Watching the panicky Catastrophic Lab-Leak Fiasco Failure debate continue to play out, I’ve found it useful to imagine how the WMD debate would’ve played out in 2002 if Twitter had existed, and Bush et al were widely understood to be shameless liars on the scale of the Trumpers.
My sense is it would’ve developed differently, but along similar lines. Bush would’ve asserted the existence of WMD, nearly all liberals would’ve assumed he was lying, some in media would’ve overstated their certainty about the unknowable and called the WMD allegation “debunked.”
Then, Bush-allied intelligence sources would’ve planted stories about Iraqi scientists getting mysteriously ill (or whatever) in the Wall Street Journal (or wherever), and a posse of liberals would’ve arisen to say The Media’s WMD Fiasco Is A Crisis.
Meanwhile the truth of the matter would’ve remained unchanged: No credible evidence of WMD, very shaky evidence, absence of WMD very hard to prove, but the promoters of WMD theories would’ve remained the world’s biggest liars with the worst ulterior motives.
Anyhow, it’s good to communicate with epistemic humility, it’s also good not to let yourself be played for a sucker.
The theoretical stakes of zoonotic vs lab-accident transmission are small, but the material stakes of making it seem like a bigger deal than it is are potentially quite high.
Asking people to be cognizant of whose bidding they’re doing isn’t the same as asking them to lie. It just means they should communicate carefully.
I have no idea about the origins of COVID-19 and I think it’s undoubtedly important to try to find out. Everyone knows it won’t be the last time we are confronted with something like it. Trump was such an inveterate liar that it just became easier to discount everything he said than to assume otherwise. And let’s not forget, he lied about all this too, for months, even admitting that he was downplaying the virus just as the Chinese Government was doing. He gets no credit for anything on this subject. Ever.
If Trump is right about the lab leak, it would change the truth from "Trump collaborated with Xi to downplay the virus and cause countless deaths" to "Trump collaborated with Xi to downplay the virus, which was leaked by China, and cause countless deaths." https://t.co/SqvQ00bUIP
— Will Saletan (wsaletan on Threads) (@saletan) June 9, 2021
The last time the worst person in the world weighed in on “science” was pictured in the photo above, illustrating her deep understanding of the subject.
Oliver Willis caught up with her latest insights:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) asserted on Tuesday that COVID-19 was a “bioweapon” and said she did not believe otherwise “because I don’t believe in evolution.”
Greene made her statement during an appearance on the Real America’s Voice network’s “War Room: Pandemic,” a program hosted by disgraced former Donald Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon.
Greene accused Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of being “criminally liable” for the pandemic outbreak because, she charged without evidence, he “was using American tax dollars and sending it to the Wuhan lab to fund this research that was creating viruses.”
“That’s a bioweapon,” Greene said. “There’s no other reason to create a virus that makes people sick, spreads so quick, and kills people. There’s no other intent but it’s a bioweapon.”
Bannon then asked her if she found it implausible that the virus was the subject of research meant to find vaccines and somehow the material evolved into COVID-19.
“No, I don’t buy it because I don’t believe in evolution,” Greene replied. “I don’t believe in that type of so-called ‘science.’ I don’t believe in evolution. I believe in God.”
She is raking in millions from this stuff. Millions. PT Barnum was so very right.
There was a reason they used to call President Obama “No drama Obama.” He never seemed to get worked up about anything. It was one of the things people liked about him. He seemed to take everything in stride and the rigors of the job never overwhelmed him.
“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” Obama told Anderson Cooper during an interview that aired on CNN on Monday evening.
Asked by Cooper if the January 6 insurrection and Republicans’ effort to delegitimize elections has led him to believe that our democracy is in crisis, Obama said he’s concerned.
“I think we have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago,” he said.
In an exchange with Cooper, Obama pointed out that democracy has fallen at the ballot box in other countries.
COOPER: Democracy does not always die in a military coup.
OBAMA: Yes.
COOPER: Democracy dies at the ballot box.
OBAMA: That’s exactly right.
And Vladimir Putin gets elected with a majority of Russian voters, but none of us would claim that that’s the kind of democracy that we want.
These comments, coming from a former president, should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thought Donald Trump’s departure from the White House in January ended the existential threat to American democracy that crested with the January 6 insurrection.
“When you look at some of the laws that are being passed at the state legislative level, where legislators are basically saying, we’re going to take away the certification of election processes from civil servants, you know, secretaries of state, people who are just counting ballots, and we’re going to put it in the hands of partisan legislatures, who may or may not decide that a state’s electoral votes should go to one person or another, and when that’s all done against the backdrop of large numbers of Republicans having been convinced, wrongly, that there was something fishy about the last election, we’ve got a problem,” he said.
Fmr Pres. Obama to @AndersonCooper on the GOP: “I thought that there were enough guardrails institutionally that even after Trump was elected that you would have the so-called Republican establishment [step in]…we did not see that Republican establishment say hold on, time out” pic.twitter.com/o9ZYGOoa0J
Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard from some of the police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol from a violent mob on January 6th and their stories have been poignant and quite sad. They clearly feel betrayed by the many elected officials who have publicly dismissed what happened as simply a bunch of rowdy tourists when the officers were the ones left to literally engage in hand-to-hand combat and put their lives on the line to keep those same officials safe that day.
Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell told CNN that he was beaten by a man with a flagpole, his hand was sliced open and he was sprayed with so much chemical poison that it soaked through his clothes and burned him for hours. But what bothered him the most was that the rioters called the police traitors and said, “we’re going to shoot you. We’re going to kill you. You’re choosing your paycheck over the country. You’re a disgrace!”
I suspect that’s not something those officers hear from the tourists coming through the building on a normal day. And it’s likely that some of the police officers had been Trump fans, unable to fathom that all those white people dressed in red, white and blue, waving the American and Trump flags would ever treat cops that way.
Before the recent Senate vote on the bipartisan January 6th Commission, the mother and partner of Officer Brian Sicknick who died on that day asked to speak with the GOP senators who were planning not to vote for the bill. She simply wanted to know how it happened. A few met with her, but none of them changed their minds — at the request of Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Despite an extremely fair bipartisan process that gave Republicans equal input and influence, the Republicans whined that the commission was “politicized” and expressed confidence that almost everything people need to know about that day was already known. Congressional investigations and prosecutions of the rioters, they argued, would take care of the rest. The Republicans filibustered the bill and it went down to defeat.
On Tuesday, the first of the “reports” they all insisted would tell the tale was released. It was a bipartisan investigation undertaken by the Republican and Democratic leaders on the Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees to determine the scope of the security failures on that day. Those policemen who spoke up about the horror of that day must feel even worse than they did before. If this report is any indication, the official history of that day may very well make it appear that the primary responsibility for what happened lies with the police — not the rioters or the people who instigated it.
[T]he Capitol Police’s intelligence division flagged various social media posts that plotted to breach the building. Police Chief Yogananda Pittman told congressional investigators that the unit reportedly brought them to the department’s “command staff,” but the material never arrived at the desks of higher-ups. This lack of communication persisted throughout the plan’s escalation on social media until the riot unfolded on January 6.
The “full scope of known information” was never conveyed to Capitol Police “leadership, rank-and-file officers, or law enforcement partners.” The Intelligence Community apparently didn’t take it seriously either or, if they did, they didn’t pass on their concerns and there was no emergency authority so nobody knew which way to turn when reinforcements were required. The police simply weren’t prepared for a violent insurrection even though many of the Trump followers who were planning to swarm the Capitol that day were openly talking about perpetrating one.
It is a sobering report and does add some new detail to the story that we hadn’t heard before. But it leaves many more questions than it answers. After all, these insurrectionists didn’t just cook this up out of the blue. They felt they’d been given the order to do what they did and said so openly as they stormed the building. None of that is addressed by this investigation — and that’s because the Republicans on the committee refused to do it.
According to CNN, the language of the report was the subject of many negotiations in order to keep the timorous Republican senators on board. A committee aide told the network, “did we look at Trump’s role in the attack? The answer is no.” They couldn’t even use the word “insurrection” or mention the threats against Vice President Mike Pence in the body of the report. They were instead forced to leave Trump’s incitement against Pence to the appendix.
The report also didn’t look at the attempts behind the scenes to get the president to bring the insurrection under control, for obvious reasons: He thought it was terrific. As he told Fox News a couple of months ago:
“Right from the start, it was zero threat. Look, they went in — they shouldn’t have done it — some of them went in, and they’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know? They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in, and they walked out.
And they certainly didn’t investigate what Trump knew and what he did before January 6th because it’s potentially even more damning. Francesca Chambers of McClatchy reported just days after the event:
The night before the president directed his supporters to converge on the Capitol, he considered announcing by tweet that he would march down Pennsylvania Avenue with them. But he decided against it out of concern that they would be blocked from approaching the federal building if he provided advance notice of their plans.
At the very least it’s clear that Trump didn’t want the police to be properly prepared for a huge crowd unexpectedly bearing down on the Capitol. One might even suspect he knew exactly what he was doing.
These are things the American people have a right to know about. If people inside the White House were telling reporters about it, they could certainly be compelled to speak under oath to a congressional committee or even a special counsel. The report issued this week, with its tippy-toeing around the big orange elephant in the room only makes it more obvious how necessary a serious probe really is. The work that’s going on in the states by Republicans to further subvert the electoral process along with the ongoing threat of right-wing extremist violence cannot be fully dealt with unless the American people have access to everything that led up to this moment.
The Democrats must keep hammering away at this regardless of the GOP’s desperate desire to pretend it never happened. If they don’t, there’s a very good chance it will happen again.
You may have heard that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed an order making it illegal for the social media companies to de-platform political figures. Yes, it’s daft and probably unconstitutional but Trump cultists don’t care about that.
Anyway, if you had any doubts about the depth of their fatuous hypocrisy take a look at this:
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is praising Twitter’s decision to suspend Rebekah Jones from its platform in a statement released Monday.
Jones is of course the former Florida state employee who claimed that the DeSantis administration was fudging the numbers regarding the states Covid-19 infections and deaths, and later accused DeSantis of sending Florida police — or as she called them, the “Gestapo” — to raid her home. She also claimed she was fired for not manipulating the numbers.
Jones has since been officially labeled a “Whistleblower” which gives her legal protection, but inconsistencies in her reporting have done reasonable and serious harm to her reputation. It is not yet clear why she was suspended, but DeSantis’s office did not delay in celebrating the decision, in a statement that said it was “long overdue.”
“Rebekah Jones is the Typhoid Mary of COVID-19 disinformation and has harmed many hardworking DOH employees with her defamatory conspiracy theories,” the statement read. “I hope someone will ask Ms. Jones why she thinks she got suspended — will she allege that Governor DeSantis is somehow behind Twitter’s decision? That would be deeply ironic if she tried to spin that falsehood into her conspiracy theory, given the Governor’s stance on Big Tech.”
Followers of Governor DeSantis know that he has been a vocal critic of “Big Tech,” and alleged “cancel culture,” so much so that just two weeks ago he signed a bill that punishes social media companies who suspend accounts for users longer than 14 days. That bill is expected to go into law on July 1.
This level of trollish hypocrisy is a feature not a bug. When your voters only care about owning the libs what they love more than anything is seeing their leaders slapping their enemies in the face and laughing about it. It’s bully boy culture and nobody does it better than DeSantis. He is very cognizant of the dynamic whereas Trump just does it by instinct.
Please, please, don’t take this the wrong way. Marc Elias knows more about election law, politics, and justice when he’s sound asleep than I do when I’m wide eyed and completely caffeinated. But…
What was your first reaction on November 7, 2020, when you heard that the Associated Press had declared Joe Biden the election’s winner?
I thought the game was over.
Really?
I did. Now, did I think that Donald Trump was going to be a good loser? No. Did I think he would be gracious in defeat? No.
But did I think that he and his allies would persist in bringing frivolous postelection litigation? I didn’t anticipate that. Nor did I expect that he’d have the continued support for these efforts from the establishment of the Republican Party…
I didn’t expect this process would be opposed by Republicans. I thought they knew better…
The moment that really struck me came on December 7 when the state of Texas sued in the US Supreme Court to block four other states’ election results from being counted. My initial reaction was, “This is nonsense from the Republican attorney general of Texas who’s under indictment and who is seeking Trump’s favor. Maybe he wants a pardon?” I made the mistake of thinking, “Oh, this is crazy.”
Yes, it was a “mistake.” Long before Donald Trump praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” establishment Republicans — the Bushes, the Cheneys, and so many others — made it abundantly clear where their sentiments lay. I just don’t understand why this was so hard for so many intelligent people — and Elias is clearly brilliant — to perceive.
Like Digby, I hope it’s not too late but I fear it is.
It looks like Mr Integrity, the Senator who marches to his own drummer is really just another employee doing what he was sent to do.
Last march Jane Mayer at the New Yorker wrote a long piece about how the Koch Network was heavily lobbying Senators to oppose the Biden agenda, especially the Voting Rights legislation and the move to eliminate the filibuster. She mentioned they were specifically targeting Joe Manchin, and reportedly “had a little fun” putting the squeeze on him.
The leaked Heritage Foundation tape specifically mentions how the right wing dark money groups “had a little fun” pressuring Manchin on SB1.
CNBC reviewed an episode of a Koch policy group Americans for Prosperity’s video series, along with ads crafted by the organization. The network specifically calls on its grassroots supporters to push Manchin, a conservative Democrat, to be against some of his party’s legislative priorities.
Americans for Prosperity launched a website titled West Virginia Values, which calls on people to email Manchin “to be The Voice West Virginia Needs In D.C. — Reject Washington’s Partisan Agenda.”
It then lists all of the items Manchin has promised to oppose, including the idea of eliminating the filibuster, the For the People Act and packing the Supreme Court. It then shows everything the group believes Manchin should oppose, including Biden’s infrastructure plan and the union-friendly PRO Act.
Americans for Prosperity leaders took part in one of their video series with their West Virginia state director in May where they praised Manchin for voicing his opposition to abolishing the filibuster. The video was reviewed by CNBC after it was posted to the group’s Facebook page.
“A wise man once said that it takes a lot of courage to stand up to your enemies but that it takes even more courage up to stand up to your friends,” Ted Ellis, the director of coalitions for Americans for Prosperity’s government affairs team, told the audience. “And that’s what Joe Manchin is doing right now. He’s displaying, I think, a lot of courage and we should applaud that.”
“Our grassroots are critically important and it would be difficult to say that they are more important anywhere than West Virginia right now because of the dramatic impact that our grassroots have in West Virginia in encouraging Senator Manchin to stand strong on this point,” Casey Mattox, the vice president of legal and judicial Strategy at Americans for Prosperity, said during the presentation.
Ellis is listed on a recent lobbying report as one of the Americans for Prosperity officials who in the first quarter of 2021 lobbied against the For the People Act and Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan. The lobbyists targeted House and Senate lawmakers.
In a statement to CNBC, a spokesman Americans for Prosperity did not deny whether its officials have spoken directly to Manchin or his staff about the For the People Act. The representative praised Manchin’s stance on the bill and likened their to stance to that of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Sen. Manchin has long blazed his own path, and on this issue, we agree: Extreme partisanship gets in the way of finding positive solutions,” Lo Isidro, a spokesman for AFP, told CNBC in an emailed statement on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, this bill and the tactics some are using to pass it would make it harder to work together – chilling debate, worsening partisanship, and setting up a false choice between voting rights and free speech. We’re for both. Like the ACLU, our concerns focus on the portion that targets the First Amendment. And we’ll continue to defend those rights.”
I’m not one to assume that everything always comes down to money. But it often does. And the outsized influence these big money wingnuts wield is always relevant. They have no problem leveraging the culture war issues to get their way and use their financial clout to push politicians to do their bidding. And some don’t need much pushing although they’ll certainly take the money.
I’ve been very dour and downbeat recently about the prospects of retaining out democracy in light of the ongoing assaults from the Trump Party. I’ll admit that I am pessimistic at this point.
But there are some positive signs to point to that should not be overlooked. The recent race in New Mexico, a blueish-purple state provides a tiny bit of optimism:
Two weeks before the GOP had its first chance to pick up a seat in Congress since Joe Biden became president, the Republican Party of New Mexico hosted a three-day event dubbed “Operation Freedom.” State Sen. Mark Moores, who was running for the open seat, addressed a crowd of a few hundred party leaders, activists and donors in a hotel conference center. Afterwards, he left the hotel and drove nearly 300 miles back to Albuquerque, where he was actually competing for votes.
New Mexico Republicans had opted to hold their marquee event in Amarillo, Texas.
When the votes came in, Moores had lost to Democratic State Rep. Melanie Stansbury by 24 percentage points—even more than the margin by which Joe Biden had won the district. Nationally, it was seen as a referendum on Biden’s first months in office. But in New Mexico, the story is longer and more complex. For some frustrated New Mexico Republicans, the Amarillo episode and Moores’ loss last Tuesday highlight deeper problems with the state party’s leadership and direction over the last few years—including a turn towards Trumpism that has galvanized some of the party’s base but has seemingly turned off swing voters in the state’s traditionally purple electorate.
As recently as 2016, Republican Gov. Susana Martinez had just won re-election, Republicans had won the state House and Republican Richard Berry was in his second term as Albuquerque mayor. In the years since, the Republican party’s position in Bernalillo County—the anchor of the first congressional district, where the special election was held—has gradually eroded, taking the party’s chances statewide with it. Today, Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and a near-supermajority in the state House.
Part of the GOP’s decline can be attributed to urban-rural polarization, a process set in motion before Donald Trump’s ascent. “The fact is that CD-1 in particular has basically turned into an urban district, and like we see nationally, it’s gotten bluer and bluer,” said Lonna Rae Atkeson, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico and a frequent commentator on local politics.
It wasn’t so long ago that centrist Republican Heather Wilson represented the first district for ten years, despite Democratic victories at the presidential level in 2000 and 2004. New Mexico Republicans remain divided on whether or not the first district is winnable for their party in today’s environment, but for many, the yawning margin last week speaks volumes about the GOP’s overall strength in the state.
“The party had every incentive to try to make it reasonably close,” said Rod Adair, a Republican consultant and demographer who represented a southeast New Mexico state senate seat from 1997 to 2013. “The striking thing about the results is that you would expect, in a special election, for the party opposite the White House to get a little bit of a bump,” he added. “It was actually worse.”
Moores, one of only two Republicans left representing Albuquerque voters in either chamber of the state legislature, even lost his own state senate district by 3.5 points, according to the special election’s unofficial results.
Does this reflect the dynamic in any of the other swing states? I have no idea. I guess it depends on the party organizations and just how looney the right wing has become there. But it matters a lot for the future if at least a few have similar dynamics at play that may not be entirely obvious until people go to vote.
It’s a thin reed, I know. But I don’t think it’s healthy to just assume that these neo-fascist loons have it in the bag simply because Washington appears to be unable to offer up any countervailing power to stop them. Perhaps the people themselves will do it.
A Republican House candidate from Wisconsin says he is appalled by the violence he witnessed at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into the siege at the Capitol. But he did not disagree with G.O.P. lawmakers’ effort to overturn the presidential election results that night.
In Michigan, a woman known as the “MAGA bride” after photos of her Donald J. Trump-themed wedding dress went viral is running for Congress while falsely claiming that it is “highly probable” the former president carried her state and won re-election.
And in Washington State, the Republican nominee for governor last year is making a bid for Congress months after finally dropping a lawsuit challenging his 2020 defeat — a contest he lost by 545,000 votes.
Across the country, a rising class of Republican challengers has embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was illegitimate, marred by fraud and inconsistencies. Aggressively pushing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he was robbed of re-election, these candidates represent the next generation of aspiring G.O.P. leaders, who would bring to Congress the real possibility that the party’s assault on the legitimacy of elections, a bedrock principle of American democracy, could continue through the 2024 contests.
Dozens of Republican candidates have sown doubts about the election as they seek to join the ranks of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory. There are degrees of denial: Some bluntly declare they must repair a rigged system that produced a flawed result, while others speak in the language of “election integrity,” promoting Republican re-examinations of the vote counts in Arizona and Georgia and backing new voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in battleground states.
They are united by a near-universal reluctance to state outright that Mr. Biden is the legitimately elected leader of the country.
If 2022 is one of those proverbial “shellackings” as everyone expects, it appears we’re going to have a large Marjorie Taylor Green faction in the House. In fact, don’t be surprised if they end up deposing McCarthy and putting one of their own in charge.
I hear that Democrats don’t want their candidates to talk too much about Trump or run to hard against GOP extremism because they think the best way to win is to talk up the economy and whatever other positive things they can conjure. (At this point, I’m not sure what those things will be, other than “the GOP is out of power” which perhaps falls under the “speak no evil” edict.) So, I guess the campaigns against these people will be all about health care?
I don’t know. But in America 2021, it sure seems to me that hate trumps love in American politics. But I guess we can hope that if Trump isn’t on the ballot his cult will tune out, even if Trump clones are running all over the country. It looks like that may be our best hope.
I’m not a religious person so I have no particular theological ax to grind. But in America, religion has a gigantic influence over all of us whether we sign on to the belief system or not. So, in that sense this is everyone’s business.
This Peter Wehner piece in the Atlantic about the crisis in American Christendom is simply stunning. It starts off with a rundown on the latest scandal with the Southern Baptist Convention in which the former head, Russell Moore, resigned from the organization because of its tolerance for sexual abuse and racism.
Moore’s letter was leaked to Religion News Service (RNS) a few weeks after he resigned from the ERLC. And on June 1, Immanuel Nashville, a church not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, announced that Moore would become its pastor in residence. Which means that one of the most important figures in the SBC has completely broken with the denomination he has been a part of for virtually his entire life.
Moore’s 4,000-word letter explains why.
His departure was not primarily prompted, as many people had assumed, by his role as an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, although that had clearly upset powerful members within the politically and theologically conservative denomination. Instead, the letter suggests, the breach was caused by the stands he had taken against sexual abuse within the SBC and on racial reconciliation, which had infuriated the executive committee. The chair of the executive committee at the time, Mike Stone, is now running for SBC president. According to RNS, “Supporters have touted Moore’s resignation as proof of Stone’s effectiveness as a leader.”
The organization is also full of unreconstructed white supremacists.
But it isn’t just the Southern Baptists:
[S]omething has gone awry; the revelations contained in Russell Moore’s letter were only the latest links in a disturbingly long chain of offenses. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle published a six-part series on abuse within SBC churches. One of America’s most prominent female evangelicals, Beth Moore (no relation to Russell), split with the SBC earlier this year, citing the “staggering” disorientation of seeing denominational leaders support Trump. She has also denounced the “demonic stronghold” of white supremacy and “the sexism & misogyny that is rampant in segments of the SBC.”
“There comes a time when you have to say, this is not who I am,” Beth Moore explained to RNS. “I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists.”
Yet the problems are hardly confined to the SBC. The Catholic Church has been rocked by horrifying sexual-abuse scandals. Earlier this year, an investigation found credible evidence that Ravi Zacharias, the revered evangelist who died last year, had been engaged in sexual misconduct spanning many years and several continents. The Ravi Zacharias International Ministries board apologized for its role in discrediting one of the women Zacharias exploited and later slandered. And Jerry Falwell Jr. was forced to resign as the president and chancellor of Liberty University, one of the largest evangelical universities in the world, after allegations of sexual misconduct.
But the issues go beyond matters of sexual misconduct and abuse. Christians appear more susceptible than non-Christians to embracing conspiracy theories; 31 percent of white evangelical Christian Republicans believe in the accuracy of the claim that “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.”
Partisan, cultural, and regional identities tend to shape religious identities. “In American pop-culture parlance, ‘evangelical’ now basically means whites who consider themselves religious and who vote Republican,” according to the Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd. In so many instances, cultural identity is completely dominant over faith; it is the prism through which faith is interpreted. “‘Evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite,’” Timothy Keller, one of the most influential evangelicals in the world, wrote in The New Yorker in 2017. I have heard from pastors in different parts of America who describe a “generational catastrophe” that is unfolding because of how disillusioned young people, including many young Christians, are by what they have seen.
One of the more incisive comments about the gap we often see between faith and works sticks with me today: that for too many people of the Christian faith, Jesus is a “hood ornament.” The man who told me that was Russell Moore. But a blistering phrase used by Jesus echoes most in my mind. He likened hypocritical religious leaders who abandon their calling and lead others astray to “whitewashed tombs,” which “look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”
In their eagerness to defend their faith, many Christians refuse to look honestly at the crises American Christendom faces and the corruption within its ranks. They prefer to present to the world a spiritual Potemkin village, projecting an image of righteousness that hides some disturbing realities. There’s a desire to conceal the abuses and the wounds, the struggles and the failures, the harsh judgmentalism and craving to dominate and dehumanize others, the doubts and the dark sides. The viciousness of church politics can rival pretty much any other politics you can name; the difference is that the viciousness within churches is often cloaked in lofty spiritual language and euphemisms.
I don’t know what to say about this. My instinct is to say that it just a reflection of the deeper cultural rot we see in many of our institutions. But this is an extremely powerful faction in American life which claims to be moral arbiters in many different aspects of our personal and public lives. This hypocrisy and corruption is relevant, particularly since they have injected themselves so comprehensively into politics and are such important social institutions if we aren’t really dealing with a chicken and egg situation.
Maybe these institutions aren’t so much reflections of an ever decadent and corrupt society — maybe society is a reflection of these decadent and corrupt institutions?
*None of this is an indictment of every adherent of these faiths. Obviously, there are many good people among them. But their religious leadership leaves a lot to be desired and far to many followers have lost their way as well. The worship of Donald Trump has shown just how thin the attachment to Biblical teachings has become.
