Apostles & prophets
Stephanie McCrummen at the Washington Post reports on
a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags.
And this is why we can’t have nice things.
This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.
It’s an incredibly peculiar idea of “god” if you ask me.
What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of [New Apostolic Reformation]-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.
Ah yes Texas, home of so much right-wing lunacy.
Texas would be quite a nice place if it wasn’t so full of Texans! (And if it wasn’t so damned hot).
I hear Texas is the world’s number one producer of Texans. Having lived there for five years, I think we should encourage Texas to secede. And build a wall around it.
Union general Phil Sheridan: If I owned both Hell and Texas, I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas
iknklast: THAT is some radical politics I could get behind. Maybe Lincoln was wrong? Free the Texas Republic!
(I know the big cities can be quite liberal and :”blue”. But…)
Brian M., when I was going to college there, my roommate was sure Dubya would not take Texas. No one she knew was for Bush. I pointed out to her that her only friends in Texas were at the school…and in the Environmental Science department on top of that. Hardly representative of Texas. She was from London, and said she couldn’t comprehend how anyone could vote for someone because they were from the same state; I pointed out that Oklahoma would go for Bush for the same reason. (Oklahoma has a sort of love/hate relationship with Texas.)
She went to Oklahoma with me when I voted in the primary. She wanted to see how our election system worked. She wasn’t too impressed with what she saw over the election cycle. Neither was I, but then, I was used to it, so it didn’t shock me to see Bush win.
But I knew of only one person in our department who was voting for Bush; he was Catholic, and would vote for any pro-life candidate. He didn’t care about any other reason.
It’s easy to believe a place is liberal if you’ve never seen anything but the colleges.
Just like Jesus had.
Funny how their god doesn’t do anything for himself. If he was really interested in controlling the US government, he would have foreseen the failure of the insurrection and done some smiting himself. And doing it in an obvious, visibly godly way, instead of through the likes of the actual insurrectionists, would make it known to all that this was the Heavenly Will being carried out. Instead we have to take the word of unshaven traitors that they are doing the will of a god.
Once Trump kicks the bucket, watch the knives come out to claim the title of his “successor.”
Ikn #1, “Texas would be quite a nice place if it wasn’t so full of Texans!” — I feel this way about California, and I am a Californian… :(
I kinda feel the same way about Oregon… The Republicans are really, *really* bad and the “progressives” aren’t great.
I hate to say this guys, but it’s kind of the same in every state. America is full of Americans, and it just gets uglier. Minnesota is full to the brim with “pro-lifers” who once would vote Democract except for the one issue, but now have moved so far right that they fawn at a Trump rally. The Twin Cities are mostly an island of “not Republicans” and I wonder how long that will hold out.