Without an Enemy, they don’t know who they are
I paused last night while watching Frontline‘s Michael Flynn’s Holy War to check in with Fred Clarkson of Political Research Associates and Religion Dispatches. Clarkson and André Gagné recently uploaded A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation Part 1 and Part 2. Clarkson wrote this about Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour back in July:
Religious freedom has long been a rallying cry of the religious and political right. In recent years, it’s been used to provide a rationale for exemptions from a variety of civil right laws.
But at least since January 6th, some MAGA sectors have been dropping much of the pretense of religious freedom, while they appear to openly prepare their audiences for vigilante violence and religious war. The messages aren’t always consistent, but they are fairly consistently violent.
This has been on vivid display on the ReAwaken America Tour, which has been kind of a rolling campaign for revolt since the failed coup. Led by former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, the 15 rallies held since April 2021 have each drawn thousands of attendees. Like “Stop the Steal” events, they tend to be foggy, distortion-infused affairs, full of dire warnings of hidden evil and worse to come. There are at least three more planned this year: one for Southern Virginia, one for Western New York, and another for the Idaho panhandle—border regions intended to draw the maximum number of attendees.
Election, medical, and vaccine conspiracists, along with insurrection veterans like Flynn, Eric Trump, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, and Roger Stone grab most of the media attention. But a disturbing religious dimension has received far less attention; that is, until November, when Flynn blurted out their broad intention at a San Antonio rally, “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
Flynn was ousted as President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser for lying to the FBI about conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Trump pardoned Flynn’s felony conviction before exiting the White House in 2021.
Since the failed insurrection and alleged coup plot, the retired three-star Army general began fighting another kind of war. This one, on the home front, to make America of, by, and for Christians. Their kind of Christians.
Michael Flynn’s Holy War suggests the former general is assembling his own theocratic army. And in Florida, they are training believers as young as six in how to use firearms.
What’s fascinating about these holy warriors is their desperate need for an Enemy. THE Enemy, a general-purpose bogeyman which defines and gives meaning to their existence. As if there is no US without a THEM.
For the fringe right, once the enemy was socialism, then communism, then atheism, then secular humanism, then Islam (radical or otherwise), then socialism and communism again. Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell (in a different century) and they declared St. Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire, the fringe right is still looking for commies in woodpiles and under their beds. The MAGAs still haven’t joined the 21st century.
Now the post-QAnon fringe sees an admixture of all of THEM rolled into an international socialist-communist-blood-drinking-cannibalistic-pedophile, One-World-Order, secret cabal of un-straight, un-Christian predators dedicated to their destruction. Because running the world is not enough for their all-powerful ENEMY. The world is a conspiracy against God’s kingdom. The rest is just details.
It is unclear whether MAGA Republicans even know or care what socialism is. Or communism. Are they simply multipurpose smears so interchangeable that they don’t bother with definitions?
Down with the Washington Monument!
Clarkson points to this article on just how whacko (my term) these guys are:
Prophet Julie Green, who campaigns with Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, is also a frequent guest on the broadcast of tour regular Pastor Dave Scarlett. She says God has given her word of something dire. In a show broadcast from the Salem, Oregon ReAwaking event in April, she told Scarlett and fellow Prophet Amanda Grace that the nation’s capital is not what God wanted, and that he intends to “destroy Washington, DC.” She says that God is moving the capital to either Pennsylvania or Florida. This comes amidst some kind of sweeping away of existing institutions, out of which “America will be reborn.”
The panel also discussed the need to remove monuments that are “not of God.” Amanda Grace says the Statue of Liberty needs to come down because it’s tied to a false god and is “part of the Old Order.” (Scarlett thinks it’s tied to Islam.) Green says, “any monument that was erected by them that he didn’t want, will be torn down.” Incidentally, according to Green, God also “mentioned the Washington monument, and then all the arches of Baal.”
Noting that the Washington monument is modeled on ancient Egyptian obelisks, Green adds, “It’s not like they make anything new, they just take it from something before.” That’s why God said, “these are like the Pharaohs of old, it’s the same demonic thing that’s behind the leaders now as they were back there with Pharaohs.”
“Any monuments that are really of God, can stay,” she says. The ones that are not of God “will be destroyed, and nothing can stop that.”
“It is our calling to disrupt fake Christianity,” Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis tells her congregation. She tells Frontline she thinks American Christianity has been hijacked by people like Flynn. They have combined politics and Christianity with conspiracy theories.
“Mike Flynn is in a movement that is designed to impose a small minority of Christian ethics on the rest of the nation,” Lewis says. “We are not going to allow fascism to hijack our love.”
The United States is for everyone. But the Christian right is so freaked out about losing its ability to dominate the rest of America that they’ve twisted Jesus into something he isn’t.
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Early voting has begun here in North Carolina. Watch for For The Win (5th Ed.) in 2024.