Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Back to the Coliseum.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Back to the Coliseum.:   I've been expecting it all along.  It just came in a surprising fashion. Deep hatred of Catholics is the last acceptable form of outri...

Sunday Morning Scene. Back to the Coliseum.

 

I've been expecting it all along.  It just came in a surprising fashion.

Deep hatred of Catholics is the last acceptable form of outright bigotry in the United States, although there's been a general rise of bigotry and racism during the illegitimate Trump interregnum.  Trump's a populist, and populist tends to boost ignorance, with bigotry feeding on that.  Most of the major populist movements a person can recall, the Nazis, the Communists, the Know Nothings, featured a lot of really ignorant people who were willing to be lead around by a others, sometimes a charismatic, to them, other.¹ MAGA is a populist movement, masquerading as a conservative one, as Nazism was a populist movement that claimed conservatives within it.  It's not too surprising, therefore, that we're seeing more of this sort of thing than we have at any point since the 1960s.

Quite a few of the more ignorant members of MAGA claim they support Trump as he's Godly, which is patently absurd, but there's no denying that far right wing Evangelicalism is a major component of MAGA.  The Press, which isn't very well educated on religion anymore, just keeps calling them "Christians",  which is really misleading.  Some, but not all, far right Evangelicals supporting Trump hold religious beliefs that are very recent and very novel and well outside the mainstream of Apostolic Christianity and also out of the mainstream of most Protestant beliefs.  Almost all MAGA Evangelicals fit into the ignorant of theology and Church history camp that's strong in the United States of being "Bible Believing Christians" who are pretty ignorant of a rule on the history of the books of the Bible.

Around the periphery of MAGA, however, there's been some Apostolic Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, who have been, if not fully in the Trump camp, at least allowed to pitch a tent on its edges.  Some of this is just flat out opportunistic on their part, and it looked like it would have a major impact on the Trump administration due to Trump's flat out ignorance and laziness.  Inside the administration you have the example of J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, and outside of it you have people like Kevin Roberts.  You even have Peter Thiel, who claims not to be a Catholic but who keeps popping up in certain Catholic circles, as does Jordan Peterson and the Orthodox pundit Rod Dreher.²  National Conservatism has a strong right wing Catholic element to it, which is interesting in that it's sort of the intellectual heir of Fr. Charles Coughlin whose movement was shut down and who remains not widely admired in mainstream Catholic circles.

Most CAtholics that have supported Trump, however, have done so for one of two other reasons.  The thinking ones have done so as it seemed like he was probably the only candidate who would address long held Catholic concerns, like abortion.  People know that Trump himself was a louse, but they were willing to "hold their nose and vote".  Others were Protestantized Catholics, of which there are a lot in the United States in the Boomer and Gen. Jones generations.   These people are victims of the bad Catechization of the 1970s and as the US is a Protestant country, they've picked up a lot of Protestant beliefs.

Throughout Trump's second claim to power I've worried that the "Christian", i.e., far right Evangelical support of Trump would result in two things for Catholics.  The first, which we will not address here, is that the association of "Christian" with Trump would result in Christianity taking a major hit.  Evangelicalism definitely will. The second is that getting on the bus with Evangelicals would result in them beating us up as soon as we weren't of use to them.

And that's starting to happen.

The reason it started is because Pete Hegseth, who is festooned with Crusader themed tattoos announced that the U.S. Army is going to livestream the execution of former US Army Major Nidal Hasan who killed thirteen unarmed U.S. soldiers in 2009. ^{3 4}

The Catholic Church is opposed to killing people.  It's opposed to killing people in pretty absolutist terms and always has been, claims of Catholic haters aside.  It's always been opposed to infanticide, including abortion.  Early on in Church history there were serious debates if Christians, which were all Catholic, were required to be pacifists, and there are some saints who were.  St. Martin of Tours, who had been a Roman soldier, famously told his commander "I am a soldier of Christ; it is not lawful for me to fight."  Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer, went to his death in Nazi Germany rather than fight for the Nazi state.  Ben Salmon, an American Catholic layman who has not been beatified went to prison as a conscientious objector during World War One as he held the view that all war was immoral. ⁵   And starting with Pope John Paul II, the Church has opposed the death penalty.

Catholic Bishops immediately responded to Hegseth's live stream the killing announcement by condemning it.  Quiet a few individual priests with  a net presence did as well.  And then almost immediately after that Pope Leo XIV did, stating:

This caused an immediate reaction by some Evangelical Christians on the far right, and it did from a few very far right Catholics who are probably in the Rad Trad camp.  Predictably, a notable number of the Evangelicals threw of pretending they approved of Catholics in any fashion.  Laughable comments that the Pope doesn't know theology were out there, but more radical ones by the Invincibly Ignorant immediately arose as well.

Los of hte comments immediately cited the Old Testament, which is a bit ironic as frankly the CAtholic Church uses the Old Testament much more than any Protestant group does.  There's a number of quotes from the Old Testament that address the death penalty, for example:

Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.

Genesis 9:6 

Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death.

Exodus 21:12

So there you go. . .but wait:

Anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death.

 Exodus 21:15 & 21:17

Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.

Exodus 21:15 & 21:17

Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.

Exodus 21:16

If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death."

Leviticus 20:10 (Adultery)

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

Leviticus 20:13

Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them."

Leviticus 24:16

Okay then, if we apply to the Old Testament, we need to be killing anyone cursing their parents, kidnappers, adulterers and adulteresses, homosexuals and blasphemeres.

Indeed, if this was fully applied, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Paula White, and Scott Bessant wouldn't be in Washington D.C. as they're either adulturers or, in Bessant's case, a homosexual.  Shoot, probably about 1/3d of the congregation of Protestant congregation would have to be offed, based on my observation that they don't take divorce or pre marital sex as a sin.

Well, what the heck?  Why aren't we imposing the death penalty with sweeping abandon?

Well, that's because the Apostolic Churches and the Mainline Protestant Churches hold the view that Christ fulfilled the law and the Mosaic law does not apply to Christians.  There are a pile of laws in the Mosaic Law that nobody seeks to apply to Christians due to the Catholic Church having alway taken this view.  That's why Christians can eat shellfish and pork.  Protestants who are running around declaring that the death penalty is Biblically mandated are apparently ignorant of the Bible and is laws, or they'd be killing adulterers, blasphemers, parent disrespecters, homosexuals and not eating shrimp.

Indeed, this was the case from day one.  One of the very first debates in the Church was whether converts had to be circumcised.  Nope,  no longer applied.  The dietary laws no longer did either.

It's also odd to see how all of these people aren't citing the New Testament.  While the law was fulfilled by Christ, Christ did set down some pretty strict behavioral requirements.  We are, for example supposed to love our enemies. That's a tough one.  

Some have tried to drag out Church history, of which they're largely ignorant.  "Well, the Church has always killed people. . ."

Nope.  Indeed, from antiquity it's tried to stop it.

As Christ led you from death to life, so you should try to save not only the innocent, but also the guilty from death.

Pope St Nicholas the Great.

Now, I suppose you could argue that Pope St. Nicholas was talking about eternal life, but you sure are't going to save a guy by killing him.

And of course, there's the customary ignorant citation to the Black Legends were demonstrably untrue, but which lots of people still believe.

The Church as been against killing of all types right from the onset.  But people, deep in their hearts, like killing.  Lots of people make compromises with their Faith to justify their own acts and desires.  Today, for example, is the anniversary of the murder of Hymie Weiss, the gangster who sanctioned hits, but who also carried a rosary in his pocket.  As noted, plenty of very conservative Catholics have tried to say "well, I know that the Popes have said no death penalty, but it's still okay . . "⁶

It isn't.

And the real surprise to those not paying attention will be how prolife Catholics really are.  Indeed, I've seen surprising statements in support of the Pope from completely secular sources.

And there's utterly no support for making this execution a public spectacle.  We really are in the last days of the Roman Empire if we've reached that state.  "War, inflation, . . . don't worry, look at my shiny baubles, come watch somebody die."  Panem et circenses.

A danger of politics is that, for people who have a religion, even slightly, that it becomes easy to confuse your politics or your personal beliefs with your religion. The various flavors of the American Civil Religion are packed with that.  Divorce is okay, and even extramarital sex, unless it's homosexual. . . Trump must be a Godly man as he's doing what I want him to, even if he's a liar and a serial polygamist.

There was always going to be a day when the Evangelical far right discovered that the Catholic Church is the Universal Church, it's everywhere, and that local politics are secondary to it.  We're not right, not left, we're Catholic, the original Christians.

Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to.  Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’

But he will answer, "I don’t know you or where you come from."

Luke 13:22-30.

This warning applies to us as well.  "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."  Luke 12:48.  We really can't ignore the barbarism of the Trump administration any more.  We've invaded a foreign nation without cause, we're killing Iranians in an undeclared war, and we're murdering people on the high seas.  The Nuremberg Defense or just ignoring it all doesn't work.

Well, we were always going to be hated.  Frankly, as Catholics, when everything is going well for us, it's not going well.

Footnotes:

1.  Hitler was reportedly very charismatic, although watching him from the outside, it's hard to see why.  To his followers, Trump is charismatic, while to most other people he certainly is not.

2.  I'm not claiming that Peterson is influential in the administration, but rather he's in the Catholic end of the National Conservatives even though he is not Catholic.  His wife is.  Dreher was Catholic at one time and converted to Orthodoxy, where he remains with one foot in the Catholic door and nearly, for that matter, in the back pews. Dreher is partially responsible for the intellectual atmosphere that made Trump possible even though he now outright holds Trump in contempt.

3.  Hegseth is some sort of Evangelical on the far right.  Actual Crusaders would have regarded him as a weird heretic.  

4.  The fact that the killings occurred in 2009 is a really good argument against the death penalty in and of itself as it takes so long and is so expensive that the punishment aspect of it is nearly lost by the time the sentence is carried out.

5. St. Augustine famously developed the Just War Theory, which people sort of naively regard as a Catholic free pass to war.  It isn't.  The theory has always been fairly restrictive and even though Catholics have waged and been in a lot of wars, a lot of wars don't fit the category of being "just".  

Even when they are, finding a war that's justly waged is difficult. World War Two probably stands out as a war which, for the Allies, was just, but the Allies clearly took deeply immoral actions in it, the nighttime bombing raids of the RAF, and the USAF nuclear bombings, being the two primary examples for the Western Allies.

Recently Pope Leo has further clarified the doctrine and while I do not think that his statements actually develop it in any fashion, they caused shock waves and they probably should as Catholics really need to consider if they can morally serve in the U.S. military at this point.

6.  No Pope has declared the death penalty invalid ex cathedra, so a slim ability to argue it's still okay exists.  But it's very slim.

Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 157th Edition. How the Internet Emphases the Absurd and Marginal and Make it seem Significant. Pastor Brian Sauvé

Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 157th Edition. How th...: Holy Women at Christ's Tomb, Annibale Carracci. One Brian Sauvé, senior pastor at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, has been much on the net...

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 157th Edition. How the Internet Emphases the Absurd and Marginal and Make it seem Significant. Pastor Brian Sauvé

Holy Women at Christ's Tomb, Annibale Carracci.

One Brian Sauvé, senior pastor at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, has been much on the net recently due to some comments he made on vlog or some sort of web based video show providing for all to see how the net has served to emphasize the absurd and marginal, serving to make it seem like a big deal.

Refuge Church is a "Reformed Protestant" Church and Sauvé  describes himself as "Reformed and Protestant, Paedobaptist, Postmillennial, and Patriarchal".  The church describes itself as basically a solo scriptura group holding to 66 books of the Bible, rather than 73, which means that the don't believe in the 66 books of the Bible as the New Testament itself describes how sola scriptura is invalid and the omitted books that a German monk, who should never have been that, took out were done so based on his prejudice and a misunderstanding on what books of the Old Testament the Apostles were referring to.

Patriarchal Sauvé certainly is.  And extremely so.

Sauvé in a September 18 podcast stated the following:

Women either shouldn't be on social media or any social media they have should be kind of a walled garden situation where some competent man is curating and blocking and directing and taking a look at what's going on.  I have access to my wife's social media accounts and I have blocked—this is not an exaggeration—thousands of accounts. Thousands of them. She generally has very little idea of what is going on in the real social media because I've created a walled garden of cute goat videos.

We have normalcy bias in a certain direction.  We consider normal what is actually insane. We consider normal women having unsupervised access to one another all the time. That's not normal.

We consider normal women having political rule. We consider normal women living unattached from a male—like a father, then a husband—for lengthy periods of time. You could fill in the blank with all of these modern feminist outworkings of the original feminist vision and what they've done is they've made women anxious, psychotic, depressed, miserable, and genocidally evil. And we just go, "Oh, that's normal.'"

People are going to hear me talking about, as my wife's head, monitoring her social media, and they're going to be like, "Brian is such a tyrant." You have normalcy bias for insane world. You're living in an insane asylum and you think it's the normal world and I'm saying, "No, we don't live in the insane asylum. We do what people did for thousands of years before today."

The interview went on and discussed how "crazy" it was to allow women to vote, something Hegseth fan boy has said of Doug Wilson in Idaho.

Unlike Wyoming, the least religious state in the country, Utah is the most religious state in the Union, and its religious landscape is dominated by the Latter Day Saints.  It's not as Mormon as it once was, however, with about 55% of the residents of the state being in that faith.  Culturally, however, they dominate it.  Catholics are about 5%.  About 25% claim no particular faith.The rest are mostly some sort of Protestant but there are, of course, Jews, Muslims, etc.

About 63% of the residents of Ogden are LDS.  Catholics make up almost 9% of the population there.  The rest would mostly be some sort of Protestant.

We'd note that Mormons, which Sauvé is not, are extremely socially conservative generally.  That's important to note as while, at least in my experience, Mormons and some conservative Protestant religions do not get along, the overall cultural conservatism of Mormonism heavily impacts the Jello Belt.  I'm not saying that to be mean or critical.  Utah has some of the most well kept towns, including small towns, in the country and as a rule Mormons don't go in for the weird cultural silliness that is part of the current zeitgeist.  Without condoning the tenants of their faith, their faith also causes them to have what some folks refer to as "nice families", as other conservative religious groups sometimes to.  You'd probably have to get into Traditional Catholics in order to find a similarly family oriented well kept group of people.

The Culture of a People reflects upon the place they live.  The views that Sauvé are not all that radical in the locality in which he is speaking them, as they reflect sort of broadly on the LDS, and specifically on some of the LDS, although most LDS would not hold them to the extreme that he does.

Now, as should be obvious, Pastor Sauvé is extremely socially conservative.  Why should we care?

We shouldn't.

The church is indicated as having a "mid sized" congregation.  His congregation ought to care what he thinks, and chances are they believe exactly what he does.  This sort of extreme patriarchal view is quite limited and goes way beyond what even very conservative members of various other Christian faiths typically believe.  It's also ironic in that women more than men were the foundation of the early Faith.  Women brought men to it. There's a reason that Mary Magdalene is the "Apostle to the Apostles".  And there's a reason that St. Brigid is so closely associated with St. Patrick.

But then, I'm an Apostolic Christian where strong women are the norm.  Protestants can keep John Calvin, we'll take Joan d'Arc.

And Protestants can keep telling us that we shouldn't ask Mary for help, we're going to keep doing so.

Virgin Mary at Zetum

Such a diminished view of women is odd, and sad.

It's also cultural and malformed.

But here's the thing.  It's the Internet that has given voice to stuff like this. But for that, Sauve would be an unknown Protestant Pastor in the Jello Belt.  Probably a lot of people in his own city wouldn't be able to tell you anything about him.  I couldn't tell you anything about the two large warehouse type churches' pastors here.  I'm sure that there are Protestants around here who hold the same beliefs.  I just don't know who they are, and there aren't many of them.

The Internet is really giving voice to a lot of things, ideas and people who shouldn't have one.  I don't know if Sauve was known before, but there's a whole host of like minded Protestants who show up on blogs all the time and spark Internet outrage. That outrage then circulates their message.

It's the same with people like Nick Fuentes, whose message is political and not religious, although there is some of that mixed in.  But for the Internet, he'd just be a barely employed oddball.  

It's one of the real challenges of our time.  We need to ignore these people.  They don't deserve a national audience.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Dominionism and the Department of Defense.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Dominionism and the Departm...: The following was posted by Assistant Secretary of Defense, Sean Parnell: Sean Parnell @SeanParnellASW “Then I heard the voice of the Lord s...

Sunday Morning Scene. Dominionism and the Department of Defense.

The following was posted by Assistant Secretary of Defense, Sean Parnell:

Sean Parnell

@SeanParnellASW

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. SEND ME!’” — Isaiah 6:8

Frankly, this is a shocking association of the US military with religion.
I've warned here that the US is in the thick of an Administration that features individuals in it who who hold minoritarian Evangelical views well outside the mainstream of Christianity, and further that were introduced rather late in Christian history.  Unfortunately, the United States, which is a Protestant country, is basically the epicenter of such views and many Protestants don't realize their views are not held by most of the globes Christians, most of whom are Apostolic Christians.

Included in that set of views, for some, is the concept that Christians can help bring about the Second Coming and, in some quarters, that the United States is a nation directly charged with a Devine Mission.

The military is definitely suffering right now, with some elements of the Navy having morale problems and a war going on which the administration repeatedly claims we've won, but which drags on.  The current hope is that economic sanctions will bring Iran to its knees but none of the predictions about the war have proven correct so far.  

Not one.

One way to definitely end the war would be to commit ground troops.  It'd also be a bloody mess.

These recruiting blurbs do not indicate a commitment to inserting ground troops, but they do demonstrate a frightening mix of religion with foreign policy.  We are not Crusaders and frankly Crusaders would have regarded American Evangelicals as weird heretics.  The fact that the government sends out a message like this should be alarming, and it should be offensive to Christians, Muslims and Jews, all of whom regard Isaiah as a prophet.

Indeed, when Isaiah spoke those words, he wasn't asking to be sent into combat.  He was being sent as a prophet.

The military should never be committed to an immoral cause, but we should not imagine that every time it has been committed the commitment met Christian standards.  None of the military actions taken during the Second Trump Administration do.  They most particularly do not under the reconsideration of the Just War Theory made by Pope Leo.

What Parnell did here is wrong on so many levels.  Christians should be horrified.