On that day, people who didn't go down to the courthouse early to vote, like me, and those who didn't vote absentee, and are voting, will cast their votes.
I've been following politics since at least 1972, when Richard Nixon won his second term in office. I can remember doing so as a kid. I was nine. Teno Roncalio, a Catholic lawyer from Sweetwater County, a veteran of Operation Overlord, and a Democrat, was our Congressman. Gale McGee, a University of Wyoming professor, and a Democrat was one of our Senators. The other was Cliff Hansen, a rancher from Teton County when Teton County still had real ranches, and a Republican, was our other Senator. Stan Hathaway, a Republican Episcopalian at the time, who later became Secretary of the Interior and a Catholic, was our Governor.
Yep, that's right. We had more Democrats in Congress than Republicans. Being called a "Democrat" wasn't a slur.
In the 1980s, a very conservative and extremely religious Wyoming politician who was LDS attempted to have a bill passed targeting pornography sales. He was widely lampooned. HE had not, however campaigned on his faith, even though it obviously had informed his legislative effort.
I can't recall, until Foster Friess run for Governor in 2018, any Wyoming politician making their faith central to their campaign. If you knew much about candidates, you often knew what their faith was, but there was never anyone who boldly claimed "I'm a Christian" as a reason to vote for them. People probably would have been offended if they had, and of course Wyoming was and is the least religious state in the Union.
Something that did happen in that time frame was the arrival of the new Evangelical churches. I pass one every day on my way to work, and two gigantic ones have been built. I know very little about the one that I pass, which proclaims itself to be an "Evangelical Free Church", thereby proclaiming a denomination without realizing that its done so, and even less about the two gigantic ones, other than that one has a huge following, including members who are openly living in sin or violating Christ's injunction about divorce and remarriage.
With their arrival, and the campaign of Freiss, who wasn't from here and was never of here, and the evolution in national politics, we now see Evangelical proclamations thickly made, but with the adherence to the message of Christ thinly understood. One Natrona County legislature, newly imported from Illinois, Jeanette Ward, proclaimed her Christianity while asserting in the legislature that we are in fact not our brother's keeper. Numerous politicians in the hinterland have claimed that the Constitution is divinely inspired, a minority Protestant and minority LDS view that seemingly has wide acceptance in the populist right. A candidate in this district proclaimed his Christianity, and his wife, in his support did the same in a mailer, while making statements that are outright lies.
Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”
Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Matthew Chapter 19.
We are all familiar, of course, with the uncomfortable comment from Christ that its harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. This statement is so disquieting that one entire branch of Christianity, the heath and wealth gospel group, has dispensed entirely with focusing on it. They aren't alone, however. I heard plenty of homilies in the 70s and 80s, probably the 90s, from Priets who discussed "spiritual poverty".
I don't hear that much anymore from Apostolic Christians, whose clerics have become increasingly more orthodox.
And I think the warming is real. Vast wealth corrupts. You only have to look at the impact of the vastly wealthy to realize that, whether it be Elon Musk or Donald Trump and their personal morals.
People who look at Trump and see him as a devout Christians are fools.
But then, a lot of American Christians are Christian Light.
How does this relate here?
Well, in a culture loudly proclaiming itself to be Christian, that of the American political right, we see an awful lot of people whose adherence to the basic tenants of the Gospel are absent. That's why one right wing commentator could seriously maintain the Hawk Tuah Girl was exhibiting a conservative value (pleasuring her man, she stated), rather than seeing her for what she is, a sad example of a person whose become debased. Whole sectors, however, of the far right have become debased in various degrees, which is not to say that the left is a beacon of moral purity.
Seeing either party as a Christian one is foolish.
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself."
From a letter to Diognetus (Nn. 5-6; Funk, 397-401)
I'm fearful of what this election holds in more ways than one. One thing I'm afraid of is that the co-opting of Christianity by the Trumpists will harm it. The only really Christian party in the race is the American Solidarity Party, but it doesn't stand a chance. Some elements of Christian Nationalism are actually deeply Christian, with an understanding of Apostolic Christianity, whereas some parts are American Protestant, which have an erroneous view of the end of the Apostolic Age. They are not compatible. The deeper National Conservatives, for that matter, are an insurgent group within the far right seeking to slip in, take over, and effect a sort of social revolution. They saw J. D. Trump as their Trojan Horse, but thought they were through the gates of Troy too early.
Real Christian movements do rise up periodically. But that's what they do, rise up. They aren't imposed down. Some of that has already occured, with the far left reacting strongly to it. But that doesn't seem to be appreciated here.
I don't see a lot of really deep Christianity out there in the political field. If I did, frankly, quite a few of those things that the Democratic left have proclaimed as weird would be practiced, which may be why J. D. Vance, for all the negative attention he's attracted, is the only really honest figure in the Trump camp. He does believe the traditional things he says, I'm quite sure, currently regarded as "weird" or not. But then, like the members of the New Apostolic Reformation, which he's not party of, he's seemingly willing to make common cause with lies in order to try to advance what he regards as a greater good, something that's always tactically iffy and morally reprehensible.
Satan, we're told, is the father of lies. Lying, we're told, is a sin. In Catholic theology at least, it can be a mortal sin, which has not deterred at least one Catholica elected official here from campaigning on a whopper during the last election. Lying always has a bad end.
Lying will have some sort of existential bad end for those now doing it. Lying to yourself does as well. You can't really be "a devout Christian" with multiple marriages, or when shacked up, or when favoring your career over others or over nature, or while prioritizing wealth,
And if you are seeking to transform society, you have to give society a reason to transform. Simply declaring that you are on the side of God doesn't really do that.
Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”
Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.
The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out. I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.
And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.
But Trump's hard to figure.
I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.
I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.1
That's hard to judge at a distance. Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be. One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.
Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others. By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage. If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock. He doesn't even seem like the same person.
That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately. Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent. People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset. His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first. It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.
Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect. That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora. Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart. Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.
If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence. He's a good salesman.
I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once. But he is a good salesman. He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling. He doesn't have to believe it.
Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell. They'd often move between one sales job and another. If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever. Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling. It was the selling that they were interested in.
I strongly suspect Trump is like that.
At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016. Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas. People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.
Populist Outrage.
Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now. It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew. You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group. But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.
J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.
I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to. When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence. That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.
Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable. He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does. He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.
He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.
For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.
That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird". All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying. If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.
Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.
More this than this.
We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020. Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes. It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:
Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things. Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category. It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers. Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism. What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced. It sets its manifesto out as follows:
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.
4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen2 and Reno3do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher4, who for a while just urged societal retreat. Now Kevin Roberts5. , head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction. He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic. It's Amazon write up states:
America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.
In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.
Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.
All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.
The good news is, we’re going to win.
The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.
Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.
The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.
That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.
Vance's biography really demonstrates this. He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism. He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one. Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition. While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.6
So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?
It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.
It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion. Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it. I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.
So is this "weird"?
Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy. And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall7and the Simone and Malcolm Collins8of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".
Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets. The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.
Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird 9 while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird. If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird. The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.
Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.
The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart. Very smart, in fact. And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not. Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.
They do.
They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.
But what they've gambled on was two things. One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda. They did that for him, through Project 2025. They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.
They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term. He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.
That figure is J. D. Vance. And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.
Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for. He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump. Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.
Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.
The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.
Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President. But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it. Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.
Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem. But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.
And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution. Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt. Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.
Footnotes
* This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.
**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing. It isn't. Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.
What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church. That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion. Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians.
1. I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb. So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.
It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.
2. Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.
3. R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism. He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.
4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option. He's moved to Hungary. Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.
5. Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.
6. It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years. These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.
7. Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican. He's on the fringe right.
8. Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird. Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out. The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world. They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.
Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.
Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.
The Republican National Convention is into day three as of the time of this writing. It's a populist party now, and as others have been pointing out, it's shedding values, as all populist movements do, as rapidly as it once claimed them.
Populist movements are famously shallow, having no real political thesis behind them other than that the "will of the people" is right, because it must be. For this reason, they're also nearly universally co opted in the end by other movements. The American Populist movement of the late 19th Century was absorbed by the Progressive movement, which had a real thesis behind it. American Populist who hadn't been absorbed by first the Republicans of the Theodore Roosevelt era or by Democrats following the rise of Woodrow Wilson, ended up various far left wing movement of the 20s and 30s, including American Socialism and Communism, which again had a deeper thesis. The Communist road had already been laid for Populist in Russia, where populist movements against the Crown in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries ended up in revolution, with the revolution being co opted by the Bolsheviks, who again had a real thesis, and would absorb and destroy populism in their country. In the German Weimar Republic street level populsits, and they're always street level, would gravitate towards the KDP and the NADSP, with the Nazi's, which had a heavily populist element which again was amazingly think, winning out in the end. Post war debates on whether the Nazi Party was socialist or fascist miss the reality entirely, it was populist, making it the most successful populist party, in terms of gaining control of a major nation, of all times.
Because populism is shallow, in the end it only reflect the thin surface of a populace's culture, and often the worst elements of it, once it is allowed to establish itself. German populism yielded to insane racial theories and hatred and worshipped with fanatical loyalty the German Volk in the form of a single man, Adolf Hitler. Southern populism of the 20th Century had, as a claimed feature, a deep love of culture and Protestantism, but it also featured a profound prejudice against anyone who was not a white Protestant.
And so we've arrived at that point.
Donald Trump's rise was adopted by and backed by Christian Nationalist, who just held a convention within the last two weeks. Open about their desire to establish the United States as an exclusively Christian (Protestant) nation, they've seen Trump as a Cyrus the Great who is their divinely appointed ally. In the wake of last week's assassination attempt by a young registered Republican who, in numerous ways, demonstrated that he didn't know diddly about marksmanship, rank and file and more elite members of the movement have declared that Trump was saved by Devine Providence.
That may in fact be true, but it's worth remembering that Adolf Hitler was the target of 42 known assassination plots, more than one of which went right to the edge of success. It's also worth remembering that God does in fact work in mysterious ways, and God's acts don't necessarily corelate with human desires, and life may in fact be preserved for reasons we don't really grasp, but which do not necessarily equal our political goals.
At any rate, the Republican Convention in fact with numerous prayers offered by Christian clerics, including Catholic ones, who should be cautious about Christian Nationalism. But it's worth noting that it also opened by a prayer from a conservative Sikh female lawyer. I'm not saying that's not admirable, but the hardcore Protestant backers of a man who last year said that he would keep out of the country people who did not adhere to "our religion" are now scrambling to suggest that this isn't contrary to their view.
And beyond that, an opening speaker was one Amber Rose, about whom I know nothing other than that she has a pornographic past and present, and who does not seem to stand for anything that MAGA populist claim to is revealing. Essentially, she evokes the very type of "wokeism" that actually did give rise to the movement in significant ways, as people instinctively reacted to what they knew to be contrary to common sense and morality.
The point, therefore, at which a populist movement is absorbed into something else has been reached. The "conservative" element of populism has been boiled out. Now the Republican Party and the Populist movement stands for one thing only, Donald Trump. Almost anything that a person thinks Trump stands for is now suspect in additional. We already know, for example, a movement which was deeply opposed to abortion in a party that had been deeply opposed to abortion, has abandoned that plank, as Trump is wishy washy on the whole thing.
Not that there weren't signs of this already.
Nearly coincident with the conference on Christian Nationalism, the "Hawk tuah Girl" rose to temporary fame regarding her TikTok interview on engaging in fellatio. Deeply antithetical to Christian morality, she showed up shortly thereafter featured in Daisy Duke's al la Playboy helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now. This past week, as already noted, the RNC gave a prime speaking slot to a pro-abortion feminist and self-proclaimed slut whose claim to fame is having sex with rappers. It turns out, accordingly, that lots of rank and file MAGA adherents don't really have a concern for traditional morality, indeed, they're okay with immorality as long as its fairly conventional, or in the case of same sex marriage, with Don Jr. claims Don Sr. has always been in favor of, in spite of what he said post Obergefell, it's become conventional as our memories only stretch back to last week.
Hawk tuah.
Well, this isn't that surprising. Much of the "Christian" and "moral" nature of the current populist was paper thin. Donald Trump is a serial polygamist who took rides on the Lolita Express. Lots of ardent populists saluting Christian Nationalism have long ignored Matthew 19:9.
In this article, I draw upon critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status. Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States. Through several examples, I demonstrate how—since colonization—marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others. I conclude with a call for family scientists to further interrogate how marriage fundamentalism reproduces family inequality in American family life and to work toward its dismantling. A deeper understanding of how these complex and often covert mechanisms of structural oppression operate in family life is needed to disrupt these mechanisms and advance family equality and justice.
Marriage is a human universal. It's not "white", and indeed "white" doesn't really exist either. When people say "white" they mean Western European culture, maybe, or maybe they mean American European culture. Or maybe they just don't know what they mean and are in fact simply reinforcing the language invented for the more recent form of slavery that existed in North American until 1865.
Anyway you look at it, when you wonder why people go in and vote for Trump, well, stuff like this has an awful lot to do with it.
I should note, if you look at the items linked in on this site, over on the right, in the general interest category, there are things from the right and the left. If you only looked at some of my posts, you would assume that I'm a flaming liberal, maybe even a progressive. If you look at others, you'd assume I'm a conservative (you wouldn't assume I'm a populist, and I'm not). That probably means that I'm something else entirely, and indeed my views span right and left.
A full reader of this blog would know that I'm a Catholic, however.
One thing that I think is obvious to serious observant Catholics, and likely observant Orthodox, is that this is a Protestant Country. It really is. That's different from a "Christian Country". It's Protestant. Even people who like to spout off that this country doesn't have a religious founding of some sort are, actually, some sort of cultural Protestant, by and large. It's pretty obvious if you are a dedicated member of one of the minority religions, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, etc. As Protestants live in a Protestant culture, they don't realize that the culture is Protestant. Indeed, one of the charming things about Americans in general is the belief that everyone all over the globe thinks just like we do.
To take it a step further, quite a few sort of adherent members of other faiths, or maybe just not really well-informed members of other faiths, are heavily Protestantized. So you'll find Catholics that have heavily Protestant views, for example.
The deeply Protestant culture of the country impacts almost everything about it, from our economics to our foreign policy. It may not be at all evident to average people, but an example of that can be found in the country's overall reaction to the two major ongoing wars being fought right now.
I've supported, as people here would note, the Israeli war against Hamas, which Hamas started. But to be brutally honest, a lot of American support for Israel comes from two sources. One is the country's Jewish population, which is actually quite small, but which has been historically influential since some point in the mid 20th Century. The other is due to Evangelical Christians who see the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 as a fulfillment of a promise in the book of Revelation, although they aren't the only Christian's, or perhaps individual Christians, to see that, that way. Evangelical Christians, however, tend to see Israel in absolutist terms and many see supporting Israel as a way to directly bring about the Second Coming. For its part, the Israeli government, which actually tends to be highly secular, has worked that pretty heavily over the years.
Catholics and the Orthodox have a much more nuanced view of this topic, however, as their relationship with the region goes all the way back. Apostolic Christians were present in the region since day one. Early on, Apostolic Christianity won many converts of the Jews in the region, but also of Arabs and other regional populations. Christianity, and by that we mean Apostolic Christianity, largely converted the entire region before the Arab conquests of the 5th and 6th Century brought in Islam, but even then huge populations of Christians, and again we mean Apostolic Christians, as that is all that there were, remained. What Protestants, not Apostolic Christians, termed the Crusade when they began to falsify history came about originally to try to protect the pilgrimage routes to the very region that is now being fought over. At least up until fairly recently, 10% of the Palestinian population remained Catholic, and to the north, Lebanon was, up until fairly recently, predominately so. Large populations of Orthodox Christians were also to be found. Israel, in its relationship with out of the region Christians, however, reaches out mostly to Evangelical Christians who are pretty much completely foreign to the region.
The English Colonies were of course colonized by residents of Great Britain, who were, at the time they began to do that, Protestants. They were not all members of the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, however, and that very much has its ongoing impact today. Dissenters from the Protestant state churches, such as the "Pilgrims", took refuge in North America from whichever Protestant church was in control at the time, which was usually the Anglican Church in England, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in Scotland. Immigrants from minority Protestant faiths didn't tend to have a concept of extending religious liberty in the New World, but rather escaping oppression for their minority views in the Old. Once in North America, they tended to be just as intolerant as the established churches they had escaped from. The one thing they could all agree on, however, is that they hated Catholics.
That was in large part because the English Protestant churches of all types had to rely on myths to justify their existence. The Church of England hadn't even really intended to separate long from the Catholic Church at first, but once things got rolling, it was hard to go back. This was for a variety of reasons, and to at least some degree the Church of England remains uncomfortable with its separation. It's made several attempts towards reversing it, and some significant sections of it basically pretend it didn't occur to a certain degree. But an early feature of it was an attempt to justify what it had done, which it never really came up with a good thesis for. Part of that simply devolved to creating a mythical history of Medieval Catholicism, a different approach than that taken by the norther European principalities that followed Luther, who also didn't mean to really separate at first.
Over time, the mythical history of the Medieval Church that the English created passed away in the UK itself. Brave Catholic remnants hung on, and the fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom always meant that the fables had objections to them. But in the English colonial experiments in North America, this was largely untrue. Immigrants to the colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant, if in some areas not overwhelmingly Anglican. Fables developed during the Reformation were carried over and instituted into the telling of American history and into American culture, which is why even now students at higher levels will hear stories of bloody Inquisitions and naked aggression in the Middle East that are simply untrue.
Part of the fable is that the country has always been supportive of "freedom of religion" and even that this is enshrined in the Constitution. It isn't, and it hasn't been.
At the time of the Revolution, almost all American colonist were Protestants. Certainly exceptions existed, but Catholics were a distinct minority and members of other religions, such as Judaism, were nearly non-existent. A significant exception had been Africans brought over as slaves prior to the 1700s, but during the 1700s they largely converted to Protestant faiths, reflecting the religion of where they were held, although often not the same varieties, exactly, of Protestantism of those who held them in bondage. Certainly slaves when first brought over, which was still occurring at the time of the Revolution irrespective of its illegality, were members of African animist religions by and large. About 1/3d were Muslim, however, and a few were Catholic. In terms of cultural myth, this is interesting in that it's commonly forgotten that most African slaves were animists at the time of their enslavement and also that the common excuse at the time that they would be introduced to Christianity actually wasn't true for all of them, some already being Christians. Be all of that as it may, the legacy of pre enslavement religions dissipated relatively rapidly, although some remnant of it remains even today in terms of folk beliefs.1
In 1776 when the nation rebelled against its Anglican monarch, King George III, most of the rebellious leaders in the Continental Congress were solidly Protestant. Indeed, one of the Intolerable Acts they passed as causi belli was the Quebec Act, which allowed the Québécois to remain Catholic, which says volumes about just how anti-Catholic the country was. A popular myth had developed that the founders of the republic and its constitution were largely non-Christian theists, but it's largely baloney. The article linked in above sort of adopts that view, without really fully expressing it, in order to avoid, most likely, that the Founders founded a Christian nation, or a Protestant one.
That aside, they certainly did found a theistic republic, and their early thoughts and documents are shot through with it. Nearly all of them, if not in fact all of them, believed in "natural law" which, as the article notes shows up in the Declaration of Independence, which states:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
And it goes on from there.
Okay, well so what?
Part of this is just historical. It's important to be accurate about a nation's history, and frankly the country was founded as a Protestant republic in which everyone, almost, was a Protestant. That was its culture, and to an enormous degree, it remains its culture today. Countries always have a culture, and beyond that, they deserve one.
But (and there's always a but), this also raises some important cultural, let alone, religious topics.
As to Protestants, one thing to keep in mind that while various Protestant denominations made up the majority of practice for Americans, there was not one single Protestant church and as the nation grew, this very much became the case. At the time of the Revolution, it would have been highly likely that almost everyone in a community in which any one person lived was the same type of Protestant. In Appalachians regions, for example, most were some type of Protestant. In New England, most were (although not all0 were likely Anglicans. There were Quakers and other sects of course, but people largely lived in a community in which everyone was a member of that sect, unless you were of a distinct minority community like Catholics and Jews.
As the country expanded, however, this began to change, a fact aided by the separation from the United Kingdom which now meant that immigrants from Norther Europe in general, rather than Great Britain in particular, were widely accepted.. European Protestant faiths that had not been in the country in large numbers began to come in, with no real opposition to that. Lutherans became very common in areas with large communities of Germans. Various Anabaptist groups, always present, likewise expanded and became very influential in some regions of the country, particularly the American South.
And into this distinctly American brands of Protestantism developed, something that Americans seem particularly ignorant of today. The "village preacher" or the church that was only loosely affiliated with a denomination became common.
Gather at the River in eight different John Ford films. Ford was a devout Catholic, and obviously saw this song as emblematic of American, and Protestant, Christianity. I've heard it in a Catholic Mass exactly once, in Pennsylvania.
This in fact became a feature of American life. Well into the 1980s, of course, most American towns were heavily represented by a wide variety of American Protestant churches, but almost all of them had what is now called "non-denominational" church headed up by a pastor who likely also worked five days out of seven in something else. That figure became such an iconic American that such pastors are portrayed again and again in American films, such as those noted above, but even in much more recent ones.
The fact that American Christianity became sufficiently separate from European Christianity mean that a sort of do it yourself Christianity took particularly strong root in the US, and also in Canada, in a way that it didn't elsewhere. Those who separated, for example, from the Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia tended to become Old Believers, or even Catholics, although populations of refugee Anabaptists came into the country as well. You don't find big populations of minority in Protestant religions anywhere else, however, in North America, save for areas that American Protestants have sought to proselytize in, some of which are areas that are already heavily Catholic or Orthodox. Unique nearly wholly American strains of Protestantism, or religions that came out of Christianity, developed.
As this occured, it had an impact on the culture noted above, and still very much does. Demographers have wondered about the rise of the "nones", but in fact they've always been there. Rank and file Protestants have often not worried much about pew hopping. People baptized in a Baptist Church will go to an Assemblies of God Church, and not think much about it. Beyond that, a fairly large group of Americans feels that they are really God-fearing Christians, even though they very rarely go to Church. I've heard people who never darken the door of a church save for a funeral or wedding discuss in earnest terms how the country needs to turn back to its Christian values, and in fairness, some do in fact practice Christian virtues fairly notably.
As the same time, however, people who claim this sort of loose ill-defined American Christianity often have completely jettisoned huge tenants of actual Christianity. People will live together without being married or otherwise engage in conduct that any conventional strain of Christianity regards as gravely sinful. Divorce, specifically prohibited by Christ, is widely practiced by American Protestants who don't give it a second thought. In some ways, the easy practice of the very loose American Protestantism ranges from religion made very, very easy, to those denominations which have very strict rules that never actually appear in the New Testament, or Old, at all.
The Pine Tree Flag, one of the flags used by American revolutionaries during the war for independence. People can say what they like, but a rebel army flying a flag like this is not battling for a secular republic. Currently, this flag is associated with a group of far right wing Evangelicals of the New Apostolic Reformation who are inaccurately defined as Christian Nationalist, but who do share significant amounts of their goals including the restoration or imposition of a Christian, by which they really mean Evangelical Protestant superstructure on the country.
Into this mix, however, we now have the New Apostolic Reformation, a Protestant movement that is confused by commentators with Christian Nationalism and even sometimes confused at to its American Protestant status.
The New Apostolic Reformation comes out of that branch of American Protestantism that has the concept that the United States itself has a particular Devine mission. This sort of thinking has roots in American Protestantism that go fairly far back in the 19th Century, and it still is particularly strong in some branches of non-mainline, if that is a word, Protestantism, and also in Great Awakening religions that came out of Protestantism. The followers of such thoughts tend to believe, for example, that certain figures (often George Washington) were charged by a Devine mission at the time of the Revolution, and also tend to believe that the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired. You can find such thoughts today amongst various American Protestant religions outside of those which have retained strongly European roots, and also, as noted, as offshoots from Christianity. For example, you will sometimes hear the words common to the belief quoted by some Mormons, although it is not a tenant of the Mormon faith itself.
It was partially this line of thought that gave rise to the Manifest Destiny belief that many Americans held in the 19th Century, but it carried on until the 20th Century. Consider, for example, this 1900 statement after the US had taken the Philippines during the Spanish American War:
Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, "territory belonging to the United States," as the Constitrltion calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.
* * *
Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics: deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing hut vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given its the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: "Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many thing."
From Congressional Record(56th Cong., 1st Session) Vol XXXIII, pp.705, 711.
The concept of the US as a New Testament "chosen people" remains surprisingly strong in some quarters of American Protestantism.
The New Apostolic Reformation, faced with a United States of the early 21st Century in which the openly strong Protestant connections are now highly muted in many places, have taken this one step further than most did in the past and openly seek to establish a new wing of Protestantism which advocates for the "restoration" of perceived "lost offices" of what they conceive to have been, inaccurately, in the early Church, such as prophet and apostle. There were indeed, of course, prophets in Judaism. And there were apostles during the Apostolic Age. Indeed, as a distinctly Protestant movement, it ironically fails to grasp that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are true Apostolic Churches, and they were founded by the apostles. Restoring the "office" of apostle is not possible, as the Apostolic Age is over and Apostolic revelation fixed, something acknowledged not only by the Apostolic Churches, but also those churches of the Protestant Reformation which arose during the Reformation, the latter of which differ on that point from the Apostolic Churches only in regard to their relationship to the Apostles.
The NAR has been particularly associated with current strains of Trumpist populism, and in a vague sort of way helps to explain what is going on. As American Protestantism outside the mainline Protestant churches has always had sort of a "do it yourself" aspect to it, it's free to conceive of a mission like the NAR's while also free to ignore vast tracks of actual Christian doctrine. Looked at that way, the NAR doesn't, at least for the time being, need to worry itself about divorce and remarriage as antithetical to Christianity, or even the requirement that Christians be their brother's keeper. Rather, the thought is, that is, by some, that political success can be achieved, after which a society modeled in their view of Christianity can be imposed from the top down.
In this fashion, the life of a figure like Donald Trump can be flat out ignored in pursuit of what is imagined to be a greater goal, which is distinctly different from the view of some other Christians that they must vote for Trump as they have no other moral choice. Looked at this way, Trump becomes some sort of latter day Cyrus the Great, a non congregant being used by God to achieve a greater goal. It's a radical belief, but it is out there.
Speaker of the House Johnson flies the Pine Tree flag outside of his Congressional office.
The flag of Vatican City. This flag can occasionally be found in Catholic Churches. I can recall at one time a point at which American flags, which also occasionally could be found in Catholic Churches in the US, were removed.
An oddity in the US is that the largest single religion in the United States is a minority religion, that being Catholicism. Most Americans are Protestants, but the single biggest faith is the Catholic faith. And contrary to what some like to suggest, not only are Catholic numbers holding their own, but they're growing. At the same time this is occurring, moreover, the second "lung" of the Church, Orthodoxy, is expanding as well.
Because this is such a Protestant country in culture and outlook, one of the things about at least a lot of Catholics in the US is that they were heavily Protestantized, something that really took off once JFK told the country he could be a Catholic on Sundays, but the country didn't really need to worry about that for the rest of the week. A disaster for Catholics, Catholics rushed to acclimate and went from being seen as vaguely strange and threatening to the rest of the country to being just one denomination. At the same time that this occured, actual reforms in the Church, combined with the "Spirit of Vatican Two" in fact made Catholics seem that way to many "main line" Protestants and also to many rank and file Catholics. Many distinctly Catholic practices that had deeply inserted themselves into Catholic culture disappeared. Catholics Masses were now in English (most places) or Spanish in some. Catholics no longer were bound to eating fish as a penitential observance on Fridays outside of Lent. Distinctive female head coverings started to disappear (prior to Vatican II, we'd note). Unique accordance of respect in a formal way towards Priests ended. A fairly uniform Catholic education ended (one that I hadn't participated in, nor had my father). A weak 1970 Catechetical set of instruction came in, leading to an entire generation, of which I am part, hardly knowing the ins and outs of their Faith by the time they passed through it.
By the 80s and 90s, members of the Church who would never have thought of marrying in a Protestant Church or church shopping were doing so. Divorce and remarriage, something long common in the Protestant churches, also came in.
In some ways, it's now easy, retrospectively, to see how this came about. A lot of this was due to what might be regarded as cultural shell shock, or as one sociologist put it in a different context, "future shock". A generally disdained people for the most part, in much of the country Catholics kept to themselves and lived in "Catholic Ghettos" where their cultural uniqueness wasn't open to the rest of the world up through the middle of the 20th Century. This was never wholly the case, of course, and there were always notable converts to Catholics who were out in the world. In the West, which always tended to break down distinctions, this was much less the case once people were outside of big cities, like Denver and Salt Lake.
Still, in that time period, most Catholics were also blue collar workers and very few, save for some in certain professional occupations, had attended university. Those that did often tried to attend a Catholic university, which in those days were really Catholic. So, in much of the country they worked blue collar jobs, if they were professional their clientele was Catholic as a rule, and they tended to live in Catholic Communities. This was true for the Orthodox as well. And it was also true for Jews. Indeed, in some ways, the overall situation of these communities resembled that of African Americans, all of whom were disdained by the Ku Klux Klan and other nativists.
World War Two started to massively erode this. For the first time large numbers of Catholics attended university and after the war, for the same reason, this continued on due to the GI Bill. The walls of the Catholic (and Orthodox) Ghettos began to come down. Vatican II came along and made institutional changes in the church. Separately, the Vatican change the liturgy to its current form, a definite improvement, and provided that it could be said in the vernacular. Bishops and Priests who assumed a certain directly from this began to expand on it, and a Catholic President came in and told Americans that Catholics were just like everyone else, something a lot of Americans rapidly embraced. Similar developments happened north of the border where the Church itself started the process of dismantling institutional control of large areas of Quebec society, which in turn developed into the Quiet Revolution.
Looking back now, lots of younger Catholics wonder why their grandparents allowed so much to erode. Why did they allow the incidents of Catholic culture to fade? Why did they put up with taking out the altar rails? Why wasn't some Latin retained? Why did the parishioners not balk when the Bishops lift year around penitential meatless Fridays? The shock of it all seems like a likely answer. Having gone from heavily Irish, or German, or Italian communities and practicing a religion that practically had its own language, and that meaning that your future in the larger, Protestant, American society was at least partially laid out for you, and limited, to one in which they were told that they were fully part of the larger consumerist limitless American society where the rules only loosely applied, and then having part of the old culture simply destroyed, they were shell shocked.
Try as the American Church of hte 70s might, the fact of the matter is that CAtholic's remain stubbornly subject to the letter to Diogentus:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.
In other words, Catholics that came up after the 80s looked at what the World had given to accommodating Catholics of the late 60s, 70s, and 80s, and found it wholly wanting. Like topics, we're otherwise writing on in slow motion, tradition, which turns out to be grounded in something real, and there's an effort to take it back. As that's being done, it's the case that the reforms that came in are being rejected, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
Trad girls in conservative skirts and wearing chapel veils, young men fairly conservatively dressed, parishioners attempting to secure Latin Masses, or going to Easter Rite Devine Liturgy, aren't seeking to reform the reform, which up until recently was the vanguard of a return to tradition. They're seeking to wholesale bring the incidents of Catholicism back in. In doing that, they're making it plain that they're not just another denomination, and they don't want to really be part of the American religious scene. Whether they're applying the Benedict Option or the Constantine one, they're not only not melting in, they're returning to wholesale different. And that different doesn't look back to 1776, it looks all the way back.
So why does any of this matter?
Cyrus the Great. Some far right Evangelicals tend to see Trump as a sort of Cyrus figure. Cyrus was not Jewish, but his proclimations favored the Jewish faith in an existential sense.
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying: 'Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whosoever there is among you of all His people—his God be with him—let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD, the God of Israel, He is the God who is in Jerusalem. And whosoever is left, in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, beside the freewill-offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.'
Ezra 1:1–4
Well, it does, for a variety of reasons, some mild, and some a bit scary.
One thing is this. It used to be particularly noted by some that the English-speaking world was particularly given to democracy, which it was. Those with a limited horizon tended to associate this solely with the United States, but that was in fact extremely inaccurate. The United Kingdom had a functioning parliament in 1776 when we abandoned the UK's overlordship, and in fact that is part of the reason that we did that. They had a Parliament, and they weren't letting us in.
A person can say what they want about that and try to disassociate it somehow from something particularly English, but it is there. France, in 1776, wasn't democratic. Spain wasn't either. You can't really find another major power that was. And all of England's progeny took this path for a long time. Canada never had a non-democratic moment. Nor did New Zealand, or Australia.
Now, English democracy was not perfect, and the franchise was not even particularly large. Major classes were completely excluded based on economic, and also in the case of Catholics, religion. But it was there and that heritage was conveyed. Moreover, when it took root in North America, it expanded beyond what it had been in the UK pretty rapidly.
Which leads us to a more radical proposition.
What was also conveyed early on was a certain culture, and part of that was a political culture. The overall culture, however, was Protestant. And it remains so. It's so Protestant that even the atheists are culturally Protestant.
An essential element of that American Protestantism is the concept of "I can make up my mind for myself and nobody can tell me what to do". Lots of religious "reformers" in the US have done that, but that's a Protestant thing. To Protestants, it's not strange to hop from one Protestant denomination to another, and to even include denominations that claim to have no denomination, even though the they do. Catholics and Jews, on the other hand, are part of one, big, global, faith. Moving from parish to parish, for Catholics, is no big deal, as Catholicism is the Church. But going to another denomination is an extraordinarily radical move and an act of rebellion.
Democracy, of course, as a movement has spread well beyond the English-speaking world and indeed, there were democracies that spring up in various places in the non Protestant world, as for in example Italian city states. Antiquarians will point out the example of ancient Athens, or even Germanic and Nordic raiding bands. On the last item, all people are democratic at the tribal level, pretty much. None of this really counters the point, however.
This brings us to the next reason this is important. The most recent movement, which is threading through American Evangelicalism, is radically exclusionary in a way, and this too is part of the North American religious heritage.
It wasn't until after the Civil War that American society really started to view Catholics as suitable citizens,a and then only reluctantly. The huge Irish and German immigrant populations that fought in the war made Catholics impossible to really ignore. Jewish Americans were really small in number, but they started to be accepted, very reluctantly, about the same time. As this occured the word "Judeo-Christian" was invented to include everyone then in the country in a singular larger American Christian sort of world. But the fact remains that hostility towards both religions, and more recently Islam, has been an ongoing feature of American life.
Catholics, and if there are any, Jews and Muslims (the latter two unlikely in any numbers) flirting with the new concepts of Christian Nationalism and National Conservatism really need to do so at their caution. The New Apostolic Reformation forces may have a similar view on moral matters as mainstream and conservative Catholics do, but the NAR is definitely not Catholic. And the history for Americans of general of politics and religion being welded together, and indeed coopting each other, is not a comfortable one at all. Put another way, Donald Trump is not a deeply religious, or even moral, man, and there's no real reason to believe that he's some sort of Cyrus the Great.
But some clearly see him that way, explaining their actions, and even some of the odd propoganda in the Trumpist camp.
None of this is to say that faith shouldn't inform a person's politics. It should. But they are not the same thing.
Footnotes:
1. Native Americans of course had their own religions, but what was different about their history, up until the early 20th Century, is that unless highly assimilated, they weren't "Americans" at all. It wasn't until 1924, a date which our 100 year retrospective posts haven't even yet reached, that all Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship.
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