Civil Commotion

I have no idea what this means. None.

The irony, of course, is that theology is not a branch of knowledge, but a branch of bunco.

A federal judge in Wisconsin has ruled that the clergy housing exemption is unconstitutional; the decision is here.

The decision will doubtless be appealed by the Godly — a lot of money is at stake — and there is no telling how an appeals court will rule, or the Supreme Court if it goes that far. Certainly, the matter isn’t all settled.

Longtime Civil Commotion readers know what I think; it’s the same thing the Founders thought.

It is time then, once for all, to end the tax privileges enjoyed by religion and to stop imposing upon American citizens a compulsory duty to support institutions innately opposed to reason, hostile to American ideals, morally responsible for Niagaras of bloodshed, and destructive of national unity.

Enough.

The public subsidy of religion must end.

Notice this, too: The very people who exact a public subsidy for observance of Bronze Age superstitions are spending small fortunes — much of it made possible by the subsidy — to constrict the lives of gays and transgenders, take away contraception, impose their superstitions on pregnant women, and undermine education. Enough, indeed.

If you’re headed to D.C. this weekend, you’ll probably want to skip the National Mall — the Dominionists are setting-up camp there to pray for the replacement of four Supreme Court Justices, among other things.

Visitors to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this weekend will find themselves in the midst of a tent city that is part of what organizers are calling “a historic weekend of worship, prayer and evangelism.” The project — known as “Awaken the Dawn” — will kick off on Friday evening and run all weekend, leading into Monday’s Rise Up rally, the latest in a series of political prayer rallies organized by dominionist preacher Lou Engle under the banner of “The Call.”

Like most Religious Right events, an overarching goal of the weekend’s events is to spark a spiritual revival that will bring America “back to God.” Another goal of the rally’s organizers is to wage spiritual warfare against Supreme Court justices who have upheld women’s right to abortion. Engel has urged people to build up to the event with 30 days of prayer and fasting to prepare to “shift history.” Some prophets have been predicting miracles.

Praying is no more than talking to yourself, so that’s certainly better than other things they might do. But it would be nice to be able to visit the nation’s capital without being accosted by crazies.

Well.

Newsweek is out with a piece that takes-up Donald Trump and evangelicals’ curious loyalty to a man whose entire life is the antithesis of everything they claim to believe.

To historians, the evangelical leaders’ response was no surprise, because they know racism was behind the emergence of evangelicals as a political force in America. “If you are looking for the core animating spark of the Christian-right movement, it’s not abortion but private Christian universities not being able to have laws against interracial dating,” says Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author of The End of White Christian America (Simon & Schuster, 2016). He knows that when the federal government forced integration on public schools in the South, white parents yanked their kids out and enrolled them in new church-run schools dubbed “segregation academies.” The white flight was fast and devastating. In Mississippi, for example, the white population in the Holmes County school system dropped from 700 to 28 in year one of desegregation, and by the next year had dropped to zero.

It’s a heavy-handed piece that blatantly laughs at Trump and evangelicals though, in fairness, it is difficult to take any of them seriously or view them with respect.

I do think that racism has much to do with Trump’s popularity, but I think a greater factor is a generalized anger toward the whole of modernity. I know a lot of people who believed that the juvenile behavior of the campaign was just an act, and that most of his promises were insincere and empty — but they voted for him anyway. Why? Because they liked loved his relentless antagonism toward educated professionals, those people who were comfortable with the others, those people who approved of regulations they find constricting and incomprehensible, those people who are unafraid of an evolving world, those people who will say frankly that the Adam and Eve tale has no more dignity than Jack and the Beanstalk, those people who don’t care a hoot about same-sex marriage but care a lot about global warming.

The world has become a place where they are uncomfortable; that’s who voted for Trump.

They could identify with Trump because he, like them, then and still, is the object of mockery, too. They don’t care that Trump is a witless buffoon who, if not checked, is going to run the country into the ground because he is an idiot; they care that he says mean things about the same people they dislike.