In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann argues that a true prophet sees the weakness of the established order and visualizes a new future, an unimaginable, better future. In the modern world, for example, Martin Luther King called out the rottenness and injustice of segregated, racist America and visualized the possibility of equality.
As Fred Clark says, JD Vance and the Republican Party can’t imagine anything but going back to the past: “As skeptics and critics of liberal democracy, what is it that they want to see liberal democracy replaced with? What’s their innovative big new idea? The short answer is they don’t have one. They want to see liberal democracy replaced with what came before it. That’s a problem because everybody hated what came before it. Everybody.”
Liberal democracy hasn’t made for a perfect world? Let’s get back to the era of national churches and religious power struggles that the First Amendment rejected.
No-fault divorce sometimes leads to bad outcomes? Get back to the days when battered wives were trapped in their marriages.
Do black families have problems? They’d all disappear if we went back to Jim Crow days.
Are their problems in schools? Get back to the days of imposing Christianity onto students. And if teachers don’t spout the “right” religious lessons, they’ll be punished. All to fight a non-existent state-sponsored atheism (pissed-off Christians have been equating freedom of religion (for other people) to atheism for decades).
Is the push for a more equal, more just society creating tension? Just stop trying and tell the Israelites to be content as slaves in Egypt.
It’s easy and comforting to imagine the past as a Garden of Eden. To suggest all we need to do is reverse course and head back there. It can’t be done — and the past Republicans want wasn’t Eden for anyone but WASP men. What we have to do is find a way forward to the New Jerusalem. It’s harder but the results will be better.
As I’m using so much religious language, let’s follow up with some religious links.
Conservative megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress says the fire that damaged his church was the work of Satan. Of course, if it had been a liberal church, he’d have been discussing how their pro-gay or pro-Harris positions brought down God’s wrath.
Case in point, John MacArthur (another megachurcher) thinks Biden’s administration is God’s judgment on America. While I would never suggest a prominent Christian preacher was a full of shit, MacArthur thinks Martin Luther King was not a Christian because racial equality isn’t Christian. So yeah, he is full of shit. Hateful shit.
Another case, Eric Metaxas complaining that ministers who don’t preach support for his politics will face divine judgment. Kandiss Taylor, flat-earther Georgia Republicans, wants executions.
“This is who James Dobson has always been. It is who all of the “religious right’s scary, judgmental old men” have always been. It should not be possible for anyone observing James Dobson in 2017 to be disappointed, because it should not be possible, in 2017, to have still retained any illusions about Dobson’s morality or honesty.”
“He’s a grifter with a bad case of the shut-eye — a snake-oil salesman who drinks a full case of his own bogus formula every day.” — Slacktivist Fred Clark on Roy Moore.
According to Trump court prophet Tony Perkins, “tolerance is not a Christian virtue.” Except tolerance for himself.
Here a Christian groomer, there a groomer, there another predator. And another. And another. As a Christian, I find this a useful reminder why putting the Ten Commandments or bringing back prayer in schools are not magic bullets that will make us all more moral.
“This is the guy who responded to Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” by saying that civil rights leaders needed to “put the brakes on a little bit.” — from a post about putting up a statue of Billy Graham.
