east, and Lepidus Africa, tensions developed by 36 B.C. and the triumvirate soon dissolved. In 31 B.C., Octavian triumped over the forces of Antony and Queen Cleopatra of Egypt (also rumored to be the onetime lover of Julius Caesar) in the Battle of Actium
  • To avoid meeting Caesar’s fate, he made sure to make his position as absolute ruler acceptable to the public by apparently restoring the political institutions of the Roman republic while in reality retaining all real power for himself. In 27 B.C., Octavian assumed the title of Augustus, becoming the first emperor of Rome.
  • By 29 B.C., Octavian was the sole leader of Rome and all its provinces.
  • Augustus’ rule restored morale in Rome after a century of discord and corruption and ushered in the famous pax Romana–two full centuries of peace and prosperity.
  • He instituted various social reforms, won numerous military victories and allowed Roman literature, art, architecture and religion to flourish.
  • When he died, the Senate elevated Augustus to the status of a god, beginning a long-running tradition of deification for popular emperors.
  • The decadence and incompetence of Commodus (180-192) brought the golden age of the Roman emperors to a disappointing end. His death at the hands of his own ministers sparked another period of civil war, from which Lucius Septimius Severus (193-211) emerged victorious.
  • Meanwhile, threats from outside plagued the empire and depleted its riches, including continuing aggression from Germans and Parthians and raids by the Goths over the Aegean Sea.
  • Diocletian divided power into the so-called tetrarchy (rule of four), sharing his title of Augustus (emperor) with Maximian. A pair of generals, Galerius and Constantius, were appointed as the assistants and chosen successors of Diocletian and Maximian; Diocletian and Galerius ruled the eastern Roman Empire, while Maximian and Constantius took power in the west.
  • The stability of this system suffered greatly after Diocletian and Maximian retired from office. Constantine (the son of Constantius) emerged from the ensuing power struggles as sole emperor of a reunified Rome in 324. He moved the Roman capital to the Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, Constantine made Christianity (once an obscure Jewish sect) Rome’s official religion.
  • An entirely different story played out in the west, where the empire was wracked by internal conflict as well as threats from abroad–particularly from the Germanic tribes now established within the empire’s frontiers like the Vandals (their sack of Rome originated the phrase “vandalism”)–and was steadily losing money due to constant warfare.
  • Rome eventually collapsed under the weight of its own bloated empire, losing its provinces one by one:
  • In September 476, a Germanic prince named Odovacar won control of the Roman army in Italy.
  • After deposing the last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, Odovacar’s troops proclaimed him king of Italy, bringing an ignoble end to the long, tumultuous history of ancient Rome. The fall of the Roman Empire was complete.
  • Roman aqueducts, first developed in 312 B.C., enabled the rise of cities by transporting water to urban areas, improving public health and sanitation.
  • Roman cement and concrete are part of the reason ancient buildings like the Colosseum and Roman Forum are still standing strong today.
  • Roman arches, or segmented arches, improved upon earlier arches to build strong bridges and buildings, evenly distributing weight throughout the structure.
  • Roman roads, the most advanced roads in the ancient world, enabled the Roman Empire
  • to stay connected
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